The great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died the other day, at the age of 86, and all I could think of, with the loss of this man whose recordings I have loved since I began listening to serious music, was that he was only twenty-two years older than I am. He was always twenty-two years older than I, and, when I was young, the distance put him in another generation entirely. As a prisoner of war, he had entertained Allied troops, several years before I was born! “Several years” is a long time when you are 14. It is nothing at all when you are my age. If anything, the number “twenty-two” is a crazy kind of reminder — like a defective Christmas cracker that makes too loud a bang — that I actually was 14 at one time. Is that possible? It seems completely impossible, because I was an utterly disorganized mess when I was 14, and not at all the man that I began to be, about twenty years later. And yet, mess or not, I would play the “Libera Me” from Fischer-Dieskau’s first recording of the Fauré Requiem over and over, eventually daring to sing along. Dying, the baritone whisks me back to the beginnings of my life, as I always think of it — my childhood happened to another creature — when his beautiful voice was always there, always. He was in some quite genuine way a guardian.  

I heard him sing only once, back in the early Eighties, when he toured a Schumann program with his fourth wife, Julia Varady. I remember nothing of the music that he made that night. I was no connoisseur of Schumann, but, more than that, I was secretly let down (although very grown-up about it) to be in the same room with him. He was supposed to exist on an ethereal plane, as a voice in a studio in London or Berlin. My presumption was encouraged by the snapshots that were reproduced in the booklets that were boxed with the LPs, “candids” taken during the recording sessions. Singers dressed in dowdy street clothes stood in front of microphones, making strange faces, or they sat around tables of utilitarian design, laughing over coffee while listening to the takes. I think that these images were supposed to make the artists more conceivably approachable, but the effect for me was precisely the opposite: I learned to blot out everything incidental to the voice. I would never know Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as a man, and those little pictures saw to it that I wouldn’t want to. Everything but the polished recordings was stripped away.

It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I was surprised to hear music in the concert hall with the immediacy that it had always had for me on recordings, and another twenty years passed before I understood that the performance of music is essentially unrecordable. (See Jeremy Denk’s fascinating memoir of editing, as it were, a recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata for a demonstration of the point.) Not to worry: I knew that the music itself was easily captured, and for all time. I have it here now. “Dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.” The voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau will never perish. Not, at any rate, until I do.

***

Because Kathleen planned to have dinner with old work friends this evening, I decided to throw myself, after lunch, into a major household chore: straightening the blue room closet in which I hang my clothes and store our luggage. To beguile the hours, I fed Season Five of Lewis into the DVD player. I knew the episodes well, it seemed; I had no trouble remembering who the killers were, right from the start, in each of the four episodes. That was hardly a drawback. Wondering whodunit would have interfered with the pleasure of watching the interesting detectives and the lovely pathologist stroll through the paradise that is Oxford. Somewhere in one of the mysteries, it hit me that, mere days ago, I myself was walking around a spring-greened Bloomsbury, and that Bloomsbury was close enough: for all intents and purposes, I’d been there. Courtesy of smells of soil and stone, a previously unsuspected dimension swung open. (I remembered noting how sweet the air was in the Euston Road — of all places — how foreign and yet, from earlier visits, familiar. In a snap, Oxford ceased to be an exotic Xanadu. It was not so very far away at all.

Didn’t I just wish. In any case, Season Six comes out in two weeks.

At the London Review Bookshop the other day, Kathleen picked up a copy of No Name, the second of Wilkie Collins’s “sensation” novels of the 1860s. Like me, she had read and enjoyed The Woman in White and The Moonstone; and she was curious to see what else Collins could do. He did not disappoint. Right up until last night, just before dinner, Kathleen was not to be seen without No Name in her hands. Her brow arched over twinkling eyes, she turned every page as if remembering to take a breath, and I knew that she was engrossed in an adventure. Every time she tried to describe the book to me, it came out sounding rather like Harriet the Spy, and with barely buried glee Kathleen conceded that this might indeed be the case. She began begging me to read No Name even before she was halfway through, and, to thank her for my interesting week in Amsterdam and London, I promised that I would. Now that I’ve begun, I wish I were back in London for the duration, if only to help me clip through the novel’s 660 pages as briskly as Kathleen did.

***

I find myself meditating ever more deliberately on the gulf, as I see it, between what I’ll call multimedia informational experience and the much older interplay between reading and writing. Today’s thoughts were triggered by David Carr’s column in the Times about The Ativist, a site that I hadn’t visited before which is devoted to what investor Eric Schmidt of Google calls “the need we all have to tell stories in multimedia.” Let me be clear at the outset that I have no objection to multimediated expression — and also that I have less and less interest in exploring it. Let’s allow also for the possibility that my thoughts on the matter are determined largely by age(ing). My idea, in any case, is that the tradition of reading and writing, familiar since the inauguration of book printing in the Fifteenth Century, while it may continued to be practiced by relatively few people, is as vibrant as ever. It needs neither stimulus nor protection. If abandoned, of course, it would altogether cease, but my bet is that attentive minds will continue to find that wide but discriminating reading is the steadiest source of inspiration for good writing, which in turn contributes to further reading. I should not say that the ecology of reading and writing is a closed one; there are many other sources of inspiration, some arguably more vital than reading (raw experience comes to mind, of course; and the bond between written literature and the feature film will be a gloriously intriguing knot for a long time to come). But reading a great deal of good writing is the most reliable prompt to good writing. We may say that reading is a necessary but insufficient cause of good writing. And the importance of reading and writing, taken together, is plain: they alone provide the matrix for sorting out our most pressing concerns, from the gestation of human identity to death, and from love to despair.

I don’t mean to slight the engineers: our world would be a poorer place — it was a poorer place — without a command of weights and measures expressed in numerical terms. It is not inconceivable that we will one day be capable of saying everything that we have to say in digits. But that day, it seems very clear to me, lies a long way off; we’re going to have to know ourselves much better than we do now before we’ll be capable of such streamlined discourse.

For the time being, we have words, imprecise as they are, to signify our impressions. Matthew Arnold put it all much better in Culture and Anarchy, but his ideas might need restatement in the age of handheld devices. Reading, writing, and the consideration of life that they (and they alone) make possible require calm, quiet, and patience to a degree hardly favored by contemporary bustle; but then it is probably the case that the given contemporary bustle at any moment in our past has been unfavorable to reading and writing, and that the scintillations of immediately accessible multimedia are merely the latest in a long line of fads. What makes the new wrinkle different from all previous ones is the widespread misapprehension that multimediated expression is not so much a distraction from reading and writing as it is their replacement. That’s the bad idea that I want to label as such, conspicuously. I shouldn’t be surprised to find that we really do all need to tell stories in multimedia. But that will never have much to do with the transaction of reading and writing, a concourse of recorded words in which experience is transformed into understanding.

***

I had thought of taking the day off by spending it in bed, but I went to the movies instead. Because of the terrible wet weather that we’re having, I was more or less obliged to see Dark Shadows. (That British all-star thing about the hotel in India is showing up here, but Kathleen wants me to wait to see that with her.) The soap opera on which Dark Shadows is based was broadcast during my undergraduate days, when I watched little to no television; from what I could make out, it involved vampires camping it up on daytime TV. So I never saw so much as a minute of it. I’d have stayed away from Tim Burton’s adaptation as well, if it hadn’t been for Eva Green, whom I like very much. With her blindingly arctic smile, she makes a very good wicked witch. Everyone else in the cast, if any good at all, seems thrown away on the project, especially Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Michelle Pfeiffer appears, discomfitingly, to be acting out an allegory of ageing actresses. The vulgarity of the project, while not irritating, pervades and deadens every frame, like the bilious make-up. The Collins mansion is a ludicrous monstrosity that seems designed to amaze audiences who have never been anywhere, and does not begin to be slyly humorous. There is in fact nothing sly about Dark Shadows.

The most banal thing about Dark Shadows is, ironically, its lack of shadows. The lighting is almost religiously flat, falling on all surfaces equally. In at least one scene, Johnny Depp strikes a pose that begs for the sort of high-contrast composition that made actors such as John Barrymore seem tragic even when their roles were pathetic, and Eva Green (like Elizabeth Moss in Darling Companion) often brings the young Joan Crawford to mind, but without any of the nerve-snapping tension in which even MGM took pains to embed her. Where Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist recapitulates the artistry with which the old studios compensated for the lack of color, Tim Burton’s movie seems inspired, as if anything could be, by the ambivalent colors of the Seventies — no artistry at all. And Maine — I ask you! Has anyone been to Maine? The only scary movie with a Maine setting that seems more than halfway plausible is Dolores Claiborne, a film of resolutely prosaic settings whose one naturally dramatic scene involves heavenly bodies. Much as I love the East Coast, I do regret its complete lack of seaside clifferies.

I came home and watched The Tourist, which is no more significant than Dark Shadows but a lot more entertaining, and very sly. I wish that Angelina Jolie would play more spy movies as the lusciously cool Elise Clifton-Ward; she’s as over-the-top as can be, but she keeps her footing. I watched the final scenes carefully, noting the faint but vital stages of Johnny Depp’s facial cleanup as the big payoff approaches; lock by lock, his hair and beard grow more kempt and ruly. The Tourist is vulgar, too, but briskly: you have to pay attention to its excesses, or you’ll miss them. I wasn’t really paying attention; I was tidying the blue room, which, between Will’s visit yesterday and my unpacking, had grown unkempt if not quite unruly. Now the only mess in the house is atop the dining table, and it’s really only a matter of piled books. I’d much rather read them than sort them out. 

Has anyone else out there ever worked on the Milton Bradley jigsaw puzzle that featured this view? That’s the Munttor (Mint Tower) in the center. Of course the puzzle provided no details about the location beyond the obvious, “Amsterdam Canal” or somesuch. I still remember the delicious surprise of turning a corner, ten years ago, and realizing that this must be the place. I was standing at the base of the Munttor at the time. If you work on a jigsaw puzzle as visually complicated as this one, the ornateness of the Hotel de l’Europe (on the right) and the angle of the tour boats (on the left) burn memories in the same part of the brain, so that I could see in a flash that if I stood on that bridge over there (the one from which the picture is taken), the puzzle scene would stand before me. As indeed it did.

