The weather warms by inches. It has ceased to be too cold to spend more than a minute on the balcony, and I have straightened things up out there. If it were warmer, I’d clean it up as well, so that we could sit out there in comfort. That will happen in due course. For the moment, it’s enough that the balcony doesn’t look like a dump — which it did, for most of the winter. If in doubt, put it out(side) — that was our policy. It must have been a dispiriting spectacle for our neighbors across the street. I hope that, what with our just having moved in and the frigid air &c, they haven’t minded too much. We also hope that they won’t notice, when the weather turns balmy and we can sit on the balcony in the dark, that we’ll be going into full rear-window mode, spying on everything that we can see through their windows. (Technical note: all the windows that are visible from that end of our apartment face front.) The building across the street, which is older than ours, has fire escapes, despite its size, but no balconies. So our neighbors won’t be sitting outside in the dark spying on us while we’re spying on them. Awkwardness averted.

***

The quiet weekend was clouded by sniffles that intimated colds, either past or to come, and by two pieces, one in the New York Review of Books, one in the London, concerning the third phase of the Industrial Revolution. The first phase introduced steam-powered factories and railroads. The second phase brought us the modern conveniences (electricity, telephones, and indoor plumbing). In the third phase, the capitalists will finally attain their holy grail, which is zero human employment. Robots are about to replace us all, where they haven’t done so already. In the London Review of Books, John Lanchester, a novelist who seems to have given up fiction in order to write about economic dislocations that are stranger than fiction, tells us about robots that are both designed by robots and capable of repairing themselves. If these marvels have not quite yet been realized, it won’t be long before they take their place beside drones that, for the moment, require remote human pilots, but that any day may graduate to the status of autonomous mobile weapons. In the New York Review, Sue Halpern critiques a rather sanctimonious open letter, signed by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among others, that calls upon AI developers to bear human consequences in mind when they develop their projects. Halpern and Lanchester are both perfectly aware that nothing — under current socio-economic arrangements — is going to prevent capitalists from developing any and all machinery capable of replacing human labor, no matter how dangerous, and no matter how destructive to the social fabric.

The only question is whether the political will to resist these developments can be brought to bear before it has been so fueled by toxic grievance and resentment that it is incapable of moderation. Forget “capitalism” as a system; the deployment of hefty capital investments is an essential part of economic life. Who is to own, and who is to direct, this capital? We have seen enough to know that governments are even worse than plutocrats — just as craven but vastly less competent. We also know that small businesses, which require capital investments, too (if rather modest ones), function better if they are operator-owned. I would venture to add that small-business owners would be more inclined to provide their human employees with robotic tools than to replace their human being altogether. And I would suggest further that such robotic tools would be best designed, or at least perfected, by cooperatives or not-for-profit organizations funded by small-business owners — and not, that is, by large mass-producers.

There I go again, sketching ideas on the back of an envelope. What good does that do? Well, I may say something that inspires someone else to think of something not only better but also more effective.

Optimism wilts, however, whenever I consider the social scene in which something better and more effective would have to be implemented. The last paragraph of Sue Halpern’s piece is enough to chill any hope.

We live in a technophilic age. We love our digital devices and all that they can do for us. We celebrate our Internet billionaires: they show us the way and deliver us to our destiny. We have President Obama, who established the National Robotics Initiative to develop the “next generation of robotics, to advance the capability and usability of such systems and artifacts, and to encourage existing and new communities to focus on innovative application areas.” Even so, it is naive to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position, to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Government has too many constituent parts that have their own, sometimes competing, visions of the technological future. Business, of course, is self-interested and resists regulation. We, the people, are on our own here—though if the AI developers have their way, not for long.

The problem is not business or government or the National Robotics Institute so naively established by the President. The problem is “we.” If it is true that we live in a technophilic age, that does not necessarily mean that we are technophiles. It does not seem to me that anyone is terribly mature about what “our digital devices” “can do for us.” The smartphone, the top device of the day, reminds me of Hollywood: it’s high school with money. The smartphone is an adolescent toy that permits users to play games and to exchange gossip. (The Apple Watch will open a gym wing, accessing all sorts of physical data that ought to be of no concern to healthy young people.) Sure, I have one. I use it as a phone, and to send the occasional text (usually telling someone where I am and when I’ll get to where I’m going). I check the weather, and I practice Mandarin character recognition. I take the odd photograph and post it at Facebook. At the end of the day, though, my battery is still 90% charged. I don’t read email on it, nor do I see what other people are up to at Facebook. I don’t look up movies on IMDb or search Wikipedia for information. These are things that I do at my desk, where serious thought is unlikely to be disturbed — and I am much less likely to post a fatuous comment at Facebook. It’s true that I’m having a hard time building the habit of registering questions that occur to me throughout the day, whenever I am not at my desk, on an iPhone Evernote. But I’m working on it.

In another NYRB review, this one of William Gibson’s new novel, I learned that it is already the case that, according to reviewer Lagaya Mishan, “people have hired stand-ins to play the tedious early rounds of games as a shortcut to higher levels.” (Ew!) How long before those stand-ins are replaced by robots?

Where to begin. I was going to sketch the current state of my thinking about “the inner life.” And I shall, presently. On the way to the computer, however — at lunch, to be exact — I read the Folio essay in the new issue of Harper’s. (April 2015) It’s a piece by Fenton Johnson, “Going It Alone: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude.” What with the thoughts already running through my mind, my reading of “Going It Alone” was something of a train wreck. I found myself in a sea of paradox and confusion. There: the train just sank to the bottom. Let’s swallow a paradox or two.

Isn’t spirituality something that ought never to be mentioned? Never preached or written about, or lovingly described in ecstatic poetry? It’s not that spirituality is private (although it is), but rather that the speaking, writing self dissolves in the experience. There is no ego capable of framing a report. Indeed, much writing about spirituality announces that very conclusion. Words cannot express or capture, so we’re told, the measure of spiritual life. All that can be discussed is a sort of hangover, an afterimage. Or perhaps some sort of koan.

Here’s another. Writing of the resolution to lead a celibate life, Fenton Johnson says, “I salute the courage of those who make such declarations in public, but I admire more deeply those who honor their vows in the solitude of their hearts.” Where does that leave the writer whose subject is the experience of celibacy?

What confuses me is the nature of Johnson’s intended reader. Who is he talking to? In our society, the solitary, celibate life is available to everybody who wants it, but Johnson’s solitaries don’t just pass the time in quiet rooms or spacious deserts. No: they write. Sometimes they paint (Cézanne); sometimes they preach (Jesus); but, mostly, they write. Now, it doesn’t take an essay such as this to inform us that writing, serious writing, well-packed with thought, requires extensive solitude. Everybody who has ever written a novel worth reading, for example, has spent a lot of time alone, or, in the cases of Jane Austen, Louis Auchincloss, and others, tuned out. My dear Kathleen has the gift of creating utter solitude wherever and whenever she needs to draft a document. Or when she wants to read a book. She will not hear music that happens to be playing in the same room. A video will not distract her. She is temporarily unaware of her body. I myself, in complete contrast, am helplessly responsive to the the slightest disturbances. Libraries have never been good places for me because, by their very nature, they make no provision for actual solitude. I require strict radio silence — voluntary solitary confinement. And I’m habituated to it. I need to be alone a great deal. The careful reader will quickly grasp that I can be alone when Kathleen is around because she isn’t around. Except when she wants to be, which is, I can happily say, not quite as often as I’d like.

I gather that none of the claims that I have made about my wife or myself would tempt Johnson into regarding us as living solitary lives. They are claims that could probably be made by most readers and nearly all writers. Celibate writers are rare. Great as my esteem for Henry James may be, I cannot allow the suggestion that his celibacy puts him in a higher heaven of writers. (On the contrary: James’s writing draws much of its power from sublimated sexuality. I think it safe to say that James was sexually troubled, and I would argue that the act of writing served as his sedative.) We’ll agree with Johnson that there have been some fantastic celibate writers. The question is how incidental this celibacy is to the writing.

I began by asking about spirituality because Johnson’s theme seems to be to praise the consecration of life to something other than love and companionship, but not just any something other — no. The consecration of life to meditation and then to writing all about it. Johnson praises James and his other writers for giving us the fruits of their solitude. What they wrote is “their gift to us, their spiritual children,” Johnson writes, and by “us,” he makes it clear that he means solitaries like himself. Is he trying to say that those of us who don’t live solitary lives can’t appreciate Henry James fully?

I am not going to try to straighten any of this out. I enjoyed reading “Going It Alone,” and could not more emphatically agree with Johnson about the importance of solitude in our mindlessly overconnected lives. But I could not grasp, and in fact probably refuse to grasp, what it might mean “to define, explore, and complete the self by turning inward rather than looking outward. “

***

Here is my thinking about the inner life: it is vital, but uninteresting. Essentially uninteresting. I must somehow conduct an inner life, simply to know what I’m working with here, but I don’t think that I can make it interesting to you. It is not very interesting to me, either, which is why habits are so important. I used to believe that habits were regrettable, because they were robotic. You’re not really living if you’re doing something habitual. But I have since learned that what goes on in the bathroom, for example, is of no real interest at all — unless it’s alarming, whereupon we act upon that alarm by calling the doctor; and even then, it is of interest only to us, our loved ones, and the doctor. What goes on in the bathroom is often vital, and, from the standpoint of society, it is vital that it go on in the bathroom. I am not going to argue that what goes in the bathroom could never be transformed into interesting reading matter, but I think we can agree that the subject is not going to become common anytime soon. My point is that the bathroom is a site of highly habitual behavior. It is not “really living,” but you’d be dead otherwise.

Thinking is also an act of the inner life, but it is no more interesting to others than what goes on in the bathroom. It is not thinking that is interesting. (Unless you’re Mozart.) It is what thinking inspires you to do. It’s what you say, or write, or commit to smoke signals, that is interesting. Or that might be interesting. Interesting things happen, always and everywhere and only, between people. Some of whom — note to literary solitaries here — are dead.

More to come. Meanwhile,

Bon weekend à tous!

If Paul Taylor is at Lincoln Center, it must be spring.

First, a bit of math. What is the value of N, where N represents the number of New York seasons of performances by the Paul Taylor Dance Company that Kathleen and I have shown up for, including the current one? It is not a very high number, unfortunately — to enjoy myself thoroughly, I have to stamp down a demon who barks What took you so long? first. But it is high enough for one’s merely mortal mind to equate it with “forever.”

N turns out to be seven, as I thought. I figured that we had to have seen the Company for at least three seasons at City Center, on 55th Street, and Kathleen read in last night’s program that the Company moved to Lincoln Center in 2012, making this their fourth there. It occurred to me that the Web site that you are currently reading would allow me to determine the matter. According to this Web site, there is no mention of Paul Taylor prior to 2010. It took a few minutes, however, to remember that there is no mention of anything prior to 2010 on this Web site, because that it when it was inaugurated. Looking into its predecessor (which is still out there, if neglected), I found, yes indeed, an account dating from 2009.

In that earliest related entry, I talk about a ticket-buying spree that took place prior to the performance. Kathleen and I visited the box offices of several Broadway theatres and got seats for several shows, one of which closed before we could use them (a revival of Guys and Dolls), and one of which was a dud (The Philanthropist). About the Paul Taylor dances I said just about nothing. “Delightful,” I said. In 2010, I said even less, because I was too wrapped up in my newborn grandson. These silences don’t surprise me. For a long time, I had no idea what was going on in any given Paul Taylor dance. I just knew that I liked them, and Kathleen made it very clear that she liked them. So we went back, some seasons more often than others. We almost missed last season entirely, and it would have been quite understandable if we missed this one. But we are not going to miss this one, because one late night in January, after Kathleen had gone to sleep, I sat down at the computer and did what you’re never supposed to do after a couple of glasses of wine. I bought a boatload of tickets. To five performances, no less. To save money, I took seats on the side of the front row, but the tickets added up, and I felt quite guilty about the impulsive expense the next morning. I felt even worse when I realized that we might be unable to attend one or more of the shows, owing to Kathleen’s commitment to attend a Bitcoin event at Stanford at the end of March.

The tickets duly arrived by mail, all on the same day, and they sat unopened for weeks. I finally opened them a few days ago, and good thing, too, because, shortly afterward, Kathleen was finally booking our flights to San Francisco, and if I hadn’t put in my two cents, we’d have missed three shows instead of just one. Phew. Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil will take our tickets for the Saturday evening on which we’ll get to Palo Alto.

Last night, we discovered that seats to the side of the front row are perfect. I shouldn’t like to be any farther back. Row A is ideally distanced from the dancers — by the orchestra pit. (For there is live music once again at Paul Taylor.) This is one of the first things that I learned about Paul Taylor dances: you ought to be close enough to talk to them. Not because you’re going to do any such thing, but because you’re going to want to read all the expressions that accompany conversation. Unlike most choreographers, Paul Taylor does not work from the neck down. In the middle of a new dance that we saw last night, Sea Lark (set to Poulenc’s music for another ballet, Les Biches), two dancers stood upstage, perfectly still but for their rolling eyes. You can’t really see that from Row R.

