Yesterday, I wrote a few paragraphs about the Middle Ages, thinking out loud about some ideas about the period that are all my own. That’s not to say that they’re not anybody else’s; they might very well be. But I arrived at what I said yesterday on my own, sifting years’ of reading and bearing in mind the absurdity of the monicker: Middle Ages. How unreal! It was over before it existed! But this is true of almost all historical periods. No one thought of such labels until the Nineteenth Century. So you could argue that the Middle Ages “happened” two hundred years ago. I could argue that what I was doing yesterday was trying to separate things that really happened, and that people were actually aware of, in, say, 1200 from things that happened when modern historians began to appraise those things.

Here’s something similar. I’ve always “known” that the thinkers and poets of Antiquity regarded what we call romantic love — that involuntary surrender to transcendental emotions — as a madness, or an illness of some kind. If you were lucky, you never experienced the fever. How different we are! Ever since Rousseau and Shelley, we have been longing for the miseries of love, prizing them above all other experiences. Not until you have had your heart broken, we believe, can you be said to be fully human. But there’s a little problem. I cannot actually point to any primary source for either of these views. I can’t quote a Greek or a Roman on the subject of love-as-disease. Is it true that the ancients took this view of love, or did “this view” come into focus only after 1800? I should have to study the matter — which is to say that I don’t really know about it yet.

I was thinking about it — love as a regrettable condition — while reading According to Mark, a novel by Penelope Lively that openly treats a certain kind of love in this way. The moment at which Mark Lamming, a literary biographer more or less happily married to a stylish gallerist, realizes that he has fallen in love (with Carrie, the ginger-haired operator of a Garden Center who never reads books) could not be more dysphoric: sitting glumly in the Tube, “he knew what had happened to him.”

The reader is of course way ahead of Mark, having seen this coming; but Lively is way ahead of the reader, too. Lively knows what damage readers expect to follow the thunderbolts of passion. Scenes, evictions, marriages broken, jobs lost, &c &c. (This is perhaps her great theme: she knows what readers expect, and she gives them something else instead — something that turns out to be rather more plausible.) Oh, dear, she sees the reader thinking. Poor Mark, his whole life overturned by a stroke of bad luck. Not that Mark is romantically “blameless.” In romantic terms, that is, Mark is a dried-up pedant, impatient with those who don’t belong to the chattering classes, and certainly an intellectual snob when it comes to women whose true loves are primulas and saxifrage. But this was always the point of the ancients’ bouleversements: a would-be innocent bystander is undone by a vulnerability which he believed to be quite impossible. Guilt and innocence aren’t the point; irony is. And that is how Lively treats Mark’s malady.

At the same moment as Mark entered the room, saw her and experienced that universal thrill that is compounded of panic and exhilaration in equal proportions, it came to him that he was, quite simply, suffering a form of illness. He was temporarily disabled; there should be some kind of treatment for men of his age and situation thus stricken. It should be possible to go along to some professional but understanding bloke in a consulting room and say, “Look I have this tiresome problem; I’m a busy man and I’ve fallen in love with a girl with whom I have nothing whatsoever in common and I happen to love my wife anyway and I can’t afford the expenditure of time or emotion.” And the chap would nod and reach for a prescription pad and say, “There’s a lot of it around at the moment. Take these three times a day — they usually do the trick.” And that would be that. (82)

This comic deflation of what are usually taken to be deathless agonies is very amusing, but it happens to foreshadow the development of the “love plot,” which, I’ve rather shabbily neglected to mention, is not the heart of the novel. (According to Mark is a dramatic meditation on the relationships, not altogether unlike a love triangle, between biography, biographer, and subject.) The place of the professional but understanding bloke is taken by Mark’s wife, Diana. Does Diana have a fit when she finds out, from Carrie of all people, not only that Mark has fallen in love with her but that they have been to bed together four times? Not bloody likely!

Diana, inspecting Carrie, felt a further uprush of the energy and planning ability that had seized her ever since that moment in the café in Sarlat. Crises always brought out the best in her; she actually enjoyed episodes like burst pipes or scalded limbs or domestic drama among friends requiring immediate bustle and organisation. She had seen what to do at once. You stepped right into the centre of things and took over. What you certainly did not do was send the girl packing or heap recriminations or stow Mark away under lock and key (as if that were possible). No, what you did was establish control.

