Gotham Diary:
Épuisé
By the time I heard from Kathleen —After a delayed but otherwise uneventful flight to Raleigh-Durham, Kathleen enjoyed a nice lunch with her father and her brother. Then she called me to check in. Ordinarily, she calls whenever her flight lands, but today she decided not to, since I’d be at the movies as usual. Trouble was, I didn’t go to the movies. I’m not sure that it would have calmed down to surmise what turned out to be the case, because it had never happened before. But once I heard her voice — well, it seems in poor taste today to talk of floods of relief.
I didn’t go to the movies because when I finally did stagger out of bed at 8:30 this morning (Kathleen called to say that her plane had just arrived at LaGuardia, when it ought to have been taking off), every joint and tissue clamored for a day off. I wanted only to spend the day reading and watching movies. Kathleen’s being away for the weekend was slightly liberating but largely dispiriting; more often that not, when she’s out of town I feel like the gods in Das Rheingold after the giants carry off Freia, the goddess who tends the orchard where the apples of youthfulness grow.
It’s amazing, though, how quickly a day passes when all you’re doing is reading a book like James Gleick’s The Information. I’m struggling to keep my head about the symbolo-logico-mathematical waters. I nourish a fond hope that Mr Gleick or some other worthy will sex up set theory for me, so that I can at least imagine being interested in the topic. Despite all my years in radio, I have absolutely no palpable grasp of how sound waves, converted into electromagnetic ones, shoot through wires or zoom through the air. I can’t see how it works, and the words get in the way. And whenever the pursuit of abstraction begins to look like a game, I not only lose interest but become annoyed. I don’t like games.
I used to like a lot of games (although never athletic ones), but the passing years presented me with ever-better things to do with my time. I used to do Thomas Middleton’s acrostics whenever they appeared in the Times — something that I had occasion to remember when The Information taught me the counterintuitive but absolutely sound equation of certainty with the total lack of information. If the message can say only one thing — if there is not even the possibility of the message’s not being sent or received — then it is completly devoid of information. It was always very helpful, when solving the acrostics, to try out suffixes such as tion. (And, if that didn’t work — if, say, I had ti for sure — then ting.) But even though I’ve waded through pages about Claude Shannon and bits, I can’t quantify the amount of information that is conveyed by the difference between I and a, the only two words that can fill a single space. It’s lots, though. A passage narrated in the first person calls up a world of probabilities that distinguishes it from other kinds of prose.
(Playing games with Will will be different. I don’t in fact have anything better to do with my time than play with my grandson. I expect to have at least as much patience with games as he does.)
As for the day’s videos, I’ve watched the latter half of Morning Glory; all of Coco Before Chanel, a picture that I missed in the theatres, heaven knows why; and a strange BBC thing about Agatha Christie with Olivia Williams and Anna Massey. The last is a sort of enacted documentary, with a script taken from genuine records and from Christie’s press talk at the umpteenth anniversary of Mousetrap. I’ll watch anything with Olivia Williams in it, and I just about have.
Kathleen is going to calls tongiht, after dinner, she is bound to have more to report than I do.