Is there anything more stultifying than paperwork? It’s not necessarily unpleasant or tedious — not necessarily. But it always puts a stop to the pleasing play of the mind upon all that is finest &c. The book that I’m reading, The War of the Austrian Succession, is a tad stultifying as well, with its reversals and general sense of endlessness. The battles are rarely intrinsically decisive — Hohenfriedberg was exceptional for having highly disproportionate losses among the Prussians (few) and the Austro-Saxons (many) — but instead often go to whomever holds the field at the end. (I give up: you win.) This is not the stuff of genuine victory, and no call for triumph. I learn something new in every chapter; for example, did you know that there were fourteen English colonies on the Atlantic Seaboard? Yes, and one of them, Nova Scotia, decided not to join in the Revolution, which is how we get our textbook thirteen. (It’s as if Nova Scotia went French.) Also: I had no idea, for all the reading that I’ve done about Mme de Pompadour, that the Marquis d’Argenson (not one of her chums) was so spectacularly fatuous. Incompetence doesn’t come into it. The man was a utopian noodle-head. In connection with his appointment as chief minister, Reed Browning calls Louis XV “the silliest of kings.” I bristle — but it can’t be denied. A charming man Louis may have been, but his grasp of kingship went no further than managing a family firm (and it didn’t help that half the family was in another country, Spain). In any case, I feel as stuffed with maneuvers as barrel of pork.

For some time now — six months? something like that — Kathleen’s day has become by coming into the living room for her tea and toast and Times and SAD lights. Last week, this new development was substantiated by the new table, which I tilt down every morning but which is tilted up, in the corner, every evening. Today, I added something else to the routine. When Kathleen was done with the newspaper, I opened my Museum calendar and ran through some coming events. We had a first look at the Paul Taylor schedule for March. She gave me the tea towels that she bought at Gracious Home yesterday morning, for me to send on to the owner of our Fire Island House. The towels are a thank-you gift in part, but what I really needed them for was to sweeten a box of thoroughly banal kitchen tools that I packed up by mistake. Nothing would look more rejected and nothing could be more dejecting, at least in my view. It’s terrible to open a package that contains nothing interesting! So: tea towels, carefully chosen by Kathleen to suit the owner’s colors. Now I can box everything up.

If I could go through the calendar at breakfast once a week, that would be a triumphant victory over the forces of inertia! And it’s a good thing that I finally got round to paperwork yesterday, too, because otherwise we’d have missed our first Jazz at Lincoln Center concert, tomorrow night: Toots Thielemans. Kathleen can’t wait. She is an aficianado of the mouth organ.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2012 at 10:43 am.