Row R is fine for classical ballet. You don’t hear the stomping (not that Paul Taylor’s dancers were very audible in the first row), and all the dancers in the corps de ballet look just alike, a lovely flock of indistinguishable swans. Classical ballet can be thrilling, because, like almost everything developed in the Nineteenth Century, it breathes a dream of mechanical precision. At its best, classical ballet is perfectly coordinated.

It took me a long time to figure out that what interests Paul Taylor is salvaging the moves of classical ballet (and combining them with other moves) while eliminating the exactitude. The coordination is studiedly imperfect. This is not the result of careless or sloppy dancing. It is the inevitable consequence of Taylor’s choice of dancers. For there is no Paul Taylor “look,” no type. There are, to be sure, no fat or even remotely unfit dancers. Nor are there any usually tall people in the company. But some dancers are considerably shorter than others. Some dancers are nowhere near as slim and fine-boned as others. Michael Trusnovec is an Apollo; Sean Mahoney looks as though he might be a construction worker. Laura Halzack stands out among the women not just for the glamour of her face but for her penchant for demented abandon: sometimes, the lady looks just plain nuts. (And very beautiful.) Moments when Robert Kleinendorst looks responsible enough to be trusted with a pack of matches are very rare. George Smallwoods substantial head (shaved, but not close enough to conceal a big bald spot) makes him look stocky, although he isn’t. In short, the Paul Taylor Dance Company comprises sixteen different human beings. They dance very well together. They run through intricate, quickly-shifting configurations without running into each other. Whenever a girl takes a flying leap, there’s always a boy to catch her. But they remain sixteen different people. And at least two are in the neighborhood of forty years of age.

Some dancers are more prominently featured than others, or so it seems, but there is absolutely no corps, no clump of lesser dancers condemned to assist the stars. One of the amazing things is how well Paul Taylor has made seniority work for his company. Members are listed by seniority, and they take curtain calls in reverse seniority. Some dancers move out, leaving the company, but most seem to move up, as older dancers retire. (We were sad to see the last of Annmaria Mazzini and Amy Young, and we can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when Michael Trusnovec withdraws.) Seniority, which is meaningless artistically, has the odd leveling effect of making everyone look different. Over time, you get to know who each dancer is by name, and while every dancer appears to be capable of doing anything, no dancer leaves his or her personal uniqueness in the dressing room. Full appreciation of such full-charactered dancing requires a seat close to the stage.

It took me until last night figure out that Paul Taylor and his dancers have taught me more than anyone else about what I understand humanism to be.

Whilst ironing napkins yesterday, and generally tidying up the bedroom, I watched Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. I had hoped to see it in the theatre, but upheavals intervened, so I sent for the DVD and, as soon as the movie ended, regretted not having simply rented the thing from the Video Room. (Have I heard of Netflix? Oh, yes.) When will I watch Foxcatcher again? During a DIY Bennett Miller retrospective? (I’ve got Capote; what about Moneyball?) I remember news of the true crime that inspired the new movie. It was weird — a du Pont under arrest? In the movie, it all becomes much too creepy to be merely weird. (It’s interesting, though, that Bennett Miller makes movies about real people.)

Steve Carell really deserves some sort of Academy Award. It’s not just the facial prosthesis that buries his well-known persona, which, as we know from Dan In Real Life and The Way Way Back, can be disagreeable as well as lovably goofy. The impersonation of John DuPont is full-body acting, with a special walk (nerdy but feline), a ritzy Pennsylvania accent, an entitled way of slouching in chairs, and that incredible manner of sniffing the air, as if wondering what delightful treat — or irksome frustration — the world were about to serve up next. It is clear that this John du Pont would be swept to the margins of society if it were not for his family’s wealth. He is not just spoiled, but damaged in some biological way that rarely permits its victims to survive adolescence. He ought to have been institutionalized. Instead, he was allowed to play the munificent patriot. Steve Carell captures the compleat horror of this miscarriage, and he does so very quietly, by conveying, for example, du Pont’s inability to have a true conversation with anyone. Bradley Cooper was excellent in American Sniper, and a more real-world Academy would have awarded him the best-actor Oscar. But Carell deserved it. Maybe he’ll get it next year, the way that Jeremy Irons got it for Reversal of Fortune — truly an award for his unwatchably superb portrayal of the Mantle twins, in Dead Ringers, made the year before.

Everyone else in Foxcatcher is very good — not just the three other stars, but also the actors who play du Pont’s various henchmen. Guy Boyd and Anthony Michael Hall behave with the casual but cutthroat courtliness that surrounds America’s rich and powerful; it is their deadliness that makes John du Pont possible. They keep flashing messages, never properly interpreted, to the Schultz brothers, warning them to clear out while they can. I’d have liked to see more of Sienna Miller, who, here as in American Sniper, polishes off a gift for playing the strong man’s sweetheart. I sensed early that Channing Tatum’s gift for brooding (he can make resentment look manly and even admirable, even though it never is either) would show his character an escape route, and that Mark Ruffalo’s open manner would mark him as uncomprehending fodder for a domesticated predator, but because I was confused about which brother John du Pont shot, I watched the movie somewhat quizzically. I’ll have to see it again. But when?

***

In Sunday’s Times, Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soul Craft, an appealing book from a few years back, published a complaint about inescapable advertising at airports.

Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I heard only the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. I saw no advertisements on the walls. This silence, more than any other feature, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin. Your brow unfurrows, your neck muscles relax; after 20 minutes you no longer feel exhausted.

Outside, in the peon section, is the usual airport cacophony. Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you’re going to have to pay for it.

This is not exactly news. Luxurious precincts have long been known for their well-upholstered hush. But Crawford is right to point out that the “usual airport cacaphony” is out of hand. What bothers me is the suspicion that most people find this reassuring, as though the constant racket signified and guaranteed their safety. Whether or not that’s the case, it’s clear that nobody can afford to pay much attention to all the noise, and that is truly alarming. More and more, the public sphere punishes the attempt to pay attention. Without attention, there can be no memory, a point that I expect Kazuo Ishiguro wants to make in his new novel about a bleak and blasted world.

Consider what advertizing has done to architecture: visit Times Square. This bazaar of signs is both there and not there. It is not there because it is pointing to thousands of other places, other weathers and times of day. Indeed, it creates an alternative time of day every night. Buildings, hidden behind the signs, might look like anything, if you could see them, and indeed one remaining relic of the old days is a Beaux-Arts palace loaded with pediments and cornices. Spruced up — what one can see of it is reminiscent of a firetrap — it would be very jolly to look at. Instead, we get signs that we more or less ignore. Times Square blazes at the point where too much information becomes no information at all.

Crawford compares the proliferation of advertizing to the environmental pollution that we have learned to curb. I think it’s a little worse than that; to me, it’s more like smoking. We are more than a little complicit. Too many of us rely on television for companionship, a vice that makes genuine human interaction more difficult than it ought to be. Too many of us abuse our privacy by introducing the presence of a talking screen. If this were not the case, then we should all see the blaring spread of public advertizing for the invasion that it is.

Early this morning, I fell out of bed. I was trying to get up, but I fell in a heap instead. I slipped, it seemed, as I was trying the chancy back-out maneuver that always makes me feel like I’m trying to climb down from a Tiepolo ceiling. I’m still new at it. Until recently, I slept in one position only, half sitting-up. Immobile for the entire night, I eventually contracted painful bedsores. Then, on our trip to San Francisco in January, I discovered that, with the help of long, king-sized pillows, I could sleep not only in a more supine position, thus taking some of the stress off my duff, but also on my right side, at least for an hour or so, until my shoulder got sore. As soon as we got home, Kathleen ordered similar pillows. No more bedsores! But I could sleep on the right side only, with my back to the edge of the bed.

Unwinding from this side-sleeping position, into a standing-up position, will require further thought, if I am to avoid further tumbles.

I was able to get up from the floor without pain  or ado. Presently I was lying on my back, in bed, wondering what the damage was going to be. Over the next couple of hours, what would begin to throb or burn or spark? What muscles had been pulled, what tendons torn? Would I have to use a cane? Would I be able to use a cane? What would become of my tightly-organized householding schedule? Well, that one was easy. I knew what would happen to it. Pffft is what would happen. Presently I fell back to sleep.

When I woke up, I felt fine. I still do. No: what I feel is insanely lucky. That can’t happen again!

It was a long evening. Dinner was late because because. Kathleen came home an hour later than she thought she would, and because this is precisely what I expected, I allowed it to put off my starting in the kitchen. Then what I thought would take fifteen minutes took thirty-five. The food was good, and we ate slowly. We continued talking after our plates were clean. I said that I was going to watch a movie, which was fine with Kathleen. While washing up the dishes, however, I decided that it was too late for a movie, and that, instead, I should read a chapter of Sperber’s Marx, and, not only that, but, sticking to my schedule, do the laundry. This meant that I wasn’t in my sleepies (a Thomas Jefferson shirt from Peterman and a pair of fleece shorts) until half-past midnight.

I was restless, not tired. I had read the chapter (“The Editor,” about Marx’s career as a newspaperman in Cologne, during which he was an acerbic free-trade Hegelian who actually advocated military action against communist insurrectionists), but couldn’t settle on what next. Having finished Munich Airport — for some reason, the ending didn’t go down properly, and, while not positively unsatisfactory, it wasn’t satisfying, either — I thought I’d give The Buried Giant a try, but it was too intense, in the way that Never Let Me Go was intense: not at all difficult on the surface but nevertheless disturbing. I’ve learned from reviews what the “giant” really is, and can already see the novel, like its immediate predecessor, as a parable of what we take to be our ordinary modern life. Not, so not, bedtime reading.

I turned to Making It Up, Penelope Lively’s anti-memoir. This is a series of stories in which characters start out in positions taken from Lively’s life, but only to be drawn in quite different directions. The first story, “The Mozambique Channel,” concerns the evacuation of British women and children from Cairo, where Lively was born in 1933, in the face of Rommel’s advance across North Africa. Some went to Cape Town; others went to Jerusalem. Lively’s mother took her and her nanny to Jerusalem, so the story is about a nanny on board a ship bound for Cape Town. I had just finished that, and was about to begin the next one, which involves, I take it, an unwanted pregnancy in the early 1950s, when abortions could be deadly. Again: not bedtime reading. I got halfway through an essay by Tony Judt that heaped contumely upon the imperialism of Ariel Sharon, but I had to put it down. (Everything on that front has simply gotten worse!) Finally, I crawled into bed with A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, by Katie Whitaker. This is not my sort of book at all. Its central, unforgivable sin is the anachronistic portrayal of a seventeenth-century political marriage as a romance filmed at Shepperton or Pinewood. Almost as bad, Whitaker takes the letters exchanged by Charles and his French bride at face value, when in fact they’re largely courtly boilerplate. I’m reading, or not reading, A Royal Passion because Ray Soleil gave it to me when he was through with it. When he sees what I’ve just written, he’s going to tell me to throw the book away. But I can’t. For all its faults, Whitaker’s book does tell the important story of the quite deservedly “turbulent” career of one of those arrogant idiots who have occasionally worn the English crown.

Interesting, the way the English have always had of getting rid of arrogant idiots. Edward II, Richard II, Richard III, Charles I, Edward VIII. In France, they’d have been allowed to Ruin Everything. But not in Merrie England! (Never you mind what they did to Edward II.)

At dinner, Kathleen and I talked a little bit about humanism. My humanism, as I’m beginning very reluctantly to call it. I have mentioned in the past that “Humanism” is currently claimed by two groups, neither of which I belong to. There are the atheist humanists, who are really more interested in atheism than in human beings; and then there are the neo-Thomists, who are more interested in eternal souls than in human beings. Both are colored by Enlightenment humanism, which holds that we are all more or less alike, and could  get on better than we do, if only malefactors of every stripe were not profiting from our divisions. I’m not an Enlightenment humanist, either.

I think that we are all very different, partly because of what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” The more alike any two people might be, the more intensely they’re going to focus on their differences (no malefactors required). Sociologists and other abstract thinkers like to put people in groups, but groups only exist in situations of mob frenzy. The members of an exclusive country club may look pretty much the same to you, but you can be sure that that’s not how they see themselves. We band together not to form groups but to surround ourselves with a range of varieties small enough to be lived with. In some unfortunate people, the sense that they’re not like anybody else and that nobody understands them is a cause of pain and disconnection, but for most people, I believe, it is a source of the most profound satisfaction — at least when things are going well.

Consider: when was the last time that you were happy to hear that “You’re just like my good friend X“?

