¶ Matins: In what is certainly the most important piece of intellectual psychology that I have seen this decade, Tom Jacobs writes up Jonathan Haidt’s research into moral psychology. A must-read, the article is compulsively readable.

¶ Lauds: Say “cheese!” Conceptual artist Filippo Panseca trowels on the fontina for his startlingly high-tack painting of — who? I don’t remember reading about this scene in Edith Hamilton. (Via  Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: There’s a great cartoon in this week’s New Yorker (okay, drawing). A financial adviser tells his clients that what they ought to do is use a time machine to travel back sixteen months and convert to cash. In case you’re going back further than that, this poster from Topatoco may come in handy.

¶ Tierce: The Rattner imbroglio will probably reprise the chorus of complaints about President Obama’s personnel picks for economic recovery: all too often, they look like the “wizards” behind last year’s financial meltdown. 

¶ Sext: Freshman Composition in the Age of Tweets: “I Can Haz Writin Skillz?” (via kottke.org)

¶ Nones: Christopher Hitchens fulminates about Turkey at Slate, and takes France’s diplomatic kick-turning rather too piously. “Ankara Shows Its Hand.”  (via  The Morning News)

¶ Vespers: Will somebody please tell me why Dwight Garner, and not Janet Maslin, reviewed the new book about (not by) Helen Gurley Brown? A man instead of a woman?

¶ Compline: Hats off to Ben Jervey, a committed environmentalist who hates Earth Day.

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This week’s story in The New Yorker, Guillermo Martínez’s unassuming but extraordinary “Vast Hell” (translated by Albert Manguel), takes its title from an Argentine proverb, printed as an epigram: “A small town is a vast hell.” It doesn’t take much imagination to comprehend the proverb; for most people in history, small towns have been inescapable reservoirs of unforgotten crimes and misdemeanors. Judgment is eternally ongoing, salvation not to be had on this earth.

Mr Martínez has set his story in a small, presumably fictional, Argentinian town, situated beside the sea, but the locals’ attention is focused on outsiders, as it will be when outsiders intrude. And Mr Martínez focuses on the attention, not on its object. We never really know what the barber’s wife, known as “the French Woman,” and the scruffy young hitchhiker got up to in the boy’s tent not far from the widow Espinosa’s house. We hear plenty of the widow’s outrage at the lovers’ trysts, and even more about her conviction that only foul play can explain their disappearance.

The disappearances register in what will turn out to be a telling way.

One day, we realized that the boy and the French Woman had disappeared. I mean, the boy didn’t seem to be around anymore, and no one had seen the French Woman, either in the barbershop or on the pathway down to the beach, where she liked to go for walks. The first thing we all thought was that they’d run away together, and, maybe because running away always has a romantic ring to it, or because the dangerous temptress was now out of reach, the women seemed willing to forgive the French Woman for this. It was obvious that there was someting wrong in that marriage, they’d say. Cerviño was too old for her, and also the boy was very handsome. … And with secretive giggles they’d confess that maybe they would have done the same.

But the widow won’t have it: she’s convinced that Cerviño murdered the lovers.

In the meantime, Espinosa’s widow seemed to have gone out of her mind. She went about digging holes everywhere, armed with a ridiculous child’s shovel, hollering at the top of her voice that she wouldn’t rest until she found the bodies.

And one day she found them.

She found bodies, that is. When we have finished the story — when, perhaps, we have read it a second time (“Vast Hell” is not long), we savor Mr Martínez’s meditation on curiosity. Another widow might have attacked the dunes in search of very different bodies, but far from enlisting the local inspector’s help in finding them, she would have joined them instead — as indeed does a little dog, who, like Espinosa’s widow, can’t let go. Crime passionel is one thing; political atrocity quite another.

Before heading back to town, he ordered us not to speak to anyone about what we had seen, and jotted down, one by one, the names of all who had been there.

Perhaps when we re-read the opening sentence —

Often, when the grocery story is empty and all you can hear is the buzzing of flies, I think of that young man whose name we never knew and whom no one in town ever mentioned again.

— what we hear is the silence of unmarked graves.

¶ In Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 20 July 1749, two gems. “Moral virtues are the foundation of society in general, and of friendship in particular; but attentions, manners, and graces both adorn and strengthen them”; and — referring to time lost by his son to a recent illness — “At present you should be a good economist of your moments…”

I don’t think that Chesterfield has anything foppish in mind when he speaks of “attentions, manners, and graces.” I expect that they modulations toward understatement. Graces, for example, may be noted by an attentive observer, but they don’t attract attention from other objects.

¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Great Armada” left me feeling severely dyslexic, as I could not follow the action at all. There was a school of whales ahead of the Pequod, I think, and a fleet of Malacca pirates behind. Looking over the gunwhales of his skiff, Ishmael reports, with clubbing tact, that “When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum.” I think that this means that the males sport visible erections, but maybe that’s just my dirty mind.

