Megan captured this beautiful souvenir of Ryan and Will at our house on Sunday. I was in the room at the time, but I was so busy talking about something or other that I didn’t register a memory of Megan’s snap. I am always talking, and will probably be boring folks stiff at my own funeral. “Close the lid already!” Happily, Will, like Kathleen, can sleep right through it.

I ask you: is there any sense memory that feels more sacred than the recollection of a child’s head upon your shoulder, brushing up now and then upon your ear? It’s no wonder that we’re tempted to think of them as angels (especially when they’re asleep): how else to account for their sudden appearance as utterly real and distinctive beings?

Kathleen and I were talking about the misery that an old friend has endured, upon discovering that her lover was unfaithful. The worst part of such betrayal is that you find yourself obliged to hold up every memory — especially the happy ones — to gimlet-eyed review. The past that you thought of as your own has been hijacked, discredited, evaporated.

The arrival of Will has had a complementary, but entirely positive effect. I simply can’t remember the reality of life without him. He’s not four months old, but he has entirely denatured the reality of my first sixty-one years. I believe that it is always that way with love.  

 

Immediately it was clear: the iPad is everything that I expected it to be. I worry about eating these words down the road not because I fear that the device will surprise me with disappointments — I’m oddly but definitely sure that it won’t — but because I know that I can’t yet grasp the unintended uses to which I’ll subject it. This is where dotage plays to my advantage. Happy as a clam that the iPad does precisely what I want it to do, I’m too old and lazy to ask it to do anything else. But we shall see.

Rather than extol the merits of the iPad, however, I’d like to tell you how I came to possess one this very day. And yet I’d also like to get to bed reasonably soon. Pesky!

As  noted earlier, we celebrated Kathleen’s birthday yesterday, and I was pretty useless this morning. This morning and well into the afternoon, I was an Ibsen monologue. Maybe Strindberg. Needing a boost, I checked out the tracking report on the iPad that I ordered last week. My God! It was already delivered, downstairs, to the package room. Better than sex!

What to say? Jason Mei, my tech god, and I have worked out a workable routine. When I need something — be it a flash drive or a new computer — Jason sends me a link to a vendor site. I buy what I’m supposed to buy, and, when it arrives, I let Jason know that it’s here, and he comes to hook it up. As soon as I brought up the box from the package room, this afternoon, I dashed off a note to Jason, telling him that the iPad had arrived a day early. No problem! He’d be up after five.

The horrible embarrassing part that we will pass over as quickly as possible has me going da-DA over what turned out to be the iPad dock. No, I didn’t open the shipping box until Jason got here. (I never do.) Yes, I’d bought a dock as well as the iPad, a keyboard dock. I’d agonized. The plain-vanilla dock cost $30, the keyboard dock fifty dollars more. I’d plumped. And now I had it: my wonderful iPad keyboard dock. Useless, utterly useless, without an actual iPad. Which according to the tracking info, hadn’t even been fabricated.

If you can imagine how stupid I felt, having asked Jason to come uptown to set up my idiot-friendly reading device, please put it into a 500-word essay. $50 to the most excruciated entry. Obligatory first sentence: “So there I was, with my fabulous iPad dock…” Feel free to work in the sequel: calls were made; Internet sites were scoped. The upshot was one of the more improbable shopping expeditions in Gotham lore, as Jason and I pegged up 86th Street to Best Buy, where, at a rather sordid little back-room counter, we found that only 32 and 64-GB iPads were for sale. Jason had assured me that 16-GB would be more than enough, so I felt like chump buying the 32. Better than 64, though. You do what you can.

But you never know. Maybe, this time next year, I’ll be in App Store rehab.

If there is one word that Will’s mother does not want him to hear, ever — applied to himself, at least — it is “smart.” Whether or not it’s a word that anyone would ever think of applying to my grandson, I quite agree. Certainly nothing endangered the promise of my own life more toxically than being told that I was very smart. I became addicted to the notion that hard work was infra dig and déclassé. Indeed, I regard myself today as a recovering smart person.

It would be gross disingenuousness to deny my delighted belief that Will is loaded with brains. But this does not at all mean that he is, or ever will be, smart.

“Smart” is an American virtue. It describes the ideal American intellectual capacity: a knack for beating the system. Europeans cheat the system, by not paying taxes. Americans believe in a combination of luck and smarts, with the smarts providing a blueprint for cutting corners (a/k/a red tape) and advancing directly to Go. This makes us love the system, by the way; it explains why socialism has never had a chance on these shores. Beating the system means leaving the suckers around you behind. When my father went to Harvard Law in the late Thirties, the incoming first-years, planted in their proto-stadium seats, were directed to look to their left, then to their right. One of the men that each man beheld would not graduate, they were told. This is what is meant by “socialism for the rich.”

One of the things that I love about my father is that he did graduate — barely.

My father thought that I was a lot smarter than he was, which was touching but very wrong. (Even he knew it: he used to say that I had more books than sense. True enough — at least for the first fifty years.) No matter how brightly I turn up the brilliance of my critical wattage, I am never going to be offered a seat on the board of Twentieth Century Fox, an organization that was happy to pay my father for his good advice as a director (a director of, not at) for nine happy years, during the last of which he got to hobnob with Princess Grace. Even though he never ever went to the movies and argued against investing in the original Poseidon Adventure.

It was Dad’s dirty secret that he worked very hard. So dirty that no one ever saw it happen. No matter what the season, Dad was never at home, and, when he was, he was asleep, zonked in the latest of a series of plush leather easy chairs. 

It’s very Maureen Dowd of me to say so, but I do believe that my father slept his way to the top. Without ever taking his clothes off or getting into be with anyone else. In plain view of his family, in fact, while endless golf tournaments unspooled on the television set in the den. His example certainly makes Sir Joseph Porter’s polishing up the handle so carefully look downright grinding.

