On Friday, I went to see Skyfall, and I enjoyed it in an unthinking way. Every time I did think, I objected, but then I’m that rare bird who has no desire whatever to live in the world of James Bond. And, much as I like Daniel Craig in the role (in any role), he makes one feel his pain. I mean Craig’s pain, not Bond’s. The real pain of sprinting and jumping and punching. It’s wearying. I’d have liked to see more of Bérénice Marlohe; her scene at the bar was the best thing in the movie. More Ben Whishaw, too. Rory Kinnear reminded me of his father even before I knew who he was. (Two Help! references in as many days.)

Fossil Darling, claiming to have the inside scoop, told me yesterday that, notwithstanding Dame Judi Dench’s claim that she retired from the role of M voluntarily, the decision was really Barbara Broccoli’s. No one, he claims, has appeared in more than seven Bond vehicles, not even Sean Connery. Well, he would know. It’s very strange, knowing that Dame Judi has suffered a degree of macular degeneration that leaves her effectively blind; it’s as though she has passed on to some higher plane. She puts a new oomph into the idea of acting, quite the opposite of a sighted actor’s pretending to be blind.

The motocycle chase atop Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar made me wish more than ever that Orhan Pamuk would write a sinister screenplay to show off his beloved city — preferably in a January fog. From a grandish room in something like his family’s old apartment building, a formidable matron would run an operation dedicated to corrupting promising young politicians with the favors of temptresses played by the likes of Marion Cotillard. The story would be set before World War I, so that all the men would wear fezes. (We watched Pascali’s Island the other night. You still can’t get it on DVD, but the VHS tape worked.)

What I really wanted to see on Friday was Arco, but the showtimes didn’t work for me.  

***

Thanksgiving is just two days away, and I’m not sure how many people are coming. Six for sure — and probably just six. But I’m preparing for ten. I’m shopping today and cooking tomorrow. It’s a tremendous bore not to have access to the balcony, which always serves as a pantry when I have a party; I’ve nowhere to put anything. That goes for the apartment generally. I’m nowhere near having the emergency closet space — empty most of the time, that is — that my sanity demands. Progress on the de-accessioning front is slow. But it has finally touched the library. Yesterday, I took four shopping bags full of books up to HousingWorks. Four shopping bags — containing only forty books. True, many of them were big fat books, books like Simon Schama’s Citizens (it took a while for me to realize that Schama is Not For Me). But the total of books culled so far is a measly 49 — not even one-twentieth of my goal.

Going through the history books, I tried to sort by time (Antiquity, &c) and space (Asia, &c), but I ran out of room very quickly, and the European pile was soon toppling over all the others. It was more a miscellany than a collection. Two books that I wanted to give away but didn’t were Jonathan Spence’s In Search of Modern China (still basic and comprehensive, even if it has little or nothing to say about China today) and Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money (concise on the origins of modern banking, even if Ferguson is a dreadful old Tory).

I’m keeping a record of all the donated books. I opened a new database on ReaderWare a while back and I’m filling it, initially, with culls. In the “Location” field (which I had to insert myself), each book is shown as being shelved at “Donate 2012.” According to this new database, the only books in my collection are three novels by Elizabeth Taylor. (I entered them when I created the database because they were piled on my desk, and I wanted to give the new barcode scanner a go.) Their location is (unhelpfully) given as “New.” Happily, I know where they are; the information is stashed in the A:\ drive crammed within my skull.  

The next chapter in Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus will not be the death of me, but it will still be hard to get through. The sixteenth, it’s entitled, “Philosophical Feuds in South India and Kashmir: 500-1300 CE.” I’m not sure that I can absorb any further theological contortions. In the preceding chapter, it was explained that the Buddha was appropriated as an avatar of Vishnu, not because Brahmin writers intended to appropriate (and endorse) Buddhism, but, on the contrary, because this was a way of effecting the damnation of the antigods. (I’ll just leave it there.) The fact that the geographical extremities of India are mentioned in the coming chapter title suggests to me that Doniger is going to sweep up a few outlying matters of interest into a neat pile before moving on to Hindu relations with the Mughal emperors (in two chapters) and then with the British (two further chapters, which I read a while back, when I was sorely in need of a change of pace after learning, if that’s the word, about the Puranas.) If it weren’t for Doniger’s tart and witty writing, I should never have been able to get through her book, which has so generously assisted me with what I’m always declaring  my most important project to be: learning how ignorant I am.

Another chapter that I’ve read ahead to, “Hindus in America,” reminds me why I gave all things Indian a pass when I was growing up. Doniger is not writing about immigrants from the Subcontinent building respectable temples in the Midwest. No, she’s writing, rather, about such things as “the many porn stars who have taken the name of Kali, presumably in vain.” (Doniger kills me!) I didn’t know about the porn stars, but how well I remember Eleanor Bron as a priestess of Kali in Help! I am grateful for the innate tact that steered me away from dabbling in India in the Sixties and Seventies, when Western adventurers and journalists were so busy erecting a looking-glass version of it, while those who made an honest effort to be serious about the culture bogged down in economic analysis and social(ist) critique. Like China, only to a far milder degree, India in those days was veiled by the wishful thinking of its leaders, who wished to grow a self-contained economy with little or no outside investment. Now that all that has been abandoned, India looks much more like a country just like any other — see the fine story about the Chandha brothers, billionaire heirs to a sprawling business empire, who shot one another to death at one of their faux farmhouses outside of New Delhi the other day. Now that India has settled down, at least in everyone’s imagination, it is much more interesting to me.  

Looking back to more recent times, when my interest in learning about India was taking root, I see that it was the Raj that attracted me, the strange (when you really look at it) experiment in which several thimbles-ful of Britons undertook to manage the broader affairs of a land of many millions. At first, the peoples ruled by the Raj were as opaque to me as they are to Forster’s Mrs Turton. By degrees, however, I noticed intriguing local colors, and along came fantastic writers like Pankaj Mishra, whose new book, From the Ruins of Empire, stirred me to read The Hindus.

Mishra also inspired me to see the famous trilogy that began Satyajit Ray’s filmmaking career. Yesterday, I watched Pather Panchali — for the first time, I’m embarrassed to say. Once again, though, I had to be glad that I’d waited, because the fecklessness of the Brahmin father was so much more intelligible with all that I’d learned from Doniger washing through my brain. (I’ll watch Aparajito and The World of Apu presently.) It’s a heavy and rather lowering movie (not least because it really was made on a shoestring, and not a very robust one), but I could see it as a story about one particular family in West Bengal, and not as an allegory of man’s inhumanity to man.  

***

 

Last night, we went down to Alphabet City to babysit. Before she and Ryan went out, Megan observed that Will is making a real effort to speak in intelligible sentences, and urged us to try very hard to understand what he was trying to say. We did our best, but no matter how many times I got him to repeat something that he said when he climbed up on his bed behind and around me (I was sitting on the edge), all I could make out was “say five sounds.” When his parents came home, we ran this by them, and they recognized it at once. “Safe and sound.” A perfectly reasonable thing to say in the vicinity of blankets and pillows.

Because we were bringing a few presents for his mother’s birthday, which we missed because we were all under the weather, Kathleen insisted on having something for Will, too. As it happened, I was having lunch with Ray Soleil, so, after that, we went to the toy shop near Lexington Avenue. I was instantly bewildered by the array of crap, but Ray zeroed in on a range of cool car puzzles called Automoblox. Ray suggested going with the bargain box of three-for-the-price-of-two, but I felt that that was a lot of toy for what was essentially to be a consolation prize, and also I wanted to know whether Will would like them. He certainly liked the one that I bought him, pulling it apart and putting it together all evening long. The difficulty for me was that he liked stripping the tires best of all, without any corresponding desire to snap them back on. Now, Will’s room is very neat — unless he’s playing in it. The little tires, I feared, would get lost in the shuffle. An inner voice said, “So what?” But it was not a very strong voice, and my piteous voice begged Will to pick up the tires so that I could play with them. Healthy young man that he is, he was deaf to these entreaties.

