Gotham Diary:
Mixed Grill
10 June 2014
The first time the term appears, it is in connection with a woman who just might own a unique infernal device; in the alternative, she might be mad. But the second time Joshua Ferris deploys “me machine,” it’s clear that he’s referring to a smartphone. We must all adopt this usage at once, to connote phones that are used for prolonged periods of time in inappropriate places. There can be no word for those who so abuse both their phones and the other people around them.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Ferris’s new novel, is, at least at the start, convulsively funny; I haven’t laughed so hard in months. And yet I can’t say what’s funny about it — not yet — or why it’s even readable, seeing that it’s the highly vernacular monologue of a dentist, one Paul O’Rourke, who runs a business (as he puts it) just off Park Avenue. O’Rourke is the disenchanted husk of a Compleat Guy, someone who has failed to find any meaning in the world, whether because he doesn’t know how to look for it (and he doesn’t) or because he’s stuck inside himself (which he is), or both. I really oughtn’t to be talking about the novel, as I’ve only reached page 38, but talking about it is one way of putting off reading it, which I began doing at lunch yesterday. I know that, once I pick up again, I’ll never be able to put it down. That, at any rate, is the kind of novel that To Rise Again at a Decent Hour feels like now. As I have read Ferris’s two previous novels, though, I know that things can change.
Is the book funny because O’Rourke is given to a kind of hip Rabelaisian logorrhea? There must be more to it than that. “Hip Rabelaisian logorrhea” sounds intensely annoying.
***
Over the weekend, we watched the three Bourne movies, the ones that star Matt Damon.
Why do we tolerate the “national security” establishment? Some sort of intelligence operation is clearly necessary, but must we not draw the line at “operations”? To put it another way, wouldn’t it be better if the assassination of Osama bin Laden were the model for covert operations? Carried out, that is, by the military, using intelligence resources. And then promptly announced to the world. We did it.
There is no way that the CIA and the NSA, to the extent that they do more than collate information, can be defended without resorting to thoughtless. “To make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.” “To save a thousand lives, you must take a hundred lives.” Human beings are not eggs, and nothing good can be made out of their destruction. The only lives that may rightly be taken by the state are those that are freely given up by those who die in its defense. These and the many other aphorisms of ersatz realpolitik are not political statements at all, but incantations designing the abandonment of political action altogether, and the embrace of tyranny.
Such questions are made earnest by Matt Damon’s performance, which has the virtue of making the ostensibly fictional feel dreadfully actual. It is hard to imagine taking these movies, and the doubts that they give rise to, at all seriously, had the role of Jason Bourne gone, as it might have done, to Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
***
Tidying the apartment on Saturday almost came to a stop when I couldn’t find my wet rag. I work with a dry rag, for polishing, and a damp cloth, for wiping objects not made of wood. Toward the end of tidying the foyer, before moving into the blue room, I put the wet rag where I couldn’t find it. This sort of thing literally drives me crazy: I must have spent twenty minutes looking at the same few places where it might have been before “moving on” and wetting another rag. I tidied the blue room and put all the cleaning things away. The house was in apple-pie order — but the missing rag was not disclosed.
It was only yesterday, about twenty-four hours later, that I found it. I had draped it on the handle of the utility cart that I move in and out of the kitchen. And when I did find it, I remembered the little voice that had warned me against putting it there. Draped on the handle, it ceased to have anything to do with the rest of the apartment and became part of the kitchen, a room with its own ecology. Had I dumped on top of the cart, I might have found the rag right away, but in among the tongs that hand on the handle, it simple vanished. I’m really rather surprised that I found it at all.
At the same time, I’m greatly relieved, because I have a dread of throwing things away unintentionally. Just the other day, I nearly entered the garbage-chute room with the laundry. It’s for this reason that I always have my housekeys in my pocket, except when dressed for bed. Even when I have no plans for going out, the possibility of locking myself out on a trip to the laundry room is only too alarmingly vivid.
How much longer will I be able to keep the apartment looking good? Ten years? On some days, that sounds wildly optimistic.
***
Tante Hannah
Also over the weekend, I found shelf space for more than two feet of books by or about Hannah Arendt. It was high time! The stack, which began piling up in January, was becoming unstable, and it had long since become clear that Tante Hannah was not the object of any fad.
I knew that WH Auden was a friend of Arendt’s — an admirer, anyway — but I had never come across a very nice thing that he wrote about The Human Condition. I’m (obviously) not referring to his blurb on the book itself, but rather to a line from an essay (a review?) that Auden published in Encounter in 1959.
It would not be inaccurate to call The Human Condition an essay in Etymology, a re-examination of what we think we mean, what we actually mean and what we ought to mean when we use such words as nature, world, labor, work, action, private, public, social, political, etc.”
Exactly so! Except, of course, for “social,” which was more a dustbin than a concept for Arendt, as I’ve mentioned in connection with Hannah Pitkin’s The Attack of the Blob. “Etymology” is so much closer to what Arendt is up to than “philosophy.” Each term in Auden’s list (except for “social”) is easily defined and clearly but not mechanically related to the others. Together, they do not form a system for thought but rather an organized point of departure for trains of thought. What I meant when I said earlier that Paul O’Rourke (Joshua Ferriss’ dentist) could not find meaning in the world is not at all vague: he has picked up, tried out, and discarded all sorts of things that Arendt would call “worldly,” from golf to Spanish, but because he approaches each by itself and by himself, he is unable to make a connection, because he never actually enters world itself but remains isolated within his ego. He is like someone who insists upon taking the Mona Lisa home for personal, private appraisal. The moment the Mona Lisa slipped into his Brooklyn Heights flat (if it did), it would leave and be lost to the world.
Daily Blague news update: Solitude.