It is very quiet here, this morning. My brother-in-law, Kevin, is still asleep. Kathleen left about an hour ago, while Megan, Ryan, and Will made their way back to the city early last night. Kevin and I will have the place to ourselves until Friday, when our Labor Day crowd will begin to show up.

I don’t feel much like working. The air is still, and so am I. Yesterday, while his parents went for a swim on their own, Will fell asleep in my arms. That hadn’t happened in two years, and, two years ago, he was a considerably smaller child. I savored the ordeal as long as I could, and then laid him on the bed with a fresh bottle of milk. He did not protest. That bit of quiet time aside, he spent the day in whirling dervish mode. I expect that he is very happy to be back with his friends in day care, although we’re all a bit apprehensive about his realizing that his best friend has graduated to pre-school.

***

Over the weekend, I finished The Blush, Elizabeth Taylor’s second short-story collection (1958). As with her novels, I couldn’t stop; I was like Will, asking for “More.” The omnibus is never going to be out of reach; I look forward — again, as with her novels — to re-reading Taylor’s stories.

Almost everything in The Blush is beguiling, but one story stands out for a complexity that is more than simply narrative. “In a Different Light” builds up a dramatic heft as it covers its considerable length (eighteen pages in the Virago edition), but seems to take a furious pleasure in smashing the unities of time, place, and action. The central character is not immediately identifiable as such, and her translation from a Greek island to suburban London seems almost improper, as though Taylor were making a mistake by keeping the story going. She’s not, of course, for it is only in London that the Greek currents of tragedy and comedy can begin to flow. That’s where the characters come from; that is where they must experience their crises, however small-scaled.

Jane and Barbara are middle-aged sisters. For some time, Jane has been living on a Greek island with her husband, who has just died. That is why Barbara has come out to see her — to try to persuade her to come home to England. Jane, however, has gone native, and almost everything she says is colored with austere fatality. When they encounter an unattached Englishman at the post office, he is tipped into Jane’s critical maw.

Jane and Barbara, at lunch, discussed him — Jane, with an almost Greek sharpness of curiosity and detachment, her sister thought. It was very mcuh like the way she was eating her artichoke — the deft stripping away of leaves, the certainty of the hidden heart being there for the reaching. Licking oil from her fingers, Jane said, “So his wife writes to tell him about the rain. Complainingly, I dare say. He thinks he is glad to get her letters, but he is gladder to put them out of his mind.”

“This you know,” said Barbara.

“This I know. And he also thinks he is glad to be in Greece. He has to be. I expect he has waited twenty years or more to come here and how can he afford, now that he’s here, to dwell on his sunburn and his blistered feet and mosquito bites? I bet he gets frightful diarrhoea, too, poor old thing.”

Jane does know. It is the tragicomedy of everyday life, Taylor’s impalpably insistent theme. Roland, the Englishman, turns out to be an architect; his wife, Iris, prefers to spend her holidays in Buxton —Iris, Buxton: dramatic foreshadowing. Who can think of irises in Buxton while roasting in the Mediterranean sun? (“Iris,” remember, is the Greek for “dawn.”) The sisters spend a lot of time with Roland during the following days, and then one day Barbara and Roland climb the mountain to the convent, where they both take naps in the sun. There is nothing romantic about this episode. In the singular and poignant passage that takes us into Roland’s confidence, it is acknowledged that he “was not greatly drawn to either” sister. He leaves a day later, and “as they turned away,” Jane strikes another oracular note.

“You may be invited once to Hampstead, then you’ll have to ask them back, and you’ll wish you hadn’t to — and Leonard will, even more. ‘My friend I met in Greece’,” she said mockingly. “After that, you’ll send Christmas cards for a year or two — especially if you can find any with a Greek flavour, which I should think would be unlikely.”

What’s most interesting about this story is not the degree to which Jane’s prediction proves to be correct, but rather the weight in Barbara’s mind, after she has met Iris (who turns out to be as dreadful as anyone who prefers Buxton to Greece must be), of the mystery of our relations with each other. As I say, there is nothing overtly romantic about her time with Roland, but we are not told that she wasn’t drawn to him. Roland’s choice of helpmeet makes Barbara happier in her happy marriage, but there is no getting round the unsettling queerness of things. This is what Taylor underscores with her prettily ironic ending. Barbara and Leonard are laughing (about Iris), and their children, Robert and Serena, are made very happy by the sound.

Hearing it, they thought they would be good forever, so that it would never stop. The world then became a settled, a serence place to be in.

One can well imagine Jane’s riposte.

I’d like to go back to that singular paragraph about Roland, which is a bit too long to quote in full; and, in any case, I want to hold up a detail that I might have missed if I hadn’t just read F R Lucas’s book on style, in which the best part of a long chapter, “The Harmony of Prose,” is devoted to scannings of striking literary passages, ancient and modern. I don’t want to attempt a summary of Lucas’s highly cautionary remarks about the judicious introjection of meter into prose, but I can say that they have made me a somewhat more appreciative reader. When I came upon the following reflection of Roland’s, it stopped me dead and insisted upon being copied into my notebook.

Dreams had come true, but merely to give birth to others.

If you insert a break at the comma, you have two lines of verse, and sweet lines they are. The thought is certainly wise enough to merit the polish: giving birth to new dreams is what dreams’ coming true is all about, as we discover on those rare occasions of dreams’ actually coming true.  

The air is heavy and still. It would be unpleasant if we were not so close to the ocean. I spent the morning reading in my bedroom, sitting on a rocker that I dragged in from the deck and planted as nearly beneath the ceiling fan as the bed allowed. I finished, finally, F R Lucas’s Style: The Art of Writing Well, a book that I am going to keep close by for frequent re-readings. It would be easy to dismiss Lucas as a mid-century don with dead white males on the brain (I was wrong about his not mentioning Jane Austen, but in fact he does not cite her for style), his grasp of the classical style is every bit as sure as such a grasp must be.

However, from the beginning of recorded time some temperaments seem born to prefer Dionysus, others Apollo. Men have never long agreed how drunk they liked art or literature to be. Most critical quarrel are about nothing else. For myself, I have come passionately to prefer sense to sensibility, and even cynics (if one must have either) to rhapsodiests and rapturists. To argue which gives more artistic pleasure is futile (though nothing seems able to stop men arguing about it). I can only suggest that humanity seems throughout its history to have suffered far worse from mental intoxications and fantaticisms that from any rare excess of sober reason. Both the Apolline and Dionysiac tribes have produced memorable writers; but the bad writer of the Apolline type can seldom become anything worse than a bore, whereas the bad writer in the Dionysiac style may prove a mere maniac, disseminating mania. In short, though the pleasure-values of literature are outside argument, its influence-values seem to me in favour of balance and restraint. One cannot destroy Dionysus (as Pentheus found to his cost). And Dionysus has his gifts. But there are other powers better to trust that he.

There you have it: lucid, supple, confident, and unobtrusively pleasant. And one other thing, that it would not have occurred to Lucas to strive for: unquestionably adult.

When I put Lucas down, I picked up Orley Farm, mindful that Lucas dismisses Trollope’s style as “undistinguished.” Can that be the right word for so distinct a voice? Lucas is certainly not above the views of Sir Peregrine Orme about genlemen, and Trollope’s prose betrays not just legal training but an interest in the legal view of things, which he often presents in with a dry jocularity that a connoisseur of style might find somewhat subfusc. It nevertheless appeals to me. I loved reading Trollope for years — until his peculiar ideas about a heroine’s love life became disagreeably insistent (indeed, I’m reading Orley Farm because Lady Mason, although “not intended to be the heroine,” is such a formidable central character) — and my own legal training made me even more appreciative. If you ask me, it’s Dickens whose writing is undistinguished: lurid, sentimental, and cheap.

Orley Farm comes as a great relief after Ivo Stourton’s mordant little masterpiece. The Book Lover’s Tale belongs on the shelf with Lolita, though perhaps not in the adjacent slot. The novel is narrated by a stylish and cultured man who steadily, one might almost say remorselessly, reveals himself to be a vacant narcissist of psychopathic heedlessness. His moral character would not be out of place in the darker novels of Ruth Rendell. But Stourton has risen to the unforgiving challenge of allowing an unattractive antihero to tell his own story in his own voice, while gripping the reader’s interest and, even, sympathy. Matt de Voy presents himself in stately periods that — drolly and hideously by turns — plausibly betray his second-rate mind as well as his ethical nullity. As he talks (and he’s a charmer), you look over his shoulder and see what his self-absorbtion prevents him from seeing. There is a strong recollection of the Eighteenth Century, of the ancien régime, in Matt’s impassioned determination to seduce a client’s wife; there were times when I wondered if I was reading Clarissa (a novel that I have not, in fact, read). The prose, very distinguished by Lucasian standards, is clear and varied; although never fussy, it steers clear of slang.

Claudia Swanson, the target of Matt’s amorous campaign is a lovely woman; I couldn’t help thinking of Michelle Williams’s portrayal of Marilyn Monroe: smart, but damaged by beauty. At the end, it is she who apologizes to him — for restoring to her the use of her first-rate mind. I cannot recommend the book too highly, and I hope that the American edition, when it appears, will be more effectively promoted than Stourton’s first novel, The Night Climbers, which really ought to have been a smash hit.   

Three chapters of Orley Farm a day: that’s my plan.

