Gotham Diary:
Imposter
3 April 2013
Why did I buy a book about the Tichbourne Claimant in January? And for the Kindle? All I can recall is that something I read or saw or heard about reminded me of this famous imposter, whom I discovered in law school, reading John Torrey Morse’s magisterial Victorian account of the Tichborne trials, Tichborne v Lushington, 1872, and Regina v Castro, 1874. “Castro” was the name used by the Claimant during his butchering days in Wagga Wagga, NSW, but the man was probably born Arthur Orton, in Wapping. The question in the case was whether Roger Charles Tichborne was lost at sea in 1854, or rescued and carried to Melbourne, where he began a new (and very different life). It is hard to imagine trying to make the Claimant’s case, for the simple reason that it could not be done without visions of the payoff of the Tichborne estate — by no means immense, but capacious enough to reward betting men — blinding one’s sense. Sadly, a search of my email accounts turns up nothing, and, as regular readers will recall, I lost a couple of notebooks this winter.
I found the book on my Kindle Paperwhite yesterday when I crept into bed after lunch. I had watched Antonioni’s L’eclisse and it had worn me out. I tuned into Richard Peña’s commentary, but learned nothing from it — perhaps I’d listened to it before. It was a pillar of scholarship, however, compared to Peter Brunette’s commentary to Blow-Up, which I watched in the evening. At least twice, Brunette voices doubts that film photographs can in fact be enlarged to yield the images that suggest to David Hemmings’s character (whose name, Thomas, is never mentioned in the film) that he has witnessed a crime. And he doesn’t get around to mentioning the soughing of the leaves in Maryon Park (which he also doesn’t name) until the photographer pays his third and last visit. This is the most beautiful thing about Blow-Up, and it always makes me sad that I don’t live in a place where it can be heard often.
L’eclisse famously begins with a long, excruciatingly dull scene between a man and a woman who have clearly exhausted themselves arguing their future all night. He wants to marry her, but she doesn’t want to marry him. She says that she doesn’t know whether she wants to marry him, but this is just a way of being nice, I think. What she does know is that she doesn’t want to cause him pain; she wishes that he would just let her go, or at least stop talking about marriage. At the other end of the picture, Alain Delon puts Vittoria (the woman, played of course by Monica Vitti) through the same drill, which is even more surprising given the young man’s obvious indisposition to settled life. (Delon, youthful as he is, goes out of his way to make Piero even more of a boy.) Why do men want to marry Vittoria? Because she’s elusive? What do they expect marriage to solve? Do they think that there will be no more long exhausting nights of talk, talk, talk?
I came away from the first viewing of L’eclisse, which happened some time during my undergraduate years, when the film was (five or six years) old, green with envy. About those two miserable people in the first scene — with nothing really to worry about! The guy (Francisco Rabal) had a great apartment, and was probably a successful architect. Monica Vitti had a great dress. Money, check! In those days, I didn’t believe that there were problems that weren’t caused by the lack of money. This conviction was bolstered by an awareness that I was never going to do anything serious about acquiring any.
I still believe that money fixes most problems. But I have learned that the second-greatest cause of life’s miseries (aside from actual organic disease, of course) is, without question, youth, and the inexperience that naturally accompanies it. Youth is all unknown unknowns, and nobody suffers more than the really smart kids, because they can’t help projecting their relatively more extensive awareness of things upon the vast blankness of their innocence, and mistaking it for something far more comprehensive than it is.
In L’eclisse, Vittoria’s real problem is that, for all her up-to-date appearance, she’s stuck in an old world of traditional gender roles. Nobody has brought her up to have a job, and doubtless her playful thoughtlessness is one of the things that endears her to men. I wonder if the new sense of authority that will have to be developed if society is to survive the coming century might not be a respect for wisdom and experience that is shaped by women, not men.
Also I am warmed by the hope that we are moving into a world that older people will understand nearly as well as their juniors. The technological warp that has twisted business and society into positions that few greybeards are capable of grasping seems to be cooling. The parents who are giving their toddlers iPads actually know how iPads work.
***
I rallied a bit yesterday, but I also took a two-hour nap in the early evening, an unheard-of thing, and I do mean unheard-of. After watching Blow-Up, I powered up the Livescribe pen. During this illness, whatever it was, and the interlude of Easter Dinner, I had neglected the Livescribe notebooks, and I’d have probably neglecting them even if I’d been in perfect health, because, inevitably, I passed from the exaltation of discovering what Evernote could do to the disappointment of learned what it couldn’t. (Emptying the dishwasher, folding the laundry, coping with Fairway &c). But I’m back on track. For years, I’ve had a rectangular wooden thing with a handle — basket? bucket? Levenger, which doesn’t offer it any more, had a fancy word — in which to place books, magazines, pens and whatnot, everything that a reader needs. It has never ever found a use. I’m not sure that it has done so now, but I am stuffing all the Livescribe notebooks into it, along with, yes, books that I’m reading, or a few of them anyway. And the pen! My Evernote kit.
The idea is to keep the Livescribe pen charged (not a problem; I can do it while I’m writing this) and using it every time I have an interesting idea. Because even the most interesting ideas will be forgotten. Age, fatigue, who knows what — short term memories with no objective prompts simply don’t survive. Not for an hour. I have boxes full of old notebooks that I never look back onto, because I no longer remember the context in which the notes were made. I really do have a hope that Evernote and the Livescribe pen will make my notes worthy of having been written. (Or prove that they’re not!)
You may ask why I don’t simply run to the computer, which is always on, to note my thoughts. The simple answer is that the computer is hostile to thought. I have never had an interesting idea at the computer, unless I was already writing about a related matter. I find it hard to think in front of computers, and that makes sense: there is far too much information on even the most rudimentary screens. I also find that I expect what I type to be more presentable than what I write by hand. Like Evernote in particular, the computer in general, however necessary, is insufficient to many of life’s tasks.
So far, in any case, Evernote has proven to be flexibly capable of organizing my handwritten notes — with a just a little help from me. A little everyday attention. I may not be at the top of my game, but it’s good to be up to that.