Whatever Will’s intellectual capacities might be, his life at the moment is sharply constrained by the skeleto-muscular limitations of life at thirteen or fourteen weeks of age. As such, Will faces a challenge that even the smartest kid can’t beat. If he were really smart, he would get the picture and stop complaining. Right?  

A game that Will particularly likes to play at the moment is the game in which I talk utter nonsense, spouting verbal salad like a patch of mint. For some reason, I have no inhibitions about producing these nonsense syllables. For some other reason, Will can tell that they’re nonsense — that they’re not the sort of thing (equally incomprehensible to him, no doubt) that I say when I’m changing his diaper, for example. I changed his diaper six times this afternoon, and we both had so much fun at it that I began to feel quite unhealthy. At one point, in fact, I worried that I was morphing into the Witch in Hansel & Gretel. He was such a plump little fowl! I bent over and asked, “Shall we stuff you with mushrooms or onions?” His mother laughed, thank heaven. So did he.

But he didn’t laugh as heartily as he did when I spouted nonsense. How can he possibly have a sense of nonsense? I’m not going to claim that he does. Maybe he just thinks that I make funny faces when I talk nonsense. When I ask him whether he’d prefer to be stuffed with mushrooms or onions, he cocks an eyebrow, a would-be stichomythic. When I burble, in contrast, there’s no critic in his look; I’m just being silly. How does he know about silly?

***

We had talked about going to park, either Carl Shurz or the much-closer Ruppert. But since the weather wasn’t very nice, and Will had been up all night with congested sinuses, Megan thought that Metro Minis would make a better outing. We didn’t get round to going until late in the day. I hailed a taxi easily enough, but when we tried to turn left on Lex, the traffic cops wouldn’t permit it, and the same prohibition was in effect at Park Avenue. Megan promptly decided that, whatever the explanation, she didn’t want to be caught in some sort of bad late-afternoon traffic thing, and she begged the driver to turn round and take us back to Yorkshire Towers. She had to beg, because the driver was full of enthusiasm for finding better routes, circumventing what he called “making a movie.” In the end, I had to insist. My instincts were the same as the driver’s — we’d find a way. He and I were both unhappy with the idea of a fare to nowhere, even if the driver was going to be paid for his pains. But I saw in a way that I have never seen it before that the mother’s wishes must be paramount. Generations of gentlemen have known as much in their twenties. Why didn’t I know about safe?  

 

When I was young, I was sure that I was the only oddball. Okay, not: there were plenty of real oddballs to make me look normal. But in crowd that excluded genuine misfits, I looked pretty unusual. I now realize that the operative word in that statement is looked.

Now, when I’m walking down the street, I’m struck by the strangeness of youth. It’s not a strangeness from me, but an absolute oddness. Young people are haunted by the newly-heard rasp of their own windy tunes, and beset by the need to make the music presentable on what amounts to nothing more gracious than a set of bagpipes. Some are better at this than others, and some figure it out sooner. But no one is really good at it. Except, perhaps, sociopaths, who, poor things, haven’t got anything better to do with themselves.

I find myself looking at all the blandly scrubbed — but hoodied — denizens of the Upper East Side and asking: what does this guy expect of life? Is it sex? Money? Showing the folks back home? What’s on his mind? Does he have a clue? About what’s on his mind, that is. After all, the most overlooked fact of life is that most people are the opposite of narcissist: they’re deeply bored by themselves. They don’t find themselves fascinating and they don’t for a moment wonder why the world isn’t quicker to recognize their latent genius. Think about it for a while, and you begin to wonder how anyone who isn’t borderline manages to get up in the morning.

How do we preserve what’s wonderful about the oh-so-adorable Buddha-baby principality of my little man Will from the onslaughts of ripening? How do we teach him that it’s right, when you’re twenty, to think that you don’t know anything?

And not the only one in the room who doesn’t know anything.

Nothing new to report. And yet, within just the past couple of days, New York has swung the broad arc between winter and summer that ought to be spring. From too cold, it has gone to too hot, and I can only imagine the havoc that this is wreaking among the youngsters.

I still remember one Saturday afternoon, nearly thirty years ago, sitting in the balcony doorway (stop right there!) in running clothes, polishing something arduous, drinking beer and listening to Derek and the D0minoes. It only happened the once. I got it, and then I never did it again.

Spring in New York City is a time of unforeseen possibilities. Not only unforeseen but invisible. You can feel them, though. At the same time, recollections crowd round, memories of every lighthearted moment that you have ever tasted. For me, owing to some quirk of timing and generations, spring in New York always involves a touch of Barefoot in the Park sophistication that is no longer sophisticated. We know everything that they couldn’t pack into the movie — smells, mostly; sharp scents of florid air. Sparkling aternoon light and distant cries of exuberance. The very idea of “the Village.” Which at this point is not that distant from the town that Edith Wharton knew, personally.

Everyone complains about the spread of national mall stores in Manhattan. Nobody complains about the spread of mall attire, though. I do wish that ordinary young New Yorkers would dress a little less comfortably, a little more anxiously. You really ought to channeling the Ed Koch mantra at all times when you’re young in New York: “How’m I doing?” You ought to be entitled to assume that, if you’re looking good, then it’s because you work at it — that you know how to set yourself off in the crowd. Even if it’s unconscious.

New York in the springtime is the last time that you will ever be a freshman. Submit and enjoy. This won’t happen again.

The dishwasher’s non-working status has grown Really Old. And very distracting: I’m worn down by the anxiety of wondering if it will ever work again. (Actually, it’s not broken. The water intake filter is clogged, so saith the super.) That’s why I haven’t got much to report this evening.