Yesterday was a very good day. I worked in the morning, ran an errand after lunch, and read all afternoon. I took my walk on the beach. At least, I suppose that this was all to the good. In the evening, all it took was one glass of wine to send me into a Zone of Zonk. I was physically present, but something less than fully responsive. Megan made a pizza for Will that promised to be a big success, but the idea behind it was that it would be utterly normal, like a worm on a hook. “Let’s not make a big deal about it, okay?” she said in an aside to me, quite reasonably not wanting to heighten Will’s expectations. “Wow!” I exclaimed. “Doesn’t that look great!” I was on AutoStupid. Happily, the pizza was utterly normal, and Will ate quite a bit of it. Else the dog house for me.

It was true, as Megan charged, that my mind was elsewhere. I had written a passage or two for Inventory and made a few notes, nothing great but not bad for the second day. Then I had read Lucas on Style. What a formidable book! I wish that I had never used the word “formidable” before, so that I could use it now with force. It is really the only word for Style. Lucas’s tone is somewhere between gravely genial and unabashedly omniscient; you get glimpses of this manner in the nicer dons who show up (and have a way of dying) in Inspector Morse. The gentleman wouldn’t dream of making you uncomfortable, but everything about him highlights your puniness. The trenches in World War I, Bletchley Park in World War II, a Works of Webster (writer of The Duchess of Malfi), and an intimate familiarity with poets and writers ancient and modern, displayed throughout a long career at Cambridge. I am not sure that Lucas’s relations with women were all they might be — he married three times, and he never mentions (much less quotes) Jane Austen in Style — but even so I am a goth by comparison, a barbarian at the gate.

All I could think of on my walk by the sea — aside from “The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” (Arnold) — was the stupidity of not having learned Latin and Greek in school. (How clever I thought I was. Now I wonder if I will ever really understand poetry, or how to write at all.) And then all I could think of was the paltriness of my morning’s work. The walk left my body in an agreeably ruddy glow, but my mind was a sunk ship.

 ***

Just had my final paragraphs deleted by this idiotic program, which I should so like to replace, but there is nobody to advise me how. I’m talking about WordPress, which to my mind is little better than Gmail, which I should never use as a word processor. It’s almost enough (it quite often is, once a month or so) to make me think of giving up blogging — or, worse, of going back to MovableType.

I was going to say something about Ivo Stourton’s new novel, The Book Lover’s Tale, which was so exciting that I cut my walk on the beach a little short in order to finish it. But I’ll say nothing for the moment, because, gee, what I already wrote got deleted by the moronic software (and it is moronic, and I must leave it behind, no matter the cost). I also said something about how marvelous Will was after dinner. He watched a movie on his iPad and let me have a long talk with his mom about Stuff; to use a cant word, I almost felt that he was enabling us. But it was all good.

The first week of vacation is almost over, and I have sailed through so many stress tests that I’m beginning to think that I may just relax. Which would be terrible!

Last night, Will was in no mood for dinner. Well, like anyone his age, he’s never in the mood for dinner, but last night he was in no mood for Megan’s dinner. He wanted his mom to leave the table and watch Finding Nemo with him.  (I worry, unreasonably, that Bruce the Shark is becoming a role model.) There was a moment of whimper and negotiation. Will agreed to wait until Megan finished her dinner. He pretended to graze on chocolate-covered raisins, but he was watching her dining progress like a hawk. When he decided that she had had enough to eat, he got down from his chair and walked into the kitchen, where we heard him rooting around among some pots on a shelf. Presently he reappeared, bearing an enameled cast iron pot that, while quite small, was heavy for him. It was the sort of vessel that I think of as European, probably because I never saw one as a child. With a lid, and a mildly conical cylinder for its handle, the pot is more decorative than useful; it says “casserole” and comfort, but you had better not believe it. This appeal may have been why Will singled it out. Having placed the pot on the table, he immediately slipped his hand into his mother’s and prepared to lead her away. “Thank you, Will,” I said. “Now that you’ve brought me this lovely pot, I won’t miss Mommy when you make her leave me all alone. This is the perfect substitute.” Megan couldn’t help laughing. “That may be the thinking,” she allowed.

***

On the beach yesterday, I thought about how much time I used to waste doing what other people said was interesting. This was largely a matter of pursuing la vie de Bohème, and of course it was in no small part a reaction to my proper bourgeois upbringing. (I may even have sensed that it was a time-honored reaction, taken, for hundreds of years, by men and women were brought up as I was but who also liked to read and write.) I indulged a lot of self-consciously louche behavior and endured uncountable hangovers. I sat up late because that was what you were supposed to do. (Also, I had a sleeping problem; but staying up late was not any kind of solution.) I was not what I would now call attractive. I did meet some lovely people, but the circumstances were often too embarrassing (in retrospect) to overlook. Good old days? I don’t think so.

On the plus side, my rebelliousness lead me to learn how to cook. By and large, though, rebellion took me nowhere very interesting. I hoped that taking drugs would make my casual lifestyle interesting, and by that I mean that I actually hoped for enlightenment from drugs, which was probably a belief to which only an early viewer of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color could have subscribed.

I was serious about my job at the radio station, although that was a form of rebellion in itself, because the pay was so low. I did learn that, whatever the genuine economic explanations for artistic impecuniousness might be, here’s one that isn’t: it is roaringly philistine to assert that artists are only paying the price of doing something that they love. There is no reason why doing something that you love ought to entail financial nonentity, and I’ve known plenty of business people over the years who have been handsomely remunerated for doing what they love. I was doing work, at the radio station, that ought to have allowed me to support a family, and not on a shoestring.

Rebellion can take a long time to undo. In law school, I tended to concentrate on the massive structural inequities of American jurisprudence. I didn’t get worked up about them. (I was still rebelling from the idea of getting worked up about anything.) But I learned to see how abstract notions of “democracy” can be made to support a society that is more unequal than its human constituents. (I may earn more than you do because I’m smarter than you are, but I’m not four hundred times smarter than you are.) I became convinced that the phrase about “adding to the whole number of free persons” “three fifths of all other persons,” in Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution is the Founders’ original sin — an open wound that has not yet healed, and that may never heal.

I am still pretty rebellious, but only where it matters: reading and writing.    

Posting an entry at noon — what depravity! I’ve spent the entire morning in a shaded rocking chair, reading Galbraith on the Great Crash. It is one of the most compulsively readable books that I have ever had the pleasure to devour. In the introduction, Galbraith writes of the pleasure that it gave him to write it. “[W]hen I left it with the publisher, I felt that I was saying goodbye to a close and valued companion.” The mordant ironies and understatements that grace almost every page go a long way to dispersing the gloom of the matter at hand.

We are having a very lazy day, by design. Megan decided to try out the market’s online delivery service, so we won’t have to go into the town. Not that I’d mind — I was thinking of going in to fetch a pizza for dinner — but taking the day off is very pleasant. I will take my walk at four-thirty, of course, because that is why I am here: the sea is my spa. I set out yesterday with jangled spirits, and was at first disheartened by the failure of the surf to work its magic immediately. By the time I reached the edge of Lonelyville, though, I could feel my elements righting themselves, rocked gently into place by the monotonous but infinitely varied sound of breaking waves and sweeping water. I didn’t have a single interesting idea, but nor did I expect to; before my mind can turn to good purpose, I have to work off the static and smooth the circuits.

As often happens, I gave two books a chance yesterday, and ended up sticking with Galbraith. The other was Ivo Stourton’s new novel, The Book Lover’s Tale. Stourton’s The Night Climbers was a delightful read a few years ago (I ought to link to what I wrote about it, but I’m taking the day off), and its successor is no less chewy.

Cambridge is a terrible place to begin a romance of this sort, since it allows for the temporary suspension of material concerns and the corresponding elevation of the importance of character. It is supremely easy to sit with a rich and beautiful girl in a spacious thirteenth-century room on a medieval cloister, with the many bells of the city ringing out in the afternoon and a black-tie party to attend in the evening, to take her by the hands and to confess that you have no money, that you are not likely to have any money, at least not at first, and that therefore you can only offer her a life of relative privation. It is equally easy for her, looking at an honest and handsome boy in the golden light of the afternoon that penetrates the ancient stained glass of the lead-latticed windows, to believe the best of herself, to look him in the eye and to say in pure hope and truth that the privations will be as nothing so long as they face them together, before the two of them embrace, make love and head off to a heavily subsidized ball. This insulation from financial circumstances amplifies the hopefulness of youth to the point of distortion. It allows a woman to believe she has paid the price for her beloved, whilst really he is the great lie of our age, an article purchased on credit.

The novel begins with the narrator in a cell, speaking, it would seem, to his solicitor. “But is he a murderer?” asks the copy on the back of the book. You’ve more or less got to go on, just to find out who’s dead. Prose of Stourton’s calibre eliminates any and all resistance.

The first thing to say about this August Diary is that it will run right through half of September.

When I came out to fix a spot of breakfast this morning, Megan came to tell me that we had run out of milk after all. So I gobbled my egg and toast and headed off for Whitney’s Pantry, where I saw to the day’s marketing than anticipated. The food has been put away, the dishwasher has been emptied, and I’m doing a small load of laundry. A morning routine seems to have taken shape.

The freight boat, carrying two boxes for me and a bicycle for Will, pulls in at 12:30, more or less. I’ll be there. I can’t wait to unpack the rest of my stuff, including tea and a teapot. Whether we’ll have lunch in town has yet to be decided. At four, I’ll take an hourlong walk along the beach. By then, I hope to have really begun to calm down.

***

Moving from the South Sea Bubble to the Great Crash of 1929, I’ve put down Malcolm Balen and picked up John Kenneth Galbraith. In the Foreword to the 1975 edition of the book, Galbraith sets forth what I consider the most basic law of men, money, and markets:

As a protection against financial illusion or insanity, memory is far better than law. When the memory of the 1929 disaster failed, law and regulation no longer sufficed. For protecting peole from the cupidity of others and their own, history is highly utilitarian. It sustains memory and memory serves the same purpose as the SEC and, on the record, is far more effective.