¶ Chapter XIV of Don Quixote, however, is laugh-out-loud funny, at least if you haven’t forgotten that Quixote and Sancho meet the Knight of the Wood and his squire in the dark. I wish that my Spanish were up to assessing whether the original is as wonderfully fruity as Edith Grossman’s translation:

By this time a thousand different kinds of brightly colored birds began to warble in the trees, and with their varied and joyous songs they seemed to welcome and greet the new dawn, who, through the doors and balconies [las puertas y balcones] of the Orient, was revealing the beauty of her face and shaking from her hair an infinite number of liquid pearls whose gentle liquor bathed the plants that seemed, in turn, to send forth buds and rain down tiny white pearls; the willows dripped their sweet-tasting manna, the fountains laughed, the streams murmured, the woods rejoiced, and the meadows flourished with her arrival. But as soon as the light of day made it possible to see and distinguish one thing from another, the first thing that appeared before Sancho Panza’s eyes was the nose of the Squire of the Wood, which was so big it almost cast a shadow over the rest of his body. In fact, it is recounted that his nose was outlandishly large, hooked in the middle, covered with warts, and of a purplish color like an eggplant; it came down the width of two fingers past his mouth, and its size, color, warts, and curvature made his face so hideous that when Sancho saw him his feet and hands started to tremble, like a child having seizures, and he decided in his heart to let himself be slapped two hundred times before he would allow his anger to awaken and then fight with that monster.

The whole episode is gloriously fishy, because the Knight of the Wood — revealed by daylight to be the Knight of the Mirrors — seems to be even dottier than Don Quixote. Long as it is, this sentence ends adorably:

While Don Quixote stopped to help Sancho into the cork tree, the Knight of the Mirrors took as much of the field as he thought necessary, and believing that Don Quixote had done the same, and not waiting for the sound of a trumpet or any other warning, he turned the reins of his horse — who was in fact no faster or better looking than Rocinante — and at his full gallop, which was a medium trot, he rode to encounter his enemy, but seeing him occupied with Sancho’s climb, he checked the reins and stopped in the middle of the charge, for which his horse was extremely grateful, since he could no longer move [de lo que el caballo quedó agradecidísmo, a causa que ya no podía moverse].

¶ Chapter 21 of Squillions, “Sigh Once More…And a Storm in the Pacific,” is relatively brief, and almost wholly devoted to the ill-fated partnership that Noël Coward entered into with Mary Martin, of all people, for the premiere of his new operette, Pacific 1860. What had seemed like a good idea in New York did not cross the Atlantic. Letters were exchanged… including a rather long one from Coward that it seems surprising of Martin to have saved. Just one teeny-tiny paragraph:

Pacific 1860 is, according to these statistics which I think are correct, the fifth theatrical production with which you have been connectedc. It is the forty-seventh theatrical production with which I have been concerned since 1920. For your performance you are paid by the management the biggest star salary payable in this Country ie ten per cent of the gross and have been given full transport for yourself and party. You arrived in this country full of friendliness and enthusiasm with a completely wrong conception of the part of Elena Salvador. This you have frequently admitted to me yourself. You accuse me in your letter of being a dictator. What you are really accusing me of is being a director. I have tried, with the utmost gentleness and patience, to guide and help you into understanding and playing Elena. Not only am I the director but I am also the author and creator of the character, therefore, I am afraid my conception must logically supersede yours. You worked extremely hard, not only up to production but after production, to play the part as I wished it played. You were on the verge of succeeding when, on account of some highly irrational and quite inaccurate opinions of your own about period clothes, you proceeded to throw away all that our joint efforts had so nearly achieved.

The envoi is priceless, both dishy and, I’m sure, sincere.

I am writing to you as a man of the theatre of many years standing who is full of admiration of your personality, charm and talent and who also sees, perhaps more than you realise, how many years of hard work, possible disappointments and the humble acceptance of superior knowledge lie ahead of you before you achieve the true reward that your ambition demands.

I used to feel guilty about not having read any of George Orwell’s books. Surely it was virtually illiterate of me not to have read the famous nightmares, Animal Farm and 1984, whether I liked them or not. The three accounts of unlucky life in the Thirties — Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia — seemed always to be highly regarded. Not have to read Orwell was yet another sign of my frivolous dilletantism. I felt bad about it, as I say, but not bad enough to alter my reading pile.