I miss doing jigsaw puzzles. But who has the time, or the room? The time can’t be helped, but there’s a trick that really works when you’re doing the puzzle on a table that has to be cleared from time to time. If you lay out the pieces on a large piece of felt, you can roll the whole thing up without disturbing the pieces (very much), and then unroll the felt when you want to work on the puzzle again.

***

Itinerary: taxi to Leidesplein. Stroll up Leidestraat to Scheltema (at the Herengraacht). Onwards to the Kinderboekwinkel, just off the Spui. Lunch at Café Luxembourg. Stroll along the Binnen Amstel (see photo) and on past the Stopera to the Joodsmuseum. Then, home: stroll across the Amstel to the Rembrandtplein, then down the Reguliersgracht to Weteringschans and across the Singelgracht to Ferdinand Bolstraat. On the other side of the Heineken plant, I stopped for a black and tan at O’Donnell’s. I’d have had two, but they didn’t take plastic. In truth I was bleeding cash. I paid the taxi in cash, missing New York very much; the Kinderboekwinkel (where I bought Groene Eieren met Ham), they took plastic but only with PINs, and I’ve never used that feature of my credit card; ditto the Joodsmuseum; and then O’Donnell’s. I felt so leaky that I actually totted up my outlays when I got home, and then I subtracted the cash on hand (deceptive: the coins here really mean something), remembered tipping the hotel doorman for the taxi, and, what do you know, all but € 1.50 was accounted for. I would never do such an accounting at home.

I am going to have to read the Dutched Dr Seuss out loud a lot before I try it out on Will. (You try it, getting the rhythm right: “Niet als ik niet kan zien wat het zijn.”)

***

Walking down the Reguliersgraacht, a very quiet canal, just far enough to the east to be off the beaten track — I doubt that many people who aren’t actually neighbors tromp up and down it — it hit me: just as there are romantic people who cannot revisit a city in which they have lived in love with someone who is no longer part of their life, so I don’t much care to visit Amsterdam again until I can do so in the company of an inhabitant. There are certainly many more things to see; there always are. But the things that I want to do, I don’t want to do alone, or with other people who know the place even less well than I do. I want to have a friend who will suggest taking a tram to a movie theatre, and then maybe meeting up with (his or her) friends afterward. In short, I want to live here for a spell, but sociably. As tall orders go, it’s sky-high. But as it is, my familiarity with Amsterdam has carried me right up to a thick pane of glass that only someone who lives here can pass me through, and what I feel now, mostly, is excluded.

Or you could say that it’s payback for the gloat of possessiveness that descends upon me every time I walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is even closer to our apartment than our storage unit is. We keep our cast-offs at the storage unit, and our better things at the museum.

***

Oh! The other night, Kathleen was remembering that the only thing that she knew about the Netherlands as a little girl was the story of Hans Brinker. I knew it, too, sort of, but I’d forgotten it. What a nice idea it would be, I thought, to get an original Dutch edition! Ahem… I ought to have looked into this at home before puzzling the poor young salesclerk at the Children’s Book Shop. The echt-itude of Mary Mapes Dodge’s tale (published in 1865) is such that no one has ever seen fit to translate it into Nederlands. If I weren’t already an old duffer, I’d be mortified.

Here’s hoping that all readers have a pleasant time of it while I’m away. For myself, I’ll be sightseeing on the outside and stocktaking on the inside. Leaving my island home seems more brutal and unnatural than ever. The forward part of my mind is genuinely looking forward to visiting two favorite cities. The bulk of it, though, is so swamped by what feels like a simple prehistoric dread of travel that I wonder what pleasure I’ll be able to take.

***

 

Last night, at bedtime, I watched a few episodes of Kipper. It wasn’t ideal; ideal would be waking up to Kipper. But it was the first time that I got to enjoy the show on a normal television setup, with more picture and lots more sound than Will’s iPad cranks out. When I get back from Amsterdam, I’m going to find out more about this show, which is top-drawer in every way. The insouciant jazz is in the same key as the breezy animation. The design, while discreetly colorful, is plain, and it keeps the sugar content very low. Probably because I lead a quiet life physically, I don’t get much out of massages and other spa treatments. But my cerebral life is fairly active, and nothing, I find, calms me down like fifteen minutes of Kipper.

Every animated entertainment aimed at children has to have its rules, but I haven’t figured out Kipper‘s yet. There are four principal characters: Kipper, who is some sort of extraordinarily good-natured sheepdog; Tiger, a neurotic terrier; Pig, who talks, and his sibling, Arnold, who doesn’t. Silence is the key to Arnold’s charmed life; because he can’t tell the others what he has seen or heard, he is privy to all sorts of wonders. Sometimes, as in “Clouds,” Kipper can follow along, but it’s more often the case that, while Kipper and Tiger make their discoveries and get into scrapes, and Pig tries to stay out of trouble, Arnold is the one who really knows the score. Even though he likes to suck his thumb.

The scrapes that Kipper and Tiger get into, in most episodes, are sometimes fanciful and sometimes not. Kipper’s world is replete with marvels only some of which are available to human children. Everything seems sensible and realistic, but in the manner of dreams. A hose comes loose, and recoils, powered by the water streaming through it, against Kipper’s house. Suddenly it pops in through his window. By the time Kipper and Tiger find out what has happened (they can’t get any water pressure at their inflatable pool), Kipper’s house has flooded to windowsill height. The two doggies paddle around and come to rest on the stairs. “Don’t you wish it could always be like this?” says Kipper. Later, he calls out to Pig, “Don’t open the door!” But of course Pig does open the door and is knocked down by a tidal wave. No harm done! They were all meaning to go swimming anyway. Yes, I do wish it were always like that.

There are no authority figures in Kipper. Tiger is forever running into difficulties, having asked for it in most cases. (He will wear a red slicker when passing by a bull in a field.) But nobody gets into trouble. Nobody scolds Kipper for standing by while his house floods. Nobody scolds him for wasting water. Nor does anyone make the snacks that he and Tiger always seem to be picnicking on. (Come to think of it, Pig is a bit of a cook.) Everyday household problems are not unknown in this world, but they don’t arise with everyday regularity. I’m keenly aware of how different that is from a world in which everyday household problems are overlooked. I would find the latter extremely agitating. But Kipper persuades me, for minutes at a time, anyway, that there is no need to worry about providence.

There’s a cheeriness about Kipper that reminds me of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! — or rather, of John, Paul, George and Ringo. But I try to ignore that; it’s the sort of clever, sophisticated insight that clutters up a very simple pleasure.

***

What was a pleasure, waking up this morning, was realizing that I’ll be sleeping here tonight. Tomorrow night, I won’t be sleeping at all; I’ll be in a plane. (Although I may give Lunesta the supreme test; if it can lull me to sleep over the Atlantic, I’ll be knocked over with gratitude.) Tomorrow, I’ll pack. Perhaps I grew up a time when it took ten days to get to Europe and back, I have a hard time thinking that I can go to Amsterdam without abandoning the apartment for months. I will ask Ray Soleil to look in if he can, late next week, but it’s not vital.

Fire Island is completely different. Kathleen remains in town during two of the weeks, and in any case I’m only three hours away, door to door, at the most. I told my barber yesterday that I’ll have to find a good barbershop in Bay Shore, because I am not coming back into town for that kind of reason.

Kathleen will pack tonight — on the late side, as usual. She has just been asked to attend a testimonial dinner at the Waldorf that she thinks that it would impolitic to miss.

Having written quite a lot yesterday, I’m inclined to take it easy today. It is also the case that my mind is fairly blank. All I can think of is packing, connectivity in an Amsterdam hotel, and how easily a concierge’s instructions will get me aboard a streetcar.

I wore my new green pants to lunch yesterday, and I told my friend that I was thinking of taking them to Amsterdam. She recommended against it. “I want to be remembered,” I said. “Well, in that case…”

The other thing that I’m certain to do is to visit Scheltema, or whatever it’s called now (if it’s still there!) and ask for a copy of Nescio’s stories. I’ve had a very hard time with the Amsterdam Stories, because they fly me back so powerfully to my own feckless youth and I don’t want to revisit the period. Again, at lunch yesterday, a pearl of wisdom dropped onto my tongue. I told my friend that I didn’t mind being old, because for so long I was afraid that my youth would never end.

It doesn’t bother me that our Amsterdam hotel, on the Amstelkanaal, lies outside the purview of tourist maps of the city (the DK guide that I picked up stops a few blocks to the north, at Sarphati Park), but I’m somewhat disheartened to note that St Pancras Station Hotel, where we’ll be staying in London for a couple of nights, is always just out of sight, beyond the edge of most Central London maps. Euston Station, next door, usually makes it in. I should note that staying at St Pancras was all my own idea; I’ve wanted to stay there ever since the pile was restored to its Victorian splendor. A case of answered prayers…

***

At bedtime last night, still in the mood, after “The Turn of the Screw,” for something dark and rich, I couldn’t decide between James and Wharton. For a minute. I chose Wharton. I read the first section of “Bunner Sisters” before falling asleep. I read the rest of the story, which is just shy of novella length, this afternoon.

My usual response to reading something wonderful for the first time is dismay: how did it take me so long to get to this? I didn’t have that feeling about “Bunner Sisters,” though; I was grateful to have had it waiting for me. I was wholly engaged by the melodrama, which at first seemed not to be as bad as I feared, but then got much, much worse. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I won’t say anything about it — only a word about Eliza Ann Bunner, from whose point of view it is told (in the third person, happily.)

What’s thrilliing about this unassuming dress-maker is how extravagantly — how just short of extravagantly — Edith Wharton imagines her highly circumscribed life. To some degree, the woman’s life is narrow because she is superstitiously pious. “I always think if we ask for more what we have may be taken from us,” she says to Evelina, the prettier sister, whom she hopes to see married one day. But it’s not all timorousness. Eliza Ann is truly at home in the barely genteel back room that she shares with Evelina, and Wharton takes pains to cleanse her prose of any trailing pity that she might feel for someone so comparatively disadvantaged.