For months now, one of the little books on the counter at Crawford Doyle has been Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. I’ve resisted — and resisted. But I caved last week and bought a copy. It was inevitable, I suppose. “Decluttering” is one of my big subjects, and I’m in no position to disdain professional advice. Especially when it’s so delicious. Kondo writes with an elfin briskness that all by itself suggests that getting rid of stuff not only ought to be easy but will be immensely gratifying. Her mantra: Don’t hold onto anything that doesn’t “spark joy.” Ergo:

My basic principle for sorting papers is to throw them all away. … After all, they will never inspire joy, no matter how carefully you keep them. (96)

She doesn’t — phew! — mean all papers. She concedes that there are papers that “must be kept indefinitely,” and she recommends setting all “sentimental” papers aside for later triage. (You’ll be throwing all of them away, too, but for different reasons.) But what a joyous idea! Certainly nothing floods me with pleasant relief more than bidding adieu to bags and bundles of paper.

With regard to books, Kondo is more perspicacious, even if her net-net advice is (as always) the same. She has some very good things to say about the possession of books, and I am meditating on them round the clock. One observation, however, stands out for immediate, explicit consideration. I reproduce it in its original boldface.

The moment you first encounter a particular book is the right time to read it. (95)

Although I can’t think of any titles at the moment, I know that I have encountered numerous exceptions to this rule. After years of sitting on a shelf, this book or that one has emerged not only as the one to be reading right now, but, more than that, as a book that I shouldn’t have properly understood had I read it when I bought it. Although I say “numerous,” however, such books don’t amount to a serious fraction of my library. On the whole, I agree with Kondo. Here is my corollary, which I assure you I’ve been struggling to obey for some time now:

Don’t buy a book that you’re not prepared to read, all the way through, right now.

But, stuff happens. I was bringing my reading pile down to size last week when boxes began arriving. Plus the equivalent of a box: a phone call from Crawford Doyle informing me that a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was being held for me. (In the process of liberating it, I purchased not only Tidying Up but the Coralie Bickford-Smith edition of Wuthering Heights, a novel that I haven’t read since the age of fifteen. Bickford-Smith had a lot to do with my good behavior during the reading of Great Expectations.) Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life arrived — precisely the sort of book that, if not read at once, moulders away for years in the limbo of “unread” books. So I’ve read two chapters all ready. It’s excellent, and precisely the kind of biography that I want: the subtitle is deadly serious.

Nevertheless, I broke my rule when I ordered Sperber’s book. I was following a conflicting rule, one that was very deeply imprinted on my character by a suburban upbringing in the age of bomb shelters.

Stock up now, while you’re thinking about it.

As you can see, I no longer approve of this rule, which wreaks havoc in the kitchen as well in in the library. I knew at once, when I unpacked the life of Marx, that I should have to finish off Sven Beckert’s The Empire of Cotton double quick. Which I did, over the weekend. Cotton is an important book about capitalism — a very important book, I think — and it is reasonably well-written. But the plush profusion of facts and figures in support of Beckert’s assertions (about which I needed no persuading) clotted the narrative, making one feel rather stuck in traffic. (It occurs to me that such books would be vastly improved by moving all, or most, of those facts and figures to an appendix, perhaps in graphic or tabular format. I also found it interesting that Beckert ended his book without any apparent sense of leaving his story in the middle: the current configuration of the Empire of Cotton is hardly likely to continue indefinitely.)

There were two recent acquisitions, also purchased at Crawford Doyle, that had to be dealt with: the new (the last?) Tony Judt, and the latest Greg Baxter. I’ve already chewed off the first portion of Jennifer Homans’s collection of her late husband’s uncollected essays and book reviews, and I’m in no danger of not reading the rest: this is exactly what I long for between issues of the New York and London Reviews, and no wonder, since that’s where many of them were published. When the Facts Change is a great book to take to lunch.

Greg Baxter’s last book, The Apartment, arrived last summer — right before our Fire Island vacation and all the upheaval that followed. I liked it a lot, which made it one of the very few novels by a contemporary American male that I should recommend. The new novel, Munich Airport, is a longer, darker version of The Apartment, with fewer tangents. Once again, the account of a short period of present time is punctuated by extended flashbacks. The flashbacks run to a handful of earlier times, and are never complete. As they pile up, a picture emerges, and it is not, so far, a pretty picture. I have not quite finished Munich Airport, so I can’t say much more right now. Looking over the entry about The Apartment, however, revealed a big difference between the two novels. Of the first novel’s narrator, I wrote that “he was more interested in the world than in himself.” I shouldn’t say that of the second novel’s narrator, not because he is too interested in himself but because he is not interested enough. He hates himself too deeply to take an interest in the world. But enough of that now; I’ll have more to say when I finish the novel. And I shall finish the novel, very soon!

Marie Kondo all but recommends chucking her book when you’re done with it, but I don’t think that I’m ever going to be done with it, no matter how much stuff I get rid of. Cathy Hirano’s translation is too much fun to read.

What I wanted to do on Wednesday, I allowed myself to do yesterday: nothing. Nothing but reading, watching a DVD, and preparing a couple of minimal meals. Kathleen, who thought that she might have contracted my little cold, and who had been up very late the night before, working on a project, decided to sleep in as well, and to work from home (the dining ell) in the afternoon. Suspended in the aspic of convalescent domesticity, I had the sense not to try to write.

I had spoken of reading Fathers and Sons in the comfort of bed amply propped with pillows and quilts, but the comfort quickly lulled me to sleep, and I got little reading done until I tired, as I always do eventually, of being in bed at all. After lunch, I coursed through the middle of the novel, pausing on the morning of the duel to watch François Truffaut’s Vivement Dimanche. (More about that some other time.) Then I went back to Fathers and Sons and finished it. After dinner, I read the first chapter of Paul Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, and, after that, the first quarter or more of Penelope Lively’s Spiderweb. (My Lively hiatus did not last very long, did it.)

***

When I was in college, I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but not Turgenev, because Turgenev, unlike the other two, was “ambivalent,” or, in other words, lightweight and wishy-washy. Timid — the one thing you could say that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy weren’t. Dostoevsky was a Slavophile pessimist, and Tolstoy a patrician idealist, but they both somehow knew that Western liberalism (an economic outlook only dimly related to the political liberalism that emerged after the American struggle for equal civil rights) was going to lead Russia to catastrophe, if only because it was too indigestible an import. Turgenev had more faith in good intentions. He was also, at the time when he was writing Fathers and Sons (1860-1), very optimistic about the reforms that the new Tsar, Alexander II, was expected to introduce. He could not know that Alexander would be assassinated, twenty years later, by revolutionary terrorists who were impatient with liberal compromises. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in short, knew, or divined, what was coming; Turgenev did not.

In those days, during the high noon of the Cold War, one read Russian novels in order to learn something about the enemy. What could Turgenev, who spent much of his adult life not only outside Russia but inside anothers’ marriage, tell us about that? A wealthy aristocrat who lived in France and elsewhere in order to be close to the married opera diva he loved (and, necessarily, to her husband), Turgenev was obviously too much the playboy to know much about the volcanic suffering that made Russians crazy, drunk, and miserable. Turgenev had a life! That his novels were said to be lovely, charming, and so forth was hardly recommendation. One wasn’t reading Russian novels for pleasure!

When I finished the novel yesterday, I read Rosamund Bartlett’s introduction to the Penguin edition (translated by Peter Carson), and I was very surprised to learn that Fathers and Sons caused a sensation when it was published. How could such a sweet — yes, charming and lovely — novel upset anyone’s equanimity? Bartlett quotes the novel’s first translator into English, Eugene Schuyler.

Each generation found the picture of the other very life-like, but their own very badly drawn.

That’s where ambivalence will get you. The fathers, the “men of the Forties,” very much resented being told that they had had their day, while their sons, who were going to do great things under the new Tsar, felt ridiculed and caricatured in the portrait of the novel’s apparent hero, Bazarov. I had missed all of this while reading the book, and I wondered what knowing of the resentments that Turgenev incurred (all were united in detesting him) would have done to the pleasure I had taken in it. More than that, though, I wondered what reading Fathers and Sons, with this background in mind, would have been like had I read it alongside Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, back in college, in the Sixties.

I can’t quite answer that, of course, but the question immediately highlighted a huge difference between the world of Fathers and Sons and the one I grew up in. The fathers and sons of the aristocratic and professional elite in mid-nineteenth-century Russia disagreed about means, but they were of one mind about the end, which was that Russia must reformed. The question was whether this reform would entail “modernization” — making the peasants more like Western Europeans. But the question’s terms showed that fathers and sons alike were blinkered about the role of commerce in this reform. Neither generation appears to have found it very important. Industry, such as it was, could have little to do with the fight for the Russian soul. The Russian soul was rooted in the land. Relations between those who owned the land and those who worked it would have to be sorted out before Russia could advance. Or so it was thought. In fact, the swelling urban proletariat that was excluded from this calculus of reform would overpower the landed interests. Fathers and sons alike would be shown to have trained their eyes on the same wrong ball.

In contrast, the struggles of the American Sixties, a century after Turgenev, were social, not economic. Remarkable prosperity encouraged demands that would never have been made in leaner times. These demands were not so much twofold as made on two distinct planes, and tensions generated by the way in which these demands rubbed in contrary directions would result not in explosive revolution but in the perplexed but fruitful fatigue of the Seventies, during which changes began to take hold. One of the planes was that of the fight for equal civil rights. No amount of legislation could settle this fight, but the laws that were enacted at least cleared the ground on which African Americans could claim equal opportunities. On the other plane, young people sought to put an end to respectability, that bogus and hypocritical portmanteau that had zombified the three cardinal civic virtues of decency, self-respect, and generosity. The tension between the two conflicts arose when black men and women, seeking to be treated as fully American, presented themselves in garb that seemed, to critical whites, to be merely respectable.

The demolition of respectability in the late 1960s was, of course, a generational fight, similar to the one seen whenever hazing rituals are contested. The elders say, “We endured it; so can you.” Just as hazing rituals are corruptions of rites of passage, so respectability was a corruption of civic virtue. Everyone knew this, but the fathers did not believe that change was feasible. The issue of civil rights was not generational at all, but it did involve fathers — the political leaders who believed that the status quo must be maintained in order to see the nation through the Cold War — and the victims of racial condescension who were infantilized by them. In Russia in the 1860s, it was agreed that Russia must be reformed. In the United States in the 196os, it was agreed that the fathers must be got rid of.

But Russia was not reformed, and the American fathers are still finding replacements (Jeb Bush, for example). Turgenev was right: Plus ça change…

It’s Wednesday, so I must have a doctor’s appointment. Yes — the dermatologist again. I’m on the verge of canceling, because I have a little cold, my second in three weeks. It would be great to fluff up the pillows, climb back into bed, and plow through Fathers and Sons. (I feel a Turgenev binge coming on.) Why, I am wondering, does Turgenev feel so relaxed, where Dickens seemed so crabbed? The comparison prompts me to consider Dickens as an experimental writer, if you can imagine. This poses great problems for my understanding Shirley Hazzard’s judgment that Great Expectations is “the most greatly realized novel in English.” I’m not sure that Great Expectations is a novel at all. There’s too much parable in it, and of course too much advocacy journalism. (One answer to my Where’s Compeyson question might well be that the actual villain of the piece isn’t Compeyson at all, but the English establishment.) There is a measure of journalism in all good fiction; novelists must observe their chosen corners of the world with critical intelligence. But we do not read novels for news of the world. We read novels to test our understanding of human nature by judging how people fit into stories. Turgenev is one of the great natural novelists, which is to say that he writes novels that define the form. Most satisfying!

(It ought to be clear, I suppose, that I do not subscribe to the view that a novel can be anything that a writer wants it to be.)

I have never been to Russia, and the Russia that Turgenev writes about was swept away long ago, at least in its visible details. But the setting of Fathers and Sons seems very familiar, or exotic in a very familiar way. There’s the house in the country, which ought to be idyllic but can’t be, because there’s not enough money. There’s the drawing room “in the latest style,” and there’s Pavel Petrovich in his tailored English clothes. There’s naive, youthfully fatuous Arkasha, and boorish, troublemaking Bazarov. There’s the question, why doesn’t the sweet-tempered Nikolay Petrovich marry Fenechka, the mother of his newborn son? The possibilities for comic but rueful disappointment stretch out before me like a field of Russian snow, and my bed, with its pillows, blankets, and quilts, would make the perfect sled in which to cross it.

The little cold hit me yesterday afternoon, as I was finishing the tidying in the book room. I had meant to go on with some paperwork, and even to do some ironing, but I could do none of this. I felt exhausted. But it was not just exhaustion, I see now.