In fact, of course, I’d read a great deal of Orwell, here and there, mostly but not exclusively in magazines, over forty-odd years — and that, I think, is what stanched any desire for more. I didn’t think much about it; if I didn’t much care for Orwell’s way of putting things, I didn’t regard it as harmful. Orwell fell into a zone that’s populated by many Twentieth-Century writers for whose work I don’t have much use: I call it Dorm Lit. Dorm Lit appeals to bright, adolescent Prince Valiants who don’t — can’t — yet know much of anything about the world beyond their own experience and who are therefore easily roused by tales of injustice. Lacking a knightly nature, I arranged the rights and wrongs of this world along a different pole. I couldn’t have told you what that was until I read James Woods’s appraisal of Orwell in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “A Fine Rage.” Here it is, in one sentence:

Modern life should be simpler and harder, he argues in this vein, not softer and more complex, and “in a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc, etc.” Note that “etc” — there speaks the puritan, reserving the right to stretch his prohibitions, at cranky whim.

There has not been a lot of oxygen, until fairly recently, for the idea that life is, unavoidably, “more complex,” and I was well into middle age before it was clear to me that people who mistrust complexity are usually rather stupid about it. What they are usually talking about, as is clear from Orwell’s little list of things that wouldn’t be missed, is the manifold. True complexity isn’t even reached. Orwell’s targets are, for the most part, modern appliances, and most of them are far more complex today than they were when Orwell took pot shots at them. Once upon a time, the home telephone had only one function: facilitating the two-party conversation. Now it has been merged with the “gramophone” and the daily newspaper, all because thousands of users made ever-more complex demands upon it. Orwell is very simply the dimwit who asks — or who used to ask — what on earth he would do with a personal computer: he would have been in no position to pass judgment upon it. By the same token, I am unable to come out for or against any item on his list, except perhaps machine guns. Even “tinned food” has its place in the best kitchens.

The simple life appeals to everyone now and then, but to some people it assumes the sanctity of a moral obligation. Occasionally, somebody writes powerfully about the beauty of doing without, and the simple life begins to look fashionable. But it can never actually be fashionable, because fashion of any kind is entirely a matter of sifting small differences in search of new ideas. It short it is inherently complex. (Without the stylistic or intellectual discipline that always informs fashion, it would be merely complicated.) Fashions may mean nothing to those who don’t care about them, but they tire out their exponents, who, at the end of the day, demand a soft — or at least a softly-lighted — environment, and who, after a certain age at least, are unlikely to seek out the “harder” just for its own sake.

Injustice itself is rarely, anymore, a matter of the brute violence that disgusts youthful minds. It stems more freely from simplifications, from failures to understand that what works in this situation does not work in that one. Our ideas of property rights have been almost hopelessly fouled by the refusal to admit kinds or degrees of such rights. We don’t even acknowledge the most obvious characteristic of ownership: the right to preserve or to destroy. What we own is the right to deal with certain things — things that belong to us — more or less violently. While the right to preserve is usually but not always a good thing, the right to destroy is certainly more difficult to assess. Treating them as the same kind of right is stupid — but what do you expect from idealists who disapprove of private property itself, or from those who are backed, by opposition, into holding that private property is as sacred as life itself.

Mr Wood’s summary of Orwell’s thinking turns out to be an uncannily accurate negative of my own, but there is one other aspect of it that I’d like to note.

So the question hangs over Orwell, as it does over so many well-heeled revolutionaries. Did he want to level up society or level it down? … A similarly telling moment appears in Orwell’s review of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). There was much in the book to agree with, Orwell said. … But Hayek’s faith in capitalist competition was overzealous. “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.” Not, you notice, that somebody loses them — which would mean raising those people up. Somebody wins them, and that cannot be allowed.

I am a passionate leveler-up. I would like everyone to have access to my softer, more complex way of life.

¶ Lord Chesterfield sends a lot of sound financial advice to his son. The heartbreaking thing about it is that those capable of taking good advice about money rarely need it. Chesterfield’s underlying budgetary principle, however, is not without interest, because, as he himself says, it’s not easy to discern.

The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind, is to find in everything, those certain bounds, quos ultra citrave nequit consistere rectum. These boundaries are marked out by a very find line, which only good sense and attention can discover; it is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In manners, this line is good-breeding; beyond it, is troublesome ceremony; short of it, is unbecoming negligence and inattention.

How often, when I was young, did I justify negligence and inattention as the avoidance of troublesome ceremony!

¶ Melville: “The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it.” Do admit.

¶ In Don Quixote, it appears that the Squire of the Wood has rather more experience at accompanying a knight errant than Sancho does. When he shares a hefty meat pie and a wine skin with the Squire of the Sorrowful Face, the latter laments,

“Your grace is a faithful and true, right and proper, magnificent and great squire, as this feast shows, and if you haven’t come here by the arts of enchantment, at least it seems that way to me, but I’m so poor and unlucky that all I have in my saddlebags is a little cheese, so hard you could break a giant’s skull with it, and to keep it company some four dozen carob beans and the same number of hazelnuts and other kinds of nuts, thanks to the poverty of my master and the idea he has and the rule he keeps that knights errant should not live and survive on anything but dried fruits and the plants of the field.”

