In the course of writing up Pierre Bayard’s How to Read Books You Haven’t Read, I needed (by my own lights) to check out a quotation from Montaigne. I can’t speak for the original, but the English translation offers extremely rudimentary annotation. The citations of Montaigne refer to Donald Frame’s mid-century translation, giving only the book’s title and a page number. The name of the essay in question would have been helpful. Although Frame’s translation has been revived for the Everyman’s Library edition, the pagination is evidently quite different. It took a while to discover that the essay that I wanted was one of Montaigne’s longest, “On Presumption.”

It was really quite shaming. Why don’t I know Montaigne – know him? Every time I open the Essays, I’m struck by his wise and sympathetic character. When he does not remind me of myself — “I flee command, obligation, and constraint. What I do easily and naturally, I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command.” — he makes his very flaws sound charming — “Of music, either vocal for which my voice is very inept, or instrumental, they never succeeded in teaching me anything.” His decent skepticism, and his insistence that the habit of putting himself at the center of Creation is a helpless vice that he bitterly regrets, mark him as astonishingly modern, far more up-to-date and congenial than men born hundreds of years later.  Even the peripatetic and unpredictable course of his discussions, innocent as they are of the rigors of Cartesian symmetry, breathes the free-for-all air of open possibility that our jaded sensibilities crave. Montaigne is by far the most ancient “authority” cited in M Bayard’s book.

As I lamented the disappointments of my own education, I read about Montaigne’s —

I gladly return to the subject of the ineptitude of our education. Its goal has been to make us not good or wise, but learned; it has attained this goal. It has not tuahgt us to follow and embrace virtue and wisdom, but has imprinted in us their derivation and etymology. We know how to decline virtue, if we cannot love it. If we do not know what wisdom is by practice and experience, we know it by jargon and by rote. With our neighbors, we are not content to know their family, their kindred, and their connections; we want to have them as friends and form some association and understanding with them. Education has taught us the definitions, divisions, and partitions of virtue, like the surnames and branches of a genealogy, without any further concern to form between us and virtue any familiar relationship and intimate acquaintance. It has chosen for our instruction not the books that have the soundest and truest opinions, but those that speak the best Greek and Latin; and amid its beautiful words, it has poured into our minds the most inane humors of antiquity.

— and it occurred to me that nothing could better complement the freshman art-history survey that used to be (and still is, I hope) the covert foundation of every student’s education in the humanities than a year (in two semesters) spent reading Montaigne. Nothing but Montaigne! Nothing but Montaigne, that is, and all the classical authors to which his Essays offer so inviting an introduction. The entire education, in other words, of a first-class Renaissance mind.

Montaigne isn’t much taught in English. Everybody gets an essay or two in the course of discovering essays (again, I hope that I speak for the present as well as the past), but the selection is necessarily narrowed to Montaigne at his most rational and least personal. And the focus of such lessons is always on the clarity of exposition; the essays are held up, after all, as models for students, not as personal reflections. Certainly Montaigne is not the backbone of liberal-arts education that he ought to be.

A year of Montaigne might be very boring for poor freshmen, but the stuff would almost certainly stick with them until better times.

To look at this new luxury building from our apartment, you wouldn’t think that any windows had been installed. One has an awful fear that it will open its doors just in time for the next big Crash.

It was almost disconcertingly quiet here today. Sonja came in the morning, to “do” the rooms as she does every two weeks — only, this time, I’d put her off for a third week, so that she wouldn’t be cleaning up (last Monday) at the same time as I (from the trip). Doormen and a few phone calls aside, that was the extent of my interpersonal contact for the day. There was no mail. I felt quite disregarded.

I considered not taking a walk. There was the Book Review to attack, and I’d lost the morning to that immense sedimentary layer of Timeses. Up at four-thirty, I read newspapers from about seven until ten-thirty. “Read” is overstating things; “glancing” was more like it; but still. What an acreage of horrid newsprint. All for two or three clippings. After a sandwich at about one, and Sonja’s departure, I decided that I must have a walk after all.

The walk has settled on the same route; eventually I shall become another Kant and folks will be setting their watches by me. (Highly unlikely, actually.) I walk around the building to 87th Street — some day I’ll tell you why, unless of course I forget — and down to Carl Schurz Park. There is a loo station by the entrance there and if need presses I stop. Doors close at four sharp, though, so late afternoon walks (in winter) are out of the question. (I always stop on the return.) I amble toward the flagstaff, which is, roughly, where 88th Street would intersect with Finley Walk if it plowed through the Park. I turn right and walk down to the end, at 81st Street. Then back the way I came.