At one point, he retreated into his favorite hidey-hole, the space behind the headboard of his bed, and thrust his hands, monster-like, and with a great deal of growling coming from his invisible head, through the slats. Actually, at first he seemed to think that brandishing one hand was sufficient, but we were much more scared when he was coaxed into deploying the other as well.

***

As soon as we got home, Kathleen reminded me of something that we discovered years ago: we both grew up hearing the phrase “for all intents and purposes” as “for all intensive purposes.” Not precisely what Will did, but very close; in both cases, “ive” was substituted for “and.” Come to think of it, I’ve never heard Will use a conjunction.

Two stories in today’s Times make it clear that we need a new way of doing things when it comes to assuring the convenience and necessity of everyday life. Andrew Higgins talked to Nederlanders, who know a thing or two about floods, about protecting New York City from future storm surges. The consensus was that we will have to figure out what works for us — copying Dutch solutions isn’t the answer. There was also concern that Americans will never spend what it takes to prevent disaster. They’d much rather (as the Nederlanders see it) clean up afterward. As they know, however, all to often there isn’t an afterward, at least for too many victims. Matthew Wald covered a new report from the National Academy of Sciences concerning the vulnerability of the American power grid to terrorist attacks — and to the weeks or months that it could be put out of service, owing to such details as the fact that bulk-transmission transformers are not manufactured in the United States.

It is time to stop treating power and safety as matters that can be handled by municipalities and profit-making corporations. We should be thinking about creating a service, modeled perhaps on the Coast Guard (although not necessarily a federal institution), charged with overseeing the safety of our towns and the security of our access to electric power. At the end of their terms, satisfactory recruits would receive appropriate professional credentials (as electricians, say), while superior recruits would be encouraged to serve as officers, effectively making a career of helping to run the system.

In an earlier Times story, it was reported that the principal topic of discussion at a meeting of Long Island Lighting trustees, held four days before Hurricane Sandy belted out widespread devastation, was the advisability of hiring a branding consultant. The storm itself was mentioned but not, apparently, discussed. It is clear that the trustees are not inclined to prioritize the well-being of their customers, thousands of whom are still without power. Whether the power company is structured as a government agency (as it is currently) or a private corporation (as it used to be) doesn’t seem to make a difference: its mission appears to provide electricity as a luxury good, as indeed electricity was when it was introduced. It isn’t so much the physical plant of LIPA that is outmoded — although its equipment has been called “antiquated” by technicians who have pitched in from other parts of the country — as it is the mindset with which the entire operation was conceived and in which, incredibly, it persists.  

***

 

Forgive my silence yesterday. I had absolutely nothing to say that anyone would want to read. Not until after dinner, that is; and I’ve learned not to write after dinner. I spent the day in a valley of bones, very tired but otherwise not uncomfortable unless I thought about myself. I had a few moments of wondering if I would find the energy to clean up, dress, and go to the hospital, but once I began that process, about an hour before the infusion, the blackest doubts came to an end. It was bitter outside, and I was grateful not to have to wait too long for a taxi. As we made our way down York Avenue, I looked up at the cluster of hospital towers and felt completely mortal. And when I arrived at the Infusion Therapy Unit, there were no familiar faces, not at first. It turned out that Sara was on duty; a very pleasant Irishwoman, she is the only nurse to have served on the unit’s staff throughout the eight-plus years that I’ve been a patient there. She had me hooked up in no time. For the first hour, I read the new New Yorker. For the second, I turned to Susan Reynolds’s Fiefs and Vassals, which I am going to re-read cover to cover. On the phone, Kathleen proposed to pick me up when the infusion was over, and I accepted with tickled delight; it would be her first visit to the Unit, and, in the event, she got to meet Sara, which was very agreeable. We walked around a few corners to a restaurant called Petaluma and had a very nice dinner, hugely entertained by the buzz coming from the glassed-off private dining room, where a speed-dating event was in progress. I know that we looked at each other with the deepest relief: that’s not how we met. This thought, carrying me back over thirty-five years, ought to have made me feel mortal, too, but it didn’t.

Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that a major ingredient of my pre-infusion depressions is anxiety about actually getting the infusion. I have never not, but there have been hiccups — most recently last spring, when a bit of careless potting-up, involving potting soil taken from a bag that had been lying on the balcony, opened, resulted in bug bites that the nurses found so alarming that they insisted that my rheumatologist have a look first. In the early days, it used to take quite a while for my blood pressure to drop to acceptable levels, a vicious circle as I sat in my chair, fretting. On one occasion, there was some confusion about the dosage. It is all rather like air turbulence during flight — uncommon but frightening. In any case, these worries evaporate once the pump is turned on, and I begin to feel better at once, long before the Remicade can have any actual physiological impact. By the time we were seated at the restaurant, I was cheerful again.

The evening was crowned by a most unexpected pleasure. A novelist with whom I have been in correspondence wrote to report his interest in what I’ve had to say here about Elizabeth Taylor. He had read five of the novels, he wrote, liking two but not caring so much for the others, and he asked for a recommendation for what to read next. This was doubly delightful, because (a) a novelist! and (b) Elizabeth Taylor! I will strain to keep my reply under a thousand words.

***

Susan Reynolds argues that what we think of as “feudalism,” with knights swearing oaths of fealty to kings and potentates, is a construct of Renaissance scholarship that corresponds only squintingly to the very unsystematic arrangements reflected by actual records surviving from the post-Carolingian world. “What the concept of feudalism seems to have done since the sixteenth century is not to help us recognize the creatures we meet but to tell us that all medieval creatures are the same so that we need not bother to look at them. Put another way, feudalism has provided a kind of protective lens through which it has seemed prudent to view the otherwise dazzling oddities and varieties of medieval creatures.”

Putting down that lens is what Reynolds’s book is all about and, as such, it is in keeping with the best intellectual efforts of our time, which strive to correct for the bland complaisance with which thinkers of the modern era minimized the difficulties of research and discovery. Victorian optimism has finally been laid to rest, and what concerns us is not so much exercising our mastery as examining our restraints. We dismiss the know-it-all as a useless fraud; we seek out the interestingly uncertain. The frank confession of ignorance and the reluctance to to build on generalizations are the hallmarks of intellectual decency. For the time being.

The thing about feeling depressed but knowing why I feel depressed is that I’m not afraid. I am reasonably certain that the state I’m in will come to an end on Wednesday, as I’m revived by tomorrow’s dose of Remicade. But if I know (from long experience) that Remicade will make me feel better, I don’t really grasp what’s making feel bad right now. The immune disorder that Remicade counteracts attacks my intestines, and that’s unpleasant but also clear and focused, unlike the rest of the malaise, which I can only compare to being locked inside a play by Chekhov. I would be despairing — despairing about feeling such despair — if I didn’t know that I’m going to be let out tomorrow.

As if to cheer me up, the little men in the gondola have just docked at our balcony, and begun hammering away at the railing.

***

 Well, no: they’re not hammering at the railings. They’re sanding down the floors, if that makes any sense. No wonder it makes such a penetrating racket. And dust everywhere. (They actually closed the windows that were slightly open — thoughtful.) And now they’ve gone down a floor.

For several years now, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History has been glaring down at me with its burnished orange jacket. It came out three years ago, and spent quite a few months in my reading pile. It’s so fat, though, that eventually I simply had to shelve it, something that I don’t like to do with books that I haven’t read. Anywhere, there is sat. I was wondering if I ought to give it away. Then, yesterday, when I finished Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire and thought, for a moment, of turning to Joseph Lelyveld’s book bout Gandhi (still in a pile), I changed my mind at the last second and pulled down Doniger instead. I’m already about a third of the way through — it’s a great read! Doniger’s openly revisionist idea is to write a history of the Vedic religion(s) that is free of Brahmin tendentiousness. But she does not assume that you are familiar with the field, as indeed I am not. Somewhere, I think, I have editions of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and I read a bit of the latter once. But I never guessed that the Hindu texts come in waves, beginning with the Rig Veda (and the other Vedas), followed by the Brahmanas, the Upanishads, and so on. It’s as though Vedic scripture were all Talmud and no Torah — or mostly Talmud, anyway (the Vedas bring Leviticus to mind). The Upanishads were written before and after a period of massive dissent, during which both the Buddhists and the Jains broke away from Vedic orthodoxy — or “orthopraxy,” as Doniger prefers, since correct behavior was generally more important than correct doctrine (inverting the Christian stress). Doniger is my kind of historian, very skeptical of “just-so” stories and hindsight-infected interpretations. (“But why assume any cult at all?”, she writes of Harappan seals. “Why need they symbolize fertility?”) And she is determined to make the ancient texts as intelligible as possible. Her motto might be taken from the Brahmanas:

Why do you inquite aboutr the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.

