14, 16, 17 June

Tuesday 14th

Writing is usually the second thing that I do every day. The first is reading the Times, which primes me by restoring a sense of the Grey Lady’s idea of the status quo. Since my idea of the status quo is quite different, the Times usually gets me going. Today, however, there was shopping that had to be done, and then bills to be paid; and, besides, I didn’t get up until half-past eleven. (I’ll let myself sleep late tomorrow, and then that will be that for jet lag.) At this point, my mind is in a material groove, piloting the ship of moi through the thousand islands that fill my stream of consciousness with practical distractions.

Returning from vacation is the best time for instituting new routines. Between the shopping and the bills, I lugged out the oversized whiteboard and wrote down all the things that I could think of doing today, in green ink, and several things that I’d like to do tomorrow, in red; and, with a black marker, a terse mention of dinner, indicating that my prep plans are up in the air. Tonight, I am going to make a sort of Stroganov, with cubes of filet mignon, mushrooms, shallots, sour cream and sage, poured over linguine. I’m going to make it up as I go along. I’ve got to remember to pull some frozen chicken pieces out of the freezer, so that I can marinate them tomorrow. You see what I mean by practical distractions; I could go on in this vein for hours. And once I had told you everything that there is to tell about the fascinating decisions that I get to make every day — for I am no longer in the closet about being a bureaucrat at heart — I could describe the improvements in the corridor, which climaxed only today in the installation of new baseboards, quieting the hitherto irritating border between the new carpet and the new wallpaper. New ceiling fixtures are yet to come, but because it is so much easier for me to look down than up, I may not even notice. I am very soothed by the baseboards.

I had hoped that the baseboards would be in place by the time we got home yesterday, but I was too tired to care that they weren’t. And happy, too: it will be a while before I go anywhere near an airport. Kathleen is thinking of an autumn jaunt to Bermuda, and I shouldn’t mind that, because the flight is not only short in duration but domestic at the New York end (US Customs has a beachhead at St George’s). And it has been a while since we’ve been. Kathleen has even threatened a return to St Croix for Thanksgiving. But I shan’t be imprisoned on a lengthy flight until the end of the year at the earliest.

I do hate to travel. I like being in other places, but even taking a taxi to Lincoln Center is a trial. Is there anything so boring as sitting in a vehicle of any kind through bumps of track and pavement and grinds of turbulence, always at the whim of someone else’s catastrophe and the ever more strangulating embrace of the security industry? I think that you have to be young not to notice the gross theft of liberty involved. Even walking isn’t a sure thing, as I’m here to testify after six years of subway-station construction right outside the front door. Nothing about life is certain, but modern motion seems to be about locking oneself into a schedule of uncertainty.

On the flight out, there was a computer glitch. I distinctly heard the captain discuss this with an IT technician, but they decided to do nothing at the time, because only the routine safety videos seemed to be affected. So we pulled out from the gate, tested the engines and whatnot, and then decided on a reboot, because it turned out that the thrust automation also wasn’t working. The pilot could have managed the plane in flight without this feature, but until it was in working order, he would not be permitted to depart. It did not take long to fix, but it did take a while for another vehicle to come along and pull us out again. We took off about an hour and a half late. Coming home, the plane was fine but the manifest was off by one passenger. This took ten minutes to clear up, but, remembering out outgoing delays, I was tearing my hair, virtually. Both flights were bumpy. Both flights were delayed, en route to the gate, by runway traffic. Sitting still in a plane anywhere but at the gate is torture for me.

Between driving out to Bay Shore (from which to ferry across to Fire Island) and back, and then the trips too and from JFK, I have seen enough of Long Island for the time being, especially the ultra-drab parts of Steinway that flank the Grand Central Parkway. How do people manage to live there? It is not a matter of poverty.