***

When you get to be older, there are days when dying doesn’t seem so very bad. One isn’t going to live forever, so what would be the harm in missing a rough patch or two, not in one’s own life but in the larger world. There are days when things really do seem to be going to the dogs, and sometimes this impression is created by what seem to be new and unimagined developments, such as the oafish thoughtlessness of young people with their devices (knowing that one would have been just as bad); and sometimes it rises from the sheer tedium of watching things happen over again, such as the crossness and dislocation of the Sixties. Young people have no idea how like boomers they are in their hope — I think that it’s a hope, not quite a belief — that the world’s problems can be fixed without resort to political activity. By “political activity” I mean “organized compromise.” Young people aren’t alone in disdaining it. Tea Partiers don’t believe in it, either; they’re convinced that their compromises have loaded them with burdens but withheld benefits. If fewer and fewer Americans believe in government, government has less and less interest in Americans. Look at the way government has allowed itself to be captured by business organizations, how addicted it has become to governing by means of obscure, coded laws buried in haystacks of legislation. Look at the way government has sent waves of volunteer servicemen and -women off to foreign lands to engage in pointless and ill-conceived battles, none of which seem to have changed anything. Something must be done in Syria, clearly, but there is no reason to look to the United States for any good ideas. As in the Sixties, we have come to an impasse: the old ways don’t work, and the new ways aren’t new. Who wants to go through it a second time?

But my political despair is but a passing fancy compared with my horror of American violence.

In a recent piece in The New York Review of Books, Nathaniel Rich asked, “What, then, explains football’s appeal among Americans?” His enumeration of possible factors concluded thus:

I thought about this as I watched this year’s Super Bowl, which was one of the most thrilling sporting events in recent memory. My fandom has only increased in recent years, against my better judgment (and even as my New York Giants have foundered). I didn’t have to think very long. The source of the game’s appeal is obvious. It’s the violence. The NFL understands this. Why else would it risk lawsuits and moral indignation? If violence wasn’t a crucial element in the sport’s appeal, the league would institute two-handed touch tomorrow.

Rich’s final paragraph begins, “America is addicted to violence; America is addicted to football.”

Every now and then, some sociologist prances along with findings that fail to establish causality leading from the violence vicariously experienced in video games, superhero comics, and “sporting events” to acts of criminal violence. But this reminds me of an exchange that I had with a European who complicated my country on its relative lack of corruption. “But you see,” I replied, thinking of lobbyists, “in this country it is all quite legal.” So with violence. To be sure, we don’t tolerate criminal gangs’ running amok and breaking each others’ bones. Put those gangs in uniform, however, and oblige them to follow a few simple dance steps, and they can thrash away while pretending to chase a ball. We don’t tolerate holdups, but we make firearms easily available to disturbed individuals — men who are already challenged by the violence in the air. You tell me: Why is American Sniper such a hit? Because it has tapped a nerve of patriotism? In your dreams! American Sniper is a movie about a guy who gets to shoot people, bang, bang, bang, they’re dead, and be praised for it! Hallelujah! The horror is not so much the extent of American violence — all violence is horrible — as it is the extent of okay violence.

I know where it comes from. It comes from the angry disenchantment of white men. I can remember when a white man who acted responsibly would almost certainly be granted a place at the table as of right, and not only that, but also the automatic respect of all those who were not white men. These privileges have been inexorably eroded during my lifetime, with the tacit permission of elite white men at the top of the socio-economic heap. As another bit of fallout from the Sixties, American white men stopped acting in solidarity and began adhering to different class and cultural norms. (Archie Bunker was a figure of fun.) Sauve qui peut!

But now I’ve got to get ready to pay a visit to the dermatologist.

Six weeks or so ago, I quoted a paragraph that included the following sentence.

I would say that Great Expectations may be the most greatly realized novel in English (though I steer clear of that sort of competitive judgment).

This was Shirley Hazzard, in a Paris Review interview, refusing to name novels that she might like to have written (a silly question indeed). “Rather, I might speak with a joyful envy of passages that I myself would not have conceivably written.” The first book that she speaks of is Great Expectations.

It was too obvious a challenge to resist, but, its obviousness notwithstanding, it also became a very complex challenge. Of course I should have to read Great Expectations (which I hadn’t done before) to see if I could figure out what Hazzard was talking about. What would Great Expectations tell me about Shirley Hazzard’s idea of a “greatly realized” novel?

The complication was that I should have to read Great Expectations as if I were enjoying it. I should be obliged to forbear from interrupting my reading with expostulations upon Dickens’s incompetence, his treacly sentimentality, his half-hearted formulaism, his inability to create fully human characters — and so forth and so on. In addition to sparing Kathleen hours of bloviate denunciation, such as I once regaled her with in connection with The Prince of Tides, almost every one of whose supernumerary words prompted two or three explosive ones from me, I should have to observe a inward, mental quiet, as if my mind were a public library. Or as if, say, Shirley Hazzard were sitting next to me. I should have to try to forget my Dickens in order to read hers.

Now, there is not much to “my Dickens.” What have I read? David Copperfield in school — hated it. A Tale of Two Cities. This I quite liked, but it was the first novel that I ever read, aside from the Hardy Boys mysteries. When I had another go at it a few years, I became so exasperated with Miss Prosser at one point that I put the novel down and never picked it up again. Bleak House — Esther Whatshername gave me boils. I could tell that I’d be rooting for Lady Dedlock, just as I did for Lady Audley. Oh, and The Pickwick Papers, which I also had to read for school, but didn’t. A Christmas Carol of course, which of course I read with a heart of stone.

As is the case with authors who don’t excite a positive enthusiasm, I pretended, for the most part, that Dickens didn’t exist. In casual conversation, I might say, “I loathe Dickens,” and complacently nod if my interlocutor agreed. That was about it. I do not understand the appeal of Dickens. The most constructive thing that I have to say is that, to the extent that Dickens’s delineations of the hell that was mid-Victorian England are righteous and powerful, they sap his work of beauty.

And I say that after reading Great Expectations.

I did not come to understand what Shirley Hazzard was talking about. I remain as mystified as I was when I first read the Paris Review interview. I try in vain to imagine ways in which one might hold Great Expectations to be “greatly realized.” (Not to mention its being the most greatly realized novel in English!) The more I turn the question over, the more Great Expectations strikes me as perfectly un-realized. Dickens goes on and on about irrelevancies while scanting the meat of his tale. It seems more than possible that all I could see of Great Expectations was the negative of Shirley Hazzard’s impression.

But this entry is not about Great Expectations so much as it is about a novel literary experience. If I quickly rose to meet the challenge of Hazzard’s judgment, that is because I had never been able to figure out what Great Expectations is about. I knew about Miss Havisham, the jilted bride who extends the moment of her rejection to the term of her natural life. (Miss Havisham is such a well-known literary curiosity that I tended to place her in The Old Curiosity Shop.) But Pip and Estella were merely names, and Magwitch hardly even that. Herbert Pocket came as a complete surprise — I’d never heard so much as a whisper about him. Nor Wemmick, nor Jaggers. As for Joe Gargery, I might have come across the name, but never a hint that he is the moral touchstone of the book.

I had never picked up, as one does pick things up, the least idea of what Great Expectations is about.

***

Midway through the middle volume, or Book II, I sent myself an Evernote, in which I made three points. Here they are, fleshed out, in slightly different order.

First, I didn’t care about Pip. As best I can make out, Pip fails on two counts. First, he has no idiosyncrasies, no hobbies, no personal color. Second, his voice is implausible — the not-uncommon mishap of first-person narratives. How did a rather oppressed little boy from the marshes of Kent learn to speak so “well”? Because Pip wasn’t real enough to care about, I was never very excited by the drama of his great expectations.

Second, Dickens’s prose, especially where it ought to have been exciting, was, in comparison with Wilkie Collins’s, dead in the water.

Third, I wondered what Trollope would have had to say about Magwitch’s project of making a gentleman out of Pip by showering him with money. This is what I should address at length if I were to study Great Expectations. The greatness of Trollope’s fiction is its preoccupation with the ordeal that young men of limited means go through when they try to do the right thing vis-à-vis the women they love. What does it mean to be a gentleman? It is much more than a matter of spending money and fresh linen. This problem, or challenge, does not, however, interest Dickens at all. Pip’s London life, which apparently involves more than a few pieces of jewelry and a habit of running up debts, is given the most cursory treatment. We have none of the vivid illustrative scenes in which Trollope would have shown us the hero’s conscience wrestling with irresistible metropolitan lures.

Nor — and this seems almost perverse to me, but then I don’t get Dickens — is Estella’s creator very interested in her. Trollope managed to kill my the pleasure that I took in his books with his fetishistic idolatry of innocent young ladies (who could never be allowed to admit that they’d made a mistake, and permitted to find a happier love), but his fiction is liberally seasoned with bad girls. How intriguing it would have been to see the full-length portrait of Estella that Trollope painted of Lizzie Eustace!

And what about Compeyson, that cipher of a villain, who appears only to drown, and whom we never once hear? Compeyson is the sort of thing that I have in mind when I charge Dickens with incompetence. Here is a man who has betrayed both of the novel’s victims, Magwitch and Miss Havisham. Surely we ought to see at least half as much of him as we do of Adolphus Crosbie (in The Small House at Allington). Compeyson, in addition to being very wicked, is the archetypal non-gentleman, the pattern of what Pip, with his great expectations, ought to avoid. (It ought to have been Compeyson, not Orlick, in the limekiln.) But, as I say, he’s hardly there at all. Dickens’s handling of this character, from introduction to finish, seems extraordinarily maladroit.

But I did find out what Great Expectations is about, and in the only proper way: by reading it, quietly and with an open mind. That was the novel literary experience, and I can’t say that it wasn’t a pleasure.

Last week witnessed a very odd cluster of three deaths, all of them taking Notre Dame men — as one would have put it in the days when such specification was unnecessary — out of the world. In descending order of age, there was Father Hesburgh, president of the University during both of my careers there; Charlie Rice, our Torts and Con Law professor in the Law School; and classmate Hal Moore, long a partner at Skadden, Arps here in New York. These passings would be individually momentous, but, coming all at once, they’re overpowering, so that it’s hard to believe that they’ve really happened. Hal was my age, more or less. I have no idea what felled him; Kathleen and I have been out of touch with the Moores ever since — well, never mind. But it’s a strange shock. Even though they were not part of our present lives, the world seems a smaller place now that Father Ted, Charlie, and Hal are no longer in it. That’s what getting old means for those who haven’t yet died. And I’m still mourning, if very quietly, the death of my colleague from radio days earlier last month.

But the death that disturbs me most is that of Times Media Critic David Carr. Just days before Carr collapsed on the newsroom floor and died of lung cancer — didn’t know you could do that in the modern world! — I charged him with striking, as I think I put it, a note of moral bankruptcy in his commentary on the Brian Williams scandal. When Carr died almost immediately afterward, I felt rather ghastly for about ten minutes, as though my accusation (although I very much doubt that he ever read it) had been fatal. But in contrast to my experience of last week’s deaths, I can say that Carr’s has not left the world a smaller place. On the contrary, his dying made things clearer, at least to me, and in that sense it was additive. Now that he was gone, it was easier to see how he had done his job — and how, arguably, it ought to be done.

It now seems obvious, painfully obvious to me that the media critic at a major newspaper, especially in a time of dramatic media transformation, ought to be making the case, self-interested though it might be, that long-form journalism is the only means of communicating the complexity of the world to intelligent readers. That, by the same token, no intelligent person ought to be caught dead or alive watching TV news. Waste your time on anything else that the boob tube has to offer, but don’t clutter your mind with the amyloid proteins of television news! Just as Paul Krugman tirelessly argues for neo-Keynsian solutions to our economic problems, attacking the proponents of austerity with the manic ferocity of the computer in War Games, so David Carr ought to have made it his business to persuade readers of The New York Times that (a) they were already doing the right thing by reading the paper, and that (b) television news would therefore be as unnecessary as it is (c) undesirable.

Reading Carr’s response to the Williams scandal, it was impossible not to recall his much-publicized problems with addiction. They ought to have had nothing to do with anything, but wasn’t Carr writing about the relationship between viewers and anchors as one of dependency? Viewers needed this, and demanded that, from their newscasters. Carr did not question this; it did not seem to occur to him that there was anything to be done about it. This is the way in which most of today’s “media critics” cover their field. The prevailing note is helplessness. We are always checking our emails, we are always following Twitter, updating our Facebook status — you really can’t expect us not to. This is who we are.

If it is indeed who we are, if we are indeed helpless to resist the lures of advertisers and other self-promoters, then let us do the rest of the world a great big final favor. Let’s acknowledge that our exceptionalism has collapsed, that we have squandered our immense resources on a weakness for the instant gratification of our most casual curiosity, such that we are no longer capable of thinking through the awesome issues that we have claimed as ours to decide throughout the Cold War and beyond. Americans are just not up to the job. Too many of us can’t be bothered to learn that Toronto is in Canada, not Italy, or that California and Nevada, despite remarkable differences in population, each has only, or as many as, two senators. We have undermined our democracy by insisting that entitles us to be stupid.

Let’s try to figure out how to tell traumatized veterans of the guerilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that we’re sorry, that we should have known that those battles made no sense, that the insurgencies that fought them were created in response to their very presence on other men’s native soil. We went to war over there so that we could feel good about it over here. The Bush Wars mark the end, or at least the disappearance, of American intelligence. I think that most smart veterans already know this, but perhaps they would like to hear an apology or two.

Perhaps we are too stupid now even to apologize. Instead, we stupidly thank veterans for their service. That makes us feel good, too. As David Carr knew, we are keen on feeling good.