That and Will. Will’s day care was closed for Easter Monday, so Megan brought him up to our place for a change. The blue room was transformed into the slumber chamber — the draperies can actually be drawn in here. The coffee table was cleared and set on edge; the Pack and Play took its place. Will got the idea, all right: he actually napped for a total of seventy minutes during the course of the day, a record so far as my being around is concerned. Megan and I agreed that Will ought to spend an hour or more in the blue room, at regular intervals, whether he’s asleep or not, whether we’re holding him or he’s stretched out in the crib. The two of us understand his reluctance to fall asleep from the inside.

At thirteen weeks, Will has come a long way from Day One. The impression of unimaginable development is paradoxically enhanced by his unchanging character—he has always been the one and only Will O’Neill. Every time he picks up a new trick, I respond as though he were now all grown up, finished with this childhood thing. And yet he is months away from eating solid food, much less crawling across the floor. He is, in a word, an infant. But when he gazes about the blue room in the draped dusk, it is obvious that he is at some level registering all of the stuff in here. When I whispered in his ear the question that I always get — “Have you really read all of those books?” — he smiled to one side, as if I didn’t know the half of it.

He likes to be held, and he likes to play. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose, but the boy could use a few lessons in decent dissumulation. He brakes from sixty to zero— from squalling infant to fun-seeking jokester — with shameless brevity. This reminds me of the more naive portion of my own childhood. I would convince my mother that I was too sick for school — no problem. Then I would give the game away by rearranging all the furniture in my bedroom. It does not yet seem to have dawned on Will that we are not out-of-towners. 

I wish that there were a way to describe the exhaustion that Will leaves behind him (or that I carry away in my taxi uptown, if I’ve been at his house) without appearing to complain. Or even to seem to be excusing the trickle of my contributions to Portico. (I’m now I don’t know how many New Yorker stories in arrears, and I’ve got two movies to put up.) It’s not physical fatigue, but more a matter of wary remoteness, as if I were carefully avoiding the job of carrying a thought across the room. I certainly don’t mind. I’d much rather carry Will.

This evening’s entry could easily be even more long-winded than last night’s — but I’m not up to it. At least, here at the outset, I don’t think that I am. Let’s see.

It was a day of errands. I was out of the house for over four hours — although, when I got home, I could not remember leaving, it seemed so long ago. This was largely a matter of sore feet. Because my errands would take me to the east side of the Upper East Side, I decided to break in an unworn pair of loafers. When I took them off (first thing), I felt that I’d had a crash-course in foot-binding. My stride was certainly no longer than that of a little old dowager empress or whatnot.

Points of interest: HousingWorks (old linens that Kathleen and I decided that we’d never use and so ought to donate);, Perry Process (“I was wondering about those,” said Kathleen when I remarked that I’d finally be taking her specialty dry-cleaning items in — including a blouse that has been waiting for two months); Demarchelier (the best croque monsieur in these parts, and, today, an amazingly tasty creamy vinaigrette on the accompanying greens; as if to compensate, the crème caramel  had no flavor at all); the Museum (membership renewal); Metro-Mini (a kit of Bummis); and Gracious Home (don’t start). Along the way, I forgot to go to the bank.

I hadn’t set foot in the Museum since late 2009, and I was definitely out of practice. Slow to believe in spring, I was wearing too many layers of clothes, and wasn’t at all in the mood for the Bronzino drawings now that I was finally looking at them. The photocollage show was more amusing — a lot more amusing. But I’d had no idea until I was actually in the building that the Belles Heures of Jean de Berry had been given the Catherine of Cleves treatment — the leaves of the Cloisters treasure, unsewn and mounted in dozens of frames, filled the basement of the Lehman Wing.

Great minds think alike? Maybe a press release went missing. Everyone knows about the Morgan show, but I alotgether missed mention of the Belles Heures project. The fact that the two most glorious illuminated codices currently domiciled in New York City have been deconstructed and put on view at the same time beggars my powers of equipage. What’s immediately astonishing is the complementary nature of the two books. The Belles Heures, about forty years older than Catherine of Cleves’s Hours, frames brilliant paintings (which I have treasured since my teens) in more or less identical borders, traceries of jewel-box ivy vines. The later book’s illustrations, although very fine, are not nearly so intensely designed as the Limbourg brothers’ work for Jean de Berry, but the borders are nothing short of trippy.

At Metro-Mini, I was shown how to change a diaper. I took this is in good humor, largely because I needed the lesson. It turns out that Bummi diapers are held together by the same sort of tension clips that are used to fasten Ace bandages, only the clips are wider, if that makes any sense. I had joked with Megan about asking for diapers suitable for a fifteen pound turkey. Will isn’t quite thirteen pounds yet — but you’ve seen those legs.

At Gracious Home, I bought a few useful things for Ryan and Megan’s flat. Their demesne has just expanded by a power of ten, and I thought that a few temporary stopgaps would be helpful — nothing that can’t be folded up and banished to storage when the time comes. The thing was, the items in question were all in different parts of the Gracious Empire. So there will be three separate deliveries! Alphabet City may be going the way of Park Slope, but three Gracious Home panel trucks in one day are certain to trigger Loisaida alarms.

An agreeable day: up by eight, paper done by nine, with tea and toast for Kathleen.

Off to work. At 9:30, the door opens. That can’t be Kathleen leaving! And it isn’t; it’s Sonja. Wednesday mornings are her new (and much better) “day.”

Kathleen leaves at 10:30, as I am just wrapping up the Office. (Choosing the links, that is; I’ll write the DO up later.) She stops by the  super’s office and tells them about the broken dishwasher, which isn’t broken really. It’s not working because the intake filter is gunked up. The super himself will confirm this in the afternoon. He will arrange for the mechanic’s visit on Monday. I can live with that. The dishwasher belongs to us, not to the building; it’s pricey Miele. We’ve upgraded every appliance in the house. Another thing: we’ve never had the building paint the apartment, something that they’re obliged to do every three years. We may weaken on this point. Nobody else wants to do the job, for love or money. We are tired of the Russian émigré look.