(Which is not to say that the re-enactment of Glass-Steagall wouldn’t be a great idea.) Tony Judt made much the same point in Postwar; sacrifices and safety-nets that seemed to do no more than meet the minimal requirements of a humane civilization became, for later generations that didn’t remember the carnage, merely expensive.

Why do most people seem to find history boring? I’ve never understood that. I’ve certainly read history books that might have been livelier, but on the whole I would nominate history as the field in which the best nonfiction writing is done. As a rule, the more serious the historian, the better the writing.

The hard work of learning history is done at the beginning — perhaps that’s the problem. When, as a child, you are required to wake up to the distances of historical time — thousands of years, crowded with events — the desire to remain asleep is intense, and most people succeed. Facts and dates are memorized for examination purposes and then forgotten. Unfortunately, a society is only as strong as its sense of history, and it is for that reason that I am pessimistic about the United States. Too many people have an unnecessary ideological resistance to the very idea of “collective memory,” which is what history in everyday life amounts to. (Worse, there is a great deal of lying about the past, indulged by the more reactionary Supreme Court justices and others who ought to know better.) At a minimum, we need leaders who, no matter what they say, really do know what has happened in the past, and not just at election time. We need an élite.

The old aristocratic order in Europe, however glittering it was two or three hundred years ago, had its origins in protection rackets that no one would have described as, literally, aristocratic. The terms were self-servingly applied to the inheritors of feudal power nearly a thousand years afterward. I often wish that we could give the concept another go, without reference to the counts and dukes of yore. But I wouldn’t know where to begin.   

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.

We’re here, and, amazingly, at 10:15, we’re all still awake. There has been a diaper emergency. Ryan has sped off to the town to see what can be bought. Meanwhile, Will is, incredibly, operational. And so am I, even more incredibly, given the little list of Things That I Forgot, the only significant lapse being the cable that connects the camera to the computer — a lapse that Ryan redressed with magic from his own backpack.

Kathleen is reading Green Eggs and Ham to Will while Megan has a moment of regroupment. We are all incredibly content. Ryan agreed with me: it’s as though the time between now and our last time here had been shoved into a closet. Not forgotten, but so not real.

There’s a loft, over the bedroom where Megan and Ryan will stay (a bed with a tester!). Will has decided that the loft is “his house.” His parents are wonderfully game.

***

I did have an amazing day: everything went as it ought. Once we were established in the house, I set out for food and booze, and decided to separate the missions. So I went out for booze, and then I went out for food. My head was an airport. It will take a day or two to settle down into the mode of being still, not traveling.  

Meanwhile, Will, who will be here for a week, is having the highest of holidays. All of us are convinced that he is the one important person in the room.

***

If Saturday was the day of arrival, Sunday has been the day of settling in — cooking, dishwashing, and laundry. All pursued with such enthusiasm that my cell phone got laundered along with the towels. My fault exlusively. I realized what I’d done shortly after the point of no return. I’ve resolved myself to a few days without a phone. I haven’t had a fit. But I’m shaken and disturbed.

The governing idea of a month by the sea — and, by the way, we have yet to walk down the lane to the ocean — is simplicity, the toughest of all standards for anyone not obliged by need and lack of options to observe it. If deprivation is a human condition characterized by preoccupation with the things that are lacked, where does simplicity shift from boon to burden? 

My brain is still an airport, and at the same time a plane seeking to land. s

***

This morning (Sunday), I finished a dandy little book by Malcolm Balen, A Very English Deceit. It’s a brisk account of the South Sea Bubble that exploded in England in 1720, later in the same year that a similar plutomania blew up in France. (Confusingly, the Banque de France and the Mississippi Company, headquartered in Paris’s rue Quincampoix, were the brainchildren of Scotsman John Law, a fugitive from English justice after the death of a romantic rival in an impetuous duel. Law did not return to England until the 1740s, after the fall of Walpole, when he was able to purchase a pardon for £10,000. Just to keep one’s head spinning, Law is buried at San Moisè, in Venice.) The episode takes its name from the South Sea Company, set up in 1711, by Tory leader Robert Harley, as a trading operation that would challenge the domination of existing Whig institutions, the Bank of England and the East India Company. Nine years later, and now just as Whig as they, the South Sea Company stepped forward with an ingenious scheme for eliminating the staggering national debt. Balen explains this scheme lucidly, and he also explains how something so hare-brained ever attained Parliamentary imprimatur. In other words, he tells a tale for our times, of corrrupt government toleration, and even encouragement, of fraudulent finance.

Edward Pearce’s book about the Walpole ministry made me realize that I had to find a book that focused on the South Sea Bubble itself, in order to organize the litter of information deposited by histories to which the catastrophe was incidental. (Charles Mackay’s well-known 1841 retelling is long on drama but short on mechanics.) Subtitled “The South Sea Bubble and the World’s First Great Financial Scandal,” Balen’s book was occasioned, as it were, by the dotcom bust of 2001. The author, a journalist with sometime berths at ITV and the BBC, acknowledges his debt to John Carswell’s 1993 study of the Bubble, which he clearly has no intention of superseding. A Very English Deceit is not really history; it’s reportage of the highest Vanity Fair quality. Which is precisely what one wants in a case like this. As an accounting of the actions and intentions of individual men — real history — Balen’s book is arguably second-rate. Having read a number of books, just in the past year, about English politics in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, I must say that I find Balen’s characterizations of the leading players, from George I to Robert Knight (and, when you know who Robert Knight was, you know what the scandal was all about), are either crude or cursory. Balen’s ball, however, is not the individual players but the game itself, and Balen shines as a financial sportscaster. The following passage, depicting the very crest-into-crash of the wave, gives a good idea of Balen’s comfortably engaging style.

Despite the gullibility of the investors and the apparent success of the share launch, however, Blunt was facing a severe cash-flow problem. Without an even faster inflow of money, there simply wasn’t enough cash … to support the share price, and if the share price could not be supported then the illusion he had created for the last six months would be shattered. Accordingly, he found a way of demonstrating his supposed confidence in the Company’s future. On 30 August he persuaded the Court of Directors to vote for an absurdly generous Christmas dividend of 30 per cent, accompanied by the astonishing promise that the annual dividend for a decade would be 50 per cent. The offer of such an extraordinary dividend was an attempt, though far too late in the day, to persuade investors to keep their money in the Comapny for the long term, rather than indulging in the short-termism that had marked the attitude of shareholders in the other bubbles. But to be in a position to pay such amounts, its shareholders could calculate, the Company would have to make at least a £15 million profit each year.

The effect was not as Blunt had intended. It was as if someone had thrown a bucketful of cold water over the investors, who had so blindly followed his charismatic financial leadership. They stood blinking and disbelieving at what they saw before them: a company whose trading prospects had been nonexistent in the past, and would be nonexistent in the future; a company whose proposed dividend implied such extraordinary annual profits that anyone with any sense could now see that it simply could not trade on the multimillion-pound scale which the offer to shareholders suggested; a commpany which was, quite nakedly, a machine for making a profit out of debt reclamation, and not a trading company at all; a company which still had a third of the national debt to sell, and whose chances of doing so were receding by the hour. “Sir,” wrote a sceptical correspondent to one newspaper, “South Sea is very sick, a premium of 50 per cent has been applied as a cordial for revival, but it won’t do; the old woman droops still.”

More intriguing, for me, than the familiar ride of boom and bust is the wonder of Walpole’s cunning transmutation of national disaster into the longest, as well as the first, premiership in British history. Walpole stage-managed the short-term resolution of the shock in such a way that the power structure that he intended to control was not itself damaged; this meant shielding a number of Very Important People, not exluding His Britannic Majesty. It meant making sure that the British government’s official call for the extradition of Robert Knight was diplomatically flouted by officials of the Holy Roman Empire; as keeper of the “little green book,” Knight was like the accountant who exposed Al Capone as a tax cheat, only, in this case, with the government in the gangster’s seat. Walpole decided which malefactors got to walk and which were pilloried and subjected to clawback. (One South Sea functionary was left with only £31, which seems a bit heartless.) And the irony of it was that Walpole’s position as Mr Clean owed entirely to his personal banker’s sensible refusal to follow Walpole’s instructions to pour money into South Sea at the peak. It is difficult to think of other opportunists on the scale of Sir Robert Walpole. Even Balen, who regards almost everyone in his book as some kind of knave (Earl Stanhope excepted), cannot avoid sounding impressed. “Walpole had protected King and country, preserved the Whig hegemony, and had made himself the indissoluble element that bound all three together.” You can’t think of studying politics without him.  

Separation anxiety: this morning, Ray Soleil and I carried the four dining chairs downstairs and out the service entrance onto 87th Street. The upholsterer’s van appeared presently, and the chairs were carried away. Although the material in which the seats are covered is in fine shape, the underlying upholstery has given way, so that you fear that you are going to fall right through the frame when you sit down. While I’m out on Fire Island, the chairs will be repaired and returned — it makes great sense. But the combination of losing the chairs while preparing to go away for an entire month left me feeling somewhat stateless.

***

Among the many books that I ordered a while back, a few have begun to stream in, and one of the first is singularly interesting just as a book, for it is the first that I have ever held, much less owned, that was published in India (Aleph Books, New Delhi 2012). It is a novel, Em and the Big Hoom, by Jerry Pinto, and I’ve read more than half of it already. It tells the story, played for rueful comedy, of an Anglophone family of Goans living in Mumbai. At the heart of the tale is the mother’s very serious bipolar disorder, which defies medication. But what fascinates me is the language, which is fluent but slightly foreign. Without ever being lost, I’m aware of missing nuances here and there, usages that have sprung up in a community that’s physically remote from other English-speaking groups, and therefore as distinctive as Cockney or country. And the pages are edged in black.