“By my faith, brother,” replied the Squire of the Wood, “my stomach isn’t made for thistles or wild pears or forest roots. Let our masters have their knightly opinions and rules and eat what their laws command. I have my baskets of food, and this wineskin hanging from the saddlebow, just in case, and I’m so devoted to it and love it so much that I can’t let too much time pass without giving it a thousand kisses and a thousand embraces.”

¶ In Squillions, the War comes to an end at last, with some very inter-esting correspondence from a man called Ingram Fraser, with whom Coward claimed no more than a “casual acquaintanceship.” Fraser’s letters about the postwar state of Coward’s Paris flat suggest either monumental impertinence or a true meeting of the minds, so to speak.

Now for the immediate future, the next trimestre begins on 15th October, at which time Frs 6,450 are due. On your behalf I promised that would be paid.

A veritable Our Man in Paris, sounds like.

In “A Tiny Feast,” Chris Adrian’s story in this week’s New Yorker, Titania and Oberon are obliged to spend a great deal of time in the pediatric cancer ward of a San Francisco hospital when their latest changeling, whom they call, simply, “Boy,” develops leukemia. Or perhaps it’s something worse. In order to fit in, the fairies assume the mortal guises of Trudy, a hairdresser, and Bob, a plantsman.

“But you’ve made the room just lovely,” the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexandra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping trace of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive names, and actually rather faerielike. Alice gestured expansively around the room, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and to blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy’s own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.

To say that the grief of losing a child to cancer has deluded a hairdresser named Trudy into thinking that she is the lead fairy out of Midsummer Night’s Dream would be crushingly heavy-handed. “What’s really going on here?” is not the question that Mr Adrian, also a Fellow in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at UC San Francisco, wants us to be asking. I don’t believe that he wants us to be asking any questions. He has told us: a mother’s child is dying. And he tells us with all the grace of his story’s conceit.

There is one question that itches with fictions that rest on a kind of madness: is the story a puzzle, or is it a fantasia? Can it be deconstructed and “solved”? Is it, in other words, an allegory? Or has the author tracked his imagination through the underbrush of possibility? My approach is a muddle: if I like something well enough, I simply re-read it from time to time, on the understanding that the story will become more clearly itself, whatever that might be.

¶ Matins: China’s purchase of American debt has slowed down, according to a recent report. As long as it doesn’t simply stop altogether (gulp)….

¶ Lauds: Green Porno, with Isabella Rosselini. These birds-‘n’-bees audio-visuals are almost okay for kids. Except of course for Ms Rosselini’s delicious naughtiness.

¶ Prime: Geoffrey Pullum, a professor of English and linguistics at Edinburgh, doesn’t think much of The Elements of Style, and will not be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Tierce: The Ford Foundation, our second largest, has streamlined its operations. This is not a cutback so much as a reconception of “lines of work” — an intellectual advance.

¶ Sext: Culinary professional Peter Hertzmann may convince you that you need an iPod Touch more than a new KitchenAid stand mixer. Wholly Apps!

¶ Nones: Jonathan Head’s BBC report, appraising the latest, and inevitable, wave of unrest in Thailand highlights the core problem for most sovereignties since 1789: nurturing an élite that has the common sense to avoid disenfranchising the lower strata of society.

¶ Vespers: What, exactly, is a novella? A short novel, or a long story? At hitheringandthithering waters, John Madera collects a number of reasonably learned opinions — or, at least (and what is better), reading lists. (via The Second Pass)

¶ Compline: Simon Blackburn argues (at some length, alas) that David Hume is very much the man for our times.

I suspect that many professional philosophers, including ones such as myself who have no religious beliefs at all, are slightly embarrassed, or even annoyed, by the voluble disputes between militant atheists and religious apologists. As Michael Frayn points out in his delightful book The Human Touch, the polite English are embarrassed when the subject of religion crops up at all. But we have more cause to be uncomfortable.

The annoyance comes partly because of the strong sense of deja vu. But it is not just that old tunes are being replayed, but that they are being replayed badly. The classic performance was given by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the middle of the 18th century. Hume himself said that nothing could be more artful than the Dialogues, and it is the failure to appreciate that art that is annoying.

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¶ This morning, just a few chapters of Moby-Dick. In my effort to understand the fame of this dog’s-breakfast of a book, I flail about not unlike Melville’s leviathans, sure of only one thing: I can’t wait to put the remaining fifty-odd chapters behind me and be done with the thing. Today, though, I had a more interesting idea than the desperate need to escape. That it took so long to dawn is perhaps itself the best indication of how uncongenial Moby-Dick is.

Moby-Dick is essentially a boy’s own book about hunting, but with this difference: it’s hunting for democrats. No scions of ancient noble houses figure in its narrative, unless of course you count the noble savages who excel at harpooning. The hunt is open to anyone who can talk his way aboard a ship.