Instead of writing, I launch a maintenance project. I have graduated to that sort of thing. In the old days, it was always a matter of dealing with impossible messes, Augaean stables. There was no mess today. Instead, a lot of small-scale disorder. Too boring to discuss, but very satisfying to knock off. In the end, a byprodut of three shopping bags. Plus the Bag of Crap.

The Bag of Crap used to be the Box of Crap.  Either way, it deserves a separate entry. Let’s just say that the box had to be forgone when, filled to the brim and beyond, it missed the shelf and dumped out all over the floor. Here’s a promise: I’ll photograph the contents of the Bag of Crap. Pester me if I don’t!

Throughout the tidying — moving chairs and upending tables so that I can vacuum the carpet beneath them, but no big deal really; this is no do-rag day by any means — I cannot get over the flush of satisfaction that overcomes me all the time these days. It’s the same flush that tells eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds that they’re really grown-up now! The sense of having gotten the hang of things. I have spent much of the past six months splashing in the puddle of this flush. Getting the hang of things, in spades!  

Did you know, for example, that a dishwasher makes the perfect dishrack? For drying dishes? You wash things in the sink and then slot them in the nice clean dishwasher. No dishrack in the world holds as much as a dishwasher! And then, first thing in the morning, you put all of yesterday’s dishes away. I’m not saying that this is a brilliant idea. I can think of at least twenty women who would have advised me (mordantly — we’re only human) to give it a try. But it is a very useful idea, and I seem to have at least three really useful ideas every week. Being a fallapart 62 years of age, I really do have to ask, “What took so long?”

Shortly after five, I get dressed and run two First Avenue errands. First stop: Morning Calm Gallery. Another separate entry. Second stop: Agata & Valentina, where I pick up the ingredients for my ragù and then add enough other stuff to round out the bill to $75. (More than a third of that goes to oversized red snapper filets.)

Home from the errands, I sit on the balcony for the first time in 2010 and read the LRB. Don’t get me started on how lucky I feel. If the dishwasher were working, I’d wash all the items on the balcony table that have been sitting out there all winter, plates, bowls, bottles, teapots, whatnot; stuff that has to find a new place. Something tells me that it will find its new place without having been dishwashed first. My parsley plantation, by the way, could not be more robust. Another separate entry: how crazy am I to eat parsley that has grown in soil that gets a fresh coat of lampblack pollution every day? Mayor Bloomberg: New Yorkers have respiratory diseases because of the trucks, not because of the cigarettes! Let me tell you about my Venice Plan for Manhattan.

Eventually, I go indoors and write up the links. This takes longer than usual because I get choosy. In the end, Compline is the original choice but Prime and Tierce are replaced. As soon as I’ve uploaded the pages, I throw the bunch of stuff on the bed into shopping bags, and the shopping bags into stout canvas tote bags, and head off for Westphalia. I am in and out of storage in less than five minutes. I call Kathleen at the office. Leaving storage, I say, “I’m crossing First Avenue,” meaning that it will take about ten minutes to reach our rendez-vous at Lex and 62nd. Twenty minutes later, just after the waitress at Mon Petit Café (I’m not making this up) advises me that the kitchen will be closing shortly, Kathleen calls from First and 62nd. “Where is this place?”

Everything works out well, I have onglet, Kathleen has boeuf bourguignon. We have a good talk about the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, even though Kathleen hasn’t seen them in the flesh (she loves the catalogue). Trust me: the people lucky and/or provident enough to see the show at the Morgan are not going to shut up about it for The Rest of Their Lives. Think really, really seriously about missing this show if seeing it is an option.

Speaking of seeing things, our tickets for the revival of Lend Me a Tenor arrived yesterday. We’ll be a party of six. What fun that’s going to be! The play will be fun, too. One of these days, don’t you know, we’ll be treated to a show that begins with series of actors reading a series of blog entries. They’ll be playing characters who are writing about the same event, but from surprisingly different perspectives. The rest of the play will be repair. Rashomon not so much.

Sometimes, it’s heaven to be sixty-two. What I won’t have to live through.

In one of the best developments of 2010, my grandson has taken possession of the driftwood lamp. The driftwood lamp, brought back from Florida by my grandfather and my mother when they took a road trip down there, in 1956 I think (the year after my grandmother died), sat on my “bureau” (chest of drawers) for well over fifty years now. It’s fair to say that it required adult sophistication for me to like the thing; my nature is the very opposite of “free form.”

Miraculously, the lamp and the chest were not separated until last fall, when Quatorze convinced me that the lamp was wildly out of place in the blue room. I had to agree — it was really rather kitschy. Not the lamp itself, but the placement of such a piece of beach-house furniture in sit-up-straight library. So we put it in storage. (On 13 October! I should have put it later than that.) I hated that it wasn’t being used, but I wasn’t about to give it away.

Did Megan ask for it? I doubt it, but I don’t recall for certain. It doesn’t matter. Will is stuck with it now.

***

I had planned to spend the day helping Megan work from home, at her house, but the weather was frightful, and I needed a day to myself. So did Megan and Will, as it turned out — and we all stayed home. I got a fair amount of conscientious work done, but I also spent hours in what, quite seriously, I’ve come to call driftwood mode, not in honor of the lamp, by any means, even if it’s a word that probably wouldn’t have come to mind without it. Driftwood mode involves bobbing among stacks of things and seeing what’s in them. I don’t actually do anything; like a doctor, I palpate. What’s this book? Where does this go? How much of this stuff can I throw away? There is really no sense of “project” about this drifting from pile to pile, but I managed to get quite a lot done.