It is, oddly, not boring to follow the same route every day. Of course I am always listening to something. Not music – that would be repetitious. But audiobooks. I am just past halfway through Dion Graham’s recording of Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. It is both ghastly and superb; I long to be done with it but I wouldn’t think of moving on to something else. But perplexity impends. Who is telling me this story? Dave Eggers, who wrote the book, or Valentino Achak Deng, whose story it is — with regard to which Eggers is the most astonishing ventriloquist? Or is it Dion Graham, master of vocal impersonations?

I bought the audiobook when I came home from the hospital and understood that I would be taking walks every day. I had had the book book ever since it came out, very much at the bottom of the pile (but because it’s large). When, I asked myself in moments of candor, am I going to read a novel about one of the Lost Boys of Sudan? All that desert & privation! (And who knew that Africa isn’t the worst; Achak’s experiences in Atlanta – supposed to be the scene of a happy ending – are far knottier.) I couldn’t sit in a chair and read my way through such horrors. Much better to listen, while walking. And so it has gone, for weeks now it seems.

When I get home, I look things up, to see the spellings. “Marial Bai.” “Achor Achor.” “Murahaleen.” 

It was not so cold today, and very windy, in an autumnal way that seemed intent upon ridding the trees of their dead leaves at last. Everyone remarks on the strangeness of trees full of (dessicated) leaves. Thanks perhaps to the wind, it finally smelled like Fall. Yesterday, of course, it smelled, when it smelled at all, like Winter. But the weather in New York is more neurotic than any of the city’s inhabitants.

It wasn’t all newspapers. There was, amazingly, The Abstinence Teacher. More about that anon.

Kathleen has gone off to Arizona for an annual convention. We were up before dawn, bundling her into a car that pulled out of the driveway onto virgin snow. The intersection of 86th and Second was hushed and empty, the stoplights signalling to no one. A few neon signs burned here and there; a picture of the scene could have been taken in a much smaller city, perhaps even in a town. I had the unpleasant sensation of being in a picture by Edward Hopper.

My task for the day is to plow through the stack of newspapers that date back to Thanksgiving week. After I read the weekend papers. I shall be sick of newsprint! My reward will be more reading: Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which for two nights running I have had to put down lest it make falling asleep an impossibility. There is really only one word for this novel, and that is hot. Not as in hot and sexy, though – although the novel is very sexy. Rather, hot as in hot and scary. Forget about North Korea! The true axis of evil runs through the suburbs!

— Calme toi.

My new shower curtain.

Now, is this desperate or what? A snapshot of a shower curtain, for heaven’s sake! What next? (Don’t ask!)

Although I bought it before I broke my neck (I think), this shower curtain really does serve as the blazon of my new life. Yes, I know it’s retro, and, no, I don’t pine for the late Fifties. But these scribbles capture an international optimism that was imprinted upon me at an impressionable age. The insouciant mélange of bits of Rome, Paris, London and New York evokes the first whoosh of the jet age.

To paraphrase Talleyrand: those of you who weren’t there can’t imagine how snappy life was!

¶ Fear of Flying.

So I went shopping after all. The promise of twenty percent discounts on everything in the store was certainly attractive, but what really sent me to Rochester was curiosity. Could I fit into trousers with a size narrower waist?

(And, while I was at it, how about finding a tie for that shirt that Kathleen bought on sale last winter? It’s not a shirt that I should even have looked at, I don’t think – stripes of violet, sky, and Secaucus green on a black background that is really just more stripes, but black.. I soon saw her logic, however: preppy exuberance with a very downtown accent. Without a tie, however, the effect would be more Soprano Family Bat Mitzvah. The only men who would wear such vibrant apparel as a sport shirt (ie, “casual”) would have putti in the bathroom, peeing into their tooth glasses. With the neck open, and perhaps the tails hanging out, even I would look like Uncle Junior’s most disreputable uncle. So, find a tie, even if it meant lugging in the shirt, stuffed with tissues and inconveniently mounted on a hanger by Perry Process, the deluxe dry cleaner that had issues last year about putting my fancy shirts in boxes, and even though the very sight of an incoming Rochester bag – customer seeking refund or exchange in the middle of a clearance sale? – would give the staff gas, as indeed it did. I found a tie.)

The answer was a triumphant YES. And the trousers, while snug, weren’t even tight. What wouldn’t be snug, after pants that I could pull down over my hips without undoing the belt?