That is the only difference. Like any boy’s own book, Moby-Dick is liberally peppered with miscellanies, such as the two chapters that follow the excitement of the chase in which the Pequod’s men outmaneuver some Dutch whalers. “The Honor and Glory of Whaling,” followed by a pendant, “Jonah Historically Regarded,” is the sort of pep talk that “reminds” boys that they’re special:

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity, and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I msyelf belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

Note the keywords: “honorableness,” “antiquity,” “emblazoned.” “Fraternity” sounds a strong note, too, but all I can think of is: where’s Tinkerbell? Is Melville even halfway serious about the divine (or semi-divine) origins of whaling? It doesn’t really matter, because this “history” is entirely extraneous to the story of Ahab’s obsession with the White Whale — a story, I am beginning to see, almost as dwarfed by Melville’s “researches” as the whale’s brain is by the adjacent spermaceti.

It would be tolerable, and perhaps even amusing, if Melville’s language were not the excruciating mashup of jocular humor and King James poesy that it is. Blackboard screech!

¶ Casting about for a metaphor with which to describe Lord Chesterfield’s Weltanschauung — an anachronistic inquiry, I know — I keep coming back to opera seria, although I’m quite sure that Chesterfield would have detested the insolence of my conceit. We have heard, in recent letters, of the earl’s contempt for trivialities, and yet he finds in “company,” the most exalted human activity.

I cannot help being anxious for your success, at this your first appearance upon the great stage of the world; for though the spectators are always candid enough to give great allowances, and show great indulgence to a new actor; yet, from the first impressions which he makes upon them, they are apt to decide, in their own minds at least, whether he will ever be a good one, or not…

There is also a touching exhortation to keep busy that’s worth noting.

Do what you will in Berlin, provided you do but do something all day long. … If I did not know by experience, that some men pass their whole time in doing nothing, I should not think it possible for any being, superior to M Descartes’s automatons, to squander away, in absolute idleness, one single minute of that small portion of time which is allotted us in this world.

If youth knew, and age could…

¶ In Moby-Dick, more phrenology.

It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain, you can then see no indication of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.

Melville’s genius for spouting aphorisms to which one’s response is the very opposite of “So true!” is unparalleled.

¶ Don Quixote meets the Knight of the Wood, who is scandalized that Sancho dares to “speak when his master is speaking.” Is he as big a lunatic as our hero? I suspect that we’re in for a bit of aristo-pricking.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward discovers Jamaica, and it is love at first sight.

I really think that as a race we [English] must be dotty. Here is this divine place — one of the oldes British colonies and we none of us — thank God — know anything about it. That is except me and Nelson.

Little can Coward have foreseen that his divine place would be boycotted as an egregiously homophobic tourist destination. His was quite another world.

Colm Tóibín’s story in this week’s New Yorker, “The Color of Shadows,” would not have been out of place in his short-story collection, Mothers and Sons, although not only does the mother not make an appearance but we never really know why. An old friend tells Paul, the son — one of Mr T’s virtual orphans —

“It was awful what happened, of course, and I knew your mother well.”

But we’re not told what happened. It seems to have involved drink. Paul presumably knows, but that recollection does present itself in his thoughts. The important thing is that he did not know what happened when it happened — when he was a boy, and his late father’s sister, Josie, took him in.

Josie made sure that he was happy and that he studied hard. As soon asit became obvious that he was good at maths and science, she learned everything she could about careers for him and what points he would need. She paid for grinds so that he would have honours in maths and thus gain entrance to University College, Dublin, to study engineering.

The story is framed by Josie’s departure from the house in which she raised Paul, and by her death, several years later, in the nursing home run by the friend who knew his mother well. Paul finds the house, without Josie, to have “a smell of damp and old cooking.”

When he went upstairs and looked at his old bedroom, he noticed how worn the carpet was and how the color on the wallpaper had faded. He must, he thought, have noticed this before, but now the room seemed shabby and strange, almost unfamiliar, and not the room he had slept in every night throughout his childhood, with the small desk in the corner where he did his homework.

This passage comes back to me as one of the story’s most insistent, bringing to life as it does the small boy, bent over his books, the “home” in “homework” as salient as the smell of old cooking.

We’re not told what Paul’s mother did, or why she abandoned her son. But this is not a mystery that the reader must clear up. (The reader can easily imagine any number of sordid fait divers.) Rather, it’s Paul’s sense of the mystery that impinges. He may know “what happened,” but he will never comprehend it. In the language of healing, he might come to “understand” it well enough, and forgive his mother, if that’s what’s to be done, even though he goes on refusing to contact her. (For she is not dead.) But what he understands is the world that Josie brought him up in.

He remembered her always as a middle-aged woman with gray hair, someone content as long as nothing new or unusual was happening, someone always happier in her own house when the day was over and everything was in its place.