Don’t think me too virtuous. I was avoiding something: the final forty-odd pages of James Hynes’s Next. There’s no point to explaining why, because every literate person will know what I mean before the year is out. Next is an amazingly strong book, one of a handful (at least) of novels by writers somewhat younger than I am that seem to sweep away all the efforts of the generation older into a dustbin of peculiarity. Vonnegut, Barth, Updike and Roth — wankers all in comparison to artists such as Mr Hynes, writers with a profound regard for the material world — only Updike shared their attentiveness to it, but he lacked their interest in it. But when I saw where Next was going, I was angry — angry! — and had to put the book down. That was late last night. I spent a lot of today in mourning. And I still have to read those forty-odd pages!

***

At one time — did I ever tell you? — I was known as Otis. “Big Otis,” to be exact. I certainly didn’t know what I was doing in those days, or where I was going.

Reading Matt Taibbi’s furious denunciation of the Roman Catholic Church this afternoon, I thought, Oh dear, let’s not. Let’s — as I suggested last week — remember how revitalized the old Church was by the attempt of the New French Order to secularize it in 1790.

The French Revolution had many turning points; but the oath of the clergy was, if not the greatest, unquestionably one of them. It was certainly the Constituent Assembly’s most serious mistake. For the first time the revolutionaries forced fellow citizens to choose: to declare themselves publicly for or against the new order. And although refusers branded themselves unfit to exercise public office in the regenerated French Nation, paradoxically their freedom to refuse was a recognition of their right to reject the Revolution’s work. In seeking to identify dissent, in a sense the revolutionaries legitimized it. That might scarcely have mattered if, as the deputies expected, nonjurors had amounted only to a handful of prelates and their clients. But when, months rather than the expected few weeks later, the overall pattern of oath-taking became clear it was found that around half the clergy of France felt unable to subscribe.*

“Unprepared to subscribe” — soon they were inflated by all the reaction that the Revolution inevitably generated. The oath of the clergy transformed the Church from an outmoded institution into a unified receptacle for opposition to the new régime. And from that, in the course of the Nineteenth Century, it swelled into the bulwark against liberal humanism that persists to this day. 

So let’s not repeat Voltaire’s expostulation, Écrasez l’infâme. Let’s keep the strong language to a minimum. It has a tendency to echo.

*William Doyle: The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989, 1999), p. 144.

It seems hard to argue that, if Benedict XVI were at the head of some American institution, his resignation or discharge or impeachment or whatever would be clamored for on a bi/non-partisan basis. The priests who preyed on boys were at least the victims (by today’s thinking) of unmanageable drives. Cardinal Ratzinger’s only concern was to keep the brass nameplate on the door untarnished. In the Anglophone world, that’s definitive, unpardonable hypocrisy.

Not in the Roman world, though — not in the profoundly patriarchal mind-set of law that prevails on the European Continent, most of it a by-product of ecclesiastical practice. Father Knows Best may be a short-run sitcom in the early history of American television, but the maxim is the essence of Roman, or “civil,” law theory. When terrible things happen, the institution must be protected from its misbehaving exponents. Certainly no one will argue that the Roman Catholic  Church has ever supported any kind of sexual abuse, much less the abuse of children and teenagers.

But why does the Church support celibacy? Sadly, the best answer is that it painted itself into a corner, or was painted into a corner by revolutionary overreaching in the 1790s. When the Church dusted itself off after the Jacobin and Napoleonic turmoils, it was so reactionary that the word “reactionary” was invented to describe it. Reactionary it remains, and that is why the Church stands for celibate priests. There is no better reason, and don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that there is one.

Never mind about history, though. Both Joe Jervis and Choire Sicha are asking the question Lénine: What is to be done?

I have two suggestions, based not so much on my familiarity with Roman Catholic institutions as on my readings in the history of upsets. First: don’t count on the Church to fix this. As it happens, the Church has only the most paltry and technical mechanisms for coping with a bad pope. That’s where there were all those schisms and antipopes in the Middle Ages. And even if there were impeachment procedures (repeat: there are not), it would be dim to expect them to be imposed upon Benedict. After several decades of John Paul II, the College of Cardinals in particular and the episcopate generally are at least as rear-guard as our Supreme Court. Que — zut alors — faire?

To some extent, this is strictly Catholic business. Smart people who grew up Catholic but “lost their faith” don’t really have a say in how Benedict is dealt with. The Pope (Cardinal as he then was) is right to put faith ahead of circumstances. Cafeteria Catholicism ought to be as objectionable to sophisticates as it is to dogmatics. If you believe in transubtantiaion, then you’ve got to believe in (the far more recent doctrine of ) papal infallibility. End of discussion.

Here, then, is my advice for American Catholics who want to do something without risking anathema. Just stop giving money. Correction: continue giving money to any of the fantastic charities that American nuns have been running, under the radar, for the last thirty years, and be especially generous to any sister who complains about the latest visitation from Rome’s wolfhounds. But stop putting money in the basket on Sunday, and — especially — cut off donations to Peters Pence.

This is your chance to play Grover Norquist: starve the beast. Let Rome figure out what to do next

So far, this week has been what last week was not: quiet and uneventful. For me, that is. For Will, today marked a milestone: his first day of school. Megan went back to work; it was twelve weeks ago today that she went to the hospital for a test/checkup of some kind — and, what with one thing and another, she stayed. When she left the hospital a few days later, she was a mother.

Megan feels very, very good about the day care arrangement that she has been lucky enough to make, and that is really all that one can ask on behalf of a conscientious mom. Will passed the day surrounded by older children (most if not all of them in diapers just as he was) and appeared to undergo a developmental boost as a result. I’m told that I won’t recognize him when I see him next. I expect that I shall. Through all the hurdles that he has cleared so far, he has always seemed to be the same little man, only with more moving parts. As he grows, he becomes more complexly himself.