***

Does anybody out there who can’t imagine not watching television news happen to have kicked a smoking habit? Tobacco is much harder to cut off than television, but that’s for another time. All I want to say now is that you, you former smokers out there, you can’t really believe that you ever did anything so dirty, at least in the literal sense, for long enough for a habit to develop. Now, when you walk into a hotel room in which someone has been smoking, or when you see (but, again, mostly smell) an ashtray full of butts; when you remember how anxious you used to be about maybe running out of cigarettes or, just as bad, matches, you can’t imagine the satisfactions that compensated for such grossness.This is what I was told by one reformed smoker after another, until I myself gave it up (after twenty years — and this was over thirty years ago) and found out how true it was.

It’s harder, as I say, to stop smoking than it is to stop watching television. But, believe you me, once you’ve given up television, especially television news, once you have managed to keep it out of your life for a while, you will be so astonished by its screaming vulgar obscene banality that you will wonder why there aren’t laws against it — as there are now against smoking. Appalled, you will wonder. Believe you me.

There are too many books in the pile beside my reading chair. I’m not keen on any of them, but I’m also by no means disposed to relegate any to the limbo of lectio interrupta. At times like this, I choose the book that I’m likeliest to get through quickly and then hunker down, not to be distracted. At the moment, that book is Lee Standiford’s book about the Homestead Strike of 1892, Meet You In Hell. (It masquerades as a book about Carnegie and Frick.) I stayed up rather late last night, almost thrilled by Standiford’s harum-scarum account of the deadly but somewhat farcical intervention of the Pinkerton men, and drawing solace from the evidence that American humbug, which is all our political class has to offer these days, has at least the patina of a venerable tradition.

During the strike, the argument was made more than once that, just as Carnegie and Frick had property rights in their steel mill, so the workers had rights in, or to, their jobs. I want to agree with this, but I can’t. Jobs are too evanescent, at least in the long term. They come out of nowhere, and then they disappear, usually long before the people doing them stop collecting paychecks. Perhaps this will not always be the case; perhaps we will settle into economic patterns as unchanging as those that governed the European peasantry until the late Eighteenth Century. But we are in no position at the moment to try to identify the jobs that will always be with us.

The steelworker’s job, in the 1890s, whether skilled or unskilled, was not likely to be pleasant or healthy. Strong men were used up before they reached fifty. Talking about the right to have such a job sounds rather like insisting upon a good seat in hell. Men spent their own lives, literally, so that their wives and children would eat and perhaps prosper. The luckier children would push through the education barrier and never have to worry about manual labor. Everything about steelmaking in those days screamed short term. The mills themselves, huge and capital-intensive as they were, were constantly remodeled, and even replaced entirely, to accommodate changes in the market and in technology. Steel manufacture today bears little resemblance to Frick’s operation — so little, in fact, that the only common element may be the production of steel. Workers are immensely more productive — business-speak for expressing the fact that you can do the job with far fewer of them.

Always remember that the capitalist’s ideal number of employees is zero. Two things tend to happen when capitalists reduce their workforce, but these two things have an unsteady  relationship. Sometimes, the price of the product goes down. More often, the profits realized by the capitalist go up. Lower prices have always been thought to be a prima facie good. but the low price of gasoline at the moment is leading a lot of observers to question that assumption. It seems to me that the ideal price is “affordable.” That is, the people who need the product can pay for it without making unseemly sacrifices. Need is a key part of this calculation. Nobody needs a very large hi-def screen. (Quite the reverse, it may well be.) People need transportation; they do not need particular vehicles. Affordable health care is far more important. So is healthy food, something that is now available only to the affluent. And to get back to cars for a moment: the price of the automobile is socially negligible. Socially salient are all the other costs of operating a private vehicle: maintenance, insurance, and parking. We think too much about stuff. What if all the stuff that we needed were just given to us, but we remained responsible for all the upkeep. This is a serious vision: in the ideal economy, everything would be capable of updates and upgrades (rather than”repairs”), and nothing would need to be replaced. The ideal economy would be less mechanical and more organic.

“Affordable” is one of those concepts that defy definition while being instantly recognizable in everyday experience. Ideally, everyone can have a job paying a wage that makes a secure and healthy life, with something left over for discretionary fun, affordable. I’ll take that one step further: a good definition of the humane life is the affordable life. Anything less is stunting and wrong. Which is not to say that lives lived below the threshold of affordability are the result of anybody’s fault. But because of the entrepreneurial origins of even our most stolid utilities, we still put profits first, because that is how new businesses not so much flourish as just plain survive. As new businesses, that is.

I do believe that, if a job needs doing, then the incumbent who is doing it satisfactorily has a better right to continue doing it than a less expensive worker has to take it over. Has there been research, philosophical or otherwise, into how much profit ought to go to workers? It seems to me that this rate would be a figure that shifted with time. At the beginning of an enterprise, workers might quite fairly be ill-paid, or even asked to work for free (ie “equity,” which may well turn out to be a big piece of nothing). In a new business, it is typically necessary to plow most revenues into the enlargement and enhancement of operations. But as dividends rise — and by “dividends” I mean not just (re-)payments to investors but the “salaries” and “bonuses” of upper management as well — as the puddle of money that is not required to improve the business gets bigger, so, it seems, should the worker’s wages, and very much in some sort of proportion. Ultimately, capitalists ought to disappear from businesses entirely, replaced by credentialed, professional managers who have no interest in profits at all. Ultimately, a business is run as a social utility, committed to providing useful products or services at affordable prices (meaning prices that support affordable wages) while not harming the environment. That is where the Industrial Revolution ought to take us.

I’ll have a rather different report to file when I finish reading Standiford’s book. It’s not my sort of thing at all, but I couldn’t resist buying it at the Frick Collection gift shop. O the irony! For Henry Clay Frick was not himself a humbug. He was rather a very cool customer who knew how to exploit everyone else’s willingness to be one. An honest devil, really: “Meet you in hell” was his reply to Carnegie’s request for a deathbed reconciliation.

Bon weekend à tous!

Ray Soleil came up after work last night and hung pictures on the last empty wall — the vertical sliver, a little more than two feet wide, behind the bookroom door. As I rarely close this door, even I will rarely see the pictures, but they’re safe, hanging neatly as they’re meant to do, and not slumped in a stack behind a sofa or voluminously wrapped up at the back of a closet. Now: to deal with the pictures that won’t be appearing on these new walls.

Three are handsome photographs from Jen Bekman, handsomely framed for the gallery in the old apartment. That they worked well in the old apartment is but a clear sign of the subtle disorganization that reigned in those rooms — the disorganization of accretion. Over thirty years, Kathleen and I acquired a lot of things, one at a time, and fit them in with what was already there. Every now and then, I would take apart the corner of a room and put it back together more coherently. Five years go, I even had the old foyer and the corridor leading to the blue room repainted — the corridor became the “gallery.” But although I was often moving things around, I was never moving everything around. In the bedroom, there was on one wall a crazy pavé of pictures large and small, most of them placed to hide the nail holes from earlier decorating schemes. There was a similar patch in the blue room as well.

The move, hellish as it often was, gave me the chance to re-place everything, and what couldn’t be placed was gotten rid of. The Bekman photographs — a pair of quietly arty shots of a pond in different weathers, and a long shot of a swimming hole in California, taken by somebody else — don’t work in this apartment because they’re not quite interesting enough to fit in any of them rooms, where pictures have been grouped with great deliberation. As to the long entry corridor, I have made it a very different kind of gallery, a miscellany of graphic images of all sizes, all of them important to me, and all of them requiring a close view. This is not the space for dreamy nature photography, to be seen at a distance. That three rather lovely pictures didn’t find a place down here, out of the dozens and dozens that did, is really no cause for regret. I’ll take them Housing Works and hope that they’ll find nice homes.

That leaves two groups of rejecta. There are pictures that have been used up. In one case, literally: it’s a print of that painting in Rome that is the centerpiece of Sacred Heart iconography. I can never remember its name (it’s a picture of the BVM), but it was given to Kathleen when she was a girl, and it is now almost unintelligibly faded, to shades of gold and cream. Then there is the “Bodley Plate” graphic of the principal buildings at Williamsburg, together with sketches of flora and fauna; copies of this eighteenth-century illustration are sold by Colonial Williamsburg, mounted in good-looking plastic frames. I had it in my bathroom for years, and I’d probably hang it in my bathroom down here, if that were possible, but it isn’t, because the tile goes almost all the way up to the ceiling. I have perhaps had my fill of the Bodley Plate. Then there’s the oval frame.

The oval frame, made out of a dark wood that I used to assume to be mahogany, is Victorian, about eight by ten, and pleasingly turned. Four ogival ridges surround the picture plane, rising to a crest about an inch above it. From this crest, four deeper ogival folds descend to the outer edge of the frame. I bought the frame a very long time ago, during one of my summer jobs on Wall Street. The shop that I bought it in was at the basement of one of the twin buildings that flank Thames street, just above Trinity Church. I recall a musty room with the air of an abandoned curiosity shop. I don’t know why I bought the frame, exactly, but I’m sure that I meant to replace the image that it came with (as frames always do), a bland botanical, no doubt cut from a rectangular page, showing a plant with small, pale yellow orchidy blooms, and leaves like Italian parsley. I’m familiar with the image, because I never did get round to finding something else to put in the frame. I’m reluctant to get rid of the frame, precisely because of the senselessness with which I’ve held on to it all these years. I feel bound to keep holding on to it, until it finally tells me the secret that it was always meant to impart. Perhaps it is telling me that message right now (it’s a lesson that I have really, seriously learned): don’t buy things just to buy things.

The final group is made up of gifts, many of them given to us in their nice frames! I review the pictures that are hanging on the walls. There are a few items of inheritance, but gifts? Here’s a little paper sculpture, showing a vine against a lattice. Kathleen, to whom it was given, was surprised to see it up on the corridor wall: “This isn’t very interesting.” (I disagree.) There is the two-page storyboard for an AT&T ad that a friend then at Young & Rubicam gave me — signed by the creatives — when I told him that I’d seen this ad on a plane and really liked it. That’s also in the corridor. There is a lithograph in the dining ell, showing a “woodie” — an old cabin cruiser — tied up on the Thames River at Mystic. It might be a gift, but it might also be a purchase, as we were taken to visit the artist, right aboard that boat, one day long ago. I’d like to think that it was a gift, because then I wouldn’t feel so bad about disposing of another picture, a gift for sure this time, from the same friend. Finally, there is the striking photograph of what turns out to be the Budapest Opera House, now finally hung for maximum visual effect. A friend of mine ran it on his blog and I asked him if I could download it. Permission granted, I had the print made myself. And then I had it framed. The extent to which this photograph is a gift, and not something that I paid for with a peppercorn, seems largely technical; certainly it lacked the element of surprise.

In the old apartment, I tended to hang anything that was presentable. Down here, you would never know how riotously we used to live. I sometimes feel that an art director has set up the apartment for a biopic. But whose? I’d like to think that it’s about a person I’ve yet to become.

Last night, I read Ian Parker’s profile of Sir Jonathan Ive, in the current issue of The New Yorker. Ive wears his knighthood lightly enough to be known either by his last name or by “Jony” — surely “Jonny” would have been preferable? He is in charge of design at Apple, which makes him a very important person indeed, the fons et origo, now that Steve Jobs is gone, of Apple’s spectacular valuation. I had never heard of him.

In the accompanying photograph of half of Ive’s stubbly face, the designer vaguely resembles a friend of mine, and I had great fun imagining my friend in Ive’s shoes, or, more exactly, in the back of his luxurious Bentley, sighing “Oh, my God” when learning that a colleague drives a Camry. My friend, you see, reads Monocle. He still reads Monocle. In case you haven’t seen it, Monocle serves readers who believe that the key to paradise will be turned when everyone is finally drinking perfectly-brewed espresso from the perfect teacup. My friend does not believe this, but I think he would like to.

The usual New Yorker profile ends by leaving you feeling that you know all that you want to know, thank you very much, about the subject. Not so this one. It is possible that Ive has learned something from aesthetes of the past: talking about your refined sensibilities makes you look ridiculous. So he will not tell us what books he reads or what movies he watches. What is it like to see the world as he does? He can’t say. He can’t say more than that talking about how he feels is very hard for him. So we cannot linger over the person of Sir Jonathan Ive, much as Parker’s persistent buzz tries to hold our attention. We drift over Ive’s smooth, understated edges (stubble notwithstanding — another puzzle) and on to the consideration of excellent design, which, as everyone knows, is what makes Apple products so desirable.

Aside from my iPhone, which I bought in order to be able to have FaceTime chats with my daughter and her family when they moved to San Francisco, and a clutch of iPods, I own no Apple products. I gave my iPad to my grandson when he left town — and I had already given him one when iPads first appeared. To me, the design of an Apple product — and I’m talking about the way it works now, not what it looks like — is repellent. It reminds me of the French, whom I do not find repellent at all, because their conviction that there is one right way to do everything is the product of generations of trial and error. Apple’s convictions in this regard must obviously spring from a much shallower well of experience, and in fact Apple’s operating conventions strike me as having very little experience behind them at all. Perhaps it would be better to say that they reflect the rather narrow experience of very intelligent men who happen to be fascinated by the machinery of automobiles.