***

We stayed at the Palace Hotel, on Market Street. It’s a grand old pile that, unlike the St Francis, is in grand new shape. Plus, it is not on Union Square. Union Square used to be a center of elegance, but now it is crowded with people who are not dressed for San Francisco. (They’re not dressed for anywhere, except perhaps for one of those space stations in Wall*E.) Nice as the Palace was, though, we didn’t spend much waking time there. As soon as we were dressed, we took a taxi to the other end of town, and then, hours later, we returned via Uber. Megan and Ryan live in Outermost Sunset, a block and a half from the Great Highway, on the other side of which stretches a Pacific beach — although it does not stretch so far as it used to do, thanks, says Megan, to El Niño. The beach has been so extensively eroded that stone debris from an ancient graveyard, dumped as ballast along the shore a long time ago, once again basks in the sunlight. I spent a lot of time sitting at the kitchen table, chatting with my daughter. I took a few pictures of my grandson, standing next to Kathleen. Will comes up to her chin. Because he is quite lean, with a swimmer’s body, he doesn’t look big — except, of course, in his kindergarten class picture. There, he and a few other boys standing in the back row look like troublesome fellows who have been held back repeatedly, who perhaps ought to be in middle school by now. By himself, though, Will does not look a day older than his age, which is six-and-a-half.

Whether Will is unusually self-conscious or not, I can’t say — I rather doubt it — but his sensitivity to perceived insult brings home to me how detached my everyday speech is from literalness. Almost everything that comes out of my mouth in casual social discourse, is exaggerated, insincere, inverted, ironic, and derogatory, and yet meant to be understood as utterly friendly. Genuinely friendly, as literal friendliness would sound altogether bogus. When I was a boy, this was the tone taken by affectionate adults, especially older men. We were called monsters and devils; we couldn’t do anything right (except that we were praised whenever we actually did), we were smart alecks and mad scientists bent on blowing up the world, and the people who told us this, we knew, loved us. At least we entertained them. They did not, as their elders had wished in the olden days, to whisk children altogether out of sight. My parents had many friends who wanted to make me part of their world, even if they had no intention of entering mine. This explains, perhaps, why I feel most comfortable with a cocktail in my hand.

Maybe it was just me. It occurred to me during an after-dinner discussion at Megan’s kitchen table that I really lacked all the ordinary inputs for being a child. I did not want to do any of the things that children were supposed to want to do, and yet I could not yet do the things that I would quite soon love to do and that I have loved doing ever since. I was too little for grown-up books, and I was only a little bit better at sitting still than the other boys were. The anguish of my childhood is exemplified by my never-realized yearning for Resonance Chessman.

Oh, how I wanted to have a set of Resonance Chessman! My mother’s cousin, Kitty, who came down from Manhattanville to babysit (and who took us to fabulously inappropriate movies, such as North By Northwest and Teahouse of the August Moon when they were new), would always correct me: Renaissance chessmen. Why the word “resonance” should come more easily to my lips is a good indication of how hopelessly at sea I was, because I certainly didn’t know what it meant. Resonance Chessmen were in fact rather medieval in appearance, which shows how the Fifties could be no less confused than I. In reality, I was not an ardent chess-player. I didn’t know yet that I had no gift for chess, and no interest in developing and possessing the skills required to play chess well, but I did suspect, guiltily, that my desire for Resonance Chessmen did not involve much playing of chess. To be honest, I’d had treated them as Resonance Tchotchkes. What I really wanted was to be old enough to own a set of Resonance Chessman. And when I did become old enough, Resonance Chessmen, and even Renaissance chessmen, were no longer very high on my wish list; in fact, they weren’t on it at all. By the time I could have owned a set, I knew that Resonance Chessmen were simply tacky, that one ought to play chess with a strong and simple wooden set of orthodox chess pieces. I spent a lot of time trying to cajole someone into buying me a set of Resonance Chessmen, but no one ever did, possibly because of an interdiction from my mother, but just as possibly because my true desire leaked through the  pleading, and it was understood that ownership of a set of Resonance Chessmen would not by itself make me old enough to regard a set of Renaissance Chessmen with fastidious disgust. Childhood was an interplanetary flight through waste and dreck that simply had to be sat through.

***

I re-read the Patrick Melrose novels on Fire Island — all but the last, At Last, which was published separately at the time that the first four were bundled together. (At the bookshop in San Francisco Airport yesterday, I saw that all five have been collected in one volume, and I’m thinking about trading in what I’ve got for that.) I was reminded that Edward St Aubyn is in a class by himself as a prose magician.