***

In the early afternoon, Megan and Will came uptown, and we met at Carl Schurz Park. It was interesting to watch Will’s interactions with the other children, who were, of course, complete strangers. There were occasional difficulties, but no violence and no tears. I was entertained by a ballet of sorts involving a little girl, her mother, and Will’s collection of small cars. While Will was playing with two of his cars, the girl approached and expressed an  interest in sharing one of them. Will did not reciprocate, but moved to bar from his little parking lot: “My cars.” When Megan suggested that Will be nicer, he reached for a third car and offered it to the girl, but it was too little, too late, and the girl walked away brusquely. This earned her a gentle reprimand from her mother, who now entered the scene and, not knowing the circumstances, thanked Will for being so generous. It was all so unfair!

For the record, I ought to note that I had my first complete telephone conversation with Will yesterday. He said hello and told me that he was at his house. I said that I was at my house, and, having just heard what he’d been up to earlier this week, asked him if he’d see the sea lions (no, the seals), the penguins (no response), and the dinosaurs (yes!). At this point, Will decided that he’d had enough, and he said “bye.” I said that I loved him, and he said that he loved me, and we both said “bye.” Then his mother came back on the line. It was all quite competent.

Having solved the shipping problem that has been eating away at my vitals for three weeks, I feel well enough to write a proper entry, complete with picture, but I think I’ll just keep my head down in case the well-being goes gossamer. What shipping problem, you ask? See how nice I am, that I don’t bore you with all my troubles? This one was particularly odious, in that I brought my full reserves of obstinacy to not dealing with it. I have only myself to spank.

(However, nota bene: I have solved the shipping problem prospectively only. No further boxes will languish at the Bay Shore branch of the Post Office in the wake of the one that I sent to an address where, it turns out, boxes from the Post Office are not accepted! (Fire Island Ferries deals only with UPS and FedEx.) As for the one that, I hope, will be returned in due course to us here in New York, it was a test, containing nothing very valuable.

***

Now, back to F L Lucas’s Style: On the Art of Writing Well, originally published in 1955. A formidable book! I wish I could remember how I heard of it. (That I hadn’t heard of it until just this summer is what’s really remarkable.) Never having spent much time with Strunk & White, I can’t say how very different Lucas is, but he’s certainly more comprehensive (longer and deeper)  than they are, and he values what used to be called Continental literature at a level wildly beyond the stretch of American popularity. Lucas extols the classical virtues of clarity and brevity and variety, but it was only for the second edition of Style that this Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, could be persuaded to footnote his copious extracts from foreign letters, chiefly French, with translations. The first edition, cannot have struck any reader as clear, brief, or varied (the examples being incomprehensible to the monophone).  

In the new Harriman House reprint of Style, a somewhat rebarbative studio photograph of the author serves as the frontispiece; you can see it here. Looking at it makes me feel that I have just spent hours in a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and I cannot quite reconcile it with Lucas’s chapter on “Good Humour and Gaiety.” And yet…

The practical conclusion? That must remain, I think, a question of temperament and of tact. There are some people with as little gift for gaiety as Milton’s elephant trying to amuse Adam and Eve by twisting its “lithe proboscis” — or as Milton himself. Heaven forbid that I should tempt any such into the quicksands of facetiousness. Better I should be taken by the neck and cast into the Cam.

It’s the right time for me to be reading this book, though. Writing intelligibly has never been more important to me. I fear that I don’t. I’m afraid that I chatter in a donnish patois all my own, composed like a bird’s nest of the most miscellaneous straws. As a sort of compensation, I have come to share Lucas’s dislike of everyday contractions, especially ‘s, which can stand for either is or has, an ambiguity that poses no difficulty to the native speaker but that may well, given the other demands of my way of writing, add an unnecessary burden to friends from other tongues. At the same time, I can’t quite bring myself to say “I am afraid” instead.

And then there is the future to consider. How much of today’s writing will be comprehensible a century from now? I should prefer most of mine to be. I am particularly worried by the sporting verbs that permeate vernacular English today, almost everywhere it is spoken. How long will “step up to the plate” mean anything? Sometimes I find myself using terms that I don’t really understand myself, such as “full court press.” I have looked into this phrase several times, but I rest assured that its meaning is a sealed book to anyone lacking an interest in basketball.

Finally, there is Lucas’s concern for “the purity of English.” It sounds awful to talk about the purity of anything, but there’s no other way to describe a problem that presses ever more heavily on my mind. It would be better to talk of the strength of the language, perhaps, because that’s what’s lost when standards are lowered in order to make an enormous intake of new speakers feel comfortable. This is no merely contemporary matter; what I have in mind is the vast immigration that made Germans the most numerous ancestors of today’s white population. Its impact remains undigested. Also: the thorough dissemination of Yiddish throughout American humor. To the extent that these influences add to the language’s flexibility and expressiveness, they are most welcome. To the extent that they replace its native structures (“graduate college”; “shop Bloomingdale’s”), they are even more noxious than the affectations of French and Latin that have troubled the English now and then in the past, worse for seizing the minds of the uneducated. We have always counted on the uneducated to remind us of our roots; it is in counterpoise to the oaken tenacity of unlettered speech that English has incorporated ways of thinking and of speaking from almost every culture with which it has come into contact. Ironically, the pigheaded Midcountry ban on bilingualism threatens the degradation of English as much as any other factor. We would all speak better English if we had to speak a little Spanish.  

The humidity is flattening. Aside from my trip to the hospital for a Remicade infusion, I spent yesterday in bed. A good deal of reading got done, and even some thinking. But I am not really here. I have checked out.

Takeaway from a front-page article in yesterday’s Times:

In fact, the Germany economy sometimes resembles one big Mittelstand company: it is built for stability more than growth. Debt is bad, prudence a higher virtue than profit.

What a concept! In today’s paper, Maureen Dowd reminds us that, according to the author herself, “Ayn” rhymes with “swine.” I wish that Ayn Rand were here, to repudiate the new veep candidate and champion crockmeister.

What, no picture?

It’s not just the crazy week that I’ve got ahead of me, but, even more, the distraction of having hit upon the appropriate structure for a long-term project that I’ve been doodling about for the past year: I’m going to ease up on contributions here. Once I get out to Fire Island, with plenty of new things to photograph,  I’ll resume normal posting.

Right now, though, I’ve got to read Ryan Lizza’s piece about Paul Ryan in a recent issue of The New Yorker. I saw in the Times today that Ryan is, or was, an avid Ayn Rand fan. As far as I’m concerned,  this makes him the equivalent of a Scientologist.

And then I’ve got to shop for dinner — for eight!

Glancing through the feeds yesterday, I came across a piece by David Thomson on Marilyn Monroe and another on used bookstores by Jeremiah Moss. (Both were noticed at 3 Quarks Daily.) And I thought: Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Or, at least, find some new feeds. There is really nothing to be said about Marilyn Monroe. The very idea of thinking about Marilyn Monroe (as distinct from responding to her onscreen persona) is, simply, fatuous. It is true, as Thomson says, that nobody knows what Monroe’s story really was, or how and why it came to an end. Does that make her fascinating? Not to me. It’s arguable that Hollywood didn’t know what to do with her, but what can’t be denied is that she found sustained effort tedious, and was not inclined to work when she was bored. But what am I doing here, talking about Marilyn Monroe? Stop at once! And, as for used bookstores! Not only is there nothing to say about used bookstores, but there is hardly anything to say about books. Here are two things that you can say about books: they’re usually easy to read, and they pile up whether you read them or not. Every library in the world contains too many books, and every library is incomplete. Scylla, meet Charybdis. I’ll just get out of the way… 

I guess it’s August. Did Rilke write about August?

***

De fil en aiguille — Marilyn Monroe > Michelle Williams > Eddie Redmayne — I watched The Other Boleyn Girl. On the surface, it’s a dreadful movie. The costumes are hideously confused, for one thing, treating the fashions of a good fifty year period as mutually contemporary, and the sets are little better; as production values go, it’s not much of an advance beyond Errol Flynn’s swashbucklers for Warner Brothers. The dialogue is truly preposterous, because it has to make plain to today’s (clueless) audiences what winks and nods would have expressed at a time when it was foolish to be explicit and straightforward. The dramatic situations are strictly soap opera.

And yet — why did I want to watch it? Why did I sit through it? The actors have a lot to do with it. Eric Bana no more resembles Henry VIII than I do — no, come to think of it, I look a great deal more like Henry VIII than he does. It cannot be said that Mr Bana looks comfortable in all those Joan Crawford shoulder pads and cocktail waitress skirts. But he’s fun. Mark Rylance is great fun, a complete toady — you want to step on him. David Morrissey’s Norfolk is a lout, possessed of less brain than he boasts, but a surfeit of King James talk withal. He’s not fun, exactly, but it is funny that he dresses as though for the court of Henry VII, complete with Christopher Columbus’ bouncy hair. Kristin Scott Thomas gives good value; whatever they paid her to impersonate Elizabeth Howard, Lady Boleyn, she earned every penny. Most of all though, the movie belongs to Ana Torrent, who plays Catherine of Aragon. Every time I watch The Other Boleyn Girl, I make a resolution to see this amazing actress in other movies. So far, nothing has come of it, but just you wait. When she says, “Where is my wise husband?”, something clicks, and you realize that all Spaniards are natural monarchs.

