Reading Note:
Defiant
Judt, DeJean, Cunningham
This week, I resumed reading. I didn’t have the time for it; I didn’t wait to have the time. I just sat down on one of the love seats in the living room and read, instead of doing other things that needed doing. It was rash; it was like spending money that I didn’t have. But it was essential. Much of the time was stolen from a bad habit of resigned prudence. Sitting down to read was bold and defiant. I took notes.
¶ I finished two books, books that I’d nearly finished months ago. They were drawn from a pile of five such books; I chose them because they were the ones I was nearest to finishing. One was Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land. A lot of great stuff happens in that book toward the end. Judt has said the things that you expect him to say, but now he begins to say things that are surprising. An admiring endorsement of something that Edmund Burke said. It’s important, Judt goes on to say, for the Left to engage with history. Not with history as a mechanical process leading to right now, but history as a gathering of people who are no longer alive but whose intrigues and passions have a lot to do with why we find ourselves where we are. Now Tony Judt is one of those people who are no longer alive. While he was stalled in a final stage of ALS, not dying, his plight was horrible to think about. Trapped in an unresponsive body! I thought that dying would be a release. It may well have been one for Judt. But it wasn’t one for me. The world is a poorer place without him, dictating somehow, in a room sixty or eighty blocks south of here.
¶ The other book was a collection of essays about comfort in the Eighteenth Century. The writer, Joan DeJean, is what Agatha Christie called a “noticing sort of person,” with an enviable habit of registering details. I wish that I could push her further, though. Her work would be stronger if she were more mindful that comfort is not at all necessarily casual, and that the abyss between the carefree and the careless is unbridgeable, and that all the opposition in the world to solemnity does not unite them.
¶ This evening, I read a few chapters of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, By Nightfall. I could easily spend the rest of the night with it. The hero is a forty-something gallerist who lives with his wife in Mercer Street. “Hostile child, horrible adolescent,” Peter has grown up to be — well, not altogether unsympathetic. But the book’s New York is not my New York. It’s recognizable, even familiar in a way. But I don’t know people like Peter. There was a time when I regretted that, when I wished that I knew the people in his world. Now, I am almost glad that I don’t. I meet them at parties and make small talk and it stops there. We smile over our mutual snobbery, which has nothing to do with birth and position but which is a matter of differing ideas about what constitutes foolishness.
Interesting, that. In all those discussions of universal values and self-evident moral imperatives, nobody ever makes claims for a common sense of foolishness. One might almost suppose that the oppopsite of “foolish” is “sexy” — if it were not terribly foolish to confer upon sexiness a vitality that it altogether lacks.