Sir Jonathan comes by his wizardry as naturally as possible: his great- and grandfather were precision metal workers, and his father a teacher of engineering. He was a prodigy in his youth; Apple snapped him up about twenty years ago. He would have left Cupertino not long afterward, but then Steve Jobs came back to head the company, and he and Ive clicked as few colleagues have clicked in this sublunary world.

The profile, in case you were wondering why The New Yorker was given access to Apple designers who have never spoken to journalists before, appears to be occasioned by the impending release of the Apple Watch. This will be the first big post-Jobs release, and without Jobs’ dark-side charisma to introduce it, Tim Cook is being resourceful.

***

I have only two things to say about design. First, nothing really good-looking has appeared since 1939. Second, I have never adopted the modernist belief that there is virtue — or even interest — in a machine’s good looks. Not being a spiritual person to begin with, I am not uplifted by the shine and swell of a piece of metal. The only emotional effects that appliances can have on me are negative. An ugly thing is regrettable, certainly; but as the ugliness is corrected and made to disappear, so does the object itself. My ideal machine does its job somewhere out of sight. Machines that we have to use — computers, stand mixers — ought to be stowed out of sight when we’re not using them.

Do I hate machines? No. But I know how dangerous they are. Their speed, their regularity, their reliability, their sheer obedience — these can be intoxicating characteristics, in comparison with which human beings might well be dismissed as, well, very poorly designed. Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there have been movements aplenty to reduce human beings to bits of machinery. We seem to have been unable to design workplaces for human beings — to conceive of the display and exercise of responsibility in non-mechanical terms. Although we understand that a great team, in any line of endeavor, is a collaborative commitment of variously-gifted people, we treat larger, more stratified groups as so much undifferentiated mass, incapable of self-direction; and we punish the human beings who stick out from it (ie, the variously-gifted).

The modern machine is an appliance that helps us to do things that are difficult, dangerous, or simply impossible by merely human means. We have not been living with modern machines for very long, roughly two and a half centuries. Until very recently, our response to the modern machine was the unreflective impulse to be wowed. Critical understanding does not go very far back. Only in my lifetime, for example, have numbers of human beings awoken to the possibility that our way of using modern machinery is endangering, and might even destroy, our planet’s ability to sustain life. (And of course the immediate response to that has been a splashing, unhelpful panic.) Meanwhile, there are more cars than ever, and if the ads that were shown during the Academy Awards presentation the other night are any indication, heaven on earth may be at hand as soon as cars come equipped with their very own drones, filming you from above while you drive along mountain highways. (The heaven part comes in when you drive off a cliff because you couldn’t take your eyes off the little movie of your own car being driven by you.) The idea that well-designed machines are endowed with salvific potency is very much with us.

But do think about it. Every time you make use of some cool gadget, are you hoping to be more of a machine yourself? If so, my counsel is: give it up. It never works. You’ll never work. Not like that gadget.

Il y a quelques jours, il me semblait que je … que j’oops! En anglais, s’il vous plaît! Quelques jours se sont passés depuis qu’on a pris une verre avec le prof!

A few days ago, it struck me that I am now old enough to read about Karl Marx — to read a biography, that is. Among the giggles, I hear gasps of dismay from those who shudder to recall last year’s apparent infatuation with Hannah Arendt. I shouldn’t worry about my falling in love with Marx and his ideas. I’m certain that I’ll find in Marx an interesting critic of his own times (and what interesting times they were!) but an almost lunatic visionary when it came to the future (it is difficult to make forecasts in interesting times). The inevitabilities that Marx foresaw have become not only implausible but unimaginable. That is, you can share Marx’s visions only to the extent that you can overlook what you know, or ought to know, about human nature.

Nevertheless, Marx was on the ground in the white water of the Industrial Revolution, a passionate observer of the metamorphosis of just about everything by the entrepreneurial power of capital, a transformation unlike any seen before, and never to be repeated unless everything is forgotten. That’s why he intrigues me: I’d like to know more about what he thought he saw. And that’s what I mean when I say that I am old enough to read about Marx — perhaps even to read what he himself wrote. The old, overarching antagonism is dead. We no longer live on a pole between Bourgeois and Bolshevik. Personal property is no longer the issue that it was when few people had very much of it. No, our fault line runs very differently: between the cosmopolitan and the orthodox.

Which makes relatively recent history difficult to understand. I’m talking about the days of my youth. This came up yesterday, when I wrote about my refusal to to attend the premiere of The Sound of Music. The mere consideration of that episode unleashed the vivid memory of a whirlwind of arguments and contentions that blasted me whenever I tried to distinguish right from wrong. There was, of course, the right and wrong of my parents’ understanding. But there was another, very different standard, according to which my parents’ way of life was corrupt, incoherent, self-deluding, and very bad for the health of society — at least insofar as society itself was not condemned as a criminal enterprise. It would be wrong, very wrong, to associate this upsetting standard very closely with Marxism; it owed much more, as I would learn later, to Nietzsche and the intellectuals — among whom John Carey, quite rightly in my view, puts Adolf Hitler. And trust me: the middle classes, c 1960, were not a pretty sight. They were still immured in Balzacian anxieties about status and respectability. There was still the paralyzing dread of vulgarity — which was nothing other than the fear that one’s origins would be found out to be (as indeed they were) common.

Almost immediately, first American, then European, and finally global civilization experienced one of those origami folds that reassesses everything. Suddenly, there was nothing to fear about being middle class, because everybody who could afford the minimal accoutrements was middle class, and just as middle class as anybody else. There is no such thing as “common” anymore. That concept is defunct. The only alternative to middle class today is poor, and very few people really believe that poverty reflects a want of virtue. Billionaires, meanwhile, are just middle class folks with too much money.

But that’s now. When I was growing up, as I say, the middle class was still producing intellectuals. Before I continue, has anyone out there north of thirty-five noticed that intellectuals have disappeared? (There is something today called the “public intellectual,” but I believe that that’s quite different.) The intellectual was not necessarily a very smart person who knew a lot about the world, but often, au contraire, an ideologue, someone who had crammed a lot of more or less indigestible systematic thinking into his brain. And, as John Carey has taught us, the intellectual was usually as horrified by his bourgeois origins as his parents were by their common antecedents. As a result, the intellectual spouted frenzies of bad faith. There was the bad faith of the bourgeoisie, but there was also the bad faith of his own pretense that he was cut from some superior cloth, that by dedicating his intelligence to the cultivation of conceptual ideas he was purifying himself of his upholstered upbringing.

It’s hard to believe that intellectuals used to be so obnoxious — but, worse than that, they were, like all ideologues, exhaustive, orthodox. They alone knew what was really right, and everyone else (in America, anyway) was a fraud.

I’m going through all of this because I want to make it clear that my dismissal of The Sound of Music, yesterday, was in no way doctrinaire. The movie was fake, all right, but not because it exploited workers or constituted capitalist propaganda. No. The Sound of Music was, like so many artifacts of that artistically neutered decade, sheer junk.

I was accused of aristocratic sympathies in those days, and I should have been happy to acknowledge them, had I not understood, especially as an adopted child, that there is nothing elective about Western aristocracy. Once upon a time, there might have been, maybe (one always thinks of William Marshall), but for hundreds of years the only way for an outsider to penetrate the aristocracy has been in the person of his offspring, with an accent on great- or great-great-grandchildren. After a few generations, your commonness washes out like a bad dye. But your yourself do not, by virtue of your aristocratic sympathies, become a member of the aristocracy — ever. A class — moreover! — which does not exist in the United States. Where were my aristocratic sympathies going to get me?

Well, they did get me this: I was no longer a target of Marxism. Marxism, like Barbara Bush, had done with me. As a putative aristocrat, I could settle down comfortably with my true character, which was, just like everyone else’s, totally bourgeois.

It will not surprise the regular reader to hear that I am re-reading, painstakingly this time, Georges Duby’s study of The Three Orders.

How nice it is, to wake up without any shards of cold-syrup hangover lodged lingeringly in my brain. I judged, before going to bed, that I should be able to breathe through the night without the aid of turquoise tonic, and, for the first night in four, I fell back on the regular pill. I was asleep soon enough — relative to the time of swallowing it, that is. It was nonetheless awfully late.

People don’t believe us when we say that we don’t watch television — except for the Academy Awards, but it’s true. (Although I do mean to watch more TV5 in future, surely that won’t count as watching television until my fluency in French is complete?) It was terribly true in this year’s case. I had gone nowhere near the new cable setup since it was installed one night in November. As a good housekeeper, I should have made sure that I knew how to work it before the Oscars rolled around, preferably a visit from Tech God JM. But there were always plenty of other things to worry about, and, besides, I didn’t think I was interested in seeing this year’s show. I hadn’t been going to the movies very often, and there wasn’t anybody that I was keen to see win. (Or so I thought.) So I waited until five o’clock, yesterday afternoon, to see what would happen when I turned things on.

At first, not much. No signal, said the screen. After a bit of scrambling, I learned the the “Input” is not what it was upstairs, because our signal has been upgraded to HD. Having got a picture, however, I couldn’t get sound. Eventually, I turned the screen around to check its inputs. They seemed to be fine. As I was putting the screen back in place, it slipped out of my hands and dropped onto its supports, shutting off in the process. Great, I thought; now I’ve broken it. But when I turned it back on, the sound came on with it. You tell me.

I found WABC, adjusted the volume, and wondered what to do next. I didn’t dare shut anything off, now that I had it just the way I wanted it. So I muted the sound. Every now and then, during the next three hours, I would drift into the living room to undo the mute, and be relieved when sound came up to match the picture. Then I would mute it again. Shortly after ten, in the middle of the Academy Awards presentations, a warning appeared on the screen: the cable box would go into power save mode in one minute, if I did not “press any button.” I found the remote, which of course my failure to touch in the past five hours had triggered this warning, and pressed a button. The box disappeared.

So we watched the Oscars after all. I was thrilled when Alexandre Desplat won, for The Grand Budapest Hotel. (Two of his scores were nominated.) Desplat is one of the great film score writers, and I’ve been noticing him ever since De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005). He writes powerfully synesthetic music, capturing now the nervously ironic grandeur of The Queen, now the reasonable, headachy paranoia of The Ghost Writer. Not since the late, great Jerry Goldsmith has there been such a consistent producer of knockout scores.

When Scarlett Johansson showed up and began chirping about The Sound of Music, I could sort of tell what was going to happen. She looked much too pleased, too excited merely to be announcing a musical number. And, when this number began, I somehow knew that Lady Gaga was not going to inject transgression of any kind into her medley of airs from The Sound of Music. (And that this would be the transgression.) I knew, in short, that Julie Andrews was going to show up. Fifty years ago, said Scarlett, said Julie. Sixty — said I. And in fact it’s Sixty-One: The Broadway production of The Boy Friend opened in September, 1954, starring the then-unknown Miss Andrews. That’s how long Julie Andrews has been working.

No, I wasn’t there. But I could have been at the premiere, in March, 1965, of the film version of The Sound of Music.

I was supposed to go. My father, who had just joined the board of directors of Twentieth Century Fox, was given four tickets to this gala, reserved-seating event. If my mother wasn’t beside herself with excitement, she was close. My sister, I seem to remember, was wearing the kind of party dress that she might have liked at the age of twelve, and I remember it this way not because I paid a lot of attention to my sister’s outfits but because it tipped me off that something infantilizing was going on. That wouldn’t have been my word at the time, of course. The word would have been wholesome, for that in fact was the word that people used in the Sixties when they wanted to coax youngsters into infantilizing positions. I had seen The Sound of Music on Broadway, and quite liked some of the songs, but there was no denying the musical’s overall wholesomeness. I put my foot down and refused to go.

Quel tohu-bohu! The uproar couldn’t have lasted very long, though, because my parents had to bundle my sister into the car and drive into the city and get to the Rivoli Theater on time. And off they went, no doubt relieved not to be carting me along with them. I don’t know why I was at home at the time, actually, because this would have been in the middle of my last semester at Blair. Except that we had trimesters at Blair, and this might have been the break between the second and the third. My parents were no doubt congratulating themselves — as I was correspondingly grateful — for having shipped me off to boarding school. As they took their seats in the movie palace, were they afraid that I would burn the house down or blow the house up? Probably not. For I had found myself at Blair. I am sure that my refusal to go to the premiere was accompanied by an articulate, if tedious, dismissal of The Sound of Music as wholesome dreck — although dreck would not have been in my vocabulary at the time, either.