Watching the Road Runner and the stylized rotundity of the dust in his wake, Patrick was reminded of the early innocent days of his drug taking, when he had thought that LSD would reveal to him something other than the tyranny of its own effects on his consciousness. (Bad News)

I don’t know how many times I’ve written about LSD, except that the number is a great deal smaller than the number of tabs swallowed, and now I see why. I could tell you that LSD was surprisingly boring, and that I was humiliated by my persistent failure to experience a terrifying hallucination. (The worst that ever happened was that the sounds of insects on a summer night became unbearably loud, and made me think of mastication rather than sexual attraction; it sounded as though gigantic bugs were about to leap from the bushes and devour me. So I had to go indoors.) But it would never, I think, have occurred to me to get to the point of LSD as well as St Aubyn does, which is that LSD is all about LSD. It is the very opposite of a gateway to insight, or to anything else. You might as well wait for a sub-par garage band to become musical. The thing is, St Aubyn has not only a way with words, but something to say that can be expressed only with the words that he invariably picks. It is arguable that this gift is not put to such glittering use in his other fictions, which can be too earnest (On the Edge) or too clever (Lost for Words). But every now and then in the Melrose novels, St Aubyn outshines his only conceivable competitor, Evelyn Waugh, for surgical virtuosity. “Stylized rotundity of the dust in his wake” is a perfect description of the pointless futility with which Wile E Coyote comes back again and again and again, hoping that, this time, it will be different. It not only never is different, but it becomes less and less interesting. It is all about dust, and nothing but dust.

The idea of taking drugs for pleasure never crossed my mind, which I suppose saved me from early destruction. Even after I accepted that enlightenment was not really on offer, I cherished LSD for its alternative consciousness, however tedious that might have been. Once I gave up on wild hallucinations, I took to challenging regular life. Could I go to a lecture, could I participate in a seminar, while tripping? Could I pass for straight? Yes! Amazingly, yes, I could! It was arduous work, and completely pointless, but I could do it, just as I could make a round trip to my dorm room, having shown up for philosophy class only to learn that a paper was due to be handed in at the end of the hour, returning with said paper in hand (and get an A for it). (Not while tripping, however; I could not write under the influence of LSD.) I was still, in my early twenties, too ignorant to know what to do with what I knew.

I keep wondering, just as I once kept taking LSD, if there was something, a voice to listen to, that would have taught me what I needed to know sooner than I learned it for myself.

***

Wednesday 16th

Some regular readers, I suppose, may have been dismayed by my rattling on, Tuesday afternoon, about Resonance Chessmen, instead of commiserating with souls made sore by the mass shooting in Orlando. I am certainly very sore. But I am frightened, too, because nothing is being done about the disgrace of accessible assault rifles. A little piece in today’s Times reports that an academic study shows that the legislative response to mass shootings is not only nil in states controlled by Democrats, but worse where Republicans rule: Republican-controlled legislatures actually follow up mass shootings with laws that make it easier to get guns. This tells me one thing, loud and clear: gun control is not the issue.

The National Rifle Association, professing to deplore mass shootings, argues that America would be safer if everyone were armed. This notion is preposterous on its face, but what keeps us from laughing at it is the suspicion that the United States has become an every-man-for-himself sort of place. We cannot count on anyone else to protect us. Police and other security services probably do protect us, far more than we know — and so, very quietly, do our civilian neighbors — but thanks to our entertainment news media, we see only instances of incompetence. Step back a bit, and it appears that government at large doesn’t work. Officials are either too wealthy from corruption to care about doing their job, or too squeezed by low tax revenues to be able to do them.

What is to be done? There seem to me to be only two “options.” The first is to wait for a beneficent leader to emerge, someone capable of rousing us all to resume the hard work of participating in a democracy. Without a committed, pluralistic drive to create a genuine government-by-the-people, the nation will continue its drift toward breakdown. Rather than wait for one leader to inspire the country as a whole, I should advocate nursing a large brood of local leaders, working in some kind of local councils or committees to improve matters close to home. This would not be easy: we should all have to learn the good manners that silence cranks and bores. The conclusions reached by councils would not be binding, but they would have to be literate and resilient. Those who found the debates tedious or taxing could vote themselves off the island, while those of us who worry that nothing can be done would have something to do.

