Gotham Diary:
Another &c
20 May 2014
Morning: Ray Soleil and I are in the middle of a project that got out of hand yesterday. The original plan was to organize and index the books on a certain bookshelf — one bookshelf in a large bookcase. But the moment we began, I saw that we should have to take on two bookshelves. These shelves are deep enough to hold three rows of books, and one of them is fairly low, meaning that I can access the books in the back only with a good deal of inconvenient excavation. Deciding which books belong in the back involves not asking, but being aware of the question, why I don’t just give them away. In the event, I was unable to fill the back row of either bookshelf, and I did decide to give a surprising number of books away. (Including Carl Jung’s Psyche and Symbol: is this not simply eyewash?)
Because most of the books on these two shelves were too old to have barcodes — many lacked ISBNs altogether — and they had to be indexed manually, the going was slow. By dinner time, the bookshelf that was the original target had yet to take its first two rows. So Ray will come back this morning, and we’ll get on with it.
***
Over the weekend, I received a one-sentence email from a friend: “I am not reading another dailyblague page until you get over this obsession with Hannah Arendt.” There! That’s the last time you’ll see the great thinker’s name in the regular text of an entry here. She will henceforth only be referred to in notes at the bottom of the page, each one labeled Tante Hannah.
I was not, of course, surprised by the complaint; I have been waiting for it. I’m sure that many readers have simply dropped me, unwilling to endure the protraction of “this obsession.” To me, it has been a combination of back-to-school and rehab. What I’m learning is not so much what a certain person thought about this and that but an ability to think more boldly and more rigorously. The rehab part takes place here, where I “share” the exhaustion of the training, and gossip about the teacher. That will continue, but only beneath a clearly-marked caesura.
It is still safe, I assume, to mention James Brooks, the conservative-ish Times columnist whose pieces are often dangerously alluring. Brooks is an adept at the calculated omission. Referrring, in today’s column, to a book by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, he does not mention the authors’ connections to The Economist, a periodical whose sedulous propagation of a distinctly paleolithic assessment of corporate business structure they captured in an earlier collaboration called The Company. This little book does a fine job of describing the burgeoning corporation of 1860, but the complications of today’s corporations, almost all of them the side-effects of elephantiasis, go unmentioned. The fact is, the modern corporation is too big and confused not to be ruled by anyone but an opportunistic manager. Today’s board members are not the men of affairs of bygone days, but fellow opportunists. And if you want to know how these men and women think, don’t read The Economist! Read Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods.
Wooldridge and Micklethwait have a new book, with a silly name, that’s apparently about the “Guardian state.” Think Singapore. Think South Korea. Think Confucius — not the actual, historical Confucius, but the stuffed idol beloved of Asian disciplinarians. Brooks dances his usual polite two-step, between sizing up the advantages and the drawbacks of the Guardian state, and sighing that Western democracy is going to hell in a handbasket.
The events of the past several years have exposed democracy’s structural flaws. Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning. Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for. The system of checks and balances can slide into paralysis, as more interest groups acquire veto power over legislation.
You can’t argue with this. But everything changes if you change voters by giving them more to do. This is another way of saying that democracy cannot rest on a foundation of mere voters, who will too often barter their votes for personal rewards. Voters need to have skin in the game, as they say; the Founders were certainly aware of this, even if their reliance on state franchise restrictions (to property owners) was somewhat complacent. The moment that new states in the Midwest began offering universal suffrage to all male residents — a move functionally identical to giving away toasters to new-account openers — the balance between benefits and burdens, the metabolism of democracy — was knocked out of whack. Direct election of senators and the president made things even worse. Mere voters want a great deal more than “more government services.” They inevitably demand the right to be stupid.
***
Evening: Who’s talking stupid? I can barely spell my name. Remember the two shelves that Ray Soleil and I were going to work on? Well, it made no sense to stop at two, so we did all four. Deciding what to put where was every bit as draining as getting in and out of my chair every two seconds and typing ISBN numbers from books published prior to bar codes. Ray, of course, did all the heavy lifting.
The last time we worked on the library — or perhaps it was the time before that — Ray and I cleared out a bookcase that was full of books about music, the movies, and the other arts, including poetry and cooking. (The poetry books were books full of poems, not books about poetry.) Then we stuffed it full of fiction, beautifully arranged. All the art books went into the shelves vacated by the fiction, but they were sorted only to fit the differing heights of the individual shelves, and they weren’t indexed at all. I had no idea where anything was in this new (non-) arrangement — not until today. Now I know. At the same time, it is also true that I know nothing, because my brain is on Empty.
The curious thing is that there weren’t enough books to fill the shelves, according to the new scheme. I mentioned the hard-to-reach third rows at the back earlier, but I had trouble with the middle rows as well. I had to cannibalize another bookcase for contributions, one that has never been organized at all. It used to stand in the bedroom, where it housed Kathleen’s collection of Oz books and ripping yarns illustrated by NC Wyeth. Upon its migration to the blue room, it became a dumping ground. It’s the easiest bookcase to access, and I am always setting up tray tables alongside it and pulling down books to see what’s behind what. After today’s project, the bookcase is just a dump, with books stuffed in every which way, however they’ll fit. I’ll deal with it tomorrow; tomorrow is another &c.
One of the rows — B4F (the front row of the fourth shelf down in the B range) — holds books that arc from Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (a book that I shall never, ever read, but: what a title!) to Mircea Eliade’s Myth and Realty. As we worked, we fell into the habit of calling this the “God” shelf. Because there was so much extra room, Jung got reprieved.
Wouldn’t you really rather hear about —
Tante Hannah?