 

I can’t see anything, but I think they’re grinding away at balcony railings, which are going to be replaced. It’s rather like the dentist’s, only with my mouth closed. That kind of fun.

Otherwise, it’s a lovely day. But that otherwise lies far away. I woke from some sweet but melancholy dreams about wandering up the West Side, in and out of the H and K line stations, deciding at last that I would try to reach Kathleen at her apartment — for this was the New York of 1980 (or earlier), and we were not yet married. And Kathleen wasn’t there. Wasn’t in the bed beside me, I mean. She was already dressed, reading the paper in the living room, and waiting for a conference call. When the call came, she had to give up on the cordless landline phone because of the racket. I made tea and toast for her, and two soft-boiled eggs for myself. (Never have I managed to drop so much eggshell into the bowl.)

I do have to get out of the house today, if only to take some photographs.  

***

It’s hard to read. My time with Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Taylor was intense. I was reading their work and then dipping into their biographies. The biographies are of course very different. Hermione Lee is writing about an acknowledged master of English literature, whereas Nicola Beauman, in The Other Elizabeth Taylor, finds herself picking bones with her subject for having done so little to advance her fame (beside all the hard work of writing, that is). Virginia Woolf is intimately associated with feminism, so that even people who don’t care for her fiction have to respond to her criticism. Elizabeth Taylor wrote no criticism. She ran a household and raised two children, writing pretty much in the Jane Austen manner — whenever she could. Seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf holds few secrets; forty years after Elizabeth Taylor’s death, Beauman discovered a bombshell that led Taylor’s children to repudiate her book: the letters that Taylor wrote to her hitherto unknown-of lover, Ray Russell.

You may wonder why I’m even comparing the two writers. Elizabeth Bowen once told Elizabeth Taylor that it was a pity that she and “Virginia” couldn’t have been great friends. In time, I have no doubt that they will be thought of together, as the leading women writers of twentieth-century England. How long that will take, I daren’t opine. More powerfully than any others, they wrote about life as it is lived, and they did so in language that brings their stories to life. Eventually, it will be necessary to do a little background reading in the period, just as it already is in the case of Lady Murasaki or even Jane Austen herself. But once the social rules have been explained (and the technological deficits borne in mind), Woolf and Taylor will be seen to capture the ambiguities and ambivalences of consciousness, the resentments entailed in doing one’s duty and keeping the social fabric in good repair, and the very flavor of resignation and acceptance, better than anyone else. They are not dreamers, these two; nor are they thinkers. (Dreaming and thinking are for children.) They are unblinking observers. And, despite everything, they write with more hope than despair. 

Someday, it will be more generally understood that these are the things that good literature must accomplish. I hope that men can keep up.

Permit me to begin on a scholarly note: most of what I have to say about genius just occurred to me the other day while thinking over Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings and, for context, re-reading parts of Hermione Lee’s 1996 biography of the writer. My thoughts are entirely sketchy and impressionistic. Aside from a glance at Wikipedia, no study of any kind was involved.

What I brought to this deliberation was something between a hunch and a conviction to the effect that “genius” is not a helpful concept, not a meaningful label. It means nothing more than “very smart person,” where “very” may be exchanged for any number of emphatic adverbs (“extraordinarily,” “unusually,” “immeasurably,” &c). In other words, it is not a grade; it does not signify a class. “Genius” is a romantic word, loaded with hokum.

As the Wikipedia entry points out, genius was the ancient Roman term for a family’s “tutelary deity,” whatever that was. It picked up something of its modern sense when the genius of certain families came to be thought of as the explanation for their prominence in affairs. But until the Nineteenth Century, genius was a possession, not an identity. You might speak of “the genius of Shakespeare,” but without claiming that “Shakespeare was a genius.” The genius of Shakespeare is reflected in his plays, in the the works that this genius inspired. Shakespeare taking a walk or a nap was not being a genius.

The idea of being a genius seems to have emerged in response to the grandeur of Romantic art and philosophy. Did Kant and Hegel write about genius? It doesn’t matter. They came to be regarded as geniuses themselves, as were Keats and Shelley, posthumously. Mozart and Beethoven also became geniuses after their deaths. (In Beethoven’s case, the reception of his late quartets is a gauge of the development; thought to be the product of a diseased or deranged mind when they were first played, they came, by virtue of their craggy inscrutability, to be proofs of genius.) Genius was sublime.

***

Genius was allowed to be eccentric. Tennyson dressed like a tramp. Genius was not obliged to behave like a gentleman — witness Carlyle and poor Jane. Geniuses, as the Victorian era deepened, became a sort of upmarket Barnum attraction. Here is a picture that Woolf paints of her mother’s youth:

Little Holland House was her world then. But what was that world like? I think of it as a summer afternoon world. To my thinking Little Holland House is an old white country house, standing in a large garden. Long windows open onto the lawn. Through them comes a stream of ladies in crinolines and little straw hats; they are attended by gentlemen in peg-top trousers and whiskers. The date is round about 1860. It is a hot summer day. The tables with great bowls of strawberries and cream are scattered about the lawn. They are “presided over” by some of the six lovely sisters, who do not wear crinolines, but are robed in splended Venetian draperies; they sit enthroned, and talk with foreign emphatic gestures — my mother too gesticulated, throwing her hands out — to the eminent men (afterwards to be made fun of by Lytton); rulers of India, statesmen, poets, painters.  … The sound of music also comes from those long low rooms where the great Watts pictures hang; Joachim playing the violin; also the sound of a voice reading poetry — Uncle Thoby would read his translations from the Persian poets. How easy it is to fill in the picture with set pieces that I have gathered from memoirs — to bring in Tennyson in his wideawake; Watts in his smock frock; Ellen Terry dressed as a boy; Garibaldi in his red shirt — and Henry Taylor turned from him to my mother — “the face of one fair girl was more to me” — so he says in a poem. But if I turn to my mother, how difficult it is to single her out as she really was; to imagine what she was thinking, to put a single sentence into her mouth! I dream; I make up pictures of a summer’s afternoon.

It is difficult to put a sentence in Julia Jackson’s mouth, I surmise, because she is a young girl in the shadow of geniuses. The presence of genius drives out triviality and invests everything with significance. Everything, even the household chores. Woolf describes the process in “Reminiscences,” a journeyman piece composed under the influence of Henry James, before she found her own voice, with an ingenuousness that it’s impossible to imagine her older self not taking issue with.

She [Julia Stephen] delighted to transact all those trifling businesses which, as women feel instinctively, are somehow derogatory to the dignity which they like to discover in clever men; and she took it as a proud testimony that he came to her ignorant of all depressions and elations but those that high philosophy bred in him.

In her mid-twenties, Woolf (or Virginia Stephen as she then was) still bought this brand of the feminine mystique. It would take years for her to acknowledge and articulate her disgust with her father’s genius act.

This frustrated desire to be a man of genius, and the knowledge that he was in truth not in the first flight — a knowledge which led to a great deal of despondency, and to that self-centredness which in later life at least made him so childishly greedy for compliments, made him brood so disproportionately over his failure and the extent of it and the reasons for it — these are qualities that break up the fine steel engraving of the typical Cambridge intellectual.

There is a glee in this deconstruction of her father’s aura that makes “A Sketch of the Past” just about the most exciting thing that Virginia Woolf ever wrote.   