She would drive. Mark would come in the front, because he would have to map-read. Carrie and the luggage would go into the back. She, Diana, would draw up an itinerary which Mark in his present shell-shocked state would be unlikely to query. She would see to it that everyone was kept busy, fed, and slightly overtired. They would be under her eye. The whole thing would be domesticated and once she got them back to England, she would have had time to work out the next phase. Carrie, who was basically docile, would have accepted her as administrator and decision-maker. Mark … well, Mark would probably be all to ready for the comforts of home and routine. (145-6)

And that is how it all works out — on the surface. Carrie and Mark go on to have further adventures, not with one another but conditioned by the peculiar relationship that they have had. Lively brings us around to the truly up-to-date understanding that “love” was never what Mark felt for Carrie, and that it was probably somewhat grandiose of him to think that it was. Indeed, the kind of love experienced by Mark is better known as infatuation. The ancients were right — just not about love.

But which ancients, exactly?

The Middle Ages. It’s curious, isn’t it, that we go on bundling the centuries between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance (the rebirth of Rome) as “the Middle Ages,” as though that in-betweenness were a of characteristic of the period, which of course it can’t have been. We can see it in retrospect, but it was unimaginable to people alive in those days. And, really, is “middle” the best that we can say of it? (Not that I am about to suggest an alternative.)

Judeo-Christian/Greek. The Middle Ages witnessed the development of an intellectual orthodoxy — something new under the sun. There was, of course, a religious orthodoxy, also developing, but by the Thirteenth Century, this religious orthodoxy — a matter of liturgical observances, monastic regularities, relations between the clergy and secular leaders, and so on — was permeated by the intellectual abstraction that we call philosophy. The flower of this permeation was the theology of Thomas Aquinas, still largely the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church. It was only partially religious, or rooted in Scripture. Structurally, it was broadly Greek, reflecting the absorption of the various Greek philosophies of Antiquity. But while Scripture was settled, the Greek element was not. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Greek contribution was Platonic in nature, because neo-Platonism was at the time a vital alternative to Christianity as a way of looking at the world. But, a few centuries before Aquinas, the very different worldview of Aristotle took hold of the Western imagination. Where Platonism counseled withdrawal from a corrupt and secondary world of the senses, Aristotelianism embraced experience, and it fanned such intellectual enthusiasm that Thomas was able to place the Jewish God Jahweh as the Prime Mover of the universe, outside but encompassing Creation, and to analyze Christ’s sacrifice in terms of Aristotelian categories.

The union of the Judeo-Christian religious and spiritual tradition with the motley Greek philosophical tradition was never stable, and it never had the consent of both families, as it were. Plenty of religious thinkers dismissed Thomas’s theories as presumptuous, and his books were even burned as such. On the Greek side, opposition took the form of needling speculations on ever-less meaningful topics. (This was when angels dancing on pins began to be counted.) Neither tradition altered the other in any essential way. But, for a moment at least, the pursuit of Judeo-Christian/Greek intellectual orthodoxy (now deep-frozen as unalterable Catholic dogma) was what young people call hot. And it cooled not to ashes but to iron.

Europe and Geography. At the Fall of Rome, Europe was a frontier, much of it unsettled by Christians. A thousand years later, it was a hive of nation states and the center of burgeoning empires. If there is a good book out there about this transformation, I’d like to see it. I’m familiar with many of the pieces, but it would be enlightening to see a historian focus on a general arrangement. The work of Norbert Elias comes to mind, but Elias was a sociologist, not a historian. He was interested in cases, whereas I’m interested in flow.

I’d also like to see a history of Europe that muted the sovereign boundaries and highlighted instead the relationships among great cities, and between cities and what Jane Jacobs called their hinterlands. These cities paid for and exploited sovereign defense systems; their taxes supported royal militaries, which in turn increasingly supported the interests of urban populations. However, after the French Revolution, which effectively substituted Paris for the head of state, sovereignties were refitted with mechanisms favoring the influence of the hinterland: almost every American state capital is, by design, a hick town. Reaction is always anti-urban and anti-cosmopolitan.

