Dear Diary: Jerusalem
Today was not quite so focused on work. I paid the bills, for example. In theory, paying the bills should require nothing more than slipping five or six sheets of checks into the printer and pressing a button. In theory, I open each bill when it arrives and type in the amount due, in Quicken. In practice — well, there is no practice, but we’re moving in the right direction. Last month, practice approximated theory very closely. This month, not so much. When I sat down with the stack of envelopes this afternoon, only two of them had been opened — the two that always arrive first. Excelsior!
(If you’re thinking of recommending something called “electronic payments,” don’t. Ghastly experience has taught me that I am too old a dog to remember to open virtual envelopes.)
Having paid the bills, and with dinner completely under control — once again, Kathleen named a time and a dish (and, once again, it came to pass) — I thought that I might work on some Portico pages, and this turned out to be interesting. That’s Chinese for “a bad idea.” Meaning to add one line — just one line! — to a draft that I wrote yesterday, I realized that I’d altogether missed the point of the story that I was writing about. Yikes! As for the other page, the one that I had to write from scratch, it was a dog’s breakfast. Happily, the virtue of having paid the bills cast a rosy glow over these disappointments. (Not to mention that hot rush of intaken breath, occasioned by grasping the wisdom of not adopting a contrarian position vis-à -vis the New Yorker‘s fiction editor.)
Before I paid the bills, I caught up with my online reading — which is to say that I read the latest entry at SORE AFRAID. Eric Patton writes about his recent (third) trip to Jerusalem. Among other things, he and his friend Asaph visited the Holocaust Museum.
We took an English tour, and the guide — a middle-aged woman with an oddly cheerful and eccentric manner about her — spoke into a microphone that transmitted a signal to headphones worn by everyone in our group. As she led us through the exhibits, she didn’t really look at us as she spoke; she just talked into the air. I understand that there is no universally accepted theory for why the Holocaust happened, but our guide kept throwing out odd bits of information that only made the terrible events even more baffling: “Hitler’s mother was very nice!” “Hitler had barely ever met a Jew growing up!” “The Nazis were not initially elected because of their anti-Jewish views!” “There were almost no religious Jews in Germany!” Do these things just suddenly happen, out of nowhere? I wondered. That was the implication of our tour guide. Everything can suddenly change and then the most horrifying atrocities will be committed by neighbors against their neighbors. It is a frightening thought.
The genius of this paragraph is that the horrible uncertainty that’s explicitly stated at its end infuses it from the start, beginning with “oddly cheerful and eccentric manner,” and steeping thereafter. That the passage is also funny only tightens the screws. At the end of the entry, I was almost weeping. I felt that my day had changed somehow.
(And yet, as Eric himself certainly knows [he has been!], the suddenness of neighborly atrocity is a hallmark of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, over and over again, after the death of Marshal Tito and the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
My day had, specifically, changed with regard to my literary scruples: if I was less fastidious about the stories that I was writing about, I was much more fasticious about my own pronouncements. And it had become the sort of day when paying the bills is a lighthearted sort of pastime.