The other option is to call a Constitutional Convention and reconfigure the United States. It seems reasonable to call this the “nuclear option,” because the decommissioned order under which we limp along today might very well be replaced by nothing but civil strife. The usefulness of this second option is to refocus our attention on the far more appealing alternative, which requires no formal changes of any kind: leadership in local councils. In the Seventies, we might have called it “consciousness-raising for citizens.” We certainly do need to regard citizenship as something more than the accumulation of trivial knowledge required to pass the US Citizenship Test.

The murders at Pulse are also a reminder that gay lives don’t quite matter, just as police shootings of (generally) young black men tell us something similar about race. The United States is still a nation that likes to see a straight white male face in the mirror. Whether this can ever change is open to question; the prejudice is one of the deepest roots of the European West to which we belong. We ought at least to be aware of that.

Do I have to do everything? Why don’t you take the initiative? Get together with a couple of friends and grapple — just for practice! — with the thorny problem of establishing protocols for the use of mobile phones in public places. Set up a Web site, and invite contributions to a position paper. Behave yourself generously, and don’t take any money from anybody. Participatory democracy is nothing if not self-funding.

***

It is possible to imagine better ways of conducting government and civil life. It is difficult to imagine how ageing could be made less burdensome to everyone, especially since we no longer believe that people with disabilities ought to stay at home and depend on such family as they have. It has been a very long time since I left my apartment for the great outdoors (or returned therefrom) without passing someone assisted by a walker. (The abundance of squalling infants simply enhances the air of hospital living.) It is not always convenient to be stuck behind someone shuffling along with a walker, but I’ll have to get one myself, eventually, if my heart holds out. I see myself on both sides of this problem.

Cathleen Schine’s new novel, They May Not Mean To, But They Do, glances at many of the indignities of old age, but it focuses on the one problem that ought to be easy to fix. Taking its title from a Philip Larkin poem which opens with the preceding line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” the novel turns the spyglass around and remembers the last line of the poem (“This Be the Verse”): “And don’t have any kids yourself.” The person being addressed with Larkin’s wisdom is Joy Bergman, an eighty-six year-old Jewish New Yorker who lives on the Upper East Side. (That is the novel’s outstanding flaw: everything about Joy screams that she lives on the Upper West Side. But unless you live on one side or the other, the distinction won’t mean very much.) Joy has two children, a son and a daughter, and she loves them to distraction. They love her, too, of course, but they mostly drive her crazy.

Schine is a social satirist who pulls her punches, producing mild but funny reads in which the familiar foibles of brainy New Yorkers are warmed over in well-written prose. In contravention of all spoiler laws, I should like to say that the final scene of They May Not Mean To is both the most characteristic and the funniest. Joy is in traffic court, which is apparently where you go if you’re ticketed by a policeman for peeing in public. Joy might very well have peed in public: she depends on Depends. But it is unlikely that a cop would pull her over, as it were. No, Joy is the “emissary” of her grandson, Ben. Ben seems to have been something of a luftmensch, although now, by the end of the book, he is studying for the LSAT and planning to go to law school — in New Orleans, where he has been a bartender for too long. It is Ben, on a visit to see his grandmother, who peed in public in such a manner as to invite official reproval.

I’m not really sure of the effectiveness, vel non, of sending your grandmother to answer charges in traffic court, but muddle is brilliantly sidestepped by a clerical error. Instead of “Ben,” the court clerk reads out “Bea.” Joy, who has been itching with discomfort at the idea that anybody might regard her as the guilty party, tries to correct the mistake.