Having taken care of the basics, I looked around to see what else there was. Not much really. This wasn’t surprising. My shirt size is one of the most popular at the store, and the sale was in its final day. Pickings were slim. More than that, though, this season has been pretty drab. Downtown without the exuberance. The designers must be anticipating another Crash, because the most exciting color going is terra cotta. I found five shirts anyway, one of them a Ralph Lauren plaid for Christmas. I have always, always wanted one of these clichés in subdued red and green, which in my eyes turn any man into a Gibraltar. Now I have one.

A pair Oxfords, lots of socks, a banker’s dozen of handkerchiefs – I won’t bore you. Carrying all the bags, though, I was a double-wide proposition. Happily, I “discovered” (and high time I did) that you can get from 55th and Seventh to 52nd and Sixth without walking down either avenue. A series of glossy alleys – it would tempting, but incorrect, to call them “arcades” cuts through at mid-block. Early on a Sunday afternoon, these alleys were open but deserted. At 55th Street, the northern end of the passage, I set down my flotilla of shopping bags and took the following picture of the City Center, one of two buildings in the immediate vicinity that Lincoln Center was built to replace. Thank heaven they weren’t torn down as well. The other one is Carnegie Hall!

.

City Center was the site of my introduction to the performing arts. Marcel Marceau, Kabuki theatre, Brigadoon, my first Mozart opera (Figaro – how juste!). I have rich memories of all my City Center experiences, except perhaps for Brigadoon, which was rather effaced by the atomic comedy of my sister’s coming out singing, “How Are Things In Guatemala?” All children ought to be exposed to Kabuki by the fifth grade at the latest. Sitting still through the perfectly incomprehensible is one of society’s most precious and needful skills.

Early next year, I’ll celebrate my sixtieth birthday with a matinee of Princess Ida – fittingly enough at City Center. 

Rosy-fingered Dawn stubs her thumb on Thulean Gotham.

Home. D’you know, I’m not quite so sure that it’s as good to be here as I thought it would be. If my library could have been transported to St Croix… For I did miss my books. Not to mention the music! Here I thought I’d stocked the “classical” Nano with plenty of music. Piffle! We went through it in a day or two, Così and the Goldbergs included. A Nano loaded with nothing but piano pieces would have done very nicely. That’s the sort of thing that you can play over and over…

But here we are, and my biggest question is what to do about the Book Review. If we had gotten back an hour earlier last night – at 8:30, say – I’d have knocked at the neighbor’s door and retrieved the stack of last weeks’ papers. But it was too late last night, and it’s much too early this morning. Then there’s the sale at Rochester, my mens’ clothing store. They called, while we were away, to let me know about their big Thanksgiving sale. Should I run over to have a look, even though all the goodies will have been cleaned out? Or should I stay away, because what could be more bitter than shopping for long-anticipated narrower trousers — after a week of vacation-inspired dietary abandon?

Home fat home…

The sea and the sky are leaden at dawn, after heavy downpours. Then the sky begins to clear.

The weather can change very quickly here, just as it can in New York. Where, with all the good luck that one needs in this life, we will set our heads down to sleep tonight.

It will be much easier to leave this place when it is chilly and grey.

Remind me to sort out other pictures by Kathleen that I’ve used this week. Most are mine, though.

Trust me, this picture is sharp at full size. Kathleen took it with her EOS Digital Rebel.

You’d have thought that I’d be able to download this image onto Canon’s ZoomBrowser EX application, which has already been loaded onto the laptop in order to accommodate my much more modest PowerShot A95. On the other, older laptop, as well as on the desktop at home, the same program services both cameras.

But the computer at hand has other ideas. It wants a disc. It craves installation.

<Heated discussion about the elements of planning for vacation.>

So much for ZoomBrowser EX. End of story? No. As we were struggling out the door toward lunch, Kathleen pulled a small bundle out of her bag. It included a piano-shaped device with a USB plug at the narrow end and a cavity for a memory card at the keyboard end. The small CD that came with it first demanded that I download Chinese characters and then told me that its drivers work only with Windows 98!!! (Exclamation marks signify Asian happy faces.) So I plugged the piano into the laptop anyway, sans benefit of driver – and it worked. All 267 images, most of them taken here last year and none of them ever deleted (evidently). It took a few minutes to download this crate of bytes, but we ran an end run around finicky Canon software!!! (More Asian happy faces.)

Problem was….

The images in the default viewer, Adobe Photoshop Album Starter, were awful. Blurry and indistinct – in a word, flou. This would never dou. And it didn’t have to. The problem turned out to be confined, not unreasonably, to the Album Starter, which is not, after all, a program that requires fantastic resolution. Viewed in Photoshop Elements, Kathleen’s kayaks were gloriously crisp and saturated with colors otherwise found only in a bowl of Kix.

