Gotham Diary:
Rip
19 April 2012
The United States is populated, by and large — still — by the descendants of European men and women whose dissatisfaction with their lot impelled them to risk the dangerous crossing of a tempestuous ocean to an unknown land of dreams and opportunity. I am but a pale reflection, a degraded spinoff of these courageous forebears. I have known since my schooldays that their experiment in liberal democracy was a failure, but I have been too attached to everyday comforts to uproot myself and leave, not for a better place (there is none) but for an exile in which I should be able to say, I am not one of these people. New York City, it is true, provides the maximum protection from the American experience, but it remains, alas, an American city. I am ashamed not to have moved on.
Kathleen will read this (on her birthday, no less) and believe that it was all her fault. If she had told me about the notice, posted in the elevator at some point in the evening, long after I had gone downstairs to pick up the mail, about a water-tank cleaning that would close down the plumbing between midnight and six in the morning, then we’d have gone to bed under normal circumstances, and not with me consulting the Internet for advice about slitting my wrists. But of course it wasn’t her fault, even if I carried on as though it were. I no more expect Kathleen to keep me apprised of this building’s shambolic management’s caprices than I expect her to boil and egg for me in the morning. It’s not her fault at all; it’s mine. I’m the one who has tolerated and temporized. In the event, the water was running again within two hours; as I was sulking at the computer, I heard it gurgle up through the pipes. But that’s not what the big deal was. The big deal, which I contrive to conceal from myself day by day, is that my home is owned by dim and thoughtless people, arguably unfit for their responsibilities, and that my home is situated in a land where it’s expected that “market forces” will solve every problem eventually.
The other day, I went to a wake, and I looked at the strikingly well-preserved lady in her early nineties and said to myself, that’s the next thirty years, going from this to that. “This” is already pretty degenerate. My back is an column of unmoving bone, and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to get around without knee surgery. I’m overweight, which makes everything worse, but I know why — I read it in a book. Specifically, a book by a French gentleman who proudly resettled in this county, named Clothaire Rapaille. In his book about marketing to “the reptilian brain,” he claims that obesity, in America, is the sign of “checking out.” It is a passive protest against the ways things are. Just as my continuing to live here, instead of figuring out a way to emigrate when I was still young, was passive.
I cannot leave now. I’m bound by ties of the deepest affection for my wife, my daughter, and my grandson. I owe it to them to take care of myself and to die of natural causes. And to stay put. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. By and large, they really do make me forget where I live, so much so that the occasional obtrusive reminder is horribly shocking.