What about Scarlett and Natalie, you’re asking. They’re fun, too. They have wildly different English accents; Ms Johansson sounds like a governess at Chatsworth, while Ms Portman suggests a party girl who has spent a lot of time on translantic steamships. It’s fun to hear both of them say, especially to one another, “my sistah.” The worst thing about the movie is that it never manages to present them as serious romantic rivals in the fine tradition of Bette Davis and Mary Astor. As Miranda might put it, there is no “sweep.”

Also: Call the Midwife has taken onscreen childbirth to new levels of interest and satisfaction. If all you’re going to do is moan and scream, we’d rather take it as read into the record.

I’ll stop there. It’s a terrible movie. It’s not a train wreck; it’s just bad. But it’s still one of my favorites. You can’t say that any of the historical personages has been seriously misrepesentented in an unfavorable way. Almost all of them — the real people — were just as ambitious and just as short-sighted. (Catherine was just as grand.) What’s wrong is what’s usually wrong with historical dramas: the characters are disfigured by the attempt to beam them up into contemporary parlance. It’s fun to see modern young actresses with little or no classical training and closets full of blue jeans attempt to put them over.

***

A brilliant conspiracy theory occurred to me yesterday. Actually, it’s not much of a conspiracy theory, because if it were true it would be the work of one man, acting alone. Well, perhaps not acting alone in the strictest sense, but then this guy is so powerful that he can tell people what to do without waiting for their cooperation. My conspiracy theory is this: The Second Avenue subway is being paid for, at least on a short-term cash basis, by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. His gift to New York.

I have no idea where this idea comes from — which just shows that I’m on to something. The last time I looked, the new T line was priced at $4.5 billion. I don’t know if the mayor is rich enough to foot the bill, but, once you start thinking about it, you realize that there are lots of billionaires out there with that kind of money. Maybe not a hundred, but more than just Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller. Let’s hit them up!

Anyway, you heard it here first. People complain about how hard the mayor has made it to drive through Midtown (bravo!), and the projected ban on supersized sodas has almost everyone nattering about the nanny state. They say, “Thank God Bloomberg will be gone soon.” I say, “Not so fast.”   

August.

***

Have you seen The Prince and the Showgirl? Recently? It’s a bad movie, too, but not my kind of bad movie. When Olivier is off, he’s unwatchable, and all his prince does is make you wish that Henry Higgins would make an entrance and unmask him as Zoltan Karpathy. As for Marilyn Monroe, she’s great when she’s alone with the camera, which is not exactly what I call “acting.” Face to face with another actor, she behaves like a producer’s niece, someone who has been given a part in order to make a mogul happy — think Miss Casswell. And who has been told, “Just act naturally, sweetie” — a Betty Boop who’s dying to take off her foundation garments. Everything about Monroe suggests sleep. If only the film were in black and white, you might just be able to nod off. 

The other night, Kathleen went out to dinner with a former client whom she liked, and although I was nicely invited to join, I decided to stay home and watch Miranda, as much of the show as I could. I made it through eleven of the twelve episodes, and to justify this indulgence, I kept a pad and pencil handy for writing down the rococo words with which Tillie, Miranda’s old schoolmate (played by Sally Phillips), ornaments her banal announcements. Here is a short selection.

Fabulosmic
Spiffulent
Marvelisimus (which Miranda expands to “Marvelissimussolini”)
Flabbergastermumu
Lunchione/Luncheonate
Kiddingtons
Tomarzipan
Tremendulous/Tremendulent

“Tomarzipan” is a variant of “tomorrow,” in case you’re stumped. How many of these constructions did the scriptwriters invent? At one point, Tillie says “Johnny Cashingtons” for “money,” but she seems to expect Miranda to know what she’s talking about. Tillie throws in a lot of actual Italian, and seems to speak French quite fluently; she appears to want her English to be equally incomprehensible to natives. 

At one point, another schoolfriend, Stinky, declares that the sushi on offer looks “edible von guzzlebuckets.” Did I hear that properly?

Another verbal thread that runs through Miranda is Miranda’s fascination with words that catch her fancy: “Clutch, now there’s a good word.” “Thrust” is another favorite. In the eleventh episode, a pas de trois for Miranda, her mother, Penny (Patricia Hodge), and a psychiatrist (Mark Heap), Miranda fills out a slow moment with ruminations on “moist,” which is “the queen of words,” and “plinth,” which is the king. “Imagine a moist plinth,” she ventures. That might be difficult, but it is not difficult to imagine imagining a moist plinth, because by this stage of the show you have spent a lot of time in the rolling parkland of Miranda’s girlish mind, well preserved into her thirties the crushing boredom and sparkling trauma of school.

The most exciting spiel in Miranda, from a language standpoint, is Penny’s unwavering determination to be either insincere or meaningless, but impatient either way. For Penny, happiness is being enviable. That’s what she wants for her daughter, and the desire embodies a kind of love that underrides the superficial cruelty of her breathtaking put-downs. (At a funeral, she tells Miranda, “I didn’t want you here. I was going to tell everyone you’re in prison. It’s less embarrassing than having to admit that you’re still single.”) Penny’s refusal to be nice for niceness’s sake — a refusal that Ms Hodge makes persuasive — is what carries that eleventh episode, devoted entirely to a “family romance” conducted within the walls of a psychiatrist’s office. While Miranda is a constant, Penny ranges abruptly between being her ally and her opponent, her loving mother and her wicked stepmother.

Penny is given several bracing verbal tics. First, her way of saying goodbye, “Such fun!” Every possible change in sense is rung on this phrase, and at at least one point Penny infuses it with a death-camp grimness. Then there is “What I call…”, which I’ve written about before. Nobody would notice this usage except an irritated child; it’s Miranda’s pedantic inability to let the phrase go that’s funny. (“I think we all call it ‘Monte Carlo’.”) Then there’s “Your father…” A sentence beginning with these two words is guaranteed to divulge sexual caprice laced with marital discord. (“Your father and I have decided that Thursday is Naughty Knitting Night.”) We don’t see dad until the very last episode, when he turns out to be the deadest-panned Tom Conti, of all people, worrying over slush turning to black ice and creating —chorus! — “an absolute deathtrap.” Mr Conti’s great moment comes when, costumed as a fez-capped, camel-riding magus (one of the Three Kings, presumably), he tells Miranda, in tones pregnant with Foreign Office understatement, “I don’t feel excited — yet.” There is absolutely nothing about this gent to suggest the untrammeled licentiousness that his wife gleefully shouts from the housetops.

***

That’s part of the point, though: the mystery of parental sexuality is the final puzzle to be solved before the attainment of adulthood. We solve it by recognizing that possibility can be incomprehensible; our inability to conjure something doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen. Miranda takes place — all twelve episodes — upon this verge. Miranda is a big girl in more ways than one. The actress Miranda Hart works a formidable magic in presenting a woman with only one step to go, almost there. The character Miranda is good-hearted but lazy, dreamy, and discouraged. She is still very much an adolescent; it’s as if her inability to grow up has boiled up inside her and made her so big. I say this as praise for the actress’s ability to put her body to dramatic use. She is an extraordinary comedienne in Miranda, pouring everything that could be learned not just from British comedy but from Carol Burnett, La Cage aux folles, and even Julia Child’s French chef into a sitcom coded with all the best subroutines. She establishes the same audience rapport that made Eric Morecambe, Jack Benny, and Lucille Ball into household gods. But Ms Hart can also be sublime, as her portrayal of Chummie in Call the Midwife demonstrates.

There is no call for sublimity in Miranda — although “moist plinth” reveals a groping for it. Miranda is a comedy about being not sublime, about growing up, about working at being a better person. That’s why it’s unofficial anthem is Heather Small’s “Proud,” imitated in every episode by Miranda’s sidekick, Stevie (Sarah Hadland). Stevie manages to sing the refrain of “Proud” — “What have you done today to make you feel proud?” — without conveying any sense of the actual song, which is finally played as the outro to the sixth episode, which concludes the first of the two seasons. I hadn’t known the song before, but when I downloaded it the other night and listened to it about fifteen times in a row, I thought how beautiful it would be as the soundtrack for a montage of clips of Chummie from Call the Midwife. Chummie, unlike Miranda, hears the song itself.

Hart has observed that she wrote the Miranda pilot with a view to creating a dream job: her show would be everything that she wanted it to be. Not so much to the extent that she succeeded in realizing her dream, but to the extent that she sold it the BBC and got two seasons out of them, I suspect that the dream was, in the moment of realization, already outgrown.

Over the weekend, the Times published a column by Cornell economist RH (“Luxury Bob”) Frank, “Will the Skillful Win? They Should Be So Lucky.” It begins with the clearest statement of the ideological rift that divides America’s elite into two camps (each of which brands the other as “the elite”).

There may be no topic that more reliably divides liberals and conservatives than the relationship between success and luck. Many conservatives celebrate market success as an almost inevitable consequence of talent and effort. Liberals, by contrast, like to remind us that even talented people who work hard sometimes fall on hard times through no fault of their own.

Frank goes on to cite a number of tests run at an experimental Web site called Music Lab. I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on these particular findings; assessing the role of luck on the popularity of rock songs — or of much more serious works of art — is problematic in the extreme, because creative works are too far from fungible. But if anybody is running tests showing that luck has nothing to do with success, I have yet to hear of it. It seems to be more and more generally accepted that successful people and projects have at some point accrued a boon that cannot be traced to talent and effort: Daniel Kahneman calls it “the halo effect.” How this halo comes to descend here but not there remains unexplained in terms of talent and effort.