There is no room for Paul’s mother in such a world, or in such an understanding of the world. And yet it cannot be said that Josie took the place of his mother. There is no trace of the American disregard for facts; no doting aunt declaring, “I’m your mother now.” There is all the caring in the world, but no mother’s love — or whatever it is that mothers have to offer. She may never be mentioned between Josie and Paul, but she is not effaced; and she is there at the end.

Her life and the one that he had lived apart from her filled his mind now, as though a space had been made for them, the shadows cleared, by what hapd happened in the night and by Josie’s going. He found himself inhaling and releasing breath as a way of nourishing that space, and he breathed in hard for a second at the thought that nourishing it like this was maybe all he would be able to do with it.

¶ Lord Chesterfield advises his son to stay in touch with one Lord Pulteney, who is not only good-natured and a man of parts but —

but there is also a third reason, which, in the course of the world, is not to be despised; his father cannot live long, and will leave him an immense fortune: which, in all events, will make him of some consequence, and if he has parts into the bargain, of very great consequence; so that his friendship may be extremely well worth your cultivating, especially as it will not cost you above one letter in one month.

This calculating will make many readers bristle — or perhaps it will be the teaching of a younger person to make such calculations that offends. It sounds incompatible with our idea that friendship ought to be disinterested. But friendship is never disinterested, or we should make friends with anyone and everyone. What is the difference between a friend’s charm, intelligence, and great wealth? The last attribute, we feel, doesn’t belong on a par with with the first two, but that, I daresay, is wishful thinking. It’s vanity, too: we flatter ourselves to think that we would be who were are without the advantages of healthy upbringing, material comforts, and so on.

¶ In Moby-Dick, Tashtego falls into the “tun” of spermaceti. Truly objectionable comparisons to childbirth are made: “Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.” This jocularity is followed by a chapter that blends whale- worhip with phrenology.

Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared by his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyradmidal silence.

The last bit leads Melville into a flight of fancy about how the Egyptians would have deified the whale (had they known whales) for the same reason that they deified the crocodile: no tongue. What self-indulgent twaddle!

¶ In Don Quixote, Quixote and Sancho encounter a troupe of actors, and for a moment it looks as though the knight errant is going to challenge them to some sort of contest. But, no: this is the Second Part, far less bumptious than the First. Quixote is persuaded to rise above a perceived slight. Phew! But a player in motley scares Rocinante, and the poor knight’s bones are bruised in yet another fall.

¶ In Squillions, Alexander Woollcott dies (with his boots on), and Noël writes about the annealing aspect of London life in wartime.

We are aware in our minds all the time that invasion, either by us or by the enemy, is imminent and might occur at any moment. We are aware all the time that only twenty miles separates us from the enemy and that, however many plays we play and however many jokes we make and however many lunches we may have at the “Ivy” or “Apéritif” or Savoy or Claridges, that anything might happen at any minutes and it is the fact that we are all subconsciously prepared for this that makes the difference that I am trying, so unsuccessfully, to explain.

Not unsuccessfully at all.

With In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, I’ve got a new book to add to the Mitford shelf. (Deborah Devonshire is the youngest of the Mitford sisters.) Patrick Leigh Fermor was one of the last century’s great travel writers, more of an explorer really. I haven’t bothered to find out, just yet, how the two became friends, but then I didn’t much bother to think before buying this book — rather pricily, as it happens, as it’s the English (and, so far, sole) edition, flown in along with the sole.

It will probably take me a while to read Fermor’s half of the correspondence. My interest in exotic locales is less than nil. Aside from a few great cities and their environs, I couldn’t be less interested in travel. But their subject-matter doesn’t explain my keen interest in the dowager duchess’s letters, which carry good-humored disingenuousness to new heights. Here we find her grace (a self-avowed philistine incapable of reading anything more difficult than Beatrix Potter) trying to begin a new book:

The first sentence is very trying, you’ll admit. Famous Authors (that fraudulent thing in America which explains how to be one) says write ‘the’ on a bit of paper (well what else could it be on) & then put down some more words. I ask you. Then I thought ‘well,’ as all interviewees begin. No good. And ‘like,’ and ‘it came to pass.’ No good either. So I looked a few ghoul vols. no help. I think it will be ‘if,’ like Kipling, but the nub of the ensuing sentence is Dutch to nearly everyone…

It’s going to go like this: ‘If you ever live in the same place for a long time you become hefted to your hill like an old sheep.’

For all the teasing, though, there are occasional passages of very high luster, such as this friendly epitaph for JFK, to whom the duchess was related by marriage (his sister married her brother-in-law). She just returned from the president’s funeral when she wrote it:

Oh dear I do feel so sad about J Kennedy, but really the fantastic luck was knowing him at all, such an extraordinary person, so funny, so touching, clever, brave & sort of good, & such marvellous company.

¶ Matins: There must have been other stories making the same point, but this is the one about libraries reminds me of what I know of the Depression.

