In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki devotes his column to the price of gasoline and its outsize effect on the economy. I read it with an odd detachment, as if I lived in some other economy. Well, I do; I live in the economy of Manhattan, which while not unrelated to the national economy isn’t the same, either. There are other cities in the United States, but none of them is like New York in having an enormous concentration of wealthy residents not far from the heart of town. Nor so many merely affluent inhabitants, either. The “city” parts of the other American cities are clusters of office buildings. We have plenty of office buildings, too, but they’re all a few blocks at most from apartment buildings where people actually live. The marginal avenues on the East and West Sides of the island are lined with shops and services — dry cleaners, nail salons, liquor stores — by the dozens. Food is sold in many different ways, from delicatessens to bodegas to vegetable stands to supermarkets. (The supermarkets are much, much smaller than their suburban counterparts.) Wherever you live in Manhattan, you will find the necessities of life on sale within walking distance. You won’t need a car. A car, in fact, will be an expensive and inconvenient albatross. Every day, I give thanks that I do not own a car. 

When I lived in Houston in the Seventies, I did not give daily thanks that I didn’t own a car; not owning a car in Houston was, as you might surmise, a royal pain. I managed, because it so happened that I rarely needed to be more than a few blocks from Westheimer Boulevard, a long thoroughfare served by a bus line. But everybody else had a car; having a car was the done thing. To say that you couldn’t do something because you didn’t have a car — well, you might as well come out and say that you were broke, improvident, poor. As indeed I was, working in classical FM radio. But at least I was spared the equally royal pain of taking care of a car, that is of paying someone else to take care of a car, at ruinous prices and on an unaccommodating timetable. My mother had a Mercedes that was always in the shop, even though it never broke down; at her level of consumption, neurosis took the place of need, and if the engine didn’t sound just right, in went the car. But my mother would have been happy to live in her car. She did live in her car. She was always driving to the other side of the county to take advantage of a special on Planter’s Dry Roasted Peanuts, horrid things. I learned about unsustainable energy use up close. 

The only habit worse than car-owning is smoking. I smoked for twenty years, and I’m glad to be done with that, too. Cigarettes are also very expensive these days, at least here in New York, where taxes have raised the price of a pack of cigarettes to something like eleven dollars. Imagine! Quite aside from health concerns, I’m delighted that I no longer smoke. Even when “everybody smoked,” plenty of people didn’t, and they minded if you did, at least in their apartments. Running out of cigarettes could be just as catastrophic as running out of gas, or at least it felt that way. And matches — to have to think about matches! Or disposable lighters that managed to dispose of themselves unexpectedly. I took up smoking in prep school, where I was desperate to send some kind of signal that I was not totally weird. Smoking, I hoped, would smooth the abrading edges of my strangeness and make me look worldly and intellectual. It was at least a bad thing to do, a noticeable vice. My other vices were all private, in that they involved not doing the things that I was supposed to do. I might not look particularly vicious, sitting there reading quietly, but in fact I was undoubtedly shirking, or at best reading the wrong book. The worst thing about reading is that it never looks as transgressive as it really is.  

The worst thing about driving a car is that you can’t read, not even the wrong book. You can be read to, of course, but as far as I’m concerned that is just not the same thing at all. In one ear and out the other, is what happens to me. When we had a weekend house in Connecticut (oh, what were we thinking?), we had a car. The drive was about seventy-five minutes long if there was no traffic. I listened to a lot of NPR. My favorite thing to listen to, though was Wallace Stevens reading “The Credences of Summer.” It’s a terrible shame that Stevens didn’t record more of this verse than he did, but “Credences” became a big hit with me, and fragments of it still float around in my brain, like aural muscae volitantes. “Fully made, fully apparent, fully found.” “Ten thousand tumblers tumbling down.”  

If I were driving these days, I’d put the time to good use with my extensive library of Teach Yourself language kits. It breaks my heart that, for all the time that I have put into them, I remain hopelessly non-fluent in Dutch, Turkish, Chinese, and even French, which I can read well enough but which I don’t understand very well when I hear it spoken. It appears likely that I will go to my grave speaking only the one language — the one language that everybody else on earth wants to speak. I do give daily thanks that I do not have to learn English; I can’t imagine how anybody picks it up. Such is my life of privilege that I don’t have to.

Elsewhere in The New Yorker, I came across the word “aotelaise,” which is how Evan Osnos renders the new Chinese word for “outlets.” How does he say this “aotelaise”? Is that a Chinese “ao,” which sounds the same as the “ou” in “outlet”? If so, it’s not how I would spell it for an English speaker. The simple fact is that you never know how anything in English is supposed to be pronounced until you know it. Which is almost but not quite as bad as never being able to get a cab after the theatre, and having to take the subway home, while all the bridge and tunnel people get in their cars and drive back to New Jersey.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.