<Phews all round.>  

As the I Ching has it: “No Blame.”

The hotel calls this Grotto Beach, but at Google Maps it’s Beauregard Bay.

Our last day, and not a cloud in the sky.  Not directly overhead, anyway. There is a bank of dim clouds over St Thomas and St John, ghostly mountainous outlines on the horizon.  (You have to know where to look.) The air seems neither warm nor cool, windy nor still.

I awoke in the middle of the night to find moonlight flooding through an open window. (That’s “window” as in porte-fenêtre..) Good Lord, I thought – we’ll be murdered in our beds. How could Kathleen have neglected to close and lock it? As I closed and locked it, I was told by a voice that sounded a lot like Kathleen’s (but couldn’t possibly have been, because it was two-thirty in the morning and Kathleen doesn’t just wake up like that) that the door had been left open “so that kitty could get out.”

Sure enough, there was kitty, stretched out on the other bed. Kitty’s ears, anyway. Kitty (a/k/a “Silly Billy” – an endearment that I had never heard Kathleen use before) is one of the many more-or-less domesticated cats who are the real parties in possession of the Buccaneer. We’ve been told that they’re very well taken care of, and, indeed, Kitty, when he or she first mewed piteously at our window, seemed interested in company, not food. Although not overweight, the cat seemed comfortable and well-nourished. It declined the offer of a bit of pretzel. We sent it packing when we left for dinner, and it came back afterward, while I was about to fall asleep over Agatha Christie’s  At Bertram’s Hotel.

I climbed back into bed, but found that I could not think of sleep with the window open. Then I had a brain wave. The windows are fitted out with those long latches, much like chains in effect, that allow a door to be cracked open and no more. If I swung the latch over the knob, the window would be open wide enough for Kitty to get out. That was the theory. In fact, even Kitty couldn’t wedge itself through a gap less than two inches wide. At three-thirty, I was awaked by more mewing. I opened the window all the way and, after a moment, Kitty ran out into the brilliant night. I closed and locked &c.

Several readers have been kind enough to ask what on earth this “&c” means. Literally, it stands for et cetera. The British manage the ampersand better (I’m searching for an example): the body of the sign far more closely resembles the letter “e,” while the lower tail curls upward before it intersects with the upper, clearly suggesting the letter “t.” As I use “&c,” it stands in for the repeat of a line that I have already written. You might call it blah blah blah, but that wouldn’t be very nice.

When I get back to New York, I’m going to eat my hat about Agatha Christie. I can’t tell you how foolish I feel, finding her so magnificently readable. Of course she’s readable. Once upon a time, successful writers were.

Needs no explanation.

Morning.

It is good to be here today, far from the dry roast turkeys and the crowded houses and the dodgy in-laws and the children who lose their interesting little selves for the day in riptides of egocentric neediness.

If anyone but a fellow New Yorker overhears you muttering that you “hate family,” you are immediately marked down as a cold misanthrope, a nasty ungrateful cur. No one stops to think that you might not be talking about individual people, but that what you probably have in mind is your family en masse. It’s the group that’s deadly, the gathering together of people whom nothing more inspired than DNA and youthful folly have thrown together.

Americans are criticized by advocates of other cultures as being “individualistic,” and I do believe that we are no longer any good at the old collective rituals – if we ever were. From the very beginning, this country has been all about leaving families behind. Where are the rituals that honor and acknowledge that? Are we ashamed of something?

This is just an unscientific hunch, but I suspect that while, in most cultures, your family really does know you best (whether it understands you or not), in this country it knows you least. I suspect further that ruthless examination would show that “family” is an illusion that we struggle to pull off at our holiday tables, an illusion that consoles us, during the brief moments when it’s convincing, for the anxiety of having effectively abandoned an institution of aboriginal human importance.

It’s good to be far from the pretense of “family,” if only for today.

Evening.

Our patio.

It’s surprising, really, but Kathleen and I are not difficult to please. More often than not, we love whatever accommodations we’ve been given. It’s true that we have usually asked for something specific (a view of the sea, a short walk to the dining room), but although we never ask for the room of our dreams, that is what we usually get. 

We’re so happy with this room that Kathleen wants to reserve it for next Thanksgiving – before we leave.

The view from our patio.

Now that the weather has cleared up, and dried up, and cooled off, it’s quite pleasant to sit on the patio. Looking up from my book, I fall into something between a reverie and stupor. It occurs to me that we could be anywhere – anywhere with green hills overlooking the sea, that is. It really doesn’t matter how near or far, how well-traveled or exotic. What we want is this: this view of the sea from a hillside, looking over low shrubs.