To this day, I have never seen that movie. I can’t say that it has been a matter of principle. My revolt at the premiere was just an early instance of my ability to avoid experiences that I won’t like to have. People say, how can you tell you won’t like something if you haven’t given it a try? I can’t explain, but I can certainly tell. The clips from The Sound of Music that were shown last night made me gasp, the film was so awful. No wonder audiences deal with it by treating it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The show ended at some time past midnight. This meant, of course, that I wouldn’t wind down enough to be ready for bed until some time after two; and it was twenty past that hour when I remembered to take my pill. As usual, it did what it was supposed to do without my feeling its onset. But I did catch out what I had long suspected and now knew to be one of its ancillary effects: I was aware that it was calming my bladder. And that was more or less the last thing I was aware of.

This morning, I finished reading Family Album, the sixth novel by Penelope Lively that I’ve read in a little more than a month. At the opening, I expected to dislike it, largely because it promised to compare unfavorably with Heat Wave, which I had just read. The big, shabby-prosperous English family, with the distracted, book-writing father and the Laura Ashley-clad mother, with plenty of delicious meals and one very juicy scandal, and with six children, all of them vaguely hostile — the set-up threatened to be an awful cliché, requiring only a murder to serve as the ironic backstory of an Inspector Morse episode. (The menace of ennui was heightened by the fact that Heat Wave, a morally thrilling book, had just climaxed with a homicide.) But one of Lively’s great strengths is the ability to refresh familiar, even stock figures, making them new and different and themselves.

I was drawn in fairly quickly. The children (soon adults) turned out to be not so much hostile as wary, and their wariness was directed at their parents, not at each other. The parents were indeed highly self-indulgent — irresponsible, really. Mum wanted a big family, much as you might want an arrangement of flowers for a party; that a family would necessarily be composed of individual human beings who would grow up to have their own lives was of little moment during the planning stages and grounds for complaint later on. Dad couldn’t have cared less about any of it. He liked having sex (apparently) and had a trust fund to pay for the consequences. Add to this parental pediment a Scandinavian au pair who, in Barbara Vine’s hands, would either kill or be killed, but in this case simply stayed on as a member of the family — for good reason. How can one resist a family album with nine subjects?

But in the end, the nicest thing about Family Album, circumstantially, was that I did not finish it with the feeling that it was the best of the bunch. A nice change! I’d begun to worry that I was becoming weak-minded. Hitherto, each novel seemed better than the one I’d just read. That was the other nice thing: my regard for the other books leveled off a good deal. How It All Began bobbed to the top only slightly faster than According to Mark; Heat Wave struck me as an accomplishment of such a different order that I had to judge it separately; The Photograph, understandably popular, is nonetheless crowd-pleasing in the same way that Family Album is; while the appeal of Moon Tiger continues to elude me. I’m glad that I read it first.

Perhaps it is finally time to read The Blue Flower, and to be done with the other Penelope (Fitzgerald). I’ve reached the point where the familiarity of some of Penelope Lively’s themes might curdle immediate further reading. Garden centers, authors (and their well-known problems with the quotidian world), cheating husbands and ambitious women — these seem to pop up in all the books with contemporary settings. Also the passage of time, or, rather, the passage of generations. This is a problem for both Lord Peters (How It All Began) and Charles Harper (Family Album): in the twilight of their careers, they can no longer find sympathetic readers among the publishers. They are vieux jeux. Experience warns me to lay off Lively for a while. I want to keep her as fresh as she does her Harlequins and her Columbines.

***

A favorite passage from Family Album:

Alison is a homemaker, a housewife, that now outmoded figure, but her management skills are not highly developed. She does not plan ahead enough, she runs out of things, she forgets to get the boiler serviced or the windows cleaned, children berate her because they have grown out of their school uniforms or she did not give them the money for the charity raffle. Ingrid is frequently reminding her (“What would I do without you?”); Charles merely looks resigned, and detached.

She is aware of these deficiencies but not particularly concerned. After, all, everyone is fed, everyone is housed and cherished and listened to and helped and supplied with pocket money and birthday parties and love and attention and a real four-star family life, which is what matters, isn’t it? Never mind if there is the occasional blip; never mind if this is not one of those homes that are run like a machine, what matters is being part of a family, isn’t it? One lovely big family. For Alison, Allersmead is a kind of glowing archetypal hearth, and she is its guardian. This is all she ever wanted: children, and a house in which to stow them — a capacious, expansive house. And a husband of course. And a dear old dog. And Denby ovenware and a Moulinex and a fish kettle and a set of Sabatier knives. She has all of these things, and knows that she is lucky. Oh, so lucky. (30-1)

Regular readers will not wonder why I single this out for attention. In the first paragraph, the author indicts Alison (“her management skills are not highly developed” — as a housekeeper, she’s a flop) — while, in the second, Alison indicts herself, with her warping way of talking, her rhetorical questions and tendentious dismissal of alternatives. In fact, her children are not “listened to.” Alison has a peculiarly successful way of dealing with inconvenient home truths. Whenever her children start conversing sharply about the reality of life at Allersmead, Alison flusters imperviously: Now don’t be so silly, children; I don’t know what you’re talking about. As a character “up denial,” she’s right out of Tennessee Williams.

In Alison’s defense, we can absolve her of the fetishism that afflicts so many women in her position (and men, too). For Alison, things do not have to be just so. She very much wants two things to be true: she wants her elder son, Paul, to be present at all family celebrations (he is, she has actually told him, her favorite), and she wants to keep her mother’s Limoges service intact. When Paul, stoned or drunk, shows up late for her silver wedding anniversary party and drops a pile of the dessert plates into a smash, it becomes something that Alison can cry about years later. But, for the most part, Alison is almost eagerly flexible.

I never quite worked out how this woman became such a good cook. At the end of the story, her expertise allows her to teach classes that have waiting lists. How did such a disorganized person ever master the discipline of getting dishes to the table all at the proper temperature? How did she learn to deal with “blips” — of which there must have been many? Maybe the explanation is that Alison is truly a monster.

Bon weekend à tous!

Yesterday, I re-read Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, published 35 years ago. All I remembered from the first reading, aside from the colossal buzz — colossal, that is, for a story set in Middle of Nowhere, Idaho — was a flood, some strange (but not at all sexual) relations among women, and a long bridge over a lake. I had no idea of what happened. And, again because of the setting, I had an impression of the surreal, because what could happen way out there? I came to the book a compleat Eastern snob. Ah, yute. Wasted on the &c.

1980 was a busy year for me. Getting out of law school, coming back to New York, studying for (and passing!) the Bar exam, finding a job; living, even, in Park Slope — perhaps I wasn’t equipped to give Housekeeping the attention it deserves. Perhaps it would be better to say that I read Robinson’s novel for the first time yesterday. Anyway, I read it and it was moving and luminous and all that; but I understand why Robinson took so long to produce another novel (Gilead, 2004). It was not so much a matter of craft. Robinson didn’t need to learn anything about telling a story. Nor was it a matter of courage, as I thought when I read each of the three later novels (Gilead was followed in 2008 by Home and in 2014 by Lila). All the courage in the world — in Robinson’s case, the determination to buck the adamant secularism of literary fiction — would not have seen those novels through to publication, much less won the critical acclaim that they received. It was a matter of purification, of concentration. Robinson taught herself, with perhaps a little help from Jean Cauvin (known to us as John Calvin), as well as from William Tyndale and the translators who succeeded him in the production of what became known as the Geneva Bible, to write about her Christian faith with the radical simplicity of Scripture. I can’t imagine that this process of purification could have been sped up by so much as a day.

So I am not going to say very much about Housekeeping. I understand the title now, I think, and it reminds me, of all things, of Wendy Doniger’s insistent way, in The Hindus — now a banned book in India — of calling Brahmins housekeepers, as if there were something wrong with being one. As indeed there is, from the spiritual point of view. I’ll come back to that in a minute. Housekeeping is largely about a grown woman’s lack of interest in domestic matters beyond the raw basics of food, clothing, and shelter. She recognizes these as needs, and does not try to transform them into arts. In the end, when the woman is about to be found unfit, by the community in which she lives, to raise her niece, she flies away, as the niece has expected her to do since her very arrival.

You can see the miracle of Lila beneath the pages, but only because you know that it will happen. Housekeeping does not really foreshadow it. Robinson already makes a connection between hobos, “transients,” vagrants, whatever you want to call them, and Christian pilgrims — Christians, that is, who follow Christ’s call to resist attachment to this world. There is a powerfully homely, one-paragraph account of Jesus’ career in Chapter 10, which is followed by an even more powerful distillation of the relationship between the guardian and her niece. (“She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her — this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.”) But what is missing is precisely what makes Lila the breathtakingly great American novel that it is: the gift of grace. At the risk of being blunt and perhaps tone-deaf, I should say that grace unites love and forgiveness (they are not two sides of the same coin) in a way that connects human beings without attachment. Robinson hints at it, as we might see in retrospect, when she has the niece, Ruth, say that her aunt, Sylvie, “gave almost no thought to me at all,” but as hints go, this is somewhat paradoxical.

Grace, to be extraordinarily specific and personal (I hope), is what keeps a marriage fresh after thirty-odd years, and you must pray for it as best and as ardently as you can. Grace is what keeps a marital vow from taking on the dead weight of duty. It is love — but whose love for whom, I shan’t presume to say. For grace is certainly a mystery.

***

In English, we have a commonsense critical term for domestic mania: we call it playing house. Playing house is of course what children do when they set out to imitate their parents. But it is also what adults do when their housekeeping loses touch with basic needs, and begins to impose conflicting “needs” of its own. Playing house as an adult leads to a failure of the generosity that ought to be housekeeping’s principal virtue. And every housekeeper is a sinner. Good housekeeping seeks to provide the basic human creatural needs in a way that erases the anxiety of need. Kitchens are well-stocked; clothes and bedding are clean and, to make that cleanliness visible, pressed; and houses are kept ship-shape. The overall idea is to make a house inviting. The moment this invitation becomes too fussy, or makes demands upon the invitees, it becomes forbidding, the very opposite of inviting.

The moment housekeeping becomes in any way forbidding, it also becomes a threat to the spirit of those who maintain the house, and a challenge to the spirit of those who enter it. This is the impossible aspect of housekeeping — impossible as love is impossible. For how do you oversee the provision of utterly material goods without becoming attached, not so much to those goods, as to your own ability to provide them? How do you learn not to take personal credit for your own good housekeeping? Wendy Doniger does not think that Brahmins have done a very good job of resisting these credits and attachments, which may be partial explanation of the ban of her book.

And how do you reconcile the requirements of good housekeeping with the needs of people who don’t belong to the household, people who pass by — people who may just be, beneath layers of dirt and grime, Jesus?

I did crawl back into bed yesterday and watch Gone Girl. Midway through, I got up and sat in my chair, the better to eat the Chinese lunch special that I’d ordered, when a tense moment in the movie elicited sharpish hunger pains. I remained in the chair for the rest of the show.

When it was over, it was two-thirty. The day seemed shot, and I decided to watch another movie. But as I was on the point of slipping another DVD into the machine, I was flooded by misgivings. What I diagnosed later as a surge of moral imagination flooded the room with images of discontent and the psychic taste or smell of wretchedness — I want to stress the sensory nature of this unpleasantness. If I did not see to my Tuesday chores right now, it would not only create a scheduling pile-up but coat the apartment with the grimy dust of demoralization. For a moment, I stood still, unwilling to shift gears, but this only gave the surge more time to buffet me about. After a minute or so, I put down the DVD, closed the machine, extinguished the monitor, and prepared to get dressed. By three-fifteen, I had made the bed, sorted the clean laundry, and begun the tidying. I reserved the right to stop if I got tired, but although I got very tired near the end, straightening the sideboard in the dining ell and vacuuming the carpets in the living room, I did not stop, but got it all done, and in little more than two hours. I listened to Don Carlos as I worked, Claudio Abbado’s recording of the grand opera in its original French. When I was done, and sitting down with a mug of tea and Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave, Katia Ricciarelli was singing “Tu che la vanità” (but in French). Well done.

I don’t think that I have ever felt the force of moral imagination so strongly before. Certainly it has priced at me often enough in my life, but it has rarely interfered with my doing what I wanted to do, at least where it was a question of not doing what I was supposed to do. This laziness is my great vice (although there is nothing great about it), and the goal of all my attempted schedules has been to trick myself into thinking that it’s almost as easy to do what I’m supposed to do as it is to do something else or, in the usual case, nothing at all. This is quite true, by the way: doing what I’m supposed to do is rarely more demanding than doing anything else, but I never think so, because there is something terribly off-putting about duty. I got off to a bad start on the duty front, and have spent much of my life trying to get in step. Yesterday’s wave, which I attribute to my latest scheduling scheme, was much more than a trick, however. It vividly insisted that the alternatives to my self-appointed duty would create pain and unhappiness.