I have come to a conclusion that I should have rejected out of hand (and not without foot stamping) when I was young: we become ourselves more quickly if we just let it happen. Being and becoming take care of themselves. What we need to attend to is doing. Oh, how I should have hated this advice! Like many Americans, I was certain that, “somewhere deep inside,” there lay a highly polished version of myself, imprisoned in the darkness, in chains as it were, and that my most important task was to discover it and “set it free.” To fail at this mission would be to live a second-rate life of grey disappointment. To which I now say: poppycock.

Correspondingly, I believed that defining yourself by your deeds was vulgar, betraying a slavish and dim-witted regard for merit badges. Here, at least, I was closer to sound thinking. It is vain indeed to expect a string of accomplishments to make sense of life — something that we should apprehend more readily if, like the French, we treated “achievement” more ambiguously, and infused it with a sense of absolute termination (death). To complete something is to lose it forever. It’s not the deed, but the doing.

When I say that I wish I were writing more for Portico, I don’t mean that I’d like to produce a higher number of pages per time period. What I’d like is to have a routine more conducive to the turning out of pages on all the things that interest me, one after the other. The transmutation of experience into language is pretty much what I’m all about, to the extent that I’m more than a generic human being, and I’d like to spend more time at it. It’s not that I lack the discipline to sit down and write. What I lack is the intellectual suppleness to think broadly and comprehensively after spending two or three hours every morning reviewing hundreds of Google Reader feeds for the Daily Office. I’ll get there. But getting there will be the beginning of a project, not the end of one.

Who cares about me, though. If a reliable angel were to assure me that I could bequeath everything that I have learned in the past couple of years to my grandson, in a form that would be useful and helpful to him, I’d take to my deathbed straightaway. Anything for the boy’s health and wisdom. 

I love Tuesday. Tuesday is my favorite day of the week, and there is really nothing finer than a productive Tuesday. Monday is a hinge day, daunting no matter how I arrange it — there’s no getting around the need to look at Google Reader again, for one thing. Friday used to be transitional as well, but I shifted going to the movies to Monday so that I could do the Saturday housekeeping one day in advance. This leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for writing. Since I have never had more than two good writing days a week, and because the norm is just one day, Wednesday and (even more) Thursday are either days off or days of desperation and disappointment.

I did not have a particularly productive Tuesday; certainly I wrote nothing for Portico (that’s what I mean by “writing”). I went to the movies — I saw Greenberg — because yesterday was gross, weather-wise, and because I was still broken-down exhausted from last week. Especially from the Great Pots and Pans Raid at Chateau Gizmo on Friday, followed by a Lenten Outing on Saturday with Eric Patton. (We went to the Morgan to look at the incredible illuminationed pages of Catherine of Cleves’s Book of Hours, something that became possible only a few years ago and that will resume impossibility (for at least fifty years) when the show closes at the beginning of May — so SEE IT!) Even though I took it easy on Sunday and Monday (yesterday), I found walking to be arduous in new and painful ways this morning. I would feel bad about being in such bad shape if I weren’t amazed at having actually lived this long.

But I did, for once, get to the Angelika before Quatorze.

I have no idea what I’m going to say about Greenberg. Right now, I can only say that I can’t imagine buying the DVD. And yet I probably will. Greta Gerwig is very interesting in the soubrette lead; I detected intimations of Kate Winslet. I’d have liked to see more of Chris Messina — I’m ready to see him in a leading role — but he did benefit from leaving the action early in the film, because almost everyone in the story proper exhaled a cloud of unpleasantness. Jennifer Jason Lee, the director’s wife and co-writer, looked lovelier than ever, rested and relaxed and not at all strung out. A nice change. Ben Stiller and Rhys Ifans were super, of course (how could they not be?), but their characters were walking arguments for the overall hopelessness of testosterone. Do we really need so many undersocialized men? Weren’t they supposed to gravitate toward Australia? To Australia?

On my way home, I stopped in at Shakespeare & Co, the very prosperous, utterly un-Parisian branch at Hunter College, and bought three books. The new Michael Lewis, which I will swallow like a plump oyster now that I’ve been appetized by the Vanity Fair excerpt. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide — I cite Jonah Lehrer at least once and usually twice a week in the Daily Office, so the Long Form Commitment is overdue. And the thin Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land. I mean, how can I not, given the man’s tribulations? Tony Judt is the very model of the man I would never forgive myself for not growing up to be. I knew this when we were both about fourteen.

But I have had the satisfaction of growing up to be the man whom I could reasonably hope to be.

 

On Saturday, Eric Patton and I were talking about the advance of technology. Eric expressed a very reasonable concern: media are evolving faster than we are, much faster. We have no idea of the long-term consequences of such immediate access to so much information.

If I were truly clever, I’d have said to Eric, “Yes! We’re already so far evolved that we’re aware, in advance, that adverse long-term consequences are a possibility, if not a likelihood!” But I wasn’t; I just listened.

Doubtless it’s nothing but my abominably conceited determination to be different, but I still think that the technological advances that were in place by 1960 changed human life far more radically than any that have  been implemented since then. The Internet is really just a fancy improvement on the telephone and the television. The convenience is amazing, but the action-at-a-distance thing was settled long before Sir Tim Berners-Lee worked out the protocols for browsing. You could even argue that HTML represents no technological advance whatsoever, that it’s only a more comprehensive use of existing technology. For a long time, remember, the Internet ran on phone lines, and on phone lines only. 

And I’m not sure that a sharp increase in the convenience of communication constitutes a disturbance of deep-seated human expectations. It’s just that, all of a sudden, everyone is on call all the time. This can be exciting, and like most exciting things it can also be stressful and tedious if overdone. Our ability to sustain excitement has not evolved, at least in any physical, genetic sense. So it’s really no different from the cultural/metabolic problem that cocaine posed to stockbrokers in the 1980s. Dreadful, but, ultimately, a test of reflection and self-control.