¶ Lauds: At least it’s free. Download John Cage’s celebrated composition, 4’33 at iTunes, and you won’t be charged. That’s because, well, you know….

¶ Prime: Here’s a truly benighted project: “Make Your Own Morandi.”

¶ Tierce: In an admirable move, Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped charges against former Alaska senator Ted Stevens — who would probably still be senator if it hadn’t been for his conviction of ethics violations. 

¶ Sext: Maira Kalman glosses Tocqueville; attends town meeting in Vermont, also elementary-school student council meeting; illustrates beautifully. (via  kottke.org)

¶ Nones: Just in time for the weekend, a palatial clip showing the meeting of two Anglophone heads of state in a remote corner of Mayfair (or is it Belgravia?).

¶ Vespers: Here’s a book that I would definitely read, if only I had time for such fun: Allegra Huston’s Love Child. Janet Maslin, mildly disapproving, makes it sound particularly delicious.

¶ Compline: Gmail turned 5 yesterday. Seems like just yesterday… and yet, how did we live without it? Just thinking about it is a sort of April Fool’s joke. Michael Calore sends an ecard from Wired. (Via Snarkmarket)

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¶ Lord Chesterfield doesn’t think much of naturalists.

It is characteristic of a man of parts and good judgment to know, and to give that degree of attention that each object deserves; whereas little minds mistake little objects for great ones, and lavish away upon the former that time and attention which only the latter deserve. To such mistakes we owe the numerous and frivolous tribe of insect-mongers, shell-mongers, and pursuers and driers of butterflies, etc. … Of this little sort of knowledge, which I have just hinted at, you will find at least as much as you need wish to know, in a splendid but pretty French book entitles Spectacle de la Nature, which will amuse you while you read it, and give you a sufficient notion of the various parts of nature….

Astronomy is different, though:

The vast and immense planetary system, the astonishing order and regularity of those innumerable world, will open a scewne to you, which not only deserves your attention as a matter of curiosity, or rather astonishment; but still more, as it will give you greater, and consequently juster ideas of that eternal and omnipotent Being, who contrived, made, and still preserves that universe, than all the contemplation of this, comparatively, very little orb, which we at present inhabit, could possibly give you.

So far as science goes, the foregoing marks Chesterfield as a man of the Seventeenth Century, not the Eighteenth.

¶ In Moby-Dick, more unintelligible cetacean anatomy. THIS IS NOT A NOVEL! I can feel a wave of Aneiosis coming on. Last season, I galloped through the final book of Virgil’s screed in one go, so mad was I to be done with it. I’m considerably farther from the end of Moby-Dick; in fact, I’m not that much past halfway. I no longer mind the reading so much; what bewilders me every time I pick up the book is its lofty reputation. It’s a piece of outsider art, is what it is.

¶ In Don Quixote, Sancho, “the scoundrel” (socarrón) shows that he’s learned a thing or two about his knight errant when he tries to solve the problem of producing a Dulcinea. He has never met this figment of Quixote’s imagination, but he has lied to the contrary, and now he’s in a pickle. Abracadabra: poor Don Quixote has been enchanted again, so that Dulcinea looks like a peasant girl, riding along on a donkey with two friends. Quixote puts up not the slightest resistance to the trick. Worse, Sancho can hardly “hide his laughter.”

¶ In Squillions, a cascade of fan letters from important people, all saying such wonderful things about In Which We Serve that you can’t believe that you’ve never seen it. I repeat: Barry Day ought to have titled his book, Letters Noël Coward Saved.

¶ Matins: What’s next, starving quarterhorses? “Boats Too Costly to Keep Are Littering Coastlines.” And here you were worried about fossil fuel emissions.

¶ Lauds: In June of next year, the Toronto summer festival, Luminato, will mount the premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s opera, Prima Donna. The work was to have been created at the Metropolitan Opera, but the composer rejected Met director Peter Gelb’s demand that Prima Donna be translated from French into English.

¶ Prime: Whatever you think of HRH’s fire station at Poundbury — and I don’t think that it’s so bad; in fact, I rather like those black drainpipes — you have to love the no-less-traditional irreverent fun that Justin McGuirk has talking about the “daft mess.”

¶ Tierce: Sounds like a good idea: Cash for Clunkers. You bring in your old car — old car — and get a credit toward the purchase of a new one — a smallish, greenish one. The move is unlikely to provide help for Cerberus, though — the private equity firm that bought Chrysler a few years ago.

¶ Sext: It’s a great day for checking out Despair, Inc.

¶ Nones: While the Times thinks that Velupillai Prabhakaran is indispensable to the Tamil insurgency, the BBC expects that the rebels would be able to carry on without him.

¶ Vespers: Not only are they both cartoonists whose work is regularly published in The New Yorker, but their styles are not remarkably dissimilar. Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin have even collaborated on a book, called My Funny Valentine. It’s about them: they are married to one another.