“It’s not me,” Joy was saying. “It’s my grandson…”

And then she looked around at all the men and women whose cars did not have taillights or headlights or side-view mirrors, all the men and women who had made mistakes on their registration papers or had read a form wrong or who had forgotten to mail some paper or who’d just never gotten around to going to the garage to get the muffler fixed, and she thought, This is humanity, all these people with shining sweaty bare shoulders and Life Savers and New York Posts folded into fans and excuses and worries and troubles and fines, and here they were all together. Everyone was so kind. Everyone was so helpful. It was really very cosmopolitan. Here she was surrounded by her fellow citizens, part of them, one of them.

“Bea Harkavy,” the voice boomed. “Public urination.”

“Is that correct?” the lawyer asked Joy.

“Oh yes,” said Joy. “This is exactly where I belong.”

Things could be so much worse; the novel could be much darker. To take just one plot point, Aaron, Joy’s late husband, rammed his thriving family business into bankruptcy, and not just once. He was a charmer without much of a head for business, one of those blind optimists who really believe that, next time, things will work out. I can’t say much more about the matter, except that it happened a long time ago. Schine does not discuss it. We are spared the easily-imagined recriminations. We’re told that Joy managed to “protect” an inherited upstate house from Aaron’s creditors, and also that she salted money away in bank accounts that Aaron didn’t know about: two sentences. Quite a few more sentences remind us that Joy is just about broke. This is probably what saves her from the fate she dreads most: being placed in a home. She certainly doesn’t have the money to pay for assisted living, and it seems that her children don’t, either, although they both have nice careers.

The children are Molly and Daniel. Molly, Ben’s mother, gave up marriage to a man for companionship with a woman; worse, she moved to Los Angeles. We are told again and again that the Bergmans are a tight-knit family. The jacket copy begins, “The Bergman clan has always stuck together.” Nevertheless, Molly is in Los Angeles, breaking her mother’s heart and feeling guilty about it. It is clear, however, that these are part-time pains. Joy has plenty to keep her busy, and she talks to Molly every day. Molly is one of those New Yorkers who, having discovered sunny California, never come home. (Everything about Molly, except her sexual preference and her religion, firmly reminded me of one of Kathleen’s oldest friends.) Molly’s companion, Freddie, is the daughter of a once somewhat-well-known character actor whose hands are Roman enough to have expelled him from two homes. Daniel works for an environmental organization. Molly, we know, is an anthropologist who digs things up; I have no idea what Daniel’s actual job is, or what his training was, or why he followed his undefined career. He lives on the Lower East Side with his wife and their two daughters, Ruby and Cora.

When Daniel and Molly discuss their mother, whom they expect to fall completely apart when Aaron dies, they say ill-considered, ungenerous things; it is not hard to imagine them re-enacting the parts of Goneril and Regan. They insist that they have their mother’s best interest at heart, but in fact her condition annoys them. Their solutions are anodyne: Why not join a poetry group at the 92nd Street Y? They worry that mourning will kill her — until she runs into an old flame, and is suddenly perceived not to be mourning enough. The old flame, Karl, is a prosperous gent who was also a friend of Aaron, and pretty soon he’s proposing. Joy responds with an elegant answer that just might start a real-world trend, and I’ll save that for you to read. Molly and Daniel, however, are beside themselves with irrational hostility to Karl. They think that he’s after her money; when they remember that he’s the one with the money, they convince themselves that he just wants a nurse. Sympathizing with Joy, I wanted to wash their mouths out with soap.

But I remembered what it was like, after my mother died. It was clear that my father was not going to spend the rest of his life alone, but I felt that our family (certainly no tight-knit clan!) was being invaded by the strange women whom he dated. There was nothing strange about them at all, of course, except that they were there, and my father evidently came to the same conclusion, because in the end he married a woman whom my sister and I, and even the woman who introduced them, regarded as an adventuress. I found her to be profoundly uncongenial, and relations froze into implicit hostility when my father died, about five years later. Being nice to Florice dragged me into a new dimension of phoneyness. To say that I had major issues with my mother is an understatement, but this did not stop me from roiling with suppressed outrage on her behalf. Had she known — ! I was just about as infantile as Molly or Daniel. (And I must say that Florice took tireless good care of my father during his long decline, cleaning up no end of messes and changing sheets in the middle of the night. She was an excellent wife.)