Finally, I’m old enough to know — to know — that much of the ADHD whatnot was in place long before Bill Gates’s Quick and Dirty Operating System was contracted out to IBM. Young ‘uns will be amazed to hear it, but complaints about “long-form reading” were rife in the 1960s. I’m still shocked to recall the exaltation with which a particularly brilliant member of my graduating class from college (1970) announced that he would never read another book in his entire life — he was done with that. One might well ask if the Internet’s true midwife wasn’t Marshall McLuhan, the pen-wielding critic who published Understanding Media in 1964.

I don’t mean any of this as a reply to Eric. Every time someone takes a call in the middle of a conversation with me (or, worse, a meal), I’m dumbfounded by the want of judgment. Can anyone who would think of answering a telephone, on a what’s-this? basis,  in the middle of an interesting conversation, be regarded as truly thoughtful? I’d say not.

Eric certainly didn’t. Although a close friend was in ordeal mode, at long distance, for much of the afternoon, Eric confined his phone calls to moments of pause and transition. Not once did he allow his iPhone to interrupt his bill of particulars against the pervasiveness of gadgetry — or my pontificating responses.

Which didn’t surprise me at all. If I were truly clever, I’d have reminded Eric that he gave up Facebook for Lent. How grounded in our unevolved humanity is that?

Preventive Medicine 102: I had an appointment with the dermatologist today. I pretended, to her assistant, that I didn’t really know why I was there. I could show off my lovely Mohs-surgery scar, and did. When Dr G peeled back the bandage, she and the technician cooed approvingly, and I wondered if they were thinking what I thought when I changed the bandage on Monday: that I was at Greenberg’s, looking at an impressively frosted cake. But if Dr G had referred the squamous-cell biopsy to Dr B, the Mohs surgeon, that was the end of her involvement. I wasn’t there for her to look at my Hostess Cupcake stitchery.

Nor was I really there for her to do a follow-up exam of [TMI]. I was there, the technician reminded me, for a full-body exam. Ick. I protested; excuses proliferated. Dr G reminded me that the exam was overdue; she also said, “I sound like your mother.” Mind you, I would not be going to a doctor who was old enough to be my mother. Dr G is older than my daughter, but not by much.

Because the [TMI] problem involved a degree of unbuckling and unbuttoning, I said to hell with it, meaning my resistance, and agreed to disrobe. Dr G naturally had to leave the room (?), but she promised to be right back. When she did not come right back, I realized that what I hate most about medical examinations is sitting around in my underwear (or worse). I do not sit around in my underwear at home. It bothers me not to be presentable. The fact that I’m at a doctor’s office makes no difference. Underwear is underwear.

After a long absence, Dr G returned, bursting with apologies. Even better, she ventured, as she began to examine the upper half of me, to ask my advice. Since I was a thoughtful person — how on earth had my dermatologist come to that conclusion? — what did I make of the very rude patient with whom she’d been dealing while I sat around in my underwear. The very rude patient was a thirty-something trophy wife who had to have everything done yesterday, in order to fly to Europe next week, and who not only didn’t want to pay for it, but couldn’t pay for it, notwithstanding such accoutrements as a Birkin bag in a color not seen before, Pucci everything-else, and a couple of Cartier tennis bracelets. Dr G was so exasperated that she suggested — “for the first time, really; I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never lost it before” — that the lady “trade in” one of her bracelets for the cosmetic procedure that she didn’t want to/couldn’t pay cash American for. Astonishing fun though this repartee was, Dr G still wanted to know what the woman could have been thinking, carrying on the way she did.

I said that her refusal to pay was meant to signify that she was too important a person to have to pay for things. Dr G and the technician stepped back a bit and admired me — there is no other word, etymologically — as if I were some science fiction wizard. “You ought to be a shrink,” they said. I thought of all the shrinks who have not said this to me, and felt better about the full-body exam process. Sadly, not so much about the underwear.

Did I say “Pucci”? Dates me, don’t it.

It was the sort of day that makes me worry that I’m overly fond of the sound of my own voice. Well, not the sound, exactly — people say nice things about it, but it does nothing for me — but the content, which was old history gossip. After lunch, to which I was treated by a dear English friend who, like Nancy Mitford, came from much too nice a family to receive the education to which her intelligence entitled her, I was asked about the origins of the American Civil War. We had been talking about the Tenthers, and about the failure of leadership in American politics over the past half-century. (Now that I’m an old man, I admire Dwight Eisenhower for keeping the nation steady during the chthonic McCarthyite hysterias of the Fifties, and I fear that he was the last true leader to occupy the White House.) I hope that my answers exploded a number of myths.

Then at dinner, after watching Equivocation, Bill Cain’s rather overcharged play about Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot at MTC, Kathleen asked me to explain the English Civil War, which she claimed to know nothing about. (She was quite surprised to learn that Oliver Cromwell came from a county family.) I had the damnedest time saying “Charles II” when I meant “Charles I,” and vice versa, but at least I never confused James II with his grandfather, James I. Trying to trace the origins of the adversity between Crown and Parliament, all I could think of was John Hampden and Ship Money. I used to know about all those crises. (I still have JR Tanner’s undoubtedly outdated review of the constitutional disputes of Seventeenth-Century England.) Good old Archbishop Laud. Strafford and “thorough.”

I am still very much in the middle of Peter Wilson’s Thirty Years War — a bit past the middle, but only a bit. I’m dying to get to Steve Pincus’s 1688. It would be grand to re-read Cecily Wedgwood’s King’s Peace; I never did have The King’s War, but I’d like to read that, too. What could be more romantic than situating the capital of royalist England at Oxford? And, speaking of cavaliers and roundheads, there is no longer any doubt that The Young Victoria has made I Puritani my favorite opera in the world. I have begun efforts to follow Victoria’s advance to favoring Norma, an opera than the strange voice of Joan Sutherland made me quite dislike, but I am in no hurry. Vien diletto…

But how am I to get any reading done if I spend hours at a time rattling off the remnants of my decayed command of dates and fates? (I had to confess to Kathleen that I couldn’t for the life of me recall what became of Richard Cromwell.) And do I really care, if charming women are inclined to pump me for the low-down on select charters and documents illustrative of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I — and Queen Victoria, whose Prince Albert was, in Strachey’s opinion, the most able statesman in England at the time of his premature demise. Did you know that Albert’s last official act, composed on his deathbed, was to soften a British ultimatum that, in its original language, would have almost certainly provoked war between the Union and the United Kingdom? Now I must bone up on the Trent Affair, so that, next time I’m asked, I’ll be able to do more than gush that Prince Albert saved the day.