It seems strange to me that, as Frank suggests, conservatives see a moral hazard in the liberal view of luck, imagining that it sanctions passive anticipation of good fortune. And that’s why I’m so grateful for David Brooks’s formulation of the issue last Friday, in his column, “The Credit Illusion.” Brooks pretends to be responding to an artfully crafted question from a successful businessman who signs himself “Confused in Columbus” and who complains about Mitt Romney’s remarks in Israel, crediting “cultural differences” with much of that country’s outsize success. “Confused” wants clarity: how much credit does he deserve for his success? Brooks’s answer is simple but magisterial.

Nonetheless, this question does have a practical and a moral answer. It is this: You should regard yourself as the sole author of all your future achievements and as the grateful beneficiary of all your past successes.

Will the mothers of America kindly start cross-stitching this motto on their infants’ pillowcases? Neither element of the rule is new; it’s the putting them together that’s arresting. You must prepare to work very hard, and you must we grateful when (and if) the hard work pays off. Truly, the most successful people ought to be the most humble. By which I mean that they ought to be the most generous, the most eager to help other hard workers. And the least inclined to stand smugly by while the poor suffer the burdens of poverty. If David Brooks himself actually came up with this solution — which it quite literally is; it dissolves the difference between the parties — then I call three cheers to the Times for paying him to sit around and think all day.

(I would like to amend Brooks’s rule slightly, to include a measure of gratitude not just for past successes but for the health and intelligence that hard work requires.)

***

The conundrum of fortune has a darker, more effectively political force, one that Felix Salmon wrote about a few weeks ago. Felix began an entry about the control of American education with a description of the Great and the Good who gather together at places like Aspen to discuss matters that, arguably, they know nothing about. 

For me, one of the more interesting tracks of the Aspen Ideas Festival is the series of conversations about education. Aspen is the natural habitat of America’s overconfident plutonomy: the kind of people who are convinced that since they have been successful themselves, they are therefore qualified — more qualified than education professionals, in fact — to diagnose problems and prescribe solutions. The ultimate example of this in recent weeks was the firing of Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, by rich trustees who had no substantive beef with her at all. Instead, they just didn’t like her reluctance to sign on to various inchoate strategies, which sound great in a mass-market leadership book but which are unlikely to be particularly helpful in the context of a venerable educational institution.

These people have all read their Steve Brill, and have watched (or even funded) Waiting for Superman. They’re generally convinced that bad teachers are The Problem, and seem to think that that reforming the nation’s education system is a task somehow akin to akin to remaking General Electric. Measure everything, work out who’s good and who’s bad, and fire the underperformers: half of the problem is solved right there. Then, look at the great teachers, the inspirational ones, and the ed-tech innovators. If America’s remaining teachers just take a leaf out of their books, and start doing the things that work really well, that’s the other half of the problem addressed.

“Plutonomy” — what a great word. Plutonomists are unusually successful people who can’t give credit where credit is due, and who, in taking all the credit for themselves, proceed to act with decidely ungenerous vanity. There is nothing that they don’t understand, because their success both confers and guarantees a universal acumen. I need do no more than ask you to consider Donald Trump. But, for a more sophisticated example, remember Lawrence Summers on the capacity of women to do rigorous science, back in 2005. These men would be ridiculous if they were not also powerful and influential. It is impossible to attribute their persistence in foolishness to talent and effort, unless it is a talent for foolishness.

While everyone is complaining about bankers, I’m becoming fixated on developers, and I don’t mean just the real-estate types who build strip malls. I mean the visionaries who have the time and the resources to manipulate the ever more dense network of legal constraints that make getting anything done almost impossible for ordinary mortals. Robert Moses, a man who craved power but not wealth, was a tyrant of development that only age and the death of personal feudatories could stop. His legacy is official impotence and private licence. No exponent of the public sphere has been entrusted with more than a small fraction of the power that Moses accumulated, and improvements to the civil fabric have been abandoned to unaccountable warlords.

The awful truth about Celeste and Jesse Forever — not the simple one, which is that “Jesse” doesn’t belong in the title — is that it has a happy ending. A slightly uncertain one, but not the wretched “happy” ending that it might have had in the old days. Which means that it can’t be a screwball comedy, or a “comedy of remarriage.” In a screwball comedy, couples are obliged (often by their own vanity) to learn precisely why they belong together or, in the alternative, why they could never live apart. In Celeste, the title character (Rashida Jones, who also co-wrote the script) learns something else. She learns that today’s college students, no matter how smart, haven’t lived long enough to know how to make truly adult choices. Does this mean that they’re “immature”? You could say that, but you’d miss the point, which is that it takes longer than it used to grow up, and we wouldn’t have it any differently. Celeste learns that it was not a great idea to marry the man of her undergraduate dreams.

This is a lesson that Celeste thinks that she has learned by the opening scene. She has “broken up” with Jesse (Andy Samberg), and apparently the machinery of legal divorce has been set into motion. But they’re still best friends; they still go out to dinner together. She’s very comfortable having him live in the studio behind her house. He’s an artist — gifted, perhaps, but somewhat feckless, and certainly not driven, as Celeste is, to excel at his métier. Celeste’s métier is cool-hunting, trend-seeking. She and her partner, Scott (Elijah Wood), work out of a top-floor office in a shiny glass office building with angular attitude. The screenplay is too clever to comment on the world-historical insignificance of marketing, but it adroitly demonstrates Celeste’s expertise by showing it off in an informal setting. As a way of dismissing a would-be suitor, Paul (Chris Messina), Celeste fixes him with a briskly patient gaze and tells him why he has just replaced his car and his smartphone with models that better express his self-image. Paul looks stunned, but you’re not sure if this is because Celeste has actually nailed him; he just might think that she’s being astonishingly rude. But she has nailed him, as he acknowledges in a later scene. The happy ending of this movie is implicit in Paul’s coming back for more. Celeste may have his number, but his ego is intact. Paul is an adult.

Until Paul makes his advance, after a yoga class (and, yes, he goes to yoga class to meet girls; what could be more adult than that?), Celeste is happy with her broken BFF. She and Jesse really do make a cute couple. They have vast reserves of private jokes and polished routines; like a happily-married couple I know, they could go through an entire day talking in quotations. And they care about one another. Do they ever! Instead of blowing kisses, they raise their arms as if they were holding infants. It’s lovely, and touching, and it tells you that this is not a relationship between grown-ups.  

We get to know Celeste very well. Jesse remains a mystery, not necessarily an interesting one. The plot is set into motion by the protests of Beth (Ari Gryanor)and Tucker (Eric Christian Olsen), also best friends from college (the same college!), who are about to get married, and who are not best pleased by the way things have worked out between Jesse and Celeste. You’d think that they’d want the couple to stop talking divorce and keep singing the “made for each other” song, but, again, if Celeste and Jesse Forever tells a well-behaved narrative that observes the traditional pieties about comic timing, it does not do so by telling lies. It is a fantasy only in that it shows the truth so clearly. Beth and Tucker want Celeste and Jesse to move on. The upshot is that Jesse decides to start dating. His counsellor in these matters, a grass dealer called Skillz (Will McCormack, Ms Jones screenwriting partner), reminds him of Veronica, whom Jesse secretly spent the night with three months ago. She was nice, but for some reason Jesse’s shy about a second date. The next thing you know, Jesse runs into Veronica at a bookstore, and smiles and good wishes are exchanged. The rest of this romance develops offstage, and we are not allowed to form an opinion about Veronica. We learn that she got pregnant as a result of the first date, but the only conclusion that we’re permitted to draw from this news is that a person like Celeste — and this is a movie about Celeste — would never allow an unexpected pregnancy to serve as the foundation of a relationship. The fact that Jesse is open to possibility on this front is hard evidence of their profound incompatibility.

In any case, Jesse’s determination to marry Veronica so that she can stay in the country (she’s Belgian!) pushes Celeste into the discomfort zone of signing the divorce papers and facing life truly alone. She falls apart, visually; ordinarily beautiful even when she’s wearing glasses — on Celeste, eyeglasses are a beauty mark signifying the seductions of rampant intelligence — Celeste blurs in overindulgent collapse, eating, drinking, and smoking with abandon. She commits what at first looks like a catastrophic oversight in a major branding project. (But, no! It’s another demonstration of Celeste’s mojo, so cool that she wasn’t even conscious of it!) But she signs the papers, and then she gives Paul a call.

This is not a movie about how a smart woman learns to be grateful and to stop taking thing for granted. There is no comeuppance, no humiliation. Celeste has to realize that she made a mistake with Jesse, and she does; in their last scene, she and Jesse are, finally, not intimate, and Celeste is as willing as Jesse is to keep a distance. They’re sad about it, of course. But sadness is not desperation. There is no ghastly lunge at happy-ever-after. That would be fantasy of a lesser kind. This is a rueful parting, heralded by the last words of Celeste’s matron-of-honor speech at the wedding of Beth and Tucker: you don’t always have to be right, even when you are. With Jesse, it was understood by both of them that Celeste was always right, which effectively put their relationship into a stalemate. How could Jesse ever learn anything for himself? With Veronica, with the sudden prospect of fatherhood, Jesse may have jumped off a cliff, but for once he’s flying solo.

Celeste isn’t someone in need of a spanking. Paul says to her, “I like you. When you’re ready, give me a call.” She does. We don’t know what happens next because, for once, neither does Celeste. Maybe Celeste and Jesse Forever is a screwball after all: Celeste finds out how right she was. I think that that calls for a toast.  

