It’s quite a bit warmer today, with intermittent sun poking through a threatening storm. The building’s air conditioning was turned on several days ago, before, for the first time in my memory, it was actually needed. I’ve got it on now, with the balcony door open, and it’s not unpleasant here in the corner, from which I can see everything even though, once I’m writing, I look at nothing. 

Shortly after she left for work, Kathleen called to tell me that José, the one doorman who has been here longer than we have, would be wanting to make an appointment with me when I eventually went downstairs. The building is changing the circuit breaker boxes in each apartment, and is scheduling two-hour blocks to do the work, during which time of course there will be no electricity in the rooms. No big deal for most people, really, but I want to be sure that all of the electronics are offline beforehand. This includes a lot of units that I don’t ordinarily touch, such as WiFi boosters and the NAS drive on which my iTunes and Quicken files are backed up. I’ve contacted Jay, the god of tech, and he has supplied me with what will make a useful checklist. So I ought to be all right. Unlike a real power outage, the replacement procedure won’t interrupt the water supply, so the inconvenience of sitting here while the box is changed won’t be too tedious. I say that now, now that I have scheduled an appointment for next week. My reaction to Kathleen’s news this morning was an urge to throw up. The idea of any sort of change was completely insupportable, and last year, when Ray Soleil installed the halogen ceiling fixture in what I now call the gallery, the on/off killed the modem. True, the modem dated back to Stonehenge — but no modem was an unthinkable predicament, even with my handy MiFi cards. 

Once I’d done a modicum of blogwork, I gathered up my housekeys and went to the Post Office. I had envelopes to mail to family members, containing sets of the postcards that I’d recently had made of photos from Will’s second trip to the Museum. I made up the envelopes last night, and addressed the remaining cards to a variety of friends, generally excluding Kathleen’s old friends, who will have to wait for the next set of postcards, ordered before I went to bed, which feature two images of Will and Kathleen looking at knightly armor. Moo, the outfit that makes the cards, has been amazing; I may have last night’s order early next week.

Of the six images in the last set of postcards, three are very dear to me and one is the standout favorite. I decided to hold on to an extra copy of this postcard, just in case. This morning, just-in-case donged in my brain. I realized that I wanted to send it to my friend JR in Paris — it was the very one that I wanted him to have. But where was his address? He had written it down in a notebook on his last visit. That sounds pretty hopeless, I know, but I had a fairly good idea of which notebook I’d had him use, and it turned out that I was right. So I printed up a label (thus entering the address into a Dymo file), pasted it on the card, and wrote “Greetings from Gotham” alongside. At the Post Office, I learned that the tarriff for sending postcards overseas is 98¢, so I bought a sheet of 98¢ stamps. As for the favorite image, I’m thinking of having Moo make it up into notecards. 

Like the Venetophiles in Judith Martin’s No Vulgar Hotel, anxious to distinguish themselves from “tourists” even though that’s precisely what they are, too, I’m uneasy about all this personalized stationery, which I love unreservedly but am not so sure that I would approve of on the receiving end. Moo, as I say, does a great job of producing a quality product at a reasonable price (and in no time at all). I, I like to think, take reasonably interesting photographs. And Will is of course the world’s first perfect grandchild, and an elf in front of the camera to boot. So I’m not crazy, am I? Oh, it’s no use; I know that Kant would not approve. 

My uneasiness is actually a highly refained sentiment that I owe to many attentive readings of Jane Austen’s Emma. In A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, William Deresiewicz recounts his mounting horror at discerning the similiarities between himself, if he must be absolutely honest, and Austen’s heroine. Good reader that he was, he recoiled from the novel’s thunderclap at Box Hill, where Emma airly and inexcusably insults Miss Bates, with a flinch of self-recognition. 

Emma’s cruelty , which I was so quick to criticize, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen’s ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to ahve. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I wdould have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn’t deplore Emma’s disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.

I read the first chapter of Deresiewicz’s literary memoir, which alternates between appreciations of Austen’s life and work and recollections of his own, with the most complete interest possible; I could not have been a less disinterested reader. I, too, had — have — grown up in Jane Austen’s tutelage. When I was young and unwilling to understand the point of good manners, I chafed at what seemed to be her insistence upon respectability, but I always knew that she was fundamentally right about things. I read her at first for her wit. Unlike Deresiewicz, I didn’t dislike Emma at all; I thought that she was a role model. How I should have like tobe rich and in charge! When Emma’s schemes fell through, I held others accountable. I blamed Mr Knightley for being such a sourpuss. I blamed Harriet for letting Emma down. I didn’t even bother to blame Mr Elton for anything; he was too hopeless, and too richly deserved Mrs E. I agreed with Mr Woodhouse on the subject of Emma’s perfection. Until, of course, that picnic at Box Hill. When Miss Bates sighs that she will have no trouble saying three very dull things — one of the options offered by the naughty game that Frank Churchill has proposed to the party — Emma can’t resist making explicit a concern that she has no doubt is universally acknowledged in Highbury. Foreseeing three very dull paragraphs, she obliges Miss Bates to be brief, and serve up her dull items at once. This is very terrible, but the first time I read the novel, I agreed with Emma, when she tries to defend herself against Mr Knightley’s wrath. “It was not so very bad. I daresay she did not understand me.” But then Mr Knightley lowers the boom.

She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if she live to old age must probably sink more. her situation should secure your compassion. it was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour — to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, hunble her — and before her niece, too — and before others, many of whom (certainly some) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her. 

My cheeks fairly smarted. And they still do, every time I read the passage, because I was a lot more like Emma than William Deresiewicz.

More anon…

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.