***

Even when that disgust was disgorged (beginning with To the Lighthouse), Woolf continued to live and write as though the “dignity,” of which her mother was so solicitous, continued to glimmer in her life, a lamplight that would give all other things their contours of significance. The most menial chores would be relieved of drudgery by the presence of this light. But the light did not shine for her as it had for her mother; Virginia herself wished to be a genius. She was able to wish it, without sounding the depths of her father’s miserable self-doubt, and the prospect must have seemed provisional to any woman born in the 1880s, growing up a thicket of geniuses all of whom, with the arguable exception of George Eliot, were male. But her relentless high-mindedness interfered with her sense of humor. It placed a high lower limit on admissible fun.  

Had she been able to forget this dignity from time to time, she might have left us much more in the vein of “Am I a Snob?”, a speech that she wrote in the Thirties to be read before old friends. What does it mean to be a snob? It means setting true values aside, hobnobbing with aristocrats, and having a lot of guilty fun.

Margot Asquith — “a lady whose birth is no better — perhaps worse — than my own” — was, nevertheless the Countess of Oxford when she wrote to Virginia to ask a fatuous favor: “When I die, I would like you to write a short notice in The Times to say you admired my writing, and thought that journalists should have made more of me.” It seems that Virginia had actually allowed that Margot was a “good” writer. “This, coming from you, might have turned my head as you are far the greatest female writer living.”

Now I was not, I think, flattered to be the greatest female writer in Lady Oxford’s eyes; but I was flattered to be asked to lunch with her alone. “Of course,” I replied, “I will come and lunch with you alone.” And I was pleased when on the day in question Mabel, our dour cook, came to me, and said, “Lady Oxford has sent her car for you, ma’am.” Obviously, she was impressed by me; I was impressed by myself. I rose in my own esteem because I rose in Mabel’s.

When I reached Bedford Square there was a large lunch party; Margot was rigged up in her finery; a ruby cross set with diamonds blazed on her breast; she was curled and crisp like a little Greek horse; tart and darting like as asp or an adder. Philip Morrell was the first to feel her sting. He was foolish and she snubbed him. But then she recovered her temper. She was very brilliant. She rattled off a string of anecdotes about the Duke of Beaufort and the Badminton hunt; how she got her blue; … about Lady Ripon, Lady Bessborough; L Balfour and “the Souls.” As for age, death and obituary articles, The Times, nothing was said of them. I am sure she had forgotten that such things existed. So had I. I was enthralled. I embraced her warmly in the hall; and the next thing I remember is that I found myself pacing along the Farringdon Road talking aloud to myself, and seeing the butchers’ shops and the trays of penny toys through an air that seemed made of gold dust and champagne.

Now no party of intellectuals has ever sent my flying down the Farringdon Road. I have dined with H G Wells to meet Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett and Granville Barker and I have only felt like an old washerwoman toiling step by step up a steep and endless staircase.

I think that Virginia Woolf felt like an old washerwoman a lot.

Fearing a different outcome in the presidential election, I was going to write about genius and Virginia Woolf this morning, but I should have to be one or the other to do so. My thoughts are flying every which-way, half elated by Barack Obama’s victory and half jittered by the impending storm. There’s no reason to expect any storm damage in the immediate neighborhood, but it’s much to soon for even a prediction of high winds.

Instead of following the news last night, Kathleen and I had a quiet dinner and then read for a few hours. I’m on the fourth and final lap of Elizabeth Taylor’s stories (those gathered in her last collection, The Devastating Boys), and two stood out yesterday, “Sisters” and “Miss A and Miss M.” The first is on the short side, only a few pages; but an entire novel is compressed within it. A respectable widow is horrified to learn that she has been tracked down by a “literary detective” who wants to ask her about her late sister, a once-famous novelist whose scandalous books were incinerated by their clergyman father. To a thrilling degree, Taylor conveys the urgency with which the housewife has buried her connection to the writer. In lesser hands, the woman would be a philistine figure of fun, but Taylor makes us weigh the cost of literary production that writers exact in the form of indiscretion. The longer one, one of the very few narrated in the first person, is about a schoolgirl who has a crush on a schoolteacher whose wittiness masks selfish cruelty. It is a model story, saturated in skill.

Is there, I wonder, a good book about Victorian geniuses?

***

 

It got very cold yesterday, and we were dismayed to think about — or to feel for, as we did reflexively — people without warm homes.

Everyone I know is “worried about the election.” I think that it is beginning to dawn on everyone I know that this presidential election is not a race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, however insistently we focus our transitory attention upon the sayings and doings of the two men. It is a battle of assymetric ideologies. On the one hand, Republican voters, as committed to the party line as the reddest Soviet; on the other, people who prefer to “think for themselves.” Many of the second group will vote for Romney because they like him, but most of the Republican’s supporters won’t give the man himself a second thought. Control of the Executive (and, through it, of the Judiciary) is what they hope to gain, not the right man in the White House. The right man is a cypher. That’s how ideology works.

Very few on the left are ideologues — anymore. If it were otherwise, there wouldn’t be so much carping from people who were wowed by Obama in 2008 but have since felt “disappointment.” Ideologues would recognize that the President said the right things to get elected and then did the right things (to the extent that he could do anything) in office. There would be no criticism (from the left) of the President’s aloof manner. There would be little rhetorical regret about the President’s failure to close the prison at Guantánamo. Most difficult to imagine, there would be no squabbling among Democrats.

But Democrats, who ought to be the majority party in any election, have not developed a post-New Deal, post-Civil Rights Acts platform. Much less have they developed an ideological cohesion to compete with that of the Republicans. It’s worth noting that ideological cohesion is rarely rational, and certainly not a matter of logically outlined objectives. The nub of Republican ideology — a commitment to the conversion of public wealth into private property — is never stated by Republicans. And Democrats are too disorganized to fight it.

Hence a close election that should be a shoe-in.

***

By “moments of being,” Virginia Woolf had something somewhat mystical, somewhat spiritual, in mind. In her discussion of the matter, in the early pages of “A Sketch of the Past,” a memoir that she composed over several years at the end of her life, she begins by distinguishing moments of being from those, by far more numerous, of non-being, of unremarkable triviality, whether pleasant or tedious. Gradually, she shifts into thinking of moments of being as “shocks.”

I only know that many of these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; myself passive. This suggests that as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow. I think this is true, because though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of aart; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

I myself don’t believe that there is a pattern underlying the cotton wool. “… it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words.” It’s curious that Woolf speaks of making real something that is already real. I agree with the second clause: she makes the evidence of pattern real by writing about it — and well deserves the rapture of getting things right. Meaning is a human construction. I say “construction” because the fashionable “construct” suggests a flimsy, improvisatory model that can be knocked down at will. Human meaning is really quite durable in contrast, not “artificial” by any means, and we have built it up as we’ve gone along. We find what works by trial and error, but what works works organically, not mechanically: human meaning is not a machine. The development of human meaning has been prone to a consistent type of error that has all the same dwindled in its impact over time: this is the tendency to see more pattern than is truly visible, to infer gods and ideals from violent storms and pleasing regularities. It is even arguable that the vast useless systems of meaning constructed by religions ancient and modern provide an indispensible prototype for the truly anthropocentric system of meaning that underlies modern secular democracy. “Anthropocentric” — a good word, but probably one that needs to be replaced. It suggests that mankind is the most important kind. This makes no sense unless you are still thinking of having stolen importance from gods or stars. The minute man becomes most important, the very idea of importance evaporates. What takes its place, and what the replacement for “anthropocentric” will have to connote, is that mankind immediately shoulders all responsibility, not for the world, but for mankind.  

On Friday, when Megan and Ryan saw that the power company had affixed a sticker to the front door of their building, warning that power could not be restored to it until damaged equipment had been replaced, they decided to stop toughing it out in their cold flat. They loaded Will and Astor, along with several large backpacks, into a taxi, and headed uptown, reaching our place at 5:30 or so. No sooner did they get here than they went back downtown (leaving Will and Astor here with us) to fetch their bicycles, which they felt would be vulnerable to looters in the event of a lengthy absence, what with Con Ed’s sticker serving as an inadvertent invitation. When they got back, we sat down to a simple dinner of sirloin, rice and peas. A few chairs in the blue room were moved, and sleeping bags unrolled. 