Whereas imperial expansion was usually violent, sovereign expansion quite often depended on dynastic consolidation via marriage. The disparate peoples brought together by a marriage were allowed to think that they had not been conquered. Patterns of consolidation (and dissolution) are fascinatingly varied. There are three models: the Hapsburg, the French, and the Italian. The Italian model is of course one of dysfunction: with the celibate pope shut out of marriage at the center of Italian affairs, the lesser powers of the peninsula (among which the bizarre example of Venice ought not to be counted) were thrown back on factions and fighting.

The French model was always centered on a geographical kernel, first the Ile-de-France and later the regions surrounding it (Touraine, Champagne, &c). Throughout the later Middle Ages, much of France was in English or Burgundian hands. The English experience taught a lesson that no one wanted to learn. Of the so-called “Atlantic Isles,” the only region that England was able to subdue was the nearest, Wales. Scotland lay too far from the settled parts of England for conquest and occupation; it eventually came to England by the marriage route. England’s rule of Ireland has never not been contentious. Similarly, English possessions in France, also separated by the sea, required constant military maintenance.

In fact, the English is an early example of the Hapsburg model of dynastic expansion. As emperors in Vienna and kings in Madrid were to discover bitterly, the English came into their French possessions by dynastic, relatively peaceful means but could not hold onto them, because geography intervened, just as it did to prevent the military conquest (once and for all) of Scotland and Ireland. The Burgundian expansion, which would be so important to the Hapsburgs, was essentially an example of the French model. It expanded by marriage and inheritance — and no small measure of guile. Unlike France, however, Burgundy — as the congeries of provinces running from the banks of the Saône to the Frisian islands is known to students of the Late Middle Ages — lacked a metropolitan center, and with it, a territorial focus. Burgundy was an early example of international activity, for it united territories within the sovereignties of France and of the Holy Roman Empire. (Burgundy was indeed the ghost of the vanished third realm contemplated by Charlemagne’s heirs, Lotharingia.) When Charles the Rash died without male issue in 1477, Louis XI of France and Maximilian of Hapsburg swiftly divided his parcels between themselves, and “Burgundy” was no more.

How ironic, then, that the richest part of this old Burgundy — Holland — proved to lie beyond the powers of both Hapsburg branches. When it finally broke free of Spanish tyranny, it did so as a Republic; but it promptly spawned a dynasty, the one that rules today’s kingdom. Dynastic or any other kind of expansion is not longer to be contemplated by the nations of Europe.

France today is pretty much the France of Louis XVI. Officially, it sees itself as a Platonic perfection: L’Hexagone. It is divided into départements and régions of roughly the same geographical size, and, in theory, all of these units are equal. In fact, of course, most of them are hinterlands. Without having studied the matter, I venture to guess that an unusually high percentage of educated French citizens live in metropolitan areas, with a stratospheric concentration in Paris. To what extent is the stability of geographical France maintained — or contested — by the flow of resources (such as educated citizens) from the hinterlands to the cities and back?

Geography may also explain the absence from our modern maps of a sovereignty encompassing what used to be the County of Toulouse, in the South of France, and Catalonia, still part of Spain. As vibrant as cultural connections between these two regions were in the Middle Ages, they remained divided, rather bluntly, by the Pyrenees.

Medieval Empires. A promissory note: I am out of time for today. I shall say only that there were three empires in medieval Europe. The first was the Holy Roman Empire, established by Charlemagne and Leo III in 800. The second and third were rough contemporaries: the kingdoms of the Holy Land during the Mediterranean crusades, and the territories of the Teutonic Knights around the Baltic. Geography may be said to have determined the life span of each; nothing is left of any of them today — except bad memories.

Writing in the current LRB about Hillary Clinton’s exceptionalist foreign-policy outlook (the United States is “the indispensable nation”), Jackson Lears proposes that

The triumph of fantasy entails the failure of imagination.

An interesting way of putting things, to say the least. What is fantasy but the purest, least trammeled product of the imagination? But for imagination to proceed without trammels, Lears seems to be saying, constitutes a kind of failure. The problem becomes clear if we plug in the word “political.” The triumph of fantasy, which always soars high above politics, is indeed a failure of the political imagination. We do not indulge the political imagination for sheer amusement. Political imagination does not support such assumptions as human immortality, no matter how arguably desirable. Political imagination allows us to conceive of social and administrative arrangements that do not currently prevail, and that might have prevailed so long ago that they are forgotten. (Lears’s example of the latter would be the idea of the “sphere of influence.”)