***

 

The one thing that I didn’t mention in yesterday’s entry — I mentioned it, but not as one of the draws that keep me buying the latest Donna Leons — was Venice. I have never been to Venice, but I should be very surprised if it does not seem familiar the moment I arrive, not because I’ve seen so many photographs of the famous buildings and curious canals, but because I’ve followed Guido Brunetto, resident of the Polo district, throughout the city, and in all weathers. I’ve followed him across the campi and about the markets and into little trattorie tucked into the corners. I may not have seen anything, actually, but I’ve absorbed some of the pace and quirkiness of life in Venice, which is essentially life as it is everywhere but with a few little wrinkles. Walk or boat, for example; how many instances, in the Brunetti novels, are there of the commissario’s working out whether a given destination is better reached by boat or on foot? A conventional realist, Donna Leon knows how to bring Brunetti’s Venice to life, and the danger for me, if and when I visit the actual city, I don’t unpack too much of the one that I’ve brought with me.

Reading Lauren Collins’s profile of Tino Sehgal in the current New Yorker, it struck me that the rejection of representation that characterizes modern art (even pop art, which substitutes hallucination for representation) is also a rejection of everyday life. The Sehgal installations that Collins describes are systematic violations of the conventions that govern everyday life. These violations are tolerable, presumably, because they occur in museum spaces, and most viewers, if they may no know what they’re getting into, know that they’re getting into something. But, again like so much modern art, they have a jokey air, an aspect of Let’s Pretend This Is How Things Are. There is no educational mission here; the object is not to discover something about how things actually are. The sociologists and cognitive scientists tackle that project. Contrasted with their disciplinary rigor, installation designers such as Tino Sehgal are pretty clearly fooling around.

I don’t object to fooling around, although I’ll admit that I haven’t much patience for it. What really bothers me is that anyone thinks of it as “art.” Art is something else. Art descends from Court Art.

***

Court Art, eh — minuets danced by nymphs and shepherds in pastoral nowheres? Very expensive objects, such as bronze clocks and tables made out of silver. Objets de vertu that you might spend a fortune on at A la Vieille Russie. That’s a part of it, but not the important part. 

Court Art is art intended to be enjoyed and appreciated by the most important people in the land, gathered together at least occasionally in a town, usually a capital, centered on some sort of palace. The palace is the building in which the most important people in the land come together, especially for ceremonial occasions honoring the ruler or the patron saints. The court is the secular ritual that takes place within the palace and that spills out of it into the town. It is here that women approach most closely the freedom of men. The court is grave for the most part, but tempered by sophisticated, well-mannered frivolity. Grave or frivolous, the court is always serious, because it is the center of power.

I’m describing the earliest courts, which arose in the Thirteenth Century in Italy. By the Eighteenth Century, Court Art was so well understood that it flourished in England quite apart from the royal coteries. One might argue that all of London, together with the satellites of the great country houses, comprised the English Court in 1800.

By 1900, there were no more courts anywhere. There were still kings and even a grand duke or two, but there were no more gatherings of all the important people of the land, and few ceremonies with any claim on attentiveness other than that of great age. There were too many important people for such gatherings, and there were too many ways of being important, many of them having little do with sovereign power. Like electric power, sovereign power was domesticated by 1900. It hummed along smoothly, doing whatever needed to be done with as little violence as possible. The personal rule of warlords was replaced by the elected authority of committees. 

Court Art, as it had been known to the most important people of the land, for whom it had constituted a kind of mirror, was no longer called for (and so the genre of large paintings depicting historical or mythological scenes came, along with others, to an end). But it did not disappear altogether. It persisted in two ways, ways that have today become antithetical.

The first is the persistence of craft. The techniques of Court Art are still studied assiduously, and traditional artists — that’s what they’re called — continue to turn out paintings and drawings and even sculptures that serve the people who enjoy them, quite aside from decorative value, as mirrors. Looking at a traditional painting that appeals to you, you see yourself in part. The vision is a serious pleasure, just as it was for people at court.

The second is the persistence of expositions of new works. For a long time, these expositions continued to feature the same kind of art that was produced for the court, but traditional artists were developing other interests, subjects that, in court eyes, appeared insignificant and unworthy of attention. These interests, curiously, could be traced back to the first sovereignty to dispense with a court: the Netherlands. It was there that mirroring art was first created for people who did not regard themselves as among the most important in the land. This tradition flowered beautifully at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

But how to continue the officially-sponsored expositions? It did not take long for Marcel Duchamp to show up with a urinal. Next week, I shall take up the mystery of how this “fountain,” and the installations to follow, continued to be considered “art” 

 

 

Reading The Anonymous Venetian, the third novel in Donna Leon’s series of Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries, was a great treat. We didn’t know about Donna Leon way back in 1994, when it appeared, but I think that we were about to find out, because we read the fifth novel, Acqua Alta, when it was new. One of Kathleen’s clients made the recommendation, and I recall that at that time the books were not easy to find in this country. If I’ve read the first book in the series, Death at La Fenice, I’ve largely forgotten it, which is good, because I’m thinking of reading all twenty books in order, perhaps this fall, perhaps next year.

Leon is not the first mystery writer to populate a multi-book series with an appealing supporting cast (although I wish I could think of someone besides P D James who has done it), but the recurring characters are the principal attraction for me. I look forward to spending time with Brunetti’s family — his vivid, brilliant wife, Paola, a professor of English literature at the university, and a worshiper at the flame of The Master; his son, Raffi, and his daughter, Chiara; and, very occasionally, Paola’s aristocratic parents. When at home, these people eat very well, but they also chatter and argue and sometimes even sulk. Then there is Signorina Elettra Zorzi, introduced in The Anonymous Venetian (I didn’t know that). What a woman of mystery! (Why has she taken a huge pay cut to work for the police?) And what a deadpan comic! (“The fact that his appointment is with his lawyer is one I do not feel myself at liberty to reveal.”) A few of the books have disappointed me not because the mysteries were so-so but because Signorina Elettra hardly appeared in them. Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta is not someone you would want to know, but you probably do know someone just like him, and can marvel at Brunetti’s mastery at manipulating his boss’s outsized but tender vanity. It is a truly Sisyphean task, because even when Brunetti gets what he wants, the Vice-Questore is still in command, still the sort of hollow man who seems to monopolize positions of command in our bureaucratic world.

Another figure introduced in The Anonymous Venetian is Officer Scarpa. This seems to be a first appearance, anyway, because Brunetti’s encounter with him is “stony” but not inimical, as encounters are in later books, when Scarpa becomes a kind of Satan in uniform, dedicated to thwarting Brunetti’s investigations (or so it seems to Brunetti). “Scarpa” is close to “Scarpia,” a connection that the author must certainly have wanted her readers to make. If the name “Scarpia” means nothing to you, then no harm done; you won’t be perplexed. But if you know it, and can’t help hearing the monster’s blasphemous outburst during the Te Deum, “Tosca, you make me forget God!” in act one of Puccini’s opera, then a resonance surrounds Scarpa — his lesser capacity signified by letter missing from his name.

That is the sort of thing that makes the Brunetti books so engaging: they’re opened up at every turn by tacit references to a world of culture and thought, to serious questions about faith and meaning. When Brunetti flies from the room of his demented mother (whom he nevertheless visits faithfully), he is reassured by the nun that the old lady is always happy to see him. “And once she senses that it’s you, Dottore, she’s really quite happy.”

This was a lie. Brunetti knew it, and Suor’ Immacolata knew it. Her faith told her it was a sin to lie, and yet she told this lie to Brunetti and his brother each and every week. Later, on her knees, she prayed to be forgiven for a sin she could not help committing and knew she would commit again. In the winter, after she prayed and before she slept, she would open the window of her room and remove from her bed the single blanket she was allowed. But, each week, she told the same lie.

(I would have suggested that Camus change his title, to The Grace of Sisyphus.)     

***

 

It was time to fill the ice chest — always a bore. As I’ve said before, the state of the ice chest is a reliable gauge of my spirits; if it’s empty, and the ice-cube tray on the top of the stack is partially empty or half-frozen, then you know I’m running on fumes. There is always plenty of ice in the freezer; the question is whether it’s in the chest, with more ice on the way. It’s the difference between subsistence and good housekeeping.

I was up to good housekeeping, but I wanted a reward, and the reward that I wanted was a song that had been floating in my heada for weeks. “Love My Way,” by the Psychedelic Furs. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.)

I used to have a 45 of the song, and perhaps I still do, somewhere, but that would be useless, as I haven’t got anything to play it on. It was time to visit the Apple Store and buy the song from iTunes. It had been a while since my last visit, however, and security had been upgraded. I was asked to provide answers to three ranges of questions. In each range, I could choose one of five or six questions, and then answer it. Trouble was, I would have to remember the answers. These weren’t the sort of questions that you don’t have to think about. For example, the question that I chose from the first range asked what was the first thing that I learned how to cook. Another question: what’s my dream job?

For someone my age, these questions are exactly equivalent to passwords that must be memorized. Realizing this, I went straight to the other computer and printed up a Dymo label (two labels, actually, one for the Filofax and one for the address book) with the three answers on it.

I understand why the questions are so fuzzy. I also understand that they’re designed for much younger customers, people who still have a clear idea of the first thing that they ever learned how to cook or what their dream job might be. They might be wrong, but they’d be sure, and their answers would act like little stamps on the virtual passport of their identity. “Once upon a time, you were here.” Ten years on, they might shrug and laugh at the idea that they ever wanted to run an eco-resort in Belize, but they wouldn’t have to try to remember how to answer the iTunes question.

And then there’s the problematic nature of clever answers. Dream job? I have it; I’m just waiting to be paid. Very funny, but how much of that will I remember, when pressed by Apple in some undoubtedly urgent moment to prove that I’m me? How precisely do the answers have to be reproduced? No, I decided not to fiddle with the dream job question. I chose a slightly more objective question instead. (Never you mind.)