The infrequency of her walks made them the chief events of her life. The mere act of going out from the monastic quiet of the shop into the tumult of the streets filled her with a subdued excitement which great too intense for pleasure as she was swallowed by the engulfing roar of Broadway or Third Avenue, and began to do timid battle with their incessant cross-currents of humanity. After a glance or two into the great show-windows she usually allowed herself to be swept back into the shelter of a side-street, and finally regained her own roof in a state of breathless bewilderment and fatigue; but gradually, as her nerves were soothed by the familiar quiet of the little shop, and the click of Evelina’s pinking machine, certain sights and sounds would detach themselves from the torrent along which she had been swept, and she would devote the rest of the day to a mental reconstruction of the different episodes of her walk, till finally it took shape in her thought as a consecutive and highly-coloured experience, from which, for weeks afterwards, she would detach some fragmentary recollection in the course of her long dialogues with her sister.

The composure of this recollective habit is really enviable. When the story really gets going, Eliza Ann is as dear to you as any character you’ll ever know. This is the sort of bravura call for sympathy that Dickens used to trumpet by the hour, but either too sharp or too flat and in any case always too loud for pleasure. There is enormous sadness in “Bunner Sisters,” but the story resists dismissal as “pathetic” with all of Eliza Ann’s remarkable force of character.

What a surprise it was, to read about Clayton Christensen in the new New Yorker yesterday afternoon. His ideas about business “disruptions” made immediate sense to me, and I could account for my ignorance of them only by thinking back to 1997, when Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know what I was doing in 1997 — reading a lot of Trollope, I suppose; I’d joined a Trollope listserv just the year before and was for the moment very engaged in discussions of his novels — but of course I know what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t keeping a Web log, or even a Web site. I wasn’t scanning hundreds of feeds a week to keep a wetted finger in the breeze. I’m sure that many other tremendously interesting new ideas flew around me back then; I can only hope that writers as good as Larissa MacFarquhar will continue to unearth them for me.

The least surprising detail in MacFarquhar’s account of Christensen’s work is his discovery of the “Church of New Finance.”

After puzzling over this mystery for a long time, he finally came up with the answer: it was owing to the way the managers had learned to measure success. Success was now measured not in numbers of dollars but in ratios. Whether it was return on net assets, or gross-margin percentage, or internal rate of return, all these measures had, in the past forty years, been enshrined into a near-religion (he liked to call it the Church of New Finance) by partners in hedge funds and venture-capital firms and finance professors in business schools. People had come tot think that the most important thing was not how much profit you made in absolute terems but what percentage of profit you made on each dollar you put it. And the belief drove managers to shed high-volume but low-margined products from their balance sheets, even though nobody had ever come across a bank that accepted deposits in ratios. This was why he called it a church: it was an encompassing orthodoxy that made it impossible for believers to see that it might be wrong.

As of course it is: for all their mathematical aura, these “ratios” involve nothing but adolescent erotic calculus, projected onto a larger field. How much trouble does a guy have to take to get into some girl’s panties? That is the ratio; that is the “thinking.” That is the reaasons for New Finance’s immediate appeal and fire-like spread. Did you think that “how much bang for the buck” came out of nowhere?

Whether we’ll be able to stop using ratios faster than the Roman aristocracy stopped eating from leaden saucepans remains to be seen.

***

Something else new: Greta Keller. How did I live to be 64 without having heard her sing before?

By the time I was washing the dinner dishes last night, the playlist in the iPod had come to an end, and I was casting about for something to listen to while I was in the kitchen. In the stack on my writing table, I found a collection of songs recorded between 1932 and 1938 by the Viennese-born “Great Lady of Chanson,” opened it up, and stuck it into the DVD player in the kitchen. The sound was not optimal, even disturbing Kathleen, who can work through anything. A few minutes later, I was able to play the music on a Nano. That sounded better. I remembered choosing this disc from among the others available because one of the numbers is “Music, Maestro, Please,” a song that I didn’t really pay attention to until a few years ago, when I noticed that the weepy lyrics are bucked up by what can only be called a striptease march. It’s a fetching juxtaposition, so profoundly campy that it’s actually funny.

When you hear Greta Keller for the first time, you think of drag queens lip-synching to Marlene Dietrich, because Keller taught Dietrich how to perform. Keller has the better voice, and she sings where Dietrich would strike a pose. Amidst the standards on the album that I’ve got (“Blue Moon,” “Stormy Weather,” “These Foolish Things”) are some interesting Continental items, such as “A Little Ramble in the Springtime With You,” which is sung mostly in German, and “When I Learn French,” which climaxes with “Please teach me some more.” Something about these songs wants to pretend that the Great War didn’t happen, and that its sequel wouldn’t have to. They sing of a parallel world in which the Dual Monarchy has become a world empire dotted with Ruritanian capitals that look a lot like Paris. If you’d like to see the Hollywood version, permit me to recommend either Trouble in Paradise or Midnight. In the end, it took the laid-back, irreverent Sixties to put an end to the dream. Now Greta Keller’s charm seems sad not because her world was reduced by war or economic dislocation but because her kind of sex appeal was discontinued, and therefore became, qua sex appeal (as distinct from a manner of singing, which in her case is timeless), ludicrous. Even gay men are giving up on “darling.”

***

For several days, I’ve been mulling over Charles Rosen’s essay, “Hofmannsthal and Radical Modernism,” which appears in his formidable collection, Freedom and the Arts (Harvard). The center of the essay is a discussion of a work that I didn’t know of, Hofmannthal’s so-called “Chandos Letter.” The Letter is a manifesto of sorts, cloaked in the costume-drama allure of a late-Sixteenth Century date, but frankly modernist in substance. Having been one of the outstanding lyric prodigies of German letters, the still-young Hofmannsthal woke up, as it were, to an understanding of the world that made poetry impossible. Here is Rosen:

Lyric poetry is properly the expression of the most personal and individual thoughts and feelings. But Hofmannsthal would claim later: “The individual is inexpressible. What is expressed already slips into generality, and is no longer individual in the strictest sense. Language and individuality are opposed.” Language is social not personal; words must be understood by others, an idiolect is non-sense. There are no special words to convey what I alone have experienced. What is most individual, most deeply personal, is therefore perverted and ruined by being put into words.

“Perverted and ruined” — loaded words. Looking at this paragraph from the other side of the Cognitive Revolution, I see Hofmannsthal and, in a more muted way, Rosen himself, as shocked by preliminary tremors of the upset; and that inclines me to regard Modernism as something like an allergic reaction not so much to the world as it had been understood before (before the Enlightenment, before the Industrial Revolution, before Freud) as to the hope that springs eternal, the hope for a new world. A new world could, according to imaginations that had been damaged by the shock of the new, only be dystopian; there was no reason to look forward to it. (Although some Modernists did, they tended toward the totalitarian megalomania of Le Corbusier, making the backsliders like Eliot and Stravinsky and Matisse preferable companions.) I haven’t really perused the essays on literature that constitute that last part of Rosen’s collection, but I expect that it would take long to find mention of “alienation” as an attribute of Modernism.

I’ll be frank: I’m heartened by the idea of Modernism as a pathology. It has always, all might life, struck me as wrong, and as I’ve grown older I’ve seen it as inherently wrong, not, as I thought when I was young, wrong simply for dismissing everything that had gone before. The Modernist impulse (I don’t believe that it was ever crystalized into an idea) was a matter of repulsion and rejection.

In another essay, “Modernism and the Cold War,” Rosen writes of Modernism’s failure to win support in the United States.

The relative, or even absolute lack of success in America is not due to the absence of brainwashing propaganda, but to the fact that almost all modernist art is rebarbative at first encounter and requires several experiences of it to come to terms.

This acknowledgment is almost sweet. Certainly there are artworks cast in the Modernist idiom that take their places, once we’re familiar with them, alongside all the other artworks that we know. But there are many that don’t, that just go on remaining rebarbative, that are meant to be unpleasant, because that is what they record: the trauma of realizing that (just as Hume always insisted) there is no natural connection between the order of the universe and the order that we perceive. The order that we perceive is determined by the struture of our brains, not by actual perception. There is a rough congruence between the two orders — there would have to be, or we would have evolved into extinction. But the truths that we need lie hidden within ourselves. And, as Hofmannsthal vaguely grasped, they are not individual. We are none of us individuals. We are all of us variations.

***

It’s the middle of the evening, and I may clip this paragraph and recycle it tomorrow. I’ve just watched W./E. for the second time, and I feel as though I’ve been to the coronation of a pope. It’s not just the stories that the movie has to tell, but the movie itself, the presence, metamorphosed, of Madonna Ciccone, the director and co-writer of the film. There were two moments that took me back — took me back to the early Eighties, when music videos were the cool new thing and Madonna was not quite that cool. Never mind what they were — all right, the second was the absolutely immortal Twist just before the end — the point is that, with this movie, Madonna becomes the person she always, I think, wanted to be, and yet never can be, except perhaps through a movie (and not in it). It is as though she discovered that for us to find out who she really is, she has to be invisible, because, if we can see her, we’ll be distracted by everything that she tried to be instead. So she enlists Abbie Cornish and Andrea Riseborough to stand in for her, or to be her bridesmaids, perhaps. There is a way in which this movie, more than anything else the performer has ever done, is all about the girl from Bay City. Like a ghost in her own movie, Madonna presses against the screen from time to time, never moreso than in the long scene in which Wallis writes and Wally reads the letters that, quite miraculously actually, it seems, Mohammed el-Fayed has held on to all these years, letters that will eventually change the whole Abdication story.

As to the movie part of the movie, there were two delights about seeing it the second time. First, I knew where the Abbie Cornish plot line was going and I was be comfortable with it. It stands up well on its own (thanks in no small degree to Oscar Isaac, a genuine screen gem), and it supports the pointilliste re-telling of the older tale. Second, I marveled at Andrea Riseborough’s voice. Her voice and her accent. I can remember when ladies from the Upper South talked just like her, especially after a martini or two. I don’t know where the actress picked it up, but she nailed it. I adored the poise with which she and Ms Cornish stand up from the park bench at the end: ladies down to the ground.