The case can be made that, prior to 1945, the United States was the indispensable nation, but the cause was more a matter of geography than one of virtue. No sooner was the second World War over, however, than the United States yielded to Cold War hysteria, seeing the spread of Russian communism everywhere. It quickly became a capitalist stooge, acting against its own interest and buckling to the demands of assorted capitalist rentiers. The net-net result of this commitment is today’s shrunken and degraded jobs market. The case can be made that, after 1945, the United States was the paranoid nation.

The fantastical nature of Clinton’s thinking is reflected in Lears’s gloss on a statement that she makes in her latest book, Hard Choices.

Her reflections on Benghazi are some of the strangest passages in her book. She says she appointed Chris Stevens as ambassador to the Libyan rebels’ new government because he knew that the most dangerous places in the world were ‘the places where American interests and values were most at stake’ and seasoned diplomats were most needed. This assertion deserves some attention. Are the most dangerous places really the most crucial to US national interests merely by virtue of the danger? ‘When America is absent, extremism takes root, our interests suffer, and our security at home is threatened,’ she writes. It would be possible to rewrite the same sentence, substituting ‘present’ for ‘absent’.

Does Hillary Clinton really believe this stuff? I have my doubts. She has certainly schooled herself to ignore contrary views, because she wants to get elected. She has a very good idea of what it will take to get elected, and pragmatism notwithstanding, it must be said to her credit that she does not pander to the selfish followers of Ayn Rand. But somebody is going to have to lead Americans out of the murk confected by Cold Warriors and the ugly Chicken Littles who followed them, and Hillary Clinton does not promise to be that leader. If the United States cannot take care of itself without taking on the rest of the world — without absolutely refusing to be “indispensable” — then it is certainly doomed.

***

Let me make it perfectly clear that I have no ideological opposition to capitalism. Without capitalism, business development of any kind is difficult at best and usually impossible. But many businesses do not need development — urban bookshops, for example — and many enterprises are not or ought not to be businesses at all — power production, ore extraction, and, in my view, housing. We seem to be evolving toward the view that human needs ought not to be subjected to commercial caprice. We have certainly learned from our Cold War opponents that government does a very poor job of playing industrialist, but there are far more options than the ideological duopoly of capitalism and socialism insists. Consider the not-for-profit corporation. Consider the B Company. Socialism and capitalism are both, after all, philosophies of the universal market. We have begun to realize that many vital transactions occur outside of the marketplace. Instead of value or price, they have worth. They are incomparable.

Many things are incomparable. Most things are only very roughly comparable. No good poem can be accurately translated into another language; the very idea of fidelity crumbles in the translators hands. The incomparability of things, however, seems to be objectionable to many. Certainly our empires of sport have been erected in order to correct this alleged problem. Two teams of so many members, playing against one another according to agreed-upon rules, are as comparable as human organizations can be, and almost everything that they do can be scored. It is therefore easy to determine which of all the teams is best. But this best has no intrinsic meaning.

The notion that the best might be a problem swerved into view over the weekend, as I digested Howard Becker’s What About Mozart? What About Murder? I don’t so much recommend the book as challenge you to read it. Oh, it’s readable enough; there are only traces of jargon, and moments when Becker directly addresses fellow sociologists are rare. The difficulty is that Becker presents his ideas so well and clearly that you cannot imagine what objection might be made to them. And then you realize that he rejects the existence of the normal. Without the normal, there can be neither best nor worst. A very widespread way of thinking about the world gets the heave-ho from Howard Becker.

Mozart stands in for the best. It took all my readerly dispassion to follow the implications of Becker’s response to the question, “Surely Mozart was an absolute genius?” (Similarly, I had to put my Western chauvinism on a leash when Becker analyzed “the classical music package.”) Had Becker chosen Beethoven, I shouldn’t have learned nearly so much, because I’m not remotely tempted to regard Beethoven as the best composer. The fact is that there are musical traditions in which Mozart is not really comprehensible; as the Emperor put it, there are “too many notes.” By the same token, murder only seems to be the worst thing when you don’t look closely. When you look closely, you have to think about self-defense and war.

