What is it about waiting that reduces me to low wretchedness? I agree with Pascal that most of human misery could be forestalled if people were better able to sit quietly in a room, but sitting quietly in a room waiting for a knock or a telephone call that may or may not come at any minute is a rare and pure kind of misery in itself, all the more painful for lacking any kind of objective manifestation (broken bones, severed arteries, masked gunmen). And when the sitting quietly goes on for an entire day, beyond hope of knock or call, until about 5:30, when the repairman finally shows up, and spends the next hour and a half on the floor of my kitchen, muttering quite audibly about the difficulty of the job, only to stand up and announce that, although the new motor has been installed, there is “a little piece” that he’s having a hard time with, is afraid of breaking, so, I’m sorry, our chief tech guy will come tomorrow, if anybody’s home, and get the job done — actually, I was relieved to hear it. It didn’t bother me in the least that the dishwasher hadn’t, after all that, been repaired. The waiting was over!

The worst that can happen is never as bad as waiting for the worst that can happen.

I won’t be spending today sitting quietly. I told the repairman that I would have to be out of the house until three in the afternoon. That was not a problem, he said. (I have my doubts, of course, about his power to fix appointments for his superiors.) Ray Soleil is going to help me tidy up the last bit of balcony evacuation, and, after lunch, he’ll cover for me while I run to Fairway and Gristede’s.

***

While sitting quietly, I read the second half of Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW. The conditions were not conducive to full literary appreciation, but I read avidly, as fascinated as I could be by the unfolding of Natalie Blake, one of Smith’s quartet of principals, all children of a housing estate in Northwest London, three of them strivers of varying degrees of success. Natalie’s achievement is the most spectacular, but she knocks about emptily in it until she begins, as earnestly as any drug addict, to destroy herself.

170. In drag

Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.

Natalie (née Keisha) reminded me of a character from another one of this seasons new books, Ian McEwan’s Serena Frome, from Sweet Tooth. Serena comes from near the other end of the social scale; she is a bishop’s daughter; and she is nowhere near as driven to succeed as Natalie is. The two women aren’t alike at all, except that their top-drawer educations leave curious holes in their minds. Both are untouched by the humanism in which higher education used to be grounded. It is true that this humanism was soiled by an unthinking paternalistic sexism, a rather mindless division of humanity along anatomical lines. But that, I think, was an accident; it could have been torn away and discarded. Instead, humanism itself was discarded. Serena Frome, thanks to her maths major, was never properly taught how to read a serious novel, with the result that she was incapable, as an adult, of reading her own behavior. (Sweet Tooth is essentially a novel about novels, and as wonderful as anything out of The Arabian Nights.)

Natalie Blake is a more familiar failure-in-success. She has worked her way to the top of the legal profession without ever grappling with the problem of living in the legal profession — of inhabiting success. What happens when the challenges run out, when accomplishment is achieved? Zadie Smith is not really interested in this problem — the problem of fitting human aspiration to human limitations — but her novel does a better job of presenting the issue than today’s universities do.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 9:08 am.