And we want it to be a view that somebody else takes care of.

Needs no explanation.

Figure (1). Lunch.

Figure (2). Before Lunch.

Waitress: Doing your homework?
Kathleen: The difference between being at work and being on vacation is that vacation comes with palm trees.

First gratuitous pretty picture

In a mad desire to re-experience the joys of first-year law school, I have spent a few hours this afternoon studying the Nano.

The Nano is a personal music device &c. Four controls are marked on its surface, one of them in English. That would be “Menu.” The other three are well-established audio symbols meaning “next chapter” (3 PM), “play/pause” (6 PM), and “last chapter” (9 PM). That doesn’t seem like a lot to work with, does it? But of course you can do a million things with these controls, or nearly, if you know how to work them. For that, though, you will have to study the Nano.

In other words, you have to buy a book. The “documentation” that accompanies the Nano is, if truth be known, less than minimal. It is a series of designs, printed on an accordion fold of shiny paper and unaccompanied by text. No messy translation problems! Even if you read the International Language of Gizmos, though, you’re sunk you buy the book, because the drawings on the fanfold are the visual equivalent of Only Four Controls. You may figure out, by dumb luck, that pressing the (unmarked) disc in the center of the Scroll Wheel turns the Nano on. How to turn it off, however, is no more intuitive than knowing that the round thing on which the four controls are marked is called the Scroll Wheel.

Last week, in preparation for this vacation, I bought two books. This afternoon’s quality time was spent with The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide (Second Edition), by Christopher Breen (Peachpit Press, 2006 – and already mildly out of date).

In two hours, I learned

• How to pause and re-start a song. Why did I need to learn how to use a clearly-marked control? Because I thought of this as the “Off” control, having been told that it was.
• How to compose a playlist.
• How to rate a song. This is handy, because simply by giving your favorite songs top (five star) ratings, you add them to a handy “Top Rated” playlist.
• Why I have only one piece of cover art. (I bought a Blossom Dearie song that I already had on CD. It’s always good to start out by buying things that you already own, so that you won’t be disappointed in case the transaction fails.)
• What “scrubbing” means.
• What the “Hold” switch is for.
• How to shuffle songs.

And much, much more. Once I’d learned how to shuffle songs, though, I called it a day. My brain, she were fried.

Second gratuitous pretty picture

You may be wondering why we have not just one Nano all of a sudden, but two. Here’s what happened. I decided to get some sort of iPod so that I could download and listen to podcasts on one. Notably, my own. It seemed odd, producing dozens of podcasts without having a clue about how to download and listen &c. Having been told that the Nano was the device for me, I put in for one. At the very same time, Kathleen got one. Her law firm handed them out at a partner retreat, so to speak. In reality, if every partner got one, then every partner paid for one. So Kathleen bought herself a Nano, in effect.

Kathleen’s Nano has her firm’s name (or a portion thereof) etched into the shiny silver backing. Since both Nanos, like all 4 GB Nanos (I’m told), are brushed-silver grey, that’s how we tell the two Nanos apart. This is useful because Kathleen’s Nano has been stocked with songs, while mine plays things like Così fan tutte, the Goldberg Variations, and those Handel concerti grossi that I mentioned in an earlier entry.

Kathleen’s Nano came loaded with a firm playlist. That is, a playlist named after the law firm. Headquarters are in Chicago, so there are several songs with that title, including one by Sufjan Stevens. So, you learn something every day – that’s what Sufjan Stevens sounds like. And I didn’t spend a dime at iTunes!

PS: I wrote this yesterday, but I thought I’d better hold it for posting today, lest you realize that you were hoping that St Croix would distract me from the delights of everyday scribbling.

PPS: It was pouring with rain. There was nothing else to do. Once I’d clipped my nails, there was really nothing else to do.

PPPS: All right, cut it out back there.

Sur la plage

After breakfast – they do a great buffet here, which I’m too old and, more recently, earnest about dieting, to pillage as it deserves – Kathleen and I strolled to the nearby shopping arcade, which is really too modest for that appellation even if there is an arcade of sorts. At the General Store, they sold all the usual stuff – gin, vermouth, scotch, and rum, rum, rum. I took it in with a stupor. The bottles answered a prayer that, although I’m no longer saying it, I used to pray so earnestly that it’s difficult to see the happy answer and yet have no reason to move. I chose a bottle of Chardonnay from the rather smaller choice of wines.