The power of great fictions to change over time — to produce different effects, to revert into more than occaasional unfamiliarity, and to blot up the sense of alteration as thought it were not the case that it is we who have changed, not the texts that we’re re-reading for the third or fourth time over a period of many years — is a fact of life that can’t be taught. I’m in the middle of Henry James’s late novella, The Turn of the Screw, and it’s nothing like what it has been before. For one thing, it’s funny. The humor is altogether inadvertent; I don’t think that I’ve mined a vein of intended comedy. But I find that I’m “reading” The Turn of the Screw as if it had nothing really to do with governesses and remote mansions and wicked ghosts. What I’m seeing instead is the problem of in-laws.

I’m reading the novella because I chanced to watch The Innocents a few weeks ago. Jack Clayton’s production, with a script to which Truman Capote contributed, seemed to want to trace Gothic horror back to Freudian roots, and that was clearly something that James could not have compassed. So I thought I’d read the story again. I don’t recall which time it was, but I remember once re-reading The Turn of the Screw in a lather of frustration: it seemed imperative that Edward Gorey be commissioned to illustrate it, but I had no idea how to go about this. (Gorey was very much alive at the time.) That urge has palpably passed; the very idea of illustrating the story itself seems gauche. (And in any case many of Gorey’s little works could be said to “illustrate” Henry James, particularly on the points of children and innocence.) What I’m going for now is the character of the unnamed governess who narrates the tale. James knits character and tale together in such a way that a claim can be made that the governess is a deluded madwoman, so hysterically attached to her little charges that she manufactures devils from whom she cannot protect them. Her story altogether lacks corroborative detail. That she is able to prevail upon the housekeeper, illiterate Mrs Grose, to agree with her hypotheses is nothing remarkable; she, after all, is a lady. And she is a lady in contest with another lady, the only other kind of lady — a fallen lady. This would be Miss Jessel, her predecessor.

Miss Jessel, the new governess learns, abandoned herself to the attentions of Peter Quint, the valet of the rich man to whom the care of little Miles and Flora has devolved. On its face this is an unspeakable mésalliance, almost to the point of outright bestiality. Whether Quint died (in an accident, slipping on an icy patch while drunk) before or after Miss Jessel’s departure from Bly (the great house), I’m not sure; I’m not sure that it matters. Miss Jessel is believed to have died, too. The governess comes to believe that the ghosts of the man and the woman have come back to claim the children. Unless you’re very out of sympathy with James’s writing, his story will flow by without striking any rocky questions about why the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel haven’t better things to do; the governess’s belief in their malignancy is so convinced that it is somewhat beyond convincing: we don’t interrogate the governess — we let Mrs Grose do that, in her half-hearted way. Instead, we let the governess set our teeth chattering with her lurid anxieties.

The great problem in all of Henry James’s fiction is other people’s knowledge. What do other people know — about the things that we know, about us; what plans do they harbor? Writing in a somewhat simpler moral universe, James presented the problem in terms of candor and dishonesty; he appears to have believed that people know what they know, and can share it or not as they choose. (We are today quite sure that this is never the case.) The difference between what I know and what you know is a crack in which the flowers of evil can take root — when it is not a fatal abyss. 

What children know — children of any age, as Maggie Verver’s history reminds us — is an aspect of the larger problem that interested James throughout his career. What Maisie Knew is a tour de force of what we might call disimagination, as James cramps his point of view into the head of a little girl, allowing her no thoughts beyond her tender years. (Such thoughts are the abstractions from which we erect our “understanding.”) In The Awkward Age, knowledge takes on a hymeneal significance; the lack of it is a badge of virginity. Trying to figure out what other people know is hard enough. What children know is of a bafflement!

What distinguishes the governess from other James characters is her impetuous inference of what Miles and Flora “know.” No sooner has a possibility occurred to her than it becomes a sure thing. At the same time, she persists in a sentimental view of childish innocence that was one of the Victorian era’s most insistent daydreams. Mere possession of wicked knowledge does not taint Flora or Miles. In the early stages of being “on to” the children, the governess worries that her attentiveness will tip them off to her suspicions. But not her worry is calmed in the most interesting way.

It would have been easy to get into a sad wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace I could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember asking if I mightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.

Reading this, I was attacked by the most inconsequent image. I remembered holding my grandson in my arms, and he was studying my face with a view to playing with it, pulling my ears and whatnot. He likes to try to put my glasses on, but until recently it was always with the air of poking an eye out to see what might happen. What this recollection had to do with anything I’ve no idea, but I suddenly understood that the governess was in the position of a mother-in-law, or perhaps a grandmother, who has allowed herself to believe that the relations of her child’s spouse are something less than a good influence on the marriage, on the grandchildren. And the position of the children, Flora and Miles, is exactly that of any perspicacious grandchildren, careful to suppress any intimations of bad influence. In The Turn of the Screw, it is precisely the children’s model behavior that convicts not them but the dreadful Quint and his paramour, Miss Jessel.

These insights, if that’s what they are, don’t make The Turn of the Screw a funny book, but they do raise a smile, because James has so cleverly (whether he knew it or not; unintended masterstrokes are always a risk with cleverness) repackaged a family problem that is as common as dirt in glitteringly scary wrappings.  

***

Perhaps I misspoke about Henry James’s “apparent belief” that people can choose whether or not to say what’s on their mind. It might be better to propose that his characters labor under that hope. Whatever he himself thought, his prose is a manifestation of the difficulties of clear and complete expression. Ultimately, it is impossible; James ends up listing the things that he does not mean to say, and hedging them in with highly nuanced qualifications.

There isn’t anything particularly new in the “Ego Depletion” entry at You Are Not So Smart — not for anyone who knows how to spell “Tierney” — but these are early days in the Cognitive Revolution, and it’s going to take a while for the gyre of tests and studies to gel into a popular program, or at any rate a program popular among literate folk. And David McRaney wraps up the entry on a lyrical note that captures the affect as well as the effects of will-power exhaustion.

Modern life requires more self control than ever. Just knowing Reddit is out there beckoning your browser, or your iPad is waiting for your caress, or your smart phone is full of status updates, requires a level of impulse control unique to the human mind. Each abstained vagary strengthens the pull of the next. Remember too that you can dampen your executive functions in many ways, like by staying up all night for a few days, or downing a few alcoholic beverages, or holding your tongue at a family gathering, or resisting the pleas of a child for the umpteenth time. Having an important job can lead to decision fatigue which may lead to ego depletion simply because big decisions require lots of energy, literally, and when you slump you go passive. A long day of dealing with bullshit often leads to an evening of no-decision television in which you don’t even feel like switching the channel to get Kim Kardashian’s face out of your television, or sitting and watching a censored Jurassic Park between commercials even though you own a copy of the movie five feet away.

This passage is embedded in a paragraph that begins and ends with admonishments to plan ahead. I think that that’s what I’ve been trying to do since my time on Fire Island last summer, and that that’s why life has felt so different and, paradoxically (?), so fatiguing ever since. Planning ahead means understanding your life in very fine detail — your routines, your environment, and so on — so that you can manipulate your course through them. Acquiring this understanding demands an entirely new set of demands upon your attention, and a new range of decisions, all of which are depleting. (Is this why it’s so hard to make serious changes? Does this explain “force of habit”?) It’s only when you’ve made the set of correct decisions about reorganizing your life that you can proceed to live that reorganized life — if you still have any energy.

This came to me this morning when, before getting up, I mulled over the title of yesterday’s entry, which I never changed even though I also never got round to giving it a raison d’être in the entry. What was on my mind, early yesterday morning, was that it has been a very long time since I popped out of bed, eager for the new day. (For breakfast, at a minimum.) I’ve attributed this lack of zip to age, and to the fatigue that increases with age (for some people), and of course to drinking too much wine, even though I now go to bed, night after night, with a perfectly clear head. This morning, it occurred to me that there might be something else at work. Out on Fire Island last summer, I had a “torso of Apollo” moment, in which I not only knew that I must change my life but saw the direction in which I must change it. And that is what I have been doing ever since, day after day — either changing my life or collapsing from the task. All the while, of course, I’ve been living my regular life — writing here, reading endless feeds, keeping house, washing up after dinner, and to some extent looking after Kathleen. You’ll say: well, what changed? All those things. I do almost everything a little bit differently, and the changes were all made with a view to conserving my will power. Whatever could be turned into an easy, unthinking habit, was. That’s probably not what Rilke had in mind, but he wasn’t living in the Cognitive Revolution. Changing your life nowadays is a matter of coding. 

***

When we were young, we Boomers, we were told that we could be anything, do anything. Our opportunities were said to be boundless. I suspect that the more affluent among us — those who grew up to assume an inordinate number of positions of power — heard the message incessantly. Of course, it was wrong; we were misinformed. We were brought up on bad information. It’s no wonder that we thought that we had all the time in the world, or that we would be allowed to slough off the consequences of our mistakes and start again. That we saw the error in this outlook is attested by the tendency that we and succeeding generations have followed toward overprogramming the lives of our children.   

Finished off by the Museum yesterday afternoon, I was good for nothing but watching movies at home. Happily, something new arrived in the (Royal) mail, a DVD of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. I didn’t know anything about this film until I read a snatch of what Wesley Morris had to say about it (in the Globe, I presume); Wesley Morris, the fourth film critic to win a Pulitzer ever, was hailed by Jim Emerson at Scanners; I’d never heard of Morris, either. When Weekend was over, I watched Runaway Jury. I’d been tempted to watch it whilst cleaning the refrigerator on Monday afternoon, but I hadn’t been up for the grim opening sequence, in which a disaffected day-trader (remember them?) goes haywire and takes a rifle to his brokerage office. I wasn’t up for that yesterday, either; I contrived to be in the kitchen making dinner for most of it.

Weekend is such a delicate picture that synopsis can only mislead. Wesley Morris writes,

Sometimes you don’t want to escape. You want to connect with a movie that’s really about something, to listen to a filmmaker talk things out, to watch him amp everyday life without calling attention to his turning up the sound.