The real problem is that grown children believe that they are supposed to know what’s best for their ageing parents. They feel that taking care of their parents is their duty, even when their parents haven’t asked for any help or behaved with serious unreliability. Rather than help out in moments of crisis (which come along at a steady clip for the elderly), children prefer to stabilize the situation, usually by forcing their parents to give up their own homes, the last thing any sane person wants to do. Children think that they Know Better.

Would Schine’s novel be better if it were darker? It would be easier to write about, perhaps. But I for one was grateful that the punches were pulled. Joy was never evicted, never incarcerated, never condemned to dependence. Her children said a lot of silly things, but nothing much came of it. The ending, as you can see, was sunny — New York sunny. While all the really bad things weren’t happening, I could enjoy the humor and the wisdom and the occasion to consider the ironic benefits of living a long life.

I flagged a wonderful paragraph to copy into my commonplace book, and I’ll share it with you.

Then she hobbled back to her apartment. There it all was, her mess, waiting, turrets and towers of mail, its banners of Post-its and crumpled tissues. It was an eclectic collection: Everything had been or was to be filed, but the names on the files had little to do with their contents and few hints for what should be added. There were multiple files labeled, for example, Urgent!!, although some were labeled URGENT, all caps, and a few Urgent! with just one exclamation point. There was a Pay Today file and a Pay Immediately file, a Miscellaneous file and a Miscellany file. There were Medical, Medicine, Health, Health Care, Health Insurance, Doctors, Doctor Bills, Medicare, and there were files by illness as well: Diabetes, Cancer/Joy, and Cancer/Aaron. Inside were flyers for Roundabout Theater and YIVO, Time Warner, DirecTV, AT&T, Verizon, and free shingles shots from CVS. There were unopened envelopes with requests for money from starving children, dogs, cats, and abandoned farm animals, newsletters from Israel and Trader Joe’s; literature from city council candidates, mayoral candidates, cemeteries, the Neptune Society, and juice fasts. Bills and tax returns, X-rays and lab reports showed up, too, here and there, as well as clippings of art reviews by Adam Gopnik from the 1980s. (181)

***

Thursday 17th

Lumbering through Jonathan Sperber’s life of Karl Marx, I’m learning nearly nothing that I didn’t already know or suspect. Without ever making a study of Marx, whose quoted words seem always to combine sarcasm and obscurity to repellent effect, I have more or less helplessly picked up the basics, namely, that Marx was a bourgeois who was never able to support his family, and that his theories about history and economics were outdated by the time of his death, in 1883. If I seem to have judged him in advance, Sperber has presented no information that would overcome my impression of a man so immature that he argued against improvements in social welfare, lest they derail or delay the “inevitable” collapse of capitalism that must necessarily precede a utopia for workers. Marx was an advocate of proletarian causes who had little but contempt for actual proletarians.

Actually, I did learn something: Marx was beset by a terrible skin disease that I didn’t know about. Sperber surmises that it was that it was the autoimmune disease hidradenitis suppurativa,

whose effects are similar to acne, but on a much larger scale — fist-sized growths, not small pimples, destruction of the outer layer of skin, not just redness and scarring. The disease is painful, disfiguring, and even today very difficult to treat.

My heart really does go out to the man: what a terrible burden! Especially for a bourgeois paterfamilias, swaddled in all those Victorian woolens! And to think that even today’s medicine might not have helped him very much! I do pity the man, but my opinion of “Karl Marx” hasn’t changed. I’m simply mystified by his posthumous influence.

At the same time, I’m reading a great deal that I don’t understand. For example, Ricardo’s “theory of differential rent”: “rent on land was equal to the difference in yield between the most fertile and the least fertile piece of land.” These lucid words roll about in my mind without making any connections. The theory seems both obvious and absurd. Sperber’s expression of an opposing theory about rent, “the rent on a piece of land was equal to the return on the capital invested in it,” seems at first to make more sense, but it soon fades into tautology; and I have no idea why this theory is labeled “absolute rent.” I smell the ancient urge to generalize about particulars: a boy’s game. The real mystery is that anybody cares about these statements. Do they say anything about the world?