We stocked up on snacks, postcards, stamps, and lip balm, and then headed across the way to the dress shop. This is where I bought the hat shown below.

This is what happens when you ask someone else to take a picture that you yourself would take, if you didn’t want it to be a picture of you. That’s the only way I have of explaining the unflattering uncertainty that takes the place, here, of an intended nonchalant gaze off toward the sea. Kathleen did in fact catch me gazing out to sea… with unflattering uncertainty. Perhaps I am squinting? Perhaps it’s the no-see-ums that swam into my eyes at about this time? Perhaps, as some would say, I’m just impossible to please.

The dress shop, as we knew, carries hats for gents as well as other many supplies, but the feature that undoubtedly attracts most male visitors is the nuisance corner, a small padded bench with its own stack of magazines. I’d have taken a picture, but it would not have been a pretty picture, and, besides, how odd. To take a picture &c. Kathleen found a good-looking suit jacket, on sale for the usual reason – but then that’s why Kathleen hardly ever pays attentions to size labels.

Having left Kathleen behind to try on clothes, I returned to the room just in time to hear the phone ringing. Who could this be? Not the office, surely. Indeed not – although it was a lawyer at the other end of the line. A very pleasant woman whom we’d shared a taxi with on our ride in from the airport. I will save her story for tomorrow, though, because – and this is why she was calling – we’ll be having dinner with her and her husband tomorrow night! I’m sure there are many people for whom such an invitation, after such an encounter, would not be at all remarkable, but Kathleen and I have a tendency to clam up when we’re on a trip. I can remember what I did differently yesterday (and it was I who made the gesture): I remarked that this was our second Thanksgiving in St Croix. Well, that was that!

Meanwhile, regular readers will be relieved – nothing less, I’m sure – to know that I have almost finished with this week’s Book Review. What’s new on that front is that I’ve taken to annotating the Review as I read it. Yes – writing on the pages with a pen! What a concept! Someday, I’ll tell you why I stopped marking up printed matter of any kind long before I went to law school – but not now. The good news is that I won’t have to think when I begin writing up my reviews. The thinking part has been done.

Color coordination is hard to avoid in this lovely place.

We returned from dinner at nine-thirty. By ten, I was out – so I’m told. The next thing I knew, I was in a strange room, brightly lighted by a bedside lamp. It was three in the morning. I hoped that the utterly inert lump by my side was Kathleen.

I stroked the lump gently. It was Kathleen.

After taking care of what woke me up, I went right back to sleep. The next thing I knew, it was eight-fifteen. Yikes!

Here we are on St Croix, and in a particularly lovely corner of St Croix, too. After a somewhat rocky night, we got ourselves to JFK on time for the 6:30 plane (we were there before five, actually). The flights, to San Juan and then to Frederiksted, were gloriously uneventful, with only patches of turbulence. For once, I actually slept on a plane – passed out, would be more like it. Kathleen stayed awake, and is napping now.

We installed ourselves at the Buccaneer almost entirely without fuss.* Wireless access to the Internet presented itself without a burp of recalcitrance. The Nano – my Nano, the one that’s stocked with classical music – is tootling away at Handel’s Concerti Grossi, Op 6, by ancient tradition our weekend wakeup music. (Kathleen always says, “There’s something different about this performance,” even though it was years before I had two complete recordings and almost as many more before I had three.) The camera is working. Well, aside from the music, you can see all of that for yourself.

I’m going to get back to Colin Wells’s rather swashbuckling but unquestionably informative history world impact of Byzantine culture, Sailing From Byzantium. And there is the Book Review to finish. Did I say “finish”? I meant to say, “start.”

We’re down for dinner in the main dining room – a covered, open-air terrace – at 7:30. If you hear me snorning between now and then, don’t giggle and wake me up.

* In fact, if there was any fuss, I don’t recall what it was about.

From Lost and Found New York.

Ever since I began reading The New Yorker, I’ve been a big fan of James Stevenson. His lightly crazed lines have always seemed to conceal secrets: if I looked hard enough, I would understand everything. And, in a sense, I jave I’ve learned that the world is full of unforeseen cracks. That it falls apart, gently, when no one is looking. Even when Mr Stevenson was sketching suburban predicaments for the magazine, his drawings betrayed a fascination with ruin (rephrased as mild dilapidation). More recently, he has contributed a series of full-page narrative illustrations about Old New York to the New York Times. Floyd Bennett Field. The old Hudson River Day Liners. The Gowanus Canal – still with us. Whenever I came across one, I’d clip it and stash it with all the other (unread, stuffed-in-boxes) clippings.