And what Weekend is about is, again in Morris’s words, “the way intimacy compounds sex until it begins to sprout feelings.” It is not about this-happened-then-that. Of course things have to happen: on a Friday night, a lifeguard and an artist meet in a gay bar and go back to the lifeguard’s apartment; on the following Sunday afternoon, the artist leaves Nottingham for Portland, Oregon and a two-year course, and the two men, who are now lovers, are as heartbroken as if they’d known each other for years. Weekend is, indeed, about the sprouting of feelings, and Andrew Haigh is a magician, because the sprouting of anything is pretty slow watching, and yet Weekend is never boring. He knows how to keep his material fresh. He perches Russell, for example, in a fourteenth-floor flat in what seems to be a well-maintained council estate. This allows for several interesting variations on the theme of his new friend’s several departures, seen walking away along an angular path from the high distance of Russell’s window.

Then there is the brilliance of excising the entire one-night-stand experience that brings the men together. We realize, with the dawn of the morning-after, that the foregoing scenes have been by way of introduction, and that the movie is starting now, when Glen pulls out a voice recorder and solicits Russell’s assessment of the sex that they’ve had, “for an art project,” he says. Russell is immediately put off, and before you know it, he and Glen have had their first fight, without raising their voices. Glen, the artist, is a sharp-tongued connoisseur of the self-hatreds of gay life; Russell, more cautious in every way (he is a lifeguard), thinks that it’s right to want to be happy. As the two men realize that they really click, Glen becomes distraught: he grasps Russell’s arms and says, “I don’t do [being] boyfriends, and I don’t want us to fall out about it.” Which is to say, I want us to be friends about not being friends. It’s impossible of course, just as the prospect of maintaining any kind of relationship for two years across thousands of miles is impossible. But Weekend,  gloriously, is not about problem-solving. As for the sex, Haigh has a genius for highlighting surrender, which registers in heads and shoulders as well as it does in any other parts of the body. His discretion is never coy.

Tom Cullen (Russell) and Chris New (Glen), appearing in their first feature, have the look of indie amateur innocents that a movie like Weekend needs; I can’t imagine how the film will read when the actors’ faces become familiar, as I’ve no doubt that they will, from other projects. That alone is a great reason to get hold of Weekend now.     

Runaway Jury, which I watched quite a number of times when the DVD came out, feels older than it is, possibly because it was shot in New Orleans before Katrina. Like Fracture, which is the movie that I did watch whilst cleaning the refrigerator, it is a game of cat-and-mouse that uses the law for tokens in much the way that Monopoly uses battleships and steam irons. This would be objectionable if the movie weren’t so fast-paced that it can dispense with absolute coherence. At the very end, the characters played by John Cusack and Rachel Weisz are presented as the Good Guys, but their justice is a little rough and certainly not legal. You forgive this, because, good or not, they whip the dickens out of Gene Hackman, whose Bad Guy status is certified from the beginning. As a “jury consultant” who will stop at nothing, not even suborning jurors, to win a favorable verdict for his clients, his Rankin Fitch flies an enemy-of-democracy flag that must have been picked up at a Cold-War souvenir shop, and Mr Hackman invests him with all the gleeful malevolence of a Bond villain. Unlike a Bond villain, however, he does not perish invisibly in the explosion of his bunker. No, he is reduced to wobbling sobs at a rundown bar, his career (and life) in utter ruins — and he’s still alive!

It’s also fun to watch Jeremy Piven before.

***

 

“Nevertheless,” Kathleen said, “and in spite of everything, I still do love you.” Not forty seconds ago she said this, concluding a discussion of last night’s late hours. I argued that she was a wicked enchantress who would stop at nothing to raise topics of interest in the wee hours; never mind what she claimed. I do know that it was not I who began, at midnight, to tabulate the locations of all the Vermeers in the world. On the other hand, it was I who brought out the London A-Z to establish where, exactly, St Pancras Station stands in relation to everything else. (Far from, just as I thought.) Don’t be surprised when I confess that we slept through our flight to Heathrow.

I want to see The Mousetrap, with an unidentified cast. The show has been running since the year before Kathleen was born — how bad can it be? Kathleen wants to see Hay Fever, with Lindsay Duncan and Jeremy Northam. So do I, but not so much. The idea of seeing Hay Fever in the West End reminds me of seeing Deborah Carr as Candida in 1977, which I actually did. It is possible to be too authentic.

Now I am off to the Museum, for a Far Corners tour of the Wing That Used to be Islamic and the wing that is still American. First, my old law school classmate and I will have lunch — her treat. When she complained about my paying for brunch on Sunday, I laughed and allowed that I would let her take me to the cafeteria at the Museum. Upon reflection, I became more generous, and arranged to meet at the Petrie Court.  

***

Wherever the Vermeers are, they’re not where they belong. The Sleeping Maid is hanging more or less in the right place, but the other four are AWOL. Serves me right.

There is still a good chance that I’ll get to the job that I’d planned to start after lunch: straightening up the refrigerator. It’s truly a job that I would almost do anything else to postpone, but I really couldn’t not sit down first and say a word about A Game of Hide and Seek, which I continued reading after lunch, and soon actually finished. It’s the ninth of Taylor’s novels that I’ve read — all the ones that you can buy off the shelf in the United States. The three remaining titles have been ordered by Crawford Doyle, and I can’t decide whether I hope that they arrive before I leave for Amsterdam and London at the end of next week. Also ordered, Nicola Beauman’s biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor, which revealed the extramarital affair that Taylor had for many years with a painter whom she met at a Communist Party meeting.

I’ve read nine books, more or less in a row, by the same author, expecting, at the beginning of each one, to find my appetite sated by familiarity, but that has never happened, and in every case I’ve been sucked into the new story quite as compellingly as if I weren’t out to read everything by the author. Formally, the books are hugely different. None of the others, for example, has Hide and Seek‘s twenty-year narrative caesura; nor does any of the other books (that I’ve read) focus so intently upon a single attachment, which could be called the love story of Harriet and Vesey if that were not exactly what Hide and Seek Isn’t. The first half of the book takes place in the late Twenties; Harriet and Vesey have only just ceased to be children. Neither knows how to behave with the other. Harriet is painfully shy, and not only that: love seems to cause her real pain (which doesn’t make it any less desirable). Not the kind of agony that Derek Parfitt uses as the test for his propositions, assuming that we would do anything to avoid it and, if we were good, anything to spare others its misery, but pain nonetheless; you wouldn’t know to look at her that she’s in love. And Vesey is an impertinent, insistent autodidact, determined to learn nothing from anyone. The last days of their last childish summer together come to a Tennysonian sunset, and, after a spell of working in a dress shop, Harriet marries somebody else, a solicitor of substance whose mother used to be a star of the West End.

Then comes the break, and everything has changed when Vesey and Harriet meet at a dance as adults. For one thing, they know how to express the fact that they were in love and have never stopped loving the other — and they do so without talking. Tables have turned: Harriet is a proper provincial matron (High Wycombe?), while Vesey is an itinerant supporting actor (he plays Laertes when Hamlet comes to town). You wouldn’t think it possible, but the novel takes a turn towards Verdi territory when Harriet’s husband, Charles, decides not only to be jealous but to throw scenes. (“No woman,” Harriet reflects, “could have bided her time, as he had.”) There’s a sensational ensemble number with Charles and his dodgy law partner and the law partner’s dodgy wife (who thought that the “worse” in “for better or worse” would be her husband, nothing additional) standing about like aristocrats in Don Carlo or Otello, while Harriet drops a crystal glass, kneels to gather the fragments, cuts her self, and is swiftly joined by Vesey, who wraps her bleeing wound in a handkerchief, oblivious of the others. It’s the most exuberantly thrilling scene that I’ve ever read in any novel — any novel that wasn’t supposed to be thrilling, that is. You can’t believe that it’s happening in an English drawing room round about the time I was born.

Taylor follows this with the most extraordinary leap. Skipping over the lovers as if they weren’t there, she writes about Charles’ invigoration: having a grievance against his wife puts a spring in his step.

His attitude toward his mother was part of the change. Now he talked of her a great deal — as she had been as an actress, and strove to remember some of those successes which at the time he had resented. He seemed all of a sudden to know a great deal about the stage without everr having gone much to the theatre. A photograph of Julia as Cleopatra, with hair low on her brow, looped and strung about with pearls and looking bad-tempered, was discovered among some old letters and left propped on his desk. He often spoke of her precarious and arduous life, although she had been, as he said, at the very top of her profession.

Julia herself, the old ageing vamp, finds “a new lease on life” in her turn, as the direct result of Charles’s new affection. So does that of the granddaughter who takes after her, despite her fanciful dream that Vesey, and not Charles, is her father. (The truth is betrayed by an unconscious gesture right out of Julia’s playbook.) Only gradually do we come back to Harriet, or rather to what is now her Big Problem: how to remain respectable whilst being in love with another man. (And she is no longer pained by Vesey; he makes her happy now, as nothing else does.) I won’t go into any of this, except to say that Taylor assumes that the reader has read a few other novels and perhaps even seen a few movies (including one that rouses Julia’s indignation, involving “a middle-aged couple in raincoats, and it all took place on a railway-station”) and, in short, manages to convey Harriet’s first-time, I’ve-never-done-this-before panic without trying your patience. The end is quick and fine.

***

Now I’d better get Nescio under my belt, hadn’t I.

Because of Diane Keaton alone, I will see Darling Companion again. Indeed, I’ll probably buy the DVD when it comes out (which may be very soon). Ms Keaton adds another sterling late-in-life performance to her charm bracelet, and she is assisted by an extremely engaging cast, including a never-better Dianne Wiest and a literally enchanting Ayelet Zurer. They say that Meryl Streep can play anybody, and it’s true; Diane Keaton is still, at the same age, America’s sweetheart. Every good woman in the land has something to learn from her. And every man, period.

But there is a difficulty about the movie, a difficulty that remains vague and not particularly oppressive until a scene near the end that stands in the place of a climax. Instead of a climax, it is the stuff of an anecdote that you might hear at Davos or at some other assembly of extremely wealthy people whose lives are so gated that they never brush anywhere near the portals. (Except in Manhattan, which is their recreational jungle.) Let us think back to Auntie Mame, to Gloria Upson’s saga of the ping-pong balls at the country club. “And then I said…And then she said…” Gloria represents a world in which, ordinary problems having vanished, one must make the most of ping-pong. So it is here.