I don’t need moral imagination to resist the temptation to steal things or commit other criminal acts. Whether or not I’d get away with them doesn’t come up; with my guilty conscience, right out of Poe, I know that I should never be able to live with the fear of being found out. I think it fair to say that I am simply never tempted to do bad things — bad things that are punishable by law, that is. I expect that most of my readers are similarly disposed — although they’re likely to have been motivated a little more by virtue and a little less by shame. I lead a life, as Marilynne Robinson would be quick to point out, in which it is relatively easy to be a good person. It’s possible that my new weekly schedule will make it even easier. That’s what my moral imagination was roaring on about yesterday.

Back in the Sixties, when I was a young person, taking advantage of the easiness of one’s life in order to become more virtuous still would have been scorned as fraudulent. Easy virtue wasn’t virtue at all. My thinking has developed a few nuances since then. Easy virtue is certainly not a point of pride. You can’t claim that you’re living properly because you’re virtuous. But that’s as regards other people. All that other people need to see is that you are living properly, or at least living well, morally. With regard to yourself, however, easy virtue is not unlike a well-developed muscle. The fact that it is relatively easy for a strong man to lift a great weight does not mean that he is not strong. So it is with good personal habits. The fact that they are easy (habitual) does not mean that they aren’t good.

It has always been easy for me to read. I can’t claim any credit for that; I was given a mind that encountered no difficulties reading printed texts. Studying the so-called great books in college, I learned that reading was a skill that could be put to good use, or to none, and whether from vanity or vision, I resolved to put mine to good use. It took a long time to learn to distinguish challenging writing from merely difficult prose; only very eventually did I discover that, indeed, the most challenging writing is very easy to read. (Du musst dein Leben andern.) I look for challenging writing in the way an athlete looks for incremental difficulties, because that is the best way to keep a strong mind strong. (It is at this point that the athletic comparison breaks down completely, because, the blandishments of Taylorist psychologists to the contrary notwithstanding, there are no metrics for mental strength.) Having a strong mind, I never have to worry about being bored or confused. Can I claim credit for this strong mind? I don’t think so. I can claim credit for that undergraduate resolution, and for sticking to it until it became a habit. Very ancient history by now.

I hope that there is nothing truly advisory about these paragraphs, except in the most general (and least helpful) sense. A few universally understood statements, perhaps. But no secrets of how I got where I am today. And you can, too. The best thing that I can do is to say something that quite accidentally triggers a moment of personal insight in the reader. My tangent becomes the reader’s orbit. More direct interference (do this) is unlikely to work, at least as planned. We are all too different, and the further we get from the grosser prohibitions, and the closer we get to what I’ll call happy virtue, the less we have to share in the way of useful information. All we can do is to remind each other of the primacy of personal difference. While we dance as conventionally as we can, the better to be good companions, we must bear in mind that we are all unalike, that each of us must find his or her own way through the world — preferably, without disturbing the dance of convention.

Nobody has any good advice to give. Only testament.

Last week was a model week. Every day was devoted to its scheduled specialty. I won’t bore you with the details, but just tell you that the inevitable upshot was collapse: this week, I can barely tie my shoes. Starting off with a holiday didn’t help; nor did having Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil to dinner last night. They’d wanted to come on Sunday, which would have worked better for me as well, but Kathleen asked for and clearly needed at least one day of the weekend to be absolutely clear, and Monday was not a holiday for her outfit anyway.

I’m thinking of crawling back into bed and watching Gone Girl, which I haven’t seen. Never mind the schedule! The savage cold outdoors is so beastly that some sort of protest seems in order, even if protest will do me no good.

***

Over the weekend, I read 10:04. Finally. I’ll be interested to see how it ages. The writing is strong but mannered. I happen to like the manner very much, but I know how that can change. Ben Lerner’s manner is shaped, I should say, by his being a poet; he has a physiological understanding of English as she is spoke. I should say — but the poetry that Lerner includes in the novel is not as interesting as his prose, not by a long shot. And the strength of his prose is not drawn from sound. Does anyone remember a poetry textbook called Sound and Sense? (I have a copy here somewhere, although not the one I had in school.) Ben Lerner is a writer of sense, not sound. He is ferociously intelligent: he knows, I believe, as much as it is possible to learn in the few years that he has been with us (b 1979). The difficulty is that he doesn’t yet grasp how things fit together — for him. The overall tone is one of bemused exasperation. Lerner writes fluid, clear sentences studded with unusual words, such as “myoclonal,” which appears once, and “proprioceptive,” which shows up a lot without ever being explained. I don’t mean that we’re never told what “proprioceptive” means, but rather that Lerner never explains why it preoccupies him. Perhaps that is the message.

But really! I’m forgetting to mention that Lerner is very funny. I laughed and laughed. I laughed, it seems, even where I wasn’t meant to.

In the first chapter, or section, Lerner introduces us to the existential drama of being a poet who has written a successful first novel and whose best friend wants to impregnate herself with his sperm. (I’m assuming that everyone knows that Lerner’s fiction is “autobiographical,” and has gotten over that.) The flavor is nicely captured in the following paragraph.

While I stirred the vegetables I realized with slowly dawning alarm that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked by myself for another person — I could not, in fact, ever remember having done so. I’d cooked with people plenty, usually acting as a dazzlingly incompetent sous chef for Alex or Jon or other friends or family. On various occasions I’d said to a woman I was interested in, “I would invite you to dinner, but I don’t cook,” at which point I would hope she’d say, “I’m a great cook,” so I could ask her to come over and teach me; then we’d get drunk in the kitchen while I displayed what I hoped was my endearing clumsiness, never learning anything. Excepting the sandwiches I had made for Alex when she had mono — and even those I tended to buy and not prepare — I simply could not recall a single instance in which I had by myself constructed a meal, however rudimentary, for another human being. The closest memory I could summon was of scrambling eggs on Mother’s or Father’s Day as a child, but the uncelebrated parent, as well as my brother, always assisted me. Conversely, there was simply no end to the number of meals I could recall other people making for me, thousands upon thousands of meals, a quantity of food that would have to be measured in tons, dating from my mother’s milk to the present; just that week Aaron had roasted a chicken for our monthly dinner to catch up and discuss Roberto; Alena had made some kind of delicious trio of Middle Eastern salads the night before; in neither meal had I lent a hand, although I’d cursorily offered. Typically my contribution was just wine, itself the carefully aged work of others. Surely there were instances I was forgetting, but even assuming there were, they were exceedingly rare.

Unlike Lerner’s cooking skills, this is extremely capable, but it is also both “endearing” and “dazzling.” Throughout the passage, excess masquerades as scruple, climaxing in the absolutely uninformative reminder that wine is “the carefully aged work of others.”

Soon after this, watching an art-house movie, the narrator decides to write more fiction, “something I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going to do.” He plans to write a story based a story, told by his college mentor, about the experience of a French writer who tried to raise some cash by publishing a collection of letters from famous correspondents that were, in fact, counterfeit, written by the author to himself. Scandal was averted when the collection was repurposed as a prize-winning epistolary novel. Lerner sends his amplification of all of this, embedded in a transliteration of his own experiences that shifts identities, off to The New Yorker, where it is accepted; only, the magazine wants him to cut the bit about the counterfeit letters. Indignant, he refuses to make changes, but when his agent and his friends persuade him that the magazine is right, he recants. Turn the page, and there’s the story, “The Golden Vanity.”

How I laughed, reading this. It was so awful! The very idea that The New Yorker would ever publish such tripe was every bit as funny as a New Yorker parody. What the story boiled down to was a denatured, almost sing-song replay of 10:04‘s first chapter. (I positively howled when “there was a small washer-and-dryer unit in a closet” was repeated; it had already had struck the note of ludicrous surplusage in the novel’s opening.) But the joke wore thin; I couldn’t wait to get to the end of “The Golden Vanity,” so that 10:04 could resume.

It was only after reading the novel that I learned that “The Golden Vanity” was published in The New Yorker. I quickly wised to the fact that the first chapter of 10:04 must have been composed in part deliberately to subvert and ridicule the story. This was a very different kind of funny.

Usually, I know when I’ve done it. But I was so entranced by my blatherations about changing tastes and Joseph Smith — the Venetian consul, not the Mormon — and the Canalettos and Vermeers in the Royal Collection that I didn’t notice that I’d knocked Kathleen out. She had been scrolling through eBay while I went on, and on, and on. It was only when I startled her with a question that I realized what I’d done. Kathleen came to, momentarily, from the deepest sleep, and I’m not sure that she was fully competent to agree to an hour’s postponement of dinner. But I saw that that was what she needed.

I had begun by talking about — well, we’ll get to that later. As long as I’m talking about my life as a doofus I ought to tell you about an embarrassing encounter with the doctor the other day. I was boasting about Kathleen, and telling him that she is one of the very few lawyers in the land with a personal brand. All you have to do is Google this brand name, and voilà. The problem was, I didn’t know the brand name. I thought it was “Spider Woman of Wall Street.” When I told this story to Kathleen, she said, “Oh, you made up the part about Wall Street.” And of course it’s not “spider” but “spdr,” for Standard & Poor’s Depositary Receipts, the name of the first exchange-traded fund. (The ticker symbol is SPY.) The doctor was not very impressed by the results of my search. When I got home, I fiddled around at the computer until I got it right. Spdrwoman. Quel moronicus.

***

As a rather naughty boy, to put it mildly, I was spanked fairly often. After I pulled down my pants (but not my undershorts), I was spanked with a hairbrush. Later, as I approached adolescence, I was flogged. Isn’t that the word? I bent over and a belt lashed my derrière. This was all my mother’s doing. Neither of us thought that there was anything wrong or unfair or disproportionate or in any way objectionable about my punishment: I was only getting what I deserved. I don’t know when this controlled violence stopped, but 1960 sounds right.

Oh! I almost forgot. At Iona Grammar School, which I attended for a few years, the Brothers had a block of Cat’s Paw shoe soling. I really don’t recall its dimensions — you didn’t see it, you just felt it — but it must have been long enough to flex a bit. A few whacks of Cat’s Paw hurt a lot, and of course standing out in the corridor and being told to bend over was humiliating. It was supposed to be.

Things have changed. A New York court recently ruled that spanking by hand was a reasonable use of force. It seems likely, however, that belts and blocks of rubber would not have been approved. And as for teachers doing the spanking — ! Old-timers cluck and shake their heads. It is recalled that the great Doctor Johnson held that no boy ever learned Latin without its being flogged into him. But no one is studying Latin anymore — not in grade school, anyway. That has changed, too. The world is, as usual, going to the dogs.

Is nothing sacred?

But things do change. That is one of the characteristics of modern life. It has bedeviled thinkers for several centuries. How do we know that anything is true? More recently, the question takes this form: is there anything true to know? Attending these questions is the suspicion that humanity would be lost if there were no certainties.

Think of it as a connectivity problem. There’s you here, looking up things on your computer. Out there, there’s truth, and what’s really real. You need a connection of some kind to get to truth and reality. What if there is no connection? What if there is no truth to connect to? Then what do you do?

A lot of people seem to be dismayed by the possibility that there is no connection, and/or that there is nothing to connect to. It can’t be right! How are we to distinguish good from evil?

I call this bundle of anxieties the old model. In the old model, individual human beings sought meaning and validation through private channels. They prayed; they had visions; truth was revealed to them — personally. (The Roman Catholic Church tried very hard to interpose itself as the source of meaning and the fountain of virtue. When priests behaved themselves, this arrangement brought a lot of comfort to a lot of people.)

In the new model, here is what happens:

Something is “real,” a statement about that thing is “true” and therefore has to be taken seriously, when what I say about it withstands all the criticisms and questions people can bring up to discredit it. I’ve always thought that’s how sociologists should work. You anticipate what serious critics — people who really don’t want your conclusion about whatever-it-is to be true, people who have a stake in showing you are wrong in any way they can do it — would say. Then you do whatever you have to do to counter those criticisms, so that those critics can no longer make those criticisms, because you have answered them so well that they have to accept your conclusions. This is not the same as shouting louder or having greater political skills. Instead, it refers to the agreement between you and your critics that their complaint isn’t, by their own standards, logically or empirical anymore and therefore they will stop making it. (173)

That’s what I’d been talking about to Kathleen. It’s from Howard Becker’s remarks on “relativism” in What About Mozart? What About Murder? It makes sense that a sociologist would produce these definitions of reality and truth, shifting the locus of fact-finding from the individual’s connection to some out-there, superhuman authority to the multiplicity of human beings. This multiplicity, unlike group of human beings, has no leader. It has no common sense, only a small collection of propositions against which no one has managed to argue successfully. Individuals rigorously challenge other individuals, and the result is more rigorous than a consensus. It is also “relative” (ie, subject to change) only temporally, and not with respect to individuals. Given the conditions in which civil society can thrive, the important matters of right and wrong are settled. Ideas about right and wrong may change over time, but at any given time everyone is bound by the prevailing understanding. So relativism doesn’t come into it, except for those old enough to recall a different dispensation.

Civil society, then, guarantees what is right, and that is a good-enough grasp of what is real and what is true. Clearly, however, the prosperity of civil society is vastly more important to the functioning of the new model than it is to that of the old.

No wonder Kathleen dropped off.

Bon weekend à tous!