Who knew how long they’d be with us? We couldn’t think about it right away. And then it turned out not to be necessary. In the morning, Megan received a surprising email from her landlord, reporting that the damage had been worked around, and that the building had power and heat. So, after a breakfast of French toast and bacon, she and Ryan took their bikes downtown and spent the afternoon cleaning up the apartment. (There was also a semi-spontaneous local parade to cheer.) They came back for Will and Astor at dusk. Will was just waking up from a long nap, having run like a top through the playground at Carl Schurz Park. Ryan ordered some pizzas and, when we’d all had a few slices, Kathleen called for a car. The car service had no idea how long it would take to arrange — two hours, I was sure. But no! There must have been a driver loistering around the corner. Fortunately, no one had listened to my advice about taking their time packing up.

Yesterday, I tidied up the apartment as I would ordinarily do on a Saturday. I felt that I was straightening out not so much the slight disarray caused by the refugees but the emotional unsteadiness that lingered in Hurricane Sandy’s wake. I didn’t get rid of all of it by any means. Devastation and power outages remain widespread around the city, and although life appears to have gotten back to normal here in Yorkville, it is, quite palably, an appearance only.

There would be a lot less deprivation if more New Yorkers (and suburbanites) lived as we do — densely, on relatively high ground, in buildings powered by buried lines, and with no real need for automobiles. We’d be in even better shape (although we didn’t need it this time) if solar or wind power could be harnessed for the purpose of running our elevators and our water-tower pump.

Anyway, the fun’s not over. Another nor’easter is headed our way for Wednesday.

***

The first package to arrive after Sandy contained Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, and Moments of Being, the collection of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings. You would not think that these books have much in common, but at a fundamental level they do, because both are concerned with uncertainty, with coming to terms with uncertainty as intelligently and honestly as possible.

Nate Silver writes,

This probabilistic element of the Bayesian way may seem uncomfortable at first. Unless we grew up playing cards or other games of chance, we were probably not encouraged to think in this way. Mathematics classrooms spend more time on abstract subjects like geometry and calculus than they do on probability and statistics. In many walks of life, expressions of uncertainty are mistaken for admissions of weakness.

Virginia Woolf writes,

Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

What both are saying is that we must live with approximations. We must resist the illusion of certainty. We must see overconfident bluster for what it is, and not permit ourselves to be falsely reassured. We must do as best we can, without any guarantees but the hope of our neighbors’ good will (founded upon our own).

You never know.

The front page of today’s Times features an ugly story about dust-ups at the region’s gas stations, with nightmarishly long lines of cars and correspondingly frayed tempers. It is easy to view the scene from an imaginary point in the future, as we look back on the drawbacks of medieval life. The automobile in America is already a concrete symbol of stupidity. It’s not the cars themselves that are to blame — technology is almost never responsible for bad behavior. But it’s the use to which they’ve been put, animating the tacky suburban simulacra of millionaires’ enclaves that surround the city today. Compounding the problem, almost every one of those mini-castles is surrounded by a moat of lawn that can double a homeowner’s consumption of fossil fuels (fertilizers, gas for lawn mowers).

The automobile extends a promise of autonomy that adolescent males cannot resist. Prom night crashes aside, no real harm there. The harm is in the civil structure of low-density housing that makes it impossible to outgrow the teenager’s attachment to his car.

And who’s to say that billions of Chinese don’t have the right to have fun? Some example we’ve set!

***

I could hardly believe it, but Nate Silver really did make his experience of poker both lucid and fascinating to me. The Signal and the Noise is 99.999% signal. Even in its brief moments of advocacy it is clear and bi-partisan. The closing of the chapter devoted to “A Climate of Healthy Skepiticism,” in which he analyses the difficulty of climate forecasting in terms that he has already laid out beautifully throughout the course of his book, Silver writes,

It is precisely because the [political] debate may continue for decades that climate scientists might do better to withdraw from the street fight and avoid crossing the Rubicon from science into politics. In science, dubious forecasts are more likely to be exposed — and the truth is more likely to preval. In politics, a domain in which the truth enjoys no privileged status, it’s anybody’s guess.

The dysfunctional state of the American political system is the best reason to be pessimistic about our country’s future. Our scientific and technological prowess is the best reason to be optimistic. We are an inventive people. The United States produces ridiculous numbers of patents, has many of the world’s best universities and research institutions, and our companies lead the market in fields ranging from pharmaceuticals to information technology. If I had a choice between a tournament of ideas and a political cage match, I know which fight I’d rather be engaging in — especially if I thought I had the right forecast.

***

It was too cold outside for shorts, but that’s what I was wearing inside, and I didn’t want to change just to run around the block. The first errand was to Duane Reade, where I had to refill two prescriptions. They had the more important of the two, but would have to wait until Monday for the other. Fine and dandy — I’d come back to pick up the important one tomorrow. But then, after I’d been to the liquor store and to Gristede’s (where there were Entenman’s coffee cakes on the shelf — yay!), the cell phone rang. I hoped that it would be Megan or Ryan, but it was Duane Reade, robo-calling without any specifics to tell me that my prescription, unspecified, would be delayed. I dumped the groceries and went out again. Would I have to manage both medications, stretching them out? Happily, no. The robo-call was, in addition to confusing, completely unnecessary.

 

We haven’t seen sunlight for quite a while. It was most welcome this morning.

I am alone in the apartment; Kathleen is at her office, where, she reports, things seem pretty normal. I’m afraid that things don’t seem normal at all to me, but that’s probably because I picked up Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise when I was done with the Times. “Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to ignore risks that threaten their livelihood, as though this will make them go away,” he writes, in the early pages of his account of the housing bubble/CDO catastrophe. Maybe what’s disturbing me is the sense   that Silver’s realism is the new normal, and it’s hard to live with.

The other book that arrived yesterday — we had mail, and we had packages — is disturbing, too, if in a very different way. Moments of Being is a collection of Virginia Woolf’s unpublished “autobiographical” writings. Among many remarkable claims for her mother, Woolf wrote this: “She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on round her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us.”  

***

The sun didn’t last for long, and I remained alone in the apartment all day. Astor, the coon cat whom Megan has cherished for many years (fourteen or so), seems to be dying, and Megan and Ryan are reluctant to leave him alone in the cold apartment.

Whether from nerves or something more microbial, I passed an uncomfortable afternoon, deeply grateful that the plumbing was in good order, running-water-wise. Even though we got off lightly — perhaps for that very reason — I’m a bit of a wreck now that the storm is really and truly past. (I was not gladdened by reading, in Nate Silver’s book, that the probability of a 6.75 magnitude earthquake’s wreaking havoc on New York City is one in 12,000 years. I should much prefer a number with six figures.) Fossil Darling, who’s working from home, feels under the weather as well. “Our nerves are completely shot,” he said.

On my way to the elevator from collecting the mail, I passed two EMS workers guiding a gurney with an apparently unconscious older man aboard. Not at all surprising on this melancholy day.

We have company today. More anon.

***

And who knows when I’ll be back tomorrow. The O’Neills will probably arrive a little earlier and certainly stay a lot longer. Which is, literally, such fun. Will was an angel today, playing with his Plan Toys trains and watching Kipper, until it was time to go home. For the first time ever, he did not want to go home. He had probably picked up something of the distress that his mother had successfully bottled up, while coping was important, but was ready to share with us as soon as she could relax. The storm surge rippling up Avenue C, as though a car had driven by, only it hadn’t. The water pouring into a basement-level area in the building next door. (The water pouring into a lot of basements, as Megan realized: what flooded the street was just so much cream on the milk, as it were.) The cold: their apartment’s temperature was dropping into the fifties, which however bracing out of doors is simply alarming within. The dark, the lack of hot water. The inability to heat up anything on an electric stove. At some point, it seemed, Will decided that our apartment was where he wanted to be, even if it wasn’t home. He resisted departure with all the eloquence (and grip) of a child his age. In the end, I think he recognized that, as he would rather be with his parents than not, he would simply have to go along. But it was a struggle. Power is expected to be restored to his neighborhood on Saturday, and “Sandy the storm,” as he calls it (her), will become an adventure.