The other day, I sorted through the clippings, throwing away most of them, and wondered, “When is Stevenson going to collect these drawings in a book?” Voilà. No sooner was the question asked than it was answered – even if it took me a day or two to find that out. On the lookout for something different to give to Miss G on her birthday, what do I see in the window of Crawford Doyle Booksellers but Lost and Found New York: Oddballs, Heroes, Heartbreakers, Scoundrels, Thugs, Mayors, and Mysteries, written and illustrated by – James Stevenson. I bought two copies.

It’s a big book, but not a thick one. The illustrations have been spread out a bit, and a number of the larger drawings have been reproduced at something like their original size. The text is every bit as evocative as the artwork. Here’s Mr Stevenson on the house at 933 East 222nd Street, from “Williamsbridge Wonders” (Williamsbridge is a neighborhood in the Bronx):

What 933 is actually made of is almost impossible to detect since most of the house is concealed behind a blaze of churning white wrought-iron. From its driveway gates, featuring white swans kissing floral arrangements, to its remarkable balcony, the house whispers of the tropics.

Makes you want to head uptown and check it out for yourself. Come finer weather…. And yet you’d have to make notes. Carrying the book itself on a tour would be thoroughly inconvenient. Doubtless some genius has managed to download the book onto his (or her!) iPhone.

The structures that Mr Stevenson describes, as well as the institutions that built them and the characters who strutted eccentrically through them (which he also describes), are rarely more than a hundred fifty years old. By European standards, they sprouted only the day before yesterday, and made it through a single night before suffering insidious neglect. Mr Stevenson, however, is able to invest them with all of the romantic charm of Tintern Abbey – with a seasoning of Big Wiseapple acidity. Fittingly, the book opens with a souvenir of the old Penn Station – forever lost, and never to be found.

In her Foreword, Kennedy Fraser captures an idea of the charm of Lost and Found New York:

I have known Stevenson for years, since we were colleagues at the old New Yorker magazine on West 43rd Street. Behind the successful artist and paterfamilias (whose own whiskers have turne dwhite by now) I have often seen what I see in Lost and Found New York, and in the pages of this book: the irrepressible ghost of a slender, boyish Jim, tugging at one’s sleeve. “Hey! I want to show you something really interesting! Take a look at this!”

Lost and Found New York is not the sort of book that hangs around in print for a long time (unless it’s a surprise best-seller, which I rather doubt will be the case here), so take my word for it and get yourself a copy pronto.

Now: what to do with those clippings?

Le bouquiniste dans la rue Mercer.

What I couldn’t figure out was why a film starring Ryan Gosling, with Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson among others, about a guy who dates an inflatable doll was showing at the art houses. On the one hand, there was the weirdness factor – that made sense. On the other, there was the awful review in the Times (“100% pure calculation”). which made the movie sound untouchable by highbrow venues. Lars and the Real Girl was at least something of a puzzle going in, which nothing else showing at the moment was. So I got on the 6 and went down to see it at the Angelika.

¶ Lars and the Real Girl.

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Afterwards, I had a teeny tiny adventure, which I turned into a shaggy dog story as soon as I got home. I have been feeling my inner Maeve Brennan lately – although I have a long way to go before I’m as eloquent as the Long-Winded Lady.

¶ Left Behind.

Yesterday afternoon – after a most agreeable lunch with Édouard (who not only came all the way uptown to Planet Yorkville but also treated!) – I went for a walk in the early twilight. It is taking me a while to adjust to the time change. I really ought to have taken my walk this morning, which I spent goofing off (not true; but certainly I could have spared the hour that the walk would have taken). I don’t mind walking in the dark per se, but I don’t like taking my constitutional in the dark. It seems wrong, somehow – badly planned.  Is it because I’m old and at least technically infirm that I prefer to walk in a park that isn’t nearly empty? Or is it the melancholy of winter evenings, which make one think, as at no other time, of families tucked into their warm and bright houses? Walking beneath the suddenly-bare trees, one feels almost neglected, on the verge, perhaps, of homelessness. This is no time to be getting exercise outdoors.

Or so it feels.

On Sunday, I had to reckon with the Marathon for the first time. I’ve watched it out the window (desultorily) for decades, but always stayed at home until it was over. Again, I ought to have taken my walk earlier in the morning, before the barricades and the yellow “Caution” tapes went up along First Avenue – a boulevard that lies between my house and the riverside park in which I like to walk. Fearing that I might be able to cross First going to the park but not coming home, I decided on heading in the other direction, toward Central Park. I would walk the circuit of the Great Lawn.