As a student, I avoided the study of economy. It looked like a kind of engineering; there was no need to grasp its principles if you weren’t going to make promises about how things work. I didn’t really know what the term “political economy” meant, but I grasped the idea behind it, which is that an economy is shaped by political decisions. But you can make these decisions, I thought, without understanding the thing called “economics” itself. That’s because your decisions are based on a knowledge of what has and has not worked in the past: history. Economics predicts; history serves more modestly but reliably to avoid repeating mistakes. Economics is for dreamers and fantasists. It is, as far as I can see, a study of epicycles.

Nevertheless I have ordered a book, Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan. I have read a bit of it at Amazon, and I expect to take issue with it. For example, in his introduction, Wheelan refers to the joke that ten different economists will answer any question with ten different answers. Then he refutes the joke by insisting that all economists would agree that the shortage of housing in New York City is the consequence of rent control. This is nonsense. Perhaps it was true at one time, many decades ago. But the truth is that the shortage of housing in New York City is the consequence of a land-ownership policy (I’m speaking of small building lots) and a bureaucratic carbuncle (do they still call it “red tape”?) that together make building anything but the largest or most expensive buildings more trouble than they’re worth. So say I. But Wheelan’s book promises (on its cover) to impart the principles of economics without boring charts and graphs. It will give me a benchmark.

Until the Industrial Revolution transformed the relation of resources to markets with the wizardry of machines, there was not much point in studying economies, because you couldn’t do anything about them. Even so, the first wave of modern economists preceded the Industrial Revolution by about a generation. It is hard to say whether Smith and Condorcet developed new and powerful intellectual tools for grappling with things as they were, or whether they had an intimation of things to come. I prefer the latter suggestion, because I have come to believe, without much empirical (historical) support, that the Industrial Revolution was the answer to a question that was in the air, and not a surprise package that materialized accidentally. In either case, though, economics remains a relatively young field of study. Properly, it is a branch of the humanities, a study of human affairs that applies rigor and consistency to the problem of avoiding the determinism of the physical sciences. It does seem to have taken us two hundred years or more to let go of the dream that people are predictable machines, just very complicated. You can predict a lot of human behavior, but not enough of it to generate a “science.” And why would you want to?

You would want to if you wanted to make the world simpler, easier to understand. But “easier to understand” is an illusion, useful in solving particular, small-scale problems, perhaps, but deadly when generalized. The world is never going to be easier to understand. Only more difficult; only more manifold. The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know. But we don’t really need to understand the world in order to thrive in it; we come equipped with common sense, the ability to distinguish plausible and implausible statements. Nobody’s common sense is perfect, of course; and the guideposts to plausibility change over time. Right now, I feel, common sense is jammed by disagreement about the inherent superiority of straight white men; to put it another way, the default status of the straight white male is under broad reconsideration. But we can understand this without understanding the world. The proper study of mankind is man.

***

Yesterday afternoon, after writing here and dithering about what to do next, I hailed a taxi and lugged two heavy bags of books to the storage unit on 62nd Street. As usual, I asked the driver to take the FDR Drive. To access the FDR from 86th Street, you drive down to the end, at the allée of cherry trees in Carl Schurz Park, and turn right onto East End Avenue. When East End Avenue ends, at 79th Street, you turn left and then right, and you’re on the Drive. Ordinarily, the trip is a zip, ten minutes max, but there was a problem yesterday, and at 82nd Street and East End the taxi began to spend more time stopped than moving. Once we reached 79th Street, we moved most of the time, but very slowly. As we crept down the Drive, I remembered reading about an expansion at Rockefeller University, involving yet another installation above the Drive. There was a photo in the paper showing a large piece of prefabricated structure being swung into place by an enormous barge-borne crane. Perhaps that was what was slowing things down. But it turned out to be a serious accident, underneath New York Hospital’s Greenberg Pavilion, which is also built over the Drive. I spotted an ambulance, but I couldn’t see the cars involved. The driver — who had been telling me, in answer to a simple question about the traffic, why he hated Bill DeBlasio, and complaining that, whenever liberals are in charge, a dubious if not criminal element always pops out of New York’s woodwork (so to speak) — noted that “a taxi was involved.” It was almost immediately time to get off the Drive, at 63rd Street. When I paid and thanked the driver, he thanked me back, “for being patient with the traffic.” I ought to have thanked him again, because he was the reason for my patience. I simply dropped into a state of listening to him. Although I am no Sherlock Holmes, I’d say that he grew up in Queens, and very likely attended Catholic school, not long after I did. He spoke with what I can call only a bitter correctness. He did not ramble and he eschewed profanity. He believed that the facts, if clearly stated, would speak for themselves — and they did. When he told me about having to change cars on his subway ride home, or about crowded trains with an all but empty car, the problem in both cases being a stinking homeless person stretched out on the seats, I felt his grievance: this sort of thing oughtn’t to happen. What is to be done about homeless people? We need a committee.