I should point out that Will is very interested in resistance generally, as, again, is normal at his age, which is not yet three. (How can this be? He is so brilliant!) Will and I have always got along on the most capital terms, but lately he has opened a front of belligerence by insisting upon sitting on my chairs. There aren’t very many of them, just one in each room, and he knows which ones they are. He is sturdy and obstinate in his occupation, and it is difficult to withhold admiration, no matter how badly I want to sit down (often very badly). He is so little and I am so big, but that’s no matter. He’s not afraid of the likes of me! (Except when he wants to be.)

He has discovered my Falstaff thimbles. I’ll let you steep in that for a moment, considering the unfailing craziness of me. The Falstaff thimbles come from Bermuda, which means that they’re tremendously Olde England, and the second thing that I want to tell you is that I have never used them (as thimbles). They are small tin statuettes of Falstaff, quaffing an ale, and the merry wives, Mistresses Ford and Page, reading his love letters side by side. Will has put these “people,” as he calls them, to good service, in the capacious cab of his Bruder bulldozer. Watching him shut them in, all I can dream of is introducing him, at some still distant point in the future, to the joys of Verdi’s “Fulgida Alice.” Oh, the laughter!

What a drag — no Times. No Times delivered to my doorstep. I wasn’t expecting one, and I don’t know what use it would be. The online articles are all jumbled and impressionistic, and there’s no news at all about getting back to normal. There can’t be. Although the storm’s effect on our household has so far been limited to splattering the windows with dirt — something that never happens ordinarily — it’s clear that we’re on an island within an island surrounded by widespread devastation. Skies are still grey; the wind, while no longer howling, is still gusty, and every now and then a bucket of rain comes out of nowhere. It is very quiet. The Mayor is going to deliver a report momentarily. 

***

This isn’t the place to wax rhapsodic about Mayor Bloomberg, but I’d happily make him tsar of everything for life. He outlined the power and transit situations and offered a few semi-definite figures, conveying the impression that the return to normal is well underway even if it’s going to take “four or five days” to get the subway system running and a little bit longer to restore power to everyone who lost it. This afternoon may see limited bus service. Taxis and livery cars can pick up multiple fares. NYU hospital has got its backup generator working. And so on and so forth.

I’m wondering how long it will take for the supermarkets to restock their shelves, and what the local restaurant scene will be like in the next few days. (And I haven’t heard a word about the Postal Service.) For the time being, however, I’m staying put.

***

I did go downstairs to see what there was to see — my first time off the floor since Saturday. There was nothing to see. There was nothing in the mailbox, and the valet/package room was closed. As expected; but it was something to do. We’re thinking of going out at about six, to see what the restaurants are like, and to try to buy milk for Will.

Will and his parents will come up tomorrow on bicycles. I just heard from Megan two minutes ago, at the turning point of a trial run. She had to cycle up to Murray Hill to get a cell phone signal. Her landline was knocked out by the flooding (which has receded), as I discovered to some chagrin this morning. Ryan’s mother, just as concerned, gave me a call; she and Ryan’s father, living near the Jersey Shore, have been out of power since yesterday and don’t expect restoration anytime soon. (They had a long wait last year, in the wake of Irene.) When I called Fran back with my news, I was not surprised to find her phone switched off, and I tried but failed to leave her a brief but comprehensive message.

I’d like to post a status update at Facebook, but I have no interesting photographs, and you can’t just say something at Facebook without a picture. Well, you can… 

***

You would hardly know that anything happened, in the aisles at Fairway. First of all: plenty of milk. Really! That’s why I went. I expected bare shelves, but no. Plenty. And I bought what I wanted, not what I had to. I did note that there wasn’t much in the way of orange juice. (What is it about New Yorkers and orange juice? Why don’t they squeeze it?) But there was plenty of everything else. Plenty of customers, too.

The milk is for Will. Megan asked me to look for some, so that she wouldn’t have to schlep it uptown. I was daunted. I had no idea whether Fairway might be open. Or if the other supermarkets were. My first reaction was to put the errand off. “Let’s go out at about six and see what’s what,” I said to Kathleen. Half an hour later, I snapped to attention. “I’ll go look for it now.”  

The intersection of 86th and Second was packed, and very lively. Everybody seemed mildly excited; everybody was talking. The stoplights weren’t working — at this intersection only — and it was difficult to see who was directing traffic, which was heavy. Nobody was minding Mayor Bloomberg’s plea to stay off the roads.

I bought eggs and butter as well. It occurred to me to look for something for dinner, something besides what I’ve already got. But nothing appeals to me. My gut has been off for several days. I’m hungry, but nothing is appetizing. This morning, I thought, “I’ll make a nice chicken salad for dinner.” But the idea of chicken salad became insupportable. So, alas, are all the other ideas. Kathleen, who feels much the same, thinks that she’d like an omelette.  

We still have power. It’s 8:45 in the evening, and the wind is howling again. It has been howling as though we were at the seaside in a storm. There was a lull at about six. It lasted for forty-five minutes. Then the howling resumed. In any ordinary place, the power lines would have come down long ago. But in any ordinary place, we wouldn’t be on the eighteenth floor, listening to mountaintop winds.

The rain, when we could see it, was horizontal: very fine, but very horizontal. That happens with snow, yes. With rain, not so much.

I baked bread this afternoon. I wondered if the power would hold — a problem because, although we have gas, the ignition is electric (and gas ovens cycle on and off, their two states; they don’t “do,” say, 375º), and I have no idea how to do what the sparkplug does. There was no “reason” to think that the power would go out: no one has lost power in Manhattan so far except for the people whose grids have been cut off by Con Edison, proactively, to protect equipment. A few minutes ago, Megan called to say that she still had power. She had power even though the storm surge was lapping at the doorstep of her building. She and Ryan have been cooking for two days; assuming that the cold and the wet don’t make their lives impossible, they’re set, although I hope that they’ll be able to come up here if they’re without power for more than a day. I also hope that our apartment will be a place worth trekking to.

Ordinarily, the second loaf goes to Megan and Ryan, but that wasn’t going to happen, so I took it across the hall to neighbors who have lived here even longer than we have done. We remember when their children were in grade school. Now they’re both parents. The daughter, who lives in Astoria, is here with her husband and her son, who’s a doll. He’s almost a year older than Will, although Will towers over him. Will, whom I spoke to as well, is fascinated by the water at the doorstep. His mother thinks that he won’t be so fascinated by the power outage when it comes. No comment.

Now I am going to shut the computer down, just in case. The dishwasher, half full, is running. Kathleen’s bathtub is filling. But I wouldn’t dream of saying that we’re ready for anything. For now, we’re okay. Thanks for all your good thoughts.

It was 8:50 before I got up this morning. I’d have stayed in bed longer, but that gondola appeared just beyond the balcony, and two little men hopped out of it and got to work, making further relaxation impossible. They nailed a square plank over the door, which opens outward, and then they removed the (very tacky) partition that separated our space from the neighboring apartment’s. (We haven’t had an actual neighbor in some time.) By degrees, I got dressed and ready to go to the doctor, the Mohs surgeon in this case, to have the staples removed from my scalp. I walked down to 69th Street in the ongoing glum weather, and was in and out of the office in minutes. The staples were removed without anaesthetic. I felt nothing; it was the listening that was disagreeable. (But not very.) Back on the street, I headed to my internist’s office to fetch a prescription, one of those that has to be submitted in writing. (All of my doctors have offices within a fairly small area, convenient to New York Hospital and to the Hospital for Special Surgery.) I headed up First Avenue to the man who shines and repairs my shoes, and then crossed the street to Agata & Valentina, where I bought some veal scallops for the weekend. (And a few other things — but only a few; the total came to only $45.) By now, it was time for lunch, at Hi-Life, a block away on Second. I read Daniel Mendelsohn on Horace while I ate a club sandwich — a yummy combo. I resolved to read more in Italian.

***

The walk to the doctor was helpful because it wore off the shock of reading about the Krim Family tragedy. Later in the day, Megan told me about the cannibal cop — I hadn’t heard about him. Actually, he hasn’t caused any bodily harm yet, unlike the presumably deranged nanny. I asked Megan to give Will an extra hug from me. Nothing is sure or truly safe in this world.  