The Dymo label printer chose that minute to run out of labels. Don’t worry; I’ll stop there — I can see you sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming “La! La! La!” Downloading “Love My Way” and getting it onto a Nano was no trouble at all, and soon I was bopping around the kitchen, dumping ice into the chest and filling up the trays, and then looking for other things to do, so that I could justify staying in the kitchen while I listenend to the song again.

“Love My Way” is — what, dreadful? It was a hit in its day; the music video (not one of the more sophisticated ones) got a lot of play on MTV in 1984, which is how I discovered it. We had just bought our first television, Kathleen and I, and hooked it up to cable. I did nothing but watch music videos for six months. I actually stayed up on New Year’s Eve because the MTV Special was hosted by The Producers — I was crazy about “What’s He Got (That I Ain’t Got)?” Then, poof, videos were gone, done. Maybe it was me.

“Love My Way” sets off Richard Butler’s bored, flattish intonation with a basic but catchy xylophone riff. I have no idea what the song is about because I’ve never seen the lyrics, and Butler’s accent is unintelligible to me. Is this even English? Why the equal emphasis on the second syllable of “follow”? The chorus whines instead of singing; the synthesizer emits vaporous chords from Dark Shadows. I can’t believe I like this song — and then the bass kicks in beneath the xylophone and I feel that we are taking off. Suddenly it is 1968 and I am part of the the most glittering bohemian gathering in Soho. I cannot imagine living without this song. I am, in fact, not living without this song. I see lots of productive kitchen reorganization in the near future.

There are things about good housekeeping that Mrs Beeton doesn’t tell you.

Forget mechanical reproduction. What about art in the age of installation? Put that in your Benjamin and smoke it.

***

The determination to keep early hours while my nighthawk of a wife junketed in Maine added a certain novelty to her absence over the weekend that, for me, began on Wednesday. I would awake very early in the morning, only to find that I had no idea what to do with myself (making Kathleen’s tea and toast is the familiar beginning of my day); and in the evening I would scramble at an unaccustomed hour to get dinner out of the way, so that I wouldn’t have to go to bed the very minute the dishes were washed. This was all so unusual that it was almost like going off to a new boarding school, where the sheer drill of keeping to a schedule numbs one to the shock of having been dropped into a jungle. And I did get a lot done. I more than made up for the lethargic beginning of the week.

But the novelty wore off yesterday afternoon, when, all of a sudden, I felt very lonely. I felt very lonely for Kathleen. Knowing that she was having lots of fun with her old friends in Maine was a considerable consolation, but it did not completely lift the tedium of knocking about an otherwise-unpopulated apartment. So instead of making the interesting dinner that I had planned, I went to the Seahorse Tavern, just to be in a room with other people, and that made me feel much better.

So did reading The Anonymous Venetian, an early Donna Leon than I’ve never got round to. Waiting for my dinner, I wondered how the title would be translated into Italian — if the author permitted translations into Italian, which she quite sensibly does not. (The entire country would mass itself into a forty-part chorus to tell her how wrong she was about every detail, especially the ones that she nailed.) I wondered, because the mystery begins with the sighting of a red pump in the muck outside an abattoir in Mestre. Pretty soon, though, it’s clear that the title would emply the masculine gender.

I keep meaning to write to Donna Leon to tell her something that I read in the London Review of Books on the flight back from London in May. Diarmaid MacCullouch, in a very nice piece about the history of the Book of Common Prayer, mentioned that Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambassador at Venice in the reign of James I, proposed to the Doge and his counselors the conversion to the Church of England of la Serenissima. Balance of power, what. It sounds totally crazy, but from an English standpoint it made marvelous sense. Such fun! From a Venetian standpoint as well, as I should like to hear Guido Brunetti’s aristocratic wife, Paola, argue at the dinner table. I content myself with the hope that Leon is more likely to have read the MacCulloch piece than this blog; it saves the agony of taxing her with a reply and not getting one.

***

Ross Douthat issued a challenge in yesterday’s Times that I am only too happy to gratify.

If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching, or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising their sons, or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston, then don’t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that’s good and decent, and that you’re going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.

Please allow me! I do not respect such freedoms! Scriptural natterings about human sexuality (Jesus’ preaching about the love and respect that we owe one another aside) are no less noxious to the society of human beings today than the rites of animal sacrifice outlined so eloquently in the first chapter of Leviticus. Good and decent such exercise may have been in the Iron Age — a time so remote that only the most childish faith in unchanging human nature can consider its outlook readily imaginable to us — but good and decent it is no more. Although not Jewish — all the more for not being so, perhaps — I should happily join a lawsuit against the successors and assigns of whatever entity or entities consigned my helpless infant body to such mutilation in 1948!

What felt better was someone’s finally asking.

Kathleen is in Maine, enjoying her annual reunion with fellow camp-counselors. I am trying to get to bed earlier. Last night was not the success I envisioned. It wasn’t until half-past eleven that I turned out the light. I blame Fossil Darling (naturally). It was his birthday yesterday, so I took him and Ray Soleil out to lunch. You could see where that was going right from the start, but, happily, the only harm done was to Ray’s duff, because he was held prisoner at the flat watching almost all of the Miranda episodes. Well, he would laugh. “You’re right,” he said at one point, “the show does build.” By the time he couldn’t take any more, it was eight o’clock. I straightened up and made myself some dinner, which I ate while watching In the Loop, about which more anon. Halfway through the movie, I put it on pause, cleaned up the dinner things and got ready for bed. I did not wobble about watching another DVD. I settled down with the New York Review of Books for a while, and then traded that in for the more surely soporific The Last Enchantments, a novel by Robert Liddell, about which I-don’t-know-what anon.

I woke at seven, and was rewarded for not getting out of bed by an unpleasant dream. I went across the street for breakfast, which meant getting dressed first. Back at home, I set Bach in Order III to playing (with an idea that I will at least be ready for bed when it ends, sometime before nine this evening), and sat down to deal with the question that started bugging me yesterday morning, long before lunch, as I was walking to the dermatologist’s office for another little excision, feeling every minute of my age, which is almost eighteen months junior to Fossil’s.

I put it in adolescent terms at the header, but the question that I’m really asking is, who have I become? Because, first and foremost, I feel that the becoming part of my life is over. There will be refinements, I’ve no doubt, and I may have to change my mind on a few issues because, having thought them through more clearly, I realize that my earlier position was unconsidered. But so long as my mind holds its somatic integrity, I will remain the person I am today, and have been for some time. But who is this person? To put it another way, assume that you have been following this Web log for a long time. How surprised would you be to meet the writer? What assumptions would you have drawn, from the things that I say, about the way in which I think? How does what I write fail to disclose how I live?

Since there is no way for you to answer that question, I’m asking my version of it. For the moment, that means trying to figure out the question itself.

***

Philosophy — you ought to know that I have no use for systematic philosophy. I do not believe that there is anything to be learned about the world from mental constructs. Mental constructs serve the purpose of organizing what you know, or think you know. They can’t tell you anything that you don’t know — except, arguably, about yourself.

The exact sciences have taken over the old business of philosophy, which engendered them all, after having been raped (resisting all the way) by mensural rigor in the Sixteenth Century. I look to astronomy, not to Plato’s notions of essence, to tell me about the stars. And I look to cognitive science, not to Freud, to tell me about psychology. I do not look anywhere for morality or ethics: I come equipped with a handful of axioms that readily evaluate all of the choices that I face in my life. I don’t try to assess other people’s choices too much, since I rarely know enough to evaluate them.   

Axioms: Violence against persons, except in self-defense, is wrong. (The death penalty is wrong.) Personal property is part of human dignity, but most possessions do not amount to “personal property.” The people around you benefit from your good behavior to the extent that it is generous. Self-righteousness and indignation are disfiguring states of mind. No principle is more important than any person.

Anti-axioms: There can be no axioms about lying. There can be no axioms about desire. Where these things are concerned, the axiomatic concepts of right and wrong are distractions. It’s the foreseeable consequences that are important. Theft is almost always a very bad idea; sexual infidelity somewhat less often so. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but, once you’ve decided “not to know,” don’t go changing your mind. It’s for this reason that “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” turns out to be unnworkable when applied to health: at a certain point, you are going to be obliged to know. But then, it’s your health. You’re in charge of that, not your mother.

Rules of thumb: Life is never simple; better to accommodate the complications. Now this is something that, I find, works for me. It works for me in much the same way that sentences with dependent and independent clauses work for me. Another rule: don’t settle for guesswork or wobbly memories. Look things up!

Accidents: Although I have no personal use for athletics of any kind, I believe that team sports absorb the general and observable urge to partisanship (which I also do not share) more agreeably than, say, war. It’s only because I don’t know why I don’t care for sports that I call this an accident. Someone equipped to get to the neurological bottom of it might demonstrate that it was inevitability, my dislike of movement “for the fun of it.” But nobody is equipped for that yet, and it may well turn out to be genuinely accidental. (Memo to self: write page about how a completely determined universe is impossible, given the chaotic nature of state-change. Better know what I’m talking about, first.) Another accident is my personal reconciliation of the love of comfort with an attraction to formality. To people who aren’t drawn to formality, I must seem awfully rigid; whereas to truly formal people, I’m something of a slob.

Disapprovals: There is no reason for me to discuss the things that I disapprove of, unless of course they fall under one of the axiomatic bans. (And it is wrong-headed to say that one “disapproves” of murder.) It is enough for other people to know that I can live without the things I’m living without with, whether or not disapproval enters into it. That is one of the good things about being old, and having put becoming and “discovery” behind one. One’s way of life becomes implicitly eloquent, to anyone paying attention. And anyone not paying attention quite clearly doesn’t want to know. So I keep my disapprovals to myself. Which is hardly to say that I make a secret of them!