The Disney version of Darling Companion would have focused on the adventures of Freeway, the runaway mutt whose disappearance causes so much angst to the human beings in his new life. Having been spotted at the side of an Interstate highway and then rescued by Beth (Ms Keaton) and her daughter, Grace (Elisabeth Moss), Freeway introduces Grace to the veterinarian whom she will marry a year later, at her parents’ Rocky Mountain vacation home. While being taken out for a walk by Joseph (Kevin Kline), Beth’s career-absorbed spinal surgeon, Freeway is seduced by the delights of the hunt when a deer lopes across the path. Joseph, fatally, is talking (about his career) on a cell phone, and he is not carrying the special orange whistle that hangs in abundant supply by the door of his chalet. That is the last we see of Freeway until the very end of the movie.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t for a moment wish to know more about Freeway’s Outward-Bound experience. I was not worried about whether he was alive or dead. Mind you, I was ticked, almost as much as Beth was, that Joseph wasn’t a very responsible pet steward; I believe that, if you are going to bring a pet into your life, then you must treat it with all the care and concern that you would give to a child (short of open-ended catastrophic medical procedures, that is, which seem unredeemedly cruel to me). A dog is not “just a dog,” once you’ve signed up to feed and shelter it. But although I loved our Labrador retrievers when I was growing up, it was a very childish and unintelligent affection, and when I grew old enough to be more mature about animals, I discovered that they didn’t interest me. So I, sitting in the darkened theatre, did not worry about Freeway. I was completely absorbed by the hunt for Freeway that ties up the six characters who remain at the Rocky Mountain lodge after Grace’s wedding to her veterinarian. (Goodbye, Elisabeth Moss!) As they hunt for the dog, the humans get to know each other better in difficult situations and become better human beings. A cast as great as this one can make you forget that you’ve seen this story before, and before and before and before.

In addition to Beth and Joseph, we had Penny (Dianne Wiest), Penny’s son (Mark Duplass) — also a spinal surgeon, and a colleague of his uncle’s back in Denver — and Penny’s new boyfriend, a dodgy-sounding entrepreneur called Russell (Richard Jenkins). Also, Carmen (Ms Zurer), the caretaker at the chalet. We could start with this detail; why not. Carmen is a ravishingly pretty half-gypsy who lives full-time at a mostly-uninhabited vacation house? (The question mark imposes itself.) And why don’t Beth and Joseph seem to know her very well? And what about the house that Beth and Joe break into when, lost in a storm while out looking for Freeway, they break a window, triggering an alarm that brings rescue to their feet? Why didn’t that house have a caretaker? Surely you don’t build a lovely faux-rustic trianon in the middle of highly scenic nowhere only to shut off the power and water when you’re not around, entrusting your property to the ministrations of a silent alarm. That’s what — that’s what ordinary people would do.

Ms Keaton and Mr Kline play Beth and Joseph, right up until the would-be climax, as ordinary, accessible overachievers; if you went to college anywhere, the odds are that there was a couple just like them in your class. But Lawrence Kasdan, who directs the film and who wrote it with his wife, Meg, have appliquéd ordinary Beth and Joe onto the very extraordinary lifestyle of Hollywood producers (Mr Kasdan is also a co-producer of Darling Companion). So when, instead of climax we must have anecdote, Beth and Joseph (and the rest of their party, which also gets an assist on the ground from Sam Shepard’s crusty sherriff) resort to criminal deception, violating five or six statutes governing civil aviation. You had to be there when this story was told the first time. In the movie’s lavish re-telling, the incident is not only unfunny but creepily narcissistic.  

We are all familiar with the concept of the train wreck, the movie that is so botched that it’s actually entertaining, as long as you can make your mind squint until verisimilitude is no longer an issue. (My favorite train wreck is Merci Docteur Rey, also starring Dianne Wiest.)  Darling Companion, also entertaining (the actors make sure of that), is another kind of disaster, the movie ruined by one single miscalculation. Mr Kasdan invested a great deal of skill and taste as well as money in Darling Companion, but he was mistaken about being able to make it fly.

***

I was right to finish my mention of tonight’s Carnegie Hall tickets, in the daily entry at Civil Pleasures, with a question mark  The weather’s grisly — penetrating and wet, worse, as far as I’m concerned, than snowfall at thirty degrees cooler — and I want to be sure not to miss any of this weekend’s events (more parties). My streak of concert cancellations this season has been unprecedented, to the extent that I’m wondering if I ought to renew any of my subscriptions. I’m even thinking about dropping Orpheus, which I’ll be missing on Saturday night because I’d rather go to a cocktail party. (Ms NOLA will take the tickets, and I know that she’ll have a good time, so I don’t feel any sense of waste. Tonight’s tickets, for a performance Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, are another matter, although I didn’t so much as buy them as take them along with good seats for Messiah at Christmas.) Increasingly, I don’t want to go out at night unless it’s to spend time with friends — and I don’t mean sitting still with friends.

The iPod playlists are undoubtedly to blame for my dismal attendance record. They have filled my brain with music that I never knew as well as I do now. Just this afternoon, I noticed that one little dance in Bach’s fourth French Suite takes for its theme a figure buried in the counterpoint of the preceding number. I realized that I knew that it was going to happen; I had heard the keyboard suites so many times in the past year that, even though I have to stop and think, which one is this?, I not only knew what was coming next but grasped that I was listening to a kind of prelude. In short, I am not hungry to hear music, and, because the playlists have made it possible for me to get to know multiple performances of many works very well — something that, as I’ve written elsewhere, was hard to achieve in the era of the LP, when every piece of music (or every record, at least) had to be physically chosen, thus putting a premium on “bests” and “favorites” — the music that I listen to at home is as varied as the music that I would hear in a concert hall. I wonder how much of what I’m saying makes sense to anyone interested in music, but not in classical music.

The second volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries has appeared, entitled As Consciousness Is Harnessed to the Flesh. What a ghastly title — I can’t believe that Sontag herself would have chosen it. “I’m irritated with images, often: they seem ‘crazy’ to me. Why should X by like Y?” Why speak of consciousness as harnessed when horses are harnessed precisely because they’re naturally independent (not to mention two of a kind). Reading Brian Dillon’s review in the Irish Times, I’m doubting that I’ll buy the book. I bought the first installment, Reborn, but almost immediately handed over to Ms NOLA.

It was embarrassing to see how insecure Sontag was about her gifts and her budding career, and Dillon writes that these worries did not dissipate even as she became the intellectual goddess of the Sixties. Her anxieties were excised from the published work that we got to see at the time. In public, Sontag spoke with a cool bravado that casually presumed that her readers were on the same page, if perhaps a sentence or a thought behind her. She was, in her photographs, so beautiful! Her beauty was the source of her authority. That’s so obvious now! When I do read the diaries — when they all come out, and, maybe if I’m lucky, get published in one volume — I’ll be interested to see how much she dared write even privately about the importance of her good looks. Certainly no ordinary-looking doofus would have been permitted to talk about all the unheard-of writers whom she served up like so many hot restaurant tips. (If you haven’t seen Annie Leibovitz’s utterly heartless photograph of Sontag’s corpse laid out for a wake, count yourself fortunate.)

I was in college when I read Against Interpretation. It convinced me that I would never measure up as an intellectual, possibly because the effort would be too great. Reading all the books and understanding them wouldn’t be the hard part. The hard part would be maintaining the stance (which you are free to think of as what it really is, a pose). Sontag could be a goddess because she was prepared to suppress her everyday humanity in a blaze of cerebral stylishness. The humanity is revealed in her diaries; she is perpetually announcing that she is on the verge of becoming a great writer — but she never, to her own satisfaction, quite gets there.

I also thought, reading “Notes on Camp,” that, if this was what the world was really like, it was arguably not worth saving.

***

Perhaps if I’d grown up ten years earlier, I would have seen “intellectual” for what it was, a fashion. The concept had been around for a century or so; it signified belief in the more or less Hegelian conviction that the universe was governed by metaphysical laws — scholasticism, in short — and that these laws would eventually but inevitable rid the world of what was not at the time called “yuppie scum.” And what could have been more scholastic than all the feuds on the Left? The Wars of the Cafés! After World War II, in this country, “intellectual” described a mildly paranoid view of the civil order as a vast conspiracy, or rather the conspiracy of a handful of secret agents operating over the vastness of the nation. One indispensable item in every intellectual’s kit was “contempt for the bourgeoisie.” Or so it seemed. In fact, there was always a tension between intellectuals who had been born and raised in bourgeois families and those from working-class backgrounds, with the latter substituting rudeness for clever condescension.

I am glad that no one sets out to be an intellectual anymore.

***

I hoped to revisit the subject of intellectuals this afternoon, but the hour that I’d have spent writing got chewed up by scheduling problems. I went to an earlier showing of Darling Companion (about which more tomorrow) and then trudged eastward to Alphabet City. I arrived before Will and his mother, but that was no inconvenience, just this once, for I was lugging a garden kneeler, one of those handy contraption that upends as a nice little bench. When they arrived, I was reading A Game of Hide and Seek in the late afternoon light. I say “just this once” because I won’t be carrying the bench in future; I had bought the one I was carrying to leave at Will’s. It makes picking up after him and sitting wherever he wants to play a great deal easier. Well, easy; it wasn’t.

Where did Will’s train table go, I asked Megan. Turns out Will played Godzilla with it, roaringly overturning the table top and sending Plan Toys tracks and Thomas the Tank Engines flying in all directions. The third time was the charm for his mother: the table was not set up again. I am sanguine about the savagery, for I believe that Will is the sort of child who will put this sort of behavior behind him fairly quickly. Been there done that, &c. With Kathleen and me, he was a quiet little fellow, engaged by Kipper when not hiding behind the sofa.

I must remember to wear an undershirt next time, no matter how warm it is. I know that he will sooner or later push his small wooden bus between the plackets of my dress shirt. I could fairly see the cogs turning while he played in my lap.

It was Megan and Ryan’s fourth anniversary! I’m so used to thinking of them as the world’s greatest parents that I lose sight of the romantic preliminaries.