***

Ms NOLA just tipped me off to a sensible piece by Tamar Adler, author of The Everlasting Meal (a book that I need a few days of peace and quiet to study), at The New Yorker blog. Her complaint, with which I could not more wholeheartedly agree, is that there is something poisonous and, worse, infectious about Anthony Bourdain’s vulgar machismo. Adler praises Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s first book, and I must confess that I got a few things out of it as well — but that was enough for me. Bourdain writes too well to be the boor that he affects to be. Pandering to men whose greatest fear in the world is being taken for a closet sissy is no way to serve the culinary profession. Guys who worry about how tough they really are don’t need encouragement. They need space travel.

At the other end of the journalistic-wisdom spectrum, we have this week’s Economist cover story, “The Man Who Must Change China.” I have seen headlines just as stupid but nothing more stupid; that this pointless statement graces the cover of the world’s most expensive “newspaper” greatly amplifies its moronic quality. China needs reform, agreed. Almost everything needs reform. But what’s that must doing there? Says who? The editors of The Economist? I hope that it made them feel better to say so. Otherwise, they’re wasting everybody’s time with their retrograde assumptions about the purpose of journalism.

I would have canceled my subscription by now if I had the energy to spare on the exercise; as it is, I’m waiting for it to run out. About a year ago, I realized that the magazine is stuck in amber, working under the misapprehension that it is still 1985 or 1990. Its view of capitalism rejects distinctions on the point of size; all chief executives have the same powers and responsibilities no matter what the size of their outfits might be. And it is bedazzled by notions of “economy of scale” that have not been adapted to the emergence of the Internet.

To be sure, few business writers seem to have a clue about where business is going, which is why we’re barreling toward the future predicted by Alan Blinder several years ago in Foreign Affairs: a world composed of rentiers and their professional or menial personal servants. The Economist ought to be a visionary publication. It settles instead for a more reactionary tone. A recent header calling for “True Progressivism” ended thus:

The right’s instinct is too often to make government smaller, rather than better. The supposedly egalitarian left’s failure is more fundamental. Across the rich world, welfare states are running out of money, growth is slowing and inequality is rising — and yet the left’s only answer is higher tax rates on wealth-creators. Messrs Obama, Miliband and Holland need to come up with something that promises both fairness and progress. Otherwise everyone will pay.

This is not helpful. Why don’t the editors “come up with something”? They talk about means-testing welfare benefits. I’m all for that, assuming that the health-care industry can be steered away from wealth-maximizing operations and restored to the path of public service. (I’m not opposed to doctors getting rich, but Big Pharma is a runaway train.) Why don’t the editors give union-hating a rest, and concentrate instead on ways of dissociating school funding from property taxes? Why not try to work with the best ideas on both sides of the aisle? Because The Economist is preaching to its choir, not to the rest of us. Bear in mind that fewer than a million people read it.

As for the “ultimatum” to Xi Jinping (apparently China’s incoming leader), it is high time that the West stopped barking admonitions at the Chinese. What’s needed is not The Economist‘s list of reforms (independent judiciary, the release of political prisoners, an easing up of political correctness, and an end to censorship), obviously desirable as those might be in Western eyes. What’s needed is a genuinely Chinese critique of China, a critique that would help China become a better China. The only alternative is a worse China. China will always be a relatively authoritarian sovereignty, and I cannot say that the example of Western democracy provides any kind of lesson to Party leaders. Instead of aiming for transparency, which will not happen in the foreseeable centuries, the Chinese need to learn how to make their belief in personal business connections more constructive. One way to begin would be to develop an ethic of marginalizing violent or larcenous family members from within the family itself. A tall order! But one that harmonizes with the persistent Confucian mindset. Another: to make women first-class Chinese people, again within the family. This would not be a matter of entitlement but rather one of expectation. Another very tall order. But imaginable, unlike the West’s arrogant pipe-dreams. “[Xi] must be ready to break with the past” — such emptiness!

My least favorite thing about growing old is my sensitivity to the weather, which, in a climate as changeable as New York’s, can be an awful inconvenience. Glum weather makes me glum — physically. (I’m convinced that what I’m sensitive to is barometric pressure, on the molecular level.) Today is very glum. I am trying not to be.

It reminds me of something else that I was reading in the LRB, Christian Lorentzen’s review of the new David Foster Wallace biography by T J Max. It is an awful shame that Wallace, who suffered so horribly from it, never applied his genius for words to the development of a term to replace “depression” — surely a name that seems itself to suffer symptoms of the disease that it refers to. Depression is what I’m feeling on this day of “clouds and fog” (according to the Times). I feel a bit low, a bit inert. What we somewhat witlessly call “clinical depression” — And what does clinical mean, here? That the illness is “serious”? That it has been diagnosed by doctors? That it requires medication? Do we speak of “clinical cancer” or “clinical heart disease”? No. — this is not some worse version of what I’m feeling today. It’s significantly different, different enough to warrant a different, and, hopefully, a more meaningful label.  

Wallace certainly described the illness with informing rigor — twice: first, in an uncollected story, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” and then in a passage in Infinite Jest. Here is the latter; Kate Gombert, a would-be suicide, explains why “depression” is the wrong word:

When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state … Well this … isn’t a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs … All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It’s all over everywhere. I don’t know what I could call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness … Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up? … But that’s just in your stomach … It’s a horrible feeling but it’s just in your stomach … OK but imagine if you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn’t, and you felt that way all the time.

“I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything.” If we could somehow tweak that in Greek, we’d have half of the new name. The other half would come from the bit about every part of the body’s wanting to throw up, but being unable to.

***

Another question that comes to mind whilst thinking of DFW is whether it makes sense to speak of celebrity as a kind of power. To be fair to the writer here, I ought to speak, in an old-fashioned tone, of Fame. (There seems to be an implicit consensus that, even if you can become famous just for being famous — pardon that ontological backwardness — that kind of famousness does not involve Fame.) The fame that Wallace sought was the kind that perdures for centuries. He wanted to be famous for writing extraordinarily well. It is too early to measure his success, largely because it will depend on the influence of his work, which has yet to tell. But he seems also to have been aware that the pursuit of fame can be corrosive as well as exhausting.

The fame that Wallace achieved gave him a degree of worldly power, in the literary and academic worlds. At least I assume so. I assume that his nod was a very potent recommendation. He appears to have gone out of his way to be nice about this; indeed, he seems to have been tortured by the longing to be nice, to the point of falling into paradox: it is not Nice to pursue Fame. It is disingenuous to keep an eye on your status while you are striving to bring Light and Truth to Mankind. I can’t help thinking of this as a deeply Midwestern conundrum.

But I’ve been digressing. I don’t, in the end, regard celebrity as a kind of power, not in the way that power interests me these days. Power is more than the celebrity’s ability to allow or encourage. It is a matter of compulsion. The powerful person can make other people do things, whether they want to or not. Nothing would ever get done without power, but from the very beginnings of our intellectual history, we have been trying to figure out how to mitigate the ghastly side effects of vesting power in any given individual man or woman.

It seems useful to regard power as creating an addiction, much as an addictive drug does. This is really the only way to explain the difficulty of setting power aside after a term. It’s interesting to note how assiduously our social arrangements for retired possessors of power attempt to mask the retirement: unless a formerly-powerful person is bent on self-destruction, he or she will continue to enjoy many of the perquisites of power, by being awarded more or less authoritative positions with more or less authoritative insitutions, not to mention the rituals of respect and convenience embodied by a car and driver. The formerly-powerful person will be provided with a troupe of de facto servants willing to jump when so bid. This illusion of continued power appears to be an effective treatment of the addiction.

But the unwillingness to retire is not the worst thing about the addiction to power. The worst thing is the deformation of judgment that induces powerful people to prefer short-term tactics for preserving their power to long-term strategies for accomplishing the goals that (presumably) fueled their launch to power. Might it be possible to inoculate candidates for powerful positions against this deformation? I’m not talking about a book of wise sayings or best practices. I’m talking about a simulation, not unlike the simulation of power that I’ve just described in connection with retirement.