If I were to try to tell you why today felt good, you’d horripilate at least. I’m used to that. I’ve been living at this level for about six months now, reorganizing the household as though I were Peter the Great designing the Table of Ranks.

I did get in a bit of writing. Two new Friday movie pages, one of them written last week but polished this afternoon, after I wrote the other from scratch. Pathetic, really — but headed the right way. You’ll be more interested to hear that Megan and Will dropped in. Yes, just like a sitcom! They were in the neighborhood (to see the new pediatrician, who’s up here) and wondered if they might just stop in. Does it get any better than that? In a word, no. I got to dandle Will for fifteen minutes. Then, before I had a chance to think of all the things that I was supposed to be doing, he was whisked away.

Will is on some sort of cusp, as how can he not be at a time when the period of a week has only just ceased to consitute a double-digit percentage of his life-span so far. At nearly eleven weeks of age, he is putting a lot of the newborn’s self-absorption behind, and trading it in for imperial toddlerhood. It’s the move from “universe” to “center of the universe.”

While I was holding him, his mother thought that perhaps his head was not quite as well-supported as it might be, and she gently pressed it back into my arm. He shot it forward the instant she released it, and her apology to him was all the reassurance that I needed. Did I tell you that he is such a prodigy that he is already (we think) teething?

At one point, we found ourselves in front of the full-length Second Empire mirror that my mother installed in our Bronxville foyer. There we all were, suddenly on the other side of where we’d been. Will’s face registered the sense of a slight problem, but he was not surprised; he did not wonder how we had vaulted through 180 degrees of space. None of the concepts that would ground such an observation are available right now. It occurred to me that the mind is much like the Internet (o irony): information is distributed among countless packets of neurons, all of which, in the case of the mirror’s reflection, are probably present in Will’s sensorium right now. What’s missing is the ability to put the packets together, as the Internet does when You’ve Got Mail. But because the packets are indeed all there, there will probably never be a moment in which Will suddenly understands what mirrors are all about. Bits of knowledge will have fused imperceptibly into understanding.

If I beg your indulgence of grandfatherly boasting, I also assure you that if Will were to do anything seriously ahead of himself I’d be stricken with alarm. I don’t want him to grow up a whit faster than his wont, and I look forward to many objectively tedious hours over the next six or seven years. But this afternoon I felt nothing less than joyous about his parents’ way with him. In one sense, certainly, we have all remade our lives somewhat to accommodate Will. But then, we’ve remade our world precisely to suit him, so that he can be part of a social bustle right now. If we adore him, it’s to make it easier for him to be part of our larger world.

Call it imperial (grand)parenthood.

 

How pleasant it would be if we could average out our sharper feelings. I’d be only too happy to trade in the spikes of ecstasy that thrust me up from time to time for an end to the pits of bad feeling that rather more often yawn beneath me, usually when I’ve got to deal with an unpleasantness from a position of fatigue. My pleasures are increasingly cerebral anyway. My miseries are more emotional than ever.

Which is to say that they fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day, leaving me wondering what all the fuss was about. This morning, it was hard to tell which font of self-pity was weeping more profusely. On the one hand, I was about to undergo a bit of outpatient surgery that might last for hours. On the other, I had to be up and dressed and out of the house at the obscenely early hour of half-past eight. For at least the length of entire Second Avenue block, I developed the economic argument against my own continued existence: I have become too expensive to keep alive. Who benefits from my drawing breath? Raptures of self-abnegating renunciation ground to a halt when an inner voice murmured, “Kathleen.” I had to slog through the remainder of the walk to the dermatologist’s office (all the way down to 69th Street!) without benefit of high-flying remorse. Life can be very hard.

The worst of it was, of course, that I’m such an inconstant bastard. I simply can’t maintain a bad mood. Gentle Reader, you have no idea how much purple prose my awareness of this failing has spared you. It would be one thing if the certainty that I’ll feel better in half an hour had any emotional weight, but of course it doesn’t. It weighs exactly as much as the good advice that’s inflicted upon fifteen year-olds.   

The surgery took no time at all, really, and I did go to the movies after all (Green Zone). Afterward, I went for a shop. I eked out the Hours; I launched a new playlist (sans superstructure — just Mozart’s piano sonatas, Vivaldi’s La Stravaganza, and Thomas Allen singing Brahms). I made a cheddar omelette for Kathleen and a cheeseburger for myself. I read bulks of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. I had a lovely chat with Megan — lovely (at both ends) largely because she is living in a Real Apartment, and I feel her happiness at least 97% as keenly as I should do if it were I, and not she, who had just escaped Château Gizmo. Later, Megan sent some lovely photos of Will via email. Quaint! She didn’t upload them at Facebook, so I didn’t, either. I did print one for Kathleen to look at, though, because of the Defargéène subtext of the shoot (the subject of which is Will’s interest in a stylized tropical fish that Kathleen made a few years ago for a forgotten purpose): Keep Knitting!  

After spending the day watching an infant whose nervous system has yet to advise him that his head will always interrupt the arc of his backward-swinging fist discover his body, I spent the evening watching a troupe of men and women at the top of their form stop on dime after dime. The two experiences interbled, but only because Paul Taylor, the prince of euphoria, has not lost track of how we begin.