After an early dinner, last night — Kathleen was grinding away on a project that had kept her busy all weekend — I finished reading In a Summer Season and immediately wrote to Peter Cameron, to tell him that a scene toward the end of Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth novel had evoked for me an apparently unrelated scene in his new novel, Coral Glynn. This evocation was a visceral upset, not a cerebral matching up of references or similarities. There were none of those that I could see. Nor was this some vague sense of déja vu. It was, rather, as though Coral had been standing behind Edwina in her “smart, dead” drawing room and exchanging glances with Kate. I knew that, if I were going to write about this unprecedented experience at all, I had better do it right away, and that, while striving for concision, I ought to include every pertinent detail of what I called a moment of “synesthesia.” It wasn’t, technically. Synesthesia is the blending, or confusion, of two different senses. But I did have the most uncanny sense of re-reading Coral Glynn even as I was reading In a Summer Season for the first time. It didn’t occur to me later that some readers might find in this an artistic failure of some kind, a staleness perhaps. But there was nothing stale about it for me; I was thrilled. The act of reading was, for a moment, electric in an entirely new way.  

Then I tried to pick a movie to watch. Ideally, it would have been Brief Encounter, only comic and in color. That is, it would have been Elizabeth Taylor’s version of Noël Coward’s fabulous tear-jerker, and not a tear-jerker at all. Sadly, this movie does not exist, so I found myself torn between Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which is an adaptation of a novel by Taylor, and The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 transposition of Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw. What The Innocents has to do with Taylor I couldn’t begin to tell you, but I suppose you could say that it was a movie that Taylor might have seen. What interested me wasn’t so much Freddie Francis’s remarkable cinematography, dreamy yet stark at the same time; I’d noticed that before. Nor was it Deborah Kerr’s operatic but Gothic reprise of her King and I role, as a governess in crinolines. What struck me was the madness of the screenplay. The screenplay is attributed to William Archibald and Truman  Capote, with “additional scenes and dialogue” provided by John Mortimer. (All very top drawer!) It is not nearly as unsettled as the novella. James leaves the governess’s soundness of mind open to question. There is a distinct possibility that she is imagining things. Not in the movie, however. The adapters’ governess may be a little intense, a little too presumptuously the angel of virtue, but she is not out of her mind. She knows what’s best for the children, and it isn’t to protect them from the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel. It’s more therapeutic than that, more in tune with the times of 1961. The governess is convinced that the only thing that will release the children from the ghostly spell of her predessor and her predecessor’s lover will be the little ones’ open acknowledgment of their corruption. You may agree or disagree about the wisdom of this treatment, but you won’t be wondering if Ms Kerr’s character is seeing things that aren’t there. This shift makes the movie itself, and not the governess, seem to be hysterical and overwrought. And not, I think, very faithful to the spirit of James’s story, which I shall have to re-read to be certain.

I watched The Innocents first, then Mrs Palfrey. I have been telling everyone that Dan Ireland’s 2005 adaptation is very faithful to Taylor’s (penultimate) novel. That can only have been because I hadn’t seen the movie in a while. The things that the filmmaker’s do to lighten up Taylor’s novel all work to infantilize it. Take Ludo’s mother, for example. There is no scene in the book in which Mrs Palfrey gets to tell Ludo’s mother how nice her son is, and it’s unlikely that Ludo’s mother would be affected by the remark. And the other elderly guests at the Claremont! They’ve been severely denatured. Mrs Arbuthnot, for example, is hardly the commanding figure that Anna Massey presents. Riddled with arthritis, she moves slowly and painfully with the aid of several canes, and in the night she cannot bring herself to get out of bed and walk down the hall to the communal loo. With the result that she is quietly asked to leave the Claremont. No dramatic collapse on the dining-room floor for her! Mr Osborne and Mrs Post are both made to be slightly dotty but basically lovable codgers. They’re not. In the novel, they’re sere, stunted trees, casting a malignant shade. I don’t think that the film gains anything by these softenings.

Finally, there is Joan Plowright herself. Ms Plowright gives a star turn in the title role, and no mistake, but she is ultimately too feminine for the part. She may be an old lady now, but she was a beautiful slip of a girl once, as you’ve only to see The Entertainer to understand, and that soft slip of a girl is still walking around in Joan Plowright’s body. What would have been better, could they have had her, would have been the late Joan Sanderson, the grimly frugal Mrs Richards in the great Fawlty Towers episode about flying tarts and a view of the wildebeests.

All the same, both movies are great to watch, and I enjoyed them more than ever for enjoying them a little more critically.

***

My visitor, George Borden, is, I’ve decided, an in-house accountant for an admiralty law firm. This means that he’s a steady worker more interested in stability than in big bucks, but also that he works in a small field, with not many genuine confrères. Whether or not George will still be an accountant working for a a specialty law firm by the time I’m done with him couldn’t matter less. The preliminary decision has taught me a lot about him, or rather allowed me to know him better. George’s wife, Alice, works for a charitable foundation whose funder is interested in public housing. The next thing to know is the character of the neighbor. Ah: I see that she is a retired executive secretary. What shall we call her? More important: is she the catalyst, the person who opens an unexpected door for George? Or is it someone to whom she is connected, someone who will take George out of his apartment building? Each one of these details is like a crumb of bread that, holding them out in my hands, attracts further details.

George’s story is about getting older, but it is not a story about decline.

After the long weekend away from the computer, I was tempted, this morning, to stretch the “long weekend” concept a bit, and to fold in a paragraph or two at the end of the preceding entry. But here I am, remembering the cherry blossoms that have long since scattered in the wind and rain. Another annual moment of extraordinary loveliness has come and gone. It was difficult to enjoy this year, because the sense of a regular, ordered world that their serried April blooms have signified in the past was this year, and not for the first, undermined by the upheaval of subway station construction outside our door. From the very start, the project has worn for me a sinister military air, as if the intersection were a checkpoint within a divided city. Civilian life does flow, largely unimpeded, all about the concrete stancheons and the fenced-in backhoes and the curious multistorey structures, and amidst the men in hard hats and orange vests, more and more of whom seem to be carrying paperwork. But, no doubt because I am old, the work is not exciting but only stressful. I am always wondering if I will live to see the end of it, not because the official completion date is so far away (what’s five years?), but because it’s hard to believe that such an extensive rupture of urban fabric can ever be repaired.

The weather is thick and gloomy. I slept badly, troubled by irritating dreams crowded with banal anxieties. (Wondering whether I had packed enough underwear recurred throughout the series.) Then there was the question, “What does George Borden do?” George Borden is something of an incubus at the moment. Yesterday, he didn’t even have a name. This morning, he not only got that but a wife named Alice. George and Alice raised two children in one of the suburbs, but moved into the city when the younger one was killed in a high-school graduation-party drunk-driving accident (how innocent a victim, I haven’t decided). Alice had always wanted to move back into the city when her children were out of school, but it was only several years after the move that she realized that George never did, and wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t wanted to leave the scene of the tragedy, which in his mind extended to anywhere dependent on automobiles; and so Alice feels a bizarre guilt, having benefited so conveniently from her child’s death. All of this came to me this morning. What will come of it? Probably nothing. Especially if I can’t think what it is that George Burden does for a living, because that is who he is. I do know that he does something that anyone who didn’t do it would find “boring.” I know that there are jillions of odd jobs out there, served out in anonymous buildings on the west side of midtown, but I don’t know anything about them. I’m tempted to make something up.  

***

If I’d been more alert this morning, I should have said something about the Walmex scandal, so brilliantly exposed by the Times in yesterday’s paper. First, I shall be very surprised if any government will take any action that will severely punish (damage) Wal-Mart and its subsidiaries. As I read David Barstow’s long but unusually lucid article, I could hear the pens of conservative scribes been sharpened against what will doubtless be dismissed as the “elitist” smear of an outstanding American enterprise that has done its level best to compete in foreign markets whose ways we ought not to presume to understand. (Even if former Wal-Mart attorney Maritza Munich did go to the trouble of pointing out that bribery is illegal in Mexico [period!].

The second thing that I want to suggest is Wal-Mart “deserves” protection because it is one of the most vital elements in American political life: surely it has led the way in removing the sting from vast income inequalities by providing an abundant amount of halfway stylish stuff to Americans of limited means. There really isn’t anything that the wealthiest Americans can own, in the ordinary of course, that their poorer countrymen can’t afford in some cheaper version. What the wealthy do uniquely command today is a combination of personal service and personal access, but service is invisible, and ordinary people would be tongue-tied over dinner with stars. What we expect from service and access is pretty idiosyncratic, as any waiter can tell you. But everyone expects a big-screen TV to hook up to ESPN. And almost everyone can afford a big-screen TV — or can acquire one, for better or worse credit-wise. This is not a world in which only the rich see the game in color.

The United States is populated, by and large — still — by the descendants of European men and women whose dissatisfaction with their lot impelled them to risk the dangerous crossing of a tempestuous ocean to an unknown land of dreams and opportunity. I am but a pale reflection, a degraded spinoff of these courageous forebears. I have known since my schooldays that their experiment in liberal democracy was a failure, but I have been too attached to everyday comforts to uproot myself and leave, not for a better place (there is none) but for an exile in which I should be able to say, I am not one of these people. New York City, it is true, provides the maximum protection from the American experience, but it remains, alas, an American city. I am ashamed not to have moved on.

Kathleen will read this (on her birthday, no less) and believe that it was all her fault. If she had told me about the notice, posted in the elevator at some point in the evening, long after I had gone downstairs to pick up the mail, about a water-tank cleaning that would close down the plumbing between midnight and six in the morning, then we’d have gone to bed under normal circumstances, and not with me consulting the Internet for advice about slitting my wrists. But of course it wasn’t her fault, even if I carried on as though it were. I no more expect Kathleen to keep me apprised of this building’s shambolic management’s caprices than I expect her to boil and egg for me in the morning. It’s not her fault at all; it’s mine. I’m the one who has tolerated and temporized. In the event, the water was running again within two hours; as I was sulking at the computer, I heard it gurgle up through the pipes. But that’s not what the big deal was. The big deal, which I contrive to conceal from myself day by day, is that my home is owned by dim and thoughtless people, arguably unfit for their responsibilities, and that my home is situated in a land where it’s expected that “market forces” will solve every problem eventually.