¶ Compline: Kathleen called in the middle of the afternoon to report that the people in London who had to sign off on a deal this afternoon couldn’t — they were without power. Here’s why.

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Brad Watson’s story, “Visitation,” in this week’s New Yorker, caught my heart in its opening paragraph, which I’ve copied below. The story goes on from the opening, as indeed it must, with marvelous readability — near the end, a fellow motel guest who’s French, not Gypsy, recapitulates the entire story in a way that I can only term ‘neoclassical’ — but it’s the beginning that I’ll come back and back to.

Loomis had never believed that line about the quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships.

The real heartbreak begins in the very next sentence, with Loomis’s determination to marry and have a child; that child is the object of the title trip. It is all immensely sad, but so beautiful that one doesn’t think of how it might be fixed.

After a while, though, my sense of my own literary acumen burns off, and I’m left envying the writers who don’t believe in happiness.

¶ It cannot be said that Lord Chesterfield lacks a meritocratic bias.

I have known many a woman, with an exact shape, and a symmetrical assemblage of beautiful features, please nobody; while others, with very moderate shapes and features, have charmed everybody. Why? because Venus will not charm so much, without her attendant Graces, as they will without her.

¶ In Moby-Dick, two execrable chapters, stuffed to the “ridge-pole” with dead metaphors. For example, the head of the right whale is compared to a violoncello. How fatuously accidental! It would be impossible to write less musically than this:

But now, forget all about blinds and whisters for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all those colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes?

This is bad for the same reason that French puns are unfunny. Anything can be seen to resemble almost anything else, which makes the spinning of comparisons a convenient opportunity for name dropping. To be reminded of a pipe organ by the right whale’s baleen is not enough — we must have the famous organ at Haarlem — devoid though it be of marine implication.

¶ When Reverend Eager, in A Room With a View, declares that the Church of Sta Croce in Florence was “built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism,” Mr Emerson demurs. “No! … That simply means the workmen weren’t paid properly.” I thought of this when Don Quixote explained to Sancho why he could not offer him the salary that Teresa Panza urged her husband to fix.

Look, Sancho, I certainly should have specified a salary for you if I had found in any of the histories of the knights errant an example that would have revealed to me and shown me, by means of the smallest sign, what wages were for a month, or a year, but I have read all or most of their histories, and I do not recall reading that any knight errant ever specified a fixed salary for his squire. I only know that all of them served without pay, and when they least expected it, if things had gone well for their masters, they found themselves rewarded with an insula or something comparable…

¶ In Squillions, Churchill writes to George VI,

Since our conversation at luncheon today, I ahve examined, in consultation with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the details of the case brought against Mr Noël Coward. The Chancellor and Sir Richard Hopkins contend that it was one of substance and that the conferment of a Knighthood upon Mr Coward so soon afterwards would give rise to unfavourable comment.

Coward would have to wait until 1970.

A paragraph in Tony Judt’s Postwar leaps out at me:

It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less. Power, position and privilege cannot be directly bought, but depend instead upon mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism. Legal rights are replaced by sycophancy, which is duly rewarded with job security or advancement. To achieve even modest and legitimate objectives — medical treatments, material necessities, educational opportunities — people are required to bed the law in a variety of minor but corrupting ways. (page 579)

With the exception of the last sentence, this looks like a perfect description of academia in America. Can Mr Judt, a doyen of our professoriat, have been directed to word this passage (doubtless correct) by an ivy-league planchette?

¶ For some reason, the egotism of Lord Chesterfield’s ambitions for his son hits me like a slap in the letter of 29 October 1748.

My anxiety for your success increases in proportion as the time approaches of your taking your part upon the great stage of the world. (more…)

¶ Matins: Blood and Treasure. We were supposed to be the land of the free, but we’re really that land of the pirates.

¶ Lauds: The death of Nathasha Richardson — how?

¶ Prime: Not since David Owen’s New Yorker piece have I seen such a ringing endorsement of Green Gotham. Hey, you rubes in your country idylls — we’re the conservors.

¶ Tierce: Something else to drive the Wingnuts crazy: Attorney General Eric Holder has announced an end to raids on medical-marijuana dispensers.

¶ Sext: Bullfighting becomes exciting — out of the ring. When one torero wins the top arts medal (?), an earlier laureate returns his in disgust.

¶ Nones: Sukumar Muralidharan’s concise and lucid “Accountability in a time of excess” exhorts you to know what you’re talking about when you invoke Adam Smith.

¶ Vespers: Everybody knows that French workers love to walk out in protest. For the chattering classes, reading books that are unpopular with the grosse légumes is preferred. As a result, La princesse de Clèves, a historical novel published in 1678, is once again a sell-out. (via Alexander Chee)

¶ Compline: It’s a lengthy, small-type read, but Danielle Allen’s review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens in TNR may be the most important piece of political theory that you read this year. Yes,
you!

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