When she was in elementary school, Kathleen and one of her classmates vied for slaves. I don’t think that anything particularly onerous was involved, and the girls who were slaves may simply have gone along with the game so long as it was a game. The idea was not so much to have slaves as to have more slaves. But eventually Kathleen awoke to the sensation that having slaves at all is pretty crummy, and she has never tried to control anyone else’s life ever since.

It was a good day for visiting the Museum, because it was a pretty dreadful day for being anywhere else. It wasn’t very wet, it’s true, but it was very dark, the sky carpeted in grey pile. It wasn’t the best day for me to visit the Museum, however, because I was still pretty tired, and not thinking entirely clearly. Having done nothing but read about the Congress of Vienna, I was poorly primed for conversation. My one great idea was to ask Ray Soleil to came along; he was a far better guide for our out-of-town friend. There have been people in deepest mourning who sparkled more brightly than I did.

We ran through the Bernini show — again, for Ray and me; we saw it a few weeks ago — because it was right there, outside the cafeteria after lunch. (Yes, I was running on cafeteria speed today. A proper restaurant would have been a stretched-out waste.) The terracotta models of saints and angels that constituted the bulk of the objects on exhibit looked much older than they were; they looked like Shang dynasty funerary pieces. The features were sketchy and most of the pieces were damaged. If I squinted, though, and saw beyond the surface, the baroque contours of wing and drape reminded me what I was looking at. Everything actually beautiful was to be seen in a photograph or drawing of the project for which the model was a preliminary. Would it be neat to own one or two of these little clay statuettes? Cool, perhaps, but neat, no. They’re just dirty old bits of clay. They were probably not intended to survive into the Twenty-First Century. (There is an attractive head of St Jerome. But I have problems with Jerome — Jerome and Augustine. They’re deeply irritating figures, as regrettable in their line as Sandy Weill in his.)

Then, because our friend hadn’t been, we went upstairs to the paintings in the American Wing. My current favorite, Mary Cassatt’s picture of Mary Dickinson Riddle, was looking sharp, but John Kensett’s beautiful Eaton’s Neck was too subtle for me in my exhausted state. I wondered what it would be like to live with the picture. It would be creepy, that’s what; I’d think about how much it must be missed at the Museum! The exhibition entitled Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before PhotoShop was not bad, but it had a Barnumesque feel, because almost all photographs were manipulated in the old days. There were two well-remembered images by Jerry Uelsmann at the end. I loved them when they were new and I love them even more now. (I see how Victorian they are in their deliberateness; this grounds their vaguely surrealist fancy.) When Ray proposed that drawing an arc across the cloudy moonlight sky in the second image would transform it into a painted ceiling, I had to protest. Wrong trompe l’oeil!  

***

I read with great interest Emily Witt’s piece about Internet dating, in the current issue of the LRB. It’s a very intelligent essay, blending personal history with a bit of research into the origins of the game. Witt sounded like someone I’d enjoy talking to, in general; but also in particular, because she put in this bit of wisdom:

I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we want, but what if we are incapable of seeing the signals being sent to us, let alone interpreting them?

By the end of the piece, Witt went further:

Internet dating alerted me to the fact that our notions of human behaviour and achievement, expressed in the agglomerative text of hundreds of internet dating profiles, are all much the same and therefore boring and not a good way to attract other people. The body, I also learned, is not a secondary entity. The mind contains very few truths that the body withholds. There is little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly. Until the bodies are introduced, seduction is only provisional.

We don’t know how to write about what someone else might find attractive about us — about, very specifically, our physical presence. Most healthy people, I believe, go through life without ever grasping such attractions as they possess clearly enough to state them. (The exceptions to this rule are probably mired in narcissism: they know far too much about themselves.) If I sign up for a dating service, I want to meet you, not encounter myself in a fun-house mirror. But I don’t know the first thing about you — that’s very much the point — so I have no idea what to say about myself that, assuming it appealed to you and you could understand what I was saying (and believe me), would make me a likely prospect for romance.

There’s another problem that Witt doesn’t mention: we have to meet people at the right time. Five years too soon, and I wouldn’t have been smart enough to see the magnficence of Kathleen, and she wouldn’t have had much to say to me. (Looking back, I see that it was very important for me that I fell in love with her at once. This was not a case, on my side, anyway, of taking a friendship further. Oh, no. I went straight to the finish line.) Five years earlier, I didn’t have the personal organization required to be a first-year law student at a decent school. Also, five years earlier, I was married to someone else. Timing, like the body, is “not a secondary entity.”

Please don’t think that I’m against Internet dating. Here’s Witt’s ultimate nugget of wisdom: “I soon discovered, as most do, that it can only speed up the rate and increase the number of encounters with other single people, where each encounter is still a chance encounter.” Speeding up the process is good. Witt met a lot of interesting people, as she says, and she learned a lot about interviewing (which she doesn’t say). She clearly learned how to have a good time just-for-tonight.

Internet dating is important largely because higher education comes at the wrong time for most people. It ought to occupy one’s mid- to late-twenties, after a substantial workplace experience during which being single is firmly normative. As thirty approaches, people today begin to be old enough to meet — to recognize and appreciate — a significant other. The current 19-22 window is ridiculously early; we might as well expect toddlers to be nubile. It isn’t just a problem of romance, either — it’s too early to make life-long friends as well. But college does remain the horn of plenty, the cornucopia of chance encounters with likely people. Which is why waiting seven years to go to law school and meet the woman of my dreams worked for me.

There,  that’s better. For quite a while, on Sunday afternoon, it was impossible to take a step without checking out the litter of toys on the floor. Bits of Lego, matchbox cars, puzzle pieces, and, eventually, the contents of Will’s backpack, which he dumped out in an already tight spot, all contrived to give the carpet a rather different pattern. It was futile to pick up after him, but I couldn’t help myself, especially as this allowed me to keep stock of things. The “tidy” arrangement in yesterday’s photograph was composed while he fell asleep in his mother’s arms.

Kathleen is flying to London today; because she wants to be fresh in the morning for her conference, she decided against the usual night flight. When she was away, the weekend before last, visiting her ffather, I was a dynamo of domestic upkeep, but I’m good for nothing at the moment — nothing but reading, that is. Tomorrow, I’m going to tour the Museum with a friend; I expect to have the energy for that. Just to be sure, though, I’m observing a second day of idleness.

When I emptied the dishwasher this morning, there were only three or four items to put in it, and I thought, no, I’ll wash them by hand. Modified idleness.

***

All I can think about, when I’m not reading Adam Zamoyski’s Rites of Peace (I’m  nearly done — and I’ve grasped everything better, especially the geopolitics, the second time round — is the difference between Miranda Hart’s sitcom and her book. I don’t know what I expected the book, Is It Just Me?, to be, but I was fairly sure that I’d be entertained, and indeed I was. A few of the jokes were recycled from the show, but context soon proved to be entirely different. Miranda is a dramatisation of what life was like for Hart before she dedicated it to becoming a “comedy actress,” as she calls herself in the book. The Miranda of the sitcom understands that she’ll never be like her schoolmates, but she can’t help trying to keep up with them. She has used an inheritance to run a “joke shop,” but has absolutely no interest in actually running a business: a dandy metaphor for the amiable pointlessness of Hart’s years as an office temp. This Miranda is still paralyzed by the unknown complications of the “thethxual.” At the same time, she is humiliated by her failure to gratify her mother’s impatience for a husband and a brood.

The Miranda who narrates the book, replete with lessons for her eighteen year-old self, is the same person with one important difference. She has discovered what she really wants to do, and is no longer beholden to anyone else’s expectations, especially including the ones that she herself built up as a schoolgirl. All she had to do was dump the conviction that she couldn’t possibly make it as a comedian. (And then work her tail off performing in grotty pubs and perfecting her routines.) A tall order, yes, but a simple one. The interesting bit about this follow-your-dream story is that doing what she wants to be doing, and doing it well, allows Hart a more extensive privacy. She is no longer betrayed by stumbles into dead ends.

A bit of Googling informs me that Miranda Hart is on a diet. I hope that she doesn’t take it too far.  As she says in the book, plump people have better skin. I’ve become an admirer of her beautiful complexion.