The other day, I went to a wake, and I looked at the strikingly well-preserved lady in her early nineties and said to myself, that’s the next thirty years, going from this to that. “This” is already pretty degenerate. My back is an column of unmoving bone, and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to get around without knee surgery. I’m overweight, which makes everything worse, but I know why — I read it in a book. Specifically, a book by a French gentleman who proudly resettled in this county, named Clothaire Rapaille. In his book about marketing to “the reptilian brain,” he claims that obesity, in America, is the sign of “checking out.” It is a passive protest against the ways things are. Just as my continuing to live here, instead of figuring out a way to emigrate when I was still young, was passive.

I cannot leave now. I’m bound by ties of the deepest affection for my wife, my daughter, and my grandson. I owe it to them to take care of myself and to die of natural causes. And to stay put. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. By and large, they really do make me forget where I live, so much so that the occasional obtrusive reminder is horribly shocking.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but perhaps you can chalk that up to vino. As I was drying the forks and spoons after dinner last night, I thought that it might be fun to write about our patterns, and the story of how they came into our lives. Yes — definitely the wine. Yet, even as I sat down in the seasonably cool morning and tasted the folly of my scheme, I stuck with the headline, because, hey, there is was. And there it will remain until and unless I think of something else.

***

When I was young — up to about three years ago — I dreamed of owning Audubon, a Tiffany silver pattern that seems designed for hands even larger than my own. The pieces have unusually broad handles that swell out to make room for little reliefs of Audubon’s birds. It is very 1880s, and very serious without being beholden to the baroque fantasies that prevail in the land of heavy silver. When I was young — 30 years ago — a teaspoon in the pattern cost about $200. I dreamed of buying a piece a month. And that is all I did. I never actually bought anything.

Dreams of Audubon wilted for many reasons. First, of course, one simply grew up. But no, it’s not that; if our lives had branched out toward an increase in entertaining, instead of toward less, the embers of my longing might not have been allowed to go cold. Third (in any case), we inherited Kathleen’s mother’s silver, which is Buckingham, a Gorham pattern that Kathleen always liked because she grew up with it, “not that it’s my favorite pattern ever.” So you might have thought that when we got married, she’d register for that.

[Historical note: In 1981, when Kathleen and I were married, brides still registered at nice shops for china, crystal, and silver, and grooms never appeared in wedding notices in the Times.]

But no, she thought it was too expensive, and that therefore we wouldn’t get any, so she chose instead the Towle pattern Queen Elizabeth, which is a bona fide knockoff, meaning that you have only to look at it to see that it’s the less-nice version of something else. It was Queen Elizabeth that fanned my ardor for Audubon. And something might have come of that if a lot of things had worked out differently, such as not buying a country house &c, but also I was calmed by the inheritance of my mother’s silver, in about 1987, after my father died. Also a Towle pattern, Silver Plumes was what I had grown up with, and I liked it not only for that reason but also because it wasn’t elaborate. But it also wasn’t very substantial — it was almost children’s silver. Also it had been degraded a bit by the primitive dishwasher detergents that, in the early postwar period, worked like sandblasters. Nevertheless: country house and all that. And when the country house chapter came to an end, the Internet chapter began. And now we finally have the Buckingham that Kathleen always wanted. End of story.

Not. A few months ago, while I was sipping a glass of wine at Ray Soleil’s, he said that he wanted to show me something. He opened his hall closet, which contains many more treasures than Ali Baba’s cave, and extracted what I think was a shopping bag. In the shopping bag were sealed plastic bags containing place settings of ravishing stainless steel. The handles were bent and folded in a way that simulated, at least to my eye, the way a plain piece of flatware would waver in outline if it were lying at the bottom of a limpid mountain brook. I had never seen anything quite so magical. Why the Pottery Barn, which introduced the pattern and sold it for a short time. Ray bought it then but never used it. I had to have it. Not Ray’s, of course. I had to go to Replacements, and buy a few pieces every month. $200 might buy three or even four pieces.

The last time I attended a funeral in New York City, it was held at the same church that I’m off to this morning, St Vincent Ferrer. Then it was the father; today it is the mother of Kathleen’s very old friend. I believe that I’ve been to one funeral in between. It would surprise me to learn that I’ve been to as many as ten funerals in my lifetime. I don’t believe that I’ve ever been to the funeral of a friend of my own, which is partly great good luck and partly proof that I have never had many close friends. At this point in time, I doubt that I would leave the metropolitan area (fly, that is) to attend any funeral at all. Nor, I think, would I go if the dead person’s connection to Kathleen were not a strong one. That’s to say that, left to myself, I would make it a point not to go to funerals.

Or would I? I must say that I’m keen to see who shows up this morning. Following Proust, Alan Hollinghurst and Edward St Aubyn are but two novelists who have recently made use of the funeral roll-call as a narrative device so irresistible that its a forcible reminder of our primate antecedents.

Today’s funeral is also going to be a Mass, which is a great bore. I can hardly hear liturgical formulas anymore without wanting to scream — scream! — for them to stop. This has nothing to do with atheism or agnosticism or any metaphysical considerations at all. It has to do with the conviction that the Roman Catholic Church long ago embalmed the teaching of Jesus in amber, as a way of shutting him up, and set the ornament in a jewelled monstrance of incredible vulgarity. In short, I feel the revulsion of one of the more austere Protestant divines, five hundred years ago. Something like that. Nothing is new under the sun.

***

Babysitting for Will last night was a companionate affair. He watched videos on the iPad for nearly two hours, every now and then coming over to where I was sitting for a hug (his idea) and a few crumbs from the muffin that he steadily dismantled, raisin by raisin, throughout the evening. I read feeds on the Kindle Fire. When Will had had enough of Kipper (adorable), Thomas, and Pingu (not so much), we went into his room and settled down for the night. He lay on his pillows with his bottle while I sat at the edge of the bed and read A Child’s Garden of Verses. I read the whole book, but when I was through, he was asleep.

***

The funeral was difficult. Something had set inside me since my last experience of Catholic liturgy, and the result was that there was no way in which I could pretend to be part of the community gathered together for the Mass. If I had been brought up in another faith, perhaps I might have sat respectfully through the service, but that was not the case, not the case at all. If the essence of Christianity is faith in personal redemption through Jesus Christ — to the extent that that’s another way of describing an afterlife in heaven — I am very settled in my unchristianity. To say more, or to put it more vehemently, seems pointlessly rude, and I mean no disrespect to those who draw comfort from Christian faith. But I can never share it — either the faith or the comfort. I never have, and I should never want to.

When I was a child, the idea that faith could be a comfort was pretty laughable: religion was really just a set of roadmaps for going to hell. Do this and you’re damned, do that and you’re damned, &c. Whatever the fine points of penitence might be, the Dominican nuns who saw to my introduction to catechism had one simple goal: to scare the hell out of us, especially the clever ones like me. Well, they scared me, all right; I’m terrified of stern, unmarried women. I should like to live in a world without them.

But I saw, this morning, as I have never seen it before, that faith is a comfort, even if it can’t be one for me. St Vincent’s almost trembled with a collective faith in eternal life in the presence of God. For the first time in my life — I’m not kidding! — I could imagine wanting to go to church. I don’t think that I had ever believed that that was possible, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. No, I hadn’t believed it. I had simply assumed that many other people were more disciplined and obedient than I. (I am not disposed to obedience.) I assumed that the only motivation for religious observance was Pascal’s wager. A desire for the religious life — I had never seen that before today. I had only seen the habit.

At the end of one of this morning’s nightmares, I awoke from being chased through a littered stable yard by a riderless, untackled thoroughbred horse. I believe that chasing people down is something that horses do only in nightmares. The dream was probably brought on in part by the warm, humid weather, itself almost as alarming as a nightmare, considering the date. Also, I was malingering. I had stayed up late (reading Donna Leon), and I was sleeping in late. The urgency of the horse dream has passed, but its hopelessness persists: I feel old and powerless this morning, and likely only to feel moreso. Staying up late and being unable to get up bright and early the next morning have taken the place, as vices that lead straight to remorse, of drinking too much and hangovers. I suppose that there’s an improvement there somewhere, but I don’t much feel it this morning, which, of course, it barely is.

Why is Jean Zimmerman’s book about Edith Minturn and Newton Phelps Stokes so sad? Is is because she dies at the end, having been kept housebound by strokes for five years? We all die in the end. Is it because he lingered on alone, relatively impecunious, for seven further years, dying in 1944? Why would that be sad, exactly? Would it be because he missed his wife (which he presumably did), or would it be because the work that had preoccupied him for nearly twenty years, the massive Iconography of Manhattan Island, was achieved to rather quiet acclaim? Is it because his adopted daughter, Helen, doesn’t seem, in Zimmerman’s telling, to have “been there” for him and his wife during their declining years? Is this sadness to be imputed to the Phelps Stokeses themselves, or is it something that the author must share with the reader? When you’re made to feel sad by a story, you do want to know why.

I can put my hands on two reasons why Love, Fiercely left me feeling gloomy. First, there was the Stokeses’ profligacy. Like the last Medici bankers and their agents, the Stokeses got much better at spending money than at making it, and when papa Anson Phelps Stokes died, the upper crust was horrified to find out how small his estate was. What ought to have been twenty million amounted to a mere one. In the Crash, Newton Phelps Stokes’s financial investments were immediately devalued, but it was the slow leakage of value from his extensive real-estate holdings that made him a little bit poorer every year for the rest of his life. He had, it is true, spent a fortune on the Iconography, but it was always more the commitment in time that upset his wife.

And that’s the other reason: we know that Edith was upset about his obsession with the Iconography because he told his friends that she was, and Zimmerman takes this at face value. But we never actually hear it from Edith. We never hear anything from Edith. We read other people’s letters, but never hers. She is never quoted. Her hands-on philanthropy is attested to — she was a leader of the kindergarten movement, and she seems to have taught immigrant women how to sew, in a school set up at St George’s. She smiled for the camera every now and then, and of course she allowed herself to be painted and sculpted — it’s because of one painting, particularly, that we’re reading about her and her husband. But if Edith Minturn had a voice, Zimmerman has not captured it, and her muteness is like a wound. It is like The Portrait of a Lady all over again, with different details but the same suffocation. Only, this time, it really happened.