Gotham Diary:
State of In A State
27 January 2015
A bit of excitement here. How much of it is warranted, and how much is pseudo-apocalyptic? You would think that there has never been a blizzard before. (I blame Twitter, which has made emergencies and disasters better than sex.) It is, however, definitely a blizzard. I like nothing better than a nice snowfall. But the winds are not nice at all. I’m glad that Kathleen is in Florida, and not due to come home until all this is over.
I ran a round of errands — well, two. I had to go to our new Duane Reade. The branch has been there for years, just down the street, but there was also one right here, across Second Avenue, that relocated to a little hole in the wall when the subway station construction got underway. It seemed to be intended to hold onto the Second Avenue customers, but management must have decided to consolidate rather than await the end of construction. So our prescriptions were moved to First Avenue, which I had visited only once before, to pick up a small stash of Lunesta, made available, somewhat contrary to company regulations, by an agreement between the two pharmacists. Odd as that was, today’s return felt even more reminiscent of The Bourne Legacy.
I stopped off at the bank and then decided to do my shopping at Agata & Valentina before lunch, rather than after, to get it out of the way. I’m not sure what would have been left for me to buy had I waited. Half of the trays in the butcher department were empty. The lines were long, but not unprecedentedly, and I got everything that I wanted except for veal stew meat. I had to settle for beef; I’ll make a variation, depending on what I have, of carbonnades à la flamande. By the time I walked across 79th Street to the Hi-Life for lunch, the weather was really unpleasant.
So I decided to give Uber a try — a try in trying circumstances. Notwithstanding the short distance, I disliked the prospect of lugging groceries (including a whole chicken) seven blocks in the raw elements. And I was curious to see, frankly, if Uber would work. I’m so conditioned to the impossibility of getting a taxi that I try not to expose myself to needing one at difficult times. Although I saw more than a few empty cabs coast by while I had my lunch, I wouldn’t dream of counting on one when I needed it. So I got out the cell phone and pressed the appropriate buttons. I was told up front that the rate would be 2.8 times higher than normal, and that the ride would cost at least $22.48. That’s exactly what it did cost. The only hitch was that I settled for the GPS guess at my location, which was across the street. Ordinarily not a problem, but that block of Second Avenue is bisected by subway construction fuss — the emergency stairs, has always been my guess. So I waited and waited and so did the driver, until he finally called and I ran across the street, against the light at 78th Street but holding up my arm in an obnoxious manner. In the car, I heard all the latest news about road and public transportation closings. The newscasters sounded like strung-out hyenas. O for the Beeb.
(I had tried to change the pickup address, but it had gone through as my destination address. I gave the driver five stars, but really to have deserved them he ought to have realized what the address change was all about. Perhaps he had already turned left onto Second when the notice came through, and it was too late.)
I went out again, this time to pick up the prescriptions at Duane Reade, even though I didn’t really need them yet, and to stop in at Gristede’s for emergency quality-of-life supplies. (Lays Classic Potato Chips and Triscuits.) For some reason, that Gristede’s has always stocked Belgian beers, in their large, expensive bottles, so I bought a bottle of Chimay for the beef stew. Then I had to stand on line for fifteen minutes, without any kind of carrier or cart. By now I had accumulated some ice cream, and I feared that it must be melting. But I managed to get home without further bother.
OMG! I’ll bet the package room/dry cleaner downstairs would be closing early! This thought hit me when I read that the Post Office closed early today and wouldn’t reopen until Wednesday. Sure that Jerri’s would also be closed tomorrow, I swept everything up and got it downstairs just in time — well, at a minute to five. I don’t think that they were closing early.
***
I propose that we look at the past again, because it matters, and because it has so often been dealt with badly. I mean the past as a phenomenon has been dealt with badly. We have taken too high a hand with it. By definition it is all the evidence we have about ourselves, to the extent that it is recoverable and interpretable, so surely its complexities should be scrupulously preserved. Evidence is always construed, and it is always liable to be misconstrued no matter how much care is exercised in collecting and evaluating it. At best, our understanding of any historical moment is significantly wrong, and this should come as no surprise, since we have little grasp of any present moment. The present is elusive for the same reason as is the past. There are no true boundaries around it, no limit to the number of factors at work on it.
Thus Marilynne Robinson, in the Introduction to her essay collection, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. (4-5). It strikes me as an eloquent definition of what Hannah Arendt means by “the world” in terms of the human condition — and I couldn’t care less whether Arendt would agree. Like Robinson’s history, Arendt’s world is a human creation, nothing more and nothing less. Very grossly, it might still profitably be understood as everything that materially exists on the day of your birth. Everything from art to archives, plus everything that everybody knows. This last quantity changes the most over a lifetime, as older generations die off and take much of their experience with them. Everything that exists has a history, more or less well-known. Sometimes, as Robinson says, so little well-known as to be almost completely misunderstood. She goes on, in the Introduction, to demonstrate for how long and to what grievous extent historians have been misrepresenting John Calvin — whom everybody claims to understand but whom nobody has bothered to read. Ditto Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx. In the first essay proper, “Darwinism,” she shows how Darwin has benefited from the misreading of his work, which, in such late books as The Descent of Man, is ludicrously and unscientifically racist.
History can’t be abandoned to the historians, even if, or perhaps especially because, they make up the rules.