At the storage unit, I remembered my plan, which was to go through the LPs that lined two shelves in the corner where I wanted to stack boxes. This would get the LPs out of the way and into boxes. I packed most of the records, but I saved too many, uncertain about Kathleen’s attachment to jazz albums that to the best of my knowledge have not been replaced by CDs (because the CDs were never issued). She will have to go through what I have set aside for keeping. There were one or two classical LPs that I couldn’t let go of. On one of them, one of the most enchanting things in all of Bach, a duet in the 78th Cantata, is performed a little differently, not by solo singers but by a chorus of women, while the through-bass is tinkled on a harpsichord, not a positif organ. This is how I first heard this music. Like so much of Bach’s choral music, it makes me think of paintings by van Eyck and the other Netherlandish masters of the Fifteenth Century. They painted such lovely angels, angels that look as though, if they could sing, they would sing Bach. I have made this association since I was a teenager, and I have always been puzzled by the Gothic or medieval mood that so much of Bach projects. A bit of the puzzle clears up when I recall reading that, in England, the Gothic never went out of style: consider Tom’s Tower at Christ Church or All Souls, both Oxford colleges. Which reminds me of something funny that I read the other day. Somebody was reviewing a new book about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, an English uprising that was duplicitously calmed by the young king, Richard II. Although the book was said to be very good, the author was chided by the reviewer for making an unnecessary and quite erroneous remark about the view of the spires of distant Westminster Abbey that the rebels and the courtiers must have shared from the East London field where they gathered for parleys. The spires of Westminster Abbey were not raised until more than three centuries later. The architect was Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), who also designed All Souls.

While I was writing yesterday, Kathleen called from Washington. She was sitting in a restaurant having lunch, and she wanted me to know that she had her phone and her wallet with her. On past trips to Washington, she has left one or the other in the train; both times, her property has been turned in at Lost and Found. The man who found her phone actually left a message on my cell phone — mine was the number most recently called — to say that he had found the phone and knew where to take it, so that I could tell Kathleen where it was when she managed to call me. Kathleen was in Washington to deliver a presentation about Exchange-Traded Funds to the Enforcement Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since Kathleen has worked on the creation and development of ETFs with most other branches of the SEC, I wondered why they couldn’t get a staffer to bring Enforcement up to speed, but perhaps it was cheaper to ask Kathleen to volunteer. It was certainly an honor. Kathleen has never worked at the SEC, and so she lacks the entrée of an alum. (It’s a matter of prestige, like clerking for a Supreme Court justice.) The problem with Kathleen is that this little paragraph is probably going to be the only announcement of the event. Not only does Kathleen fail to blow her own trumpet — she must have left it on the train.

On the phone, Kathleen was in no hurry to get off; she was waiting for a waitperson or for her lunch to arrive. I, however, was writing, and I had no news of my own. The conversation ebbed into an exchange of declarations of love. “Lots and lots and lots.” After a few volleys, I fell silent, and we soon said our goodbyes. What happened next was totally typical. As I put the phone down on the table and returned my attention to the screen, an inner voice blared a malediction: What if that’s the last time you get to talk to Kathleen? You are going to regret your hurry to get off the phone for the rest of your life! You’ll be sorry!

It wasn’t the last time. But why are we like this?

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2016 at 7:39 pm.