A good plan in every way save that of avoiding the Marathon. I’d never paid attention to the runners’ route through Central Park, but if I’d thought about it for a moment I’d have foreseen that it follows the East Drive just in from Fifth Avenue. To get to the Great Lawn - to do any sort of walking in Central Park at all – I’d have to cross the East Drive.

The bits of First Avenue and the East Drive that intersected my walking plans may have been only a few blocks apart, but they’re about five miles from each other on the Marathon route, the final stretch of which runs up First Avenue into the Bronx (passing beneath my windows) and then down Fifth Avenue into the Park and onto the East Drive, whence to the finish. This would give me time, I thought, to walk around the Great Lawn. And it did. The problem was that I didn’t believe my own reasoning. I was sure that, when I got back to the East Drive, heading east myself this time, I’d be waved away by the police who already stood guard along the way. (“Marathon: A Fiesta of NYPD Overtime.”) Instead of pursuing intriguing, if fugitive, thoughts on a leisurely stroll in a strong autumn sun, I feverishly planned alternate escapes. Would it be better to cross the Park to the West Side, and there to catch a crosstown bus back to the East Side (the buses take the transverse roads, which pass beneath the Park’s Drives)? Or to scramble down through the brush to the transverse road? I had a hard time seeing the latter option in any but a ridiculous light, but I worried at it nevertheless, as if it were a chipped tooth.

Here’s what I did not do: I did not have a fit. I did not puff myself up like a Leghorn rooster in preparation for delivering a tirade against any and all interruptions of ordinary civic routine, blah blah blah. I did not, even inwardly, “dare” any official persons to block my path. I did not contemplate making a scene.  I thought only of taking as much of a walk as possible and getting on with my day.

The next day, I blew up at an AT&T Mobility representative who, it turned out, was quite within his rights; it was I who had forgotten to do something, I who was in the wrong. So I haven’t turned into a completely new person overnight. But I did feel wretched about the wrongful blow-up afterward, and I had to restrain myself from complicating things further by calling up to apologize – to some other agent who would undoubtedly take me for a crackpot, and rightly so.

Tomorrow, I’ll definitely take my walk in the morning. But I won’t jinx things by telling you why – not yet. Suffice it to say that I plan to spend the later afternoon recording several PodCasts, with superior results. If I don’t, I’ll have a fit.

¶ Taking Stock: 8 November 2007.

Kathleen was flying home from Washington, and, when she landed, we were going to order a tasty but unwholesome dinner from Jackson Hole. Dawdling at the computer, I conceived a desire to watch Six Degrees of Separation while we munched. In 1990, we were too busy with our still-new country house to catch John Guare’s play at Lincoln Center, so we missed a chance to see Stockard Channing on stage (we did see her, though, in revivals of The Lion in Winter and The Little Foxes). She is very much the star of the movie as well.

What I missed in Fred Schepisi’s film adaption, which I’ve seen at least eight or nine times – and I’m being very conservative here – is a location shot early in the film. Actually, it’s an intermittent series of many shots, taken from different angles. The film opens in the Fifth Avenue apartment of an art dealer, but long before that scene has been completely played out, the two principals, Ouisa and Flan, are seen summarizing it in narrative parallel to a huddle of guests at a wedding reception. We see a lot of this crowd and this setting, but only in short takes. That may be why I didn’t recognize the location until this evening. Although – why this evening?

What caught my eye first were the octagonal pillars. Pillars with eight sides instead of the usual flutes are not the most common architectural feature in the world, and these octagonal pillars were very familiar octagonal pillars. Come to think of it, so were the demilune-topped French doors on a far wall, overlooking what I already knew to be a golf course. For this scene was shot in front of the fireplace (not shown) in the ballroom of Siwanoy Country Club in Bronxville. I’d say that I grew up at Siwanoy, but that might lead you to think that I can play golf, and I can’t play golf. Playing golf is my idea of Dante’s Inferno, albeit an idea with no supporting experience. Although I do remember sitting just about where Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing were seated, watching, all by myself, and God knows why, a special black-and-white program (this was long before videotapes) about South Africa’s Gary Player. I was bored to death, but I was giving Maturity a chance.

When I go out for a special evening, I put on the watch that the Club presented to my father when he finished his year-long term as president, in 1966. Kathleen has had Tiffany clean it, and replace the leather strap, so all I have to do is set it and wind it.

When my grandfather was president, during the War – this was my mother’s father, not the Judge – they tell me that he introduced Brunch. I have never submitted this tale to the slightest attempt at verification. I’m saving a few things for my real old age.