I want to discuss all of this further, but, for the moment, I ask you to consider how much baggage we should cut free of if we stopped our interminable pursuits of the best and learned to be content with the very good. Now, strictly speaking, you can argue that the very good is better than the merely good but not as good as the best, but that is not what we mean when we say, with feeling, “Oh, this is very good.” The very good will do quite well. It’s piggy to ask for more — and distracting, too.

Grey, cold Mondays are bad enough, but it’s harder than usual to get through this one because of the Brian Williams scandal. I mean the totality of the scandal, its very existence, not just the fact, as it seems to be, that the news anchor told a lie about his experience in Iraq. That is very bad, of course, but what’s a lot worse is NBC’s failure to deal with that lie, of which it was aware a year ago. It was left to servicemen to make a fuss, which they did at Facebook. The latest move is Mr Williams’s voluntary withdrawal from the public eye, but I doubt very much that it will have been the last one. I doubt that I should have paid attention to any of this if it had not been for David Carr’s column about the matter, in this morning’s Times. It wasn’t what Carr had to say about Mr Williams that bothered me; it was his peroration.

We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it. That’s why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole heaving apparatus to far-flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag bearer.

We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe-trotting, hilarious, down-to-earth, and above all, trustworthy. It’s a job description that no one can match.

This strikes the same note of moral bankruptcy that Carr hammers whenever he comes up against a tough call. Rather than salute the military — “The soldiers who ended up in harm’s way and survived that day are calling him out because their moral code requires it” — Carr ought to emulate it, and do his duty, which is to exercise judgment about media matters. Instead of breast-beating, instead of repenting that we ask the impossible of our news anchors — I certainly don’t; I ignore them altogether — Carr ought to be making suggestions about how we can change our lives and stop fueling a system that inevitably produces Brian Williams scandals.

Sixty years of television have taught us a few things about what it can and cannot do. It can show us things but it cannot explain them. It can share eloquent, but hardly objective, film clips of events as they occur, but it is absolutely impotent when it comes to official responses. All it can provide on that front is what officials wish it to provide. Discussion, negotiation, decision-making — these cannot be broadcast, because they are both incomprehensible and tedious.

A medium that can show what’s wrong with the world but that can’t show what anyone is actually doing about it is bound to generate a climate of cynicism, especially given the lingering aura of civic duty that still clings to the act of “watching the news.” Compounding this cynicism is the passivity inherent in all broadcast systems, which work in one direction only. Television news shows, skewed brainlessly toward the visual, quietly persuade their viewers that there is nothing to be done by people on their side of the camera.

Maureen Dowd wrote about the scandal yesterday, and her column brought me up to speed. It also far outstripped David Carr’s.

Although there was much chatter about the “revered” anchor and the “moral authority” of the networks, does anyone really feel that way anymore? Frothy morning shows long ago became the more important anchoring real estate, garnering more revenue and subsidizing the news division. One anchor exerted moral authority once and that was Walter Cronkite, because he risked his career to go on TV and tell the truth about the fact that we were losing the Vietnam War.

Dowd points out that the comedy shows have become more serious about the news than the network news departments. It is obvious to everyone that “the evening news” has become a decadent, meaningless ritual, incapable of informing a segment of the public that prefers entertainment to information — the same segment that watches the news. Television news in the age of the Internet is a civil toxin, a drug that metabolizes real life into nursery tales.

Walter Cronkite was indeed a man of substance. It is obvious that a replacement has never been sought. Brian Williams doesn’t deserve to be in the news, and the very fact that he is in the news is the indictment precisely.

***

Last night, I made jarrets de veau — veal shanks, or osso buco without the tomatoes. Kathleen and our dinner guest thought that it was great, but I was very dissatisfied. The meat hadn’t been cooked enough, and wasn’t, as I like it to be, falling off the bone. It hadn’t been cooked enough because it was still partially frozen when I started cooking. I had pulled the meat out of the freezer the night before, and stuffed it into the refrigerator; I ought to have taken it out of the fridge and put it on the counter when I made brunch yesterday. I also ought to have prepped it as soon as I came home from the store. I ought to have coated the shanks in olive oil and sprinkled them with an herb or two, and then wrapped them back up in the butcher paper and stored them in the refrigerator for a day or two before freezing them.

Ideally, I shouldn’t have to freeze them; I shouldn’t have had to buy them ahead of time. Ideally, all cuts of meat would be available at my favorite market every day, and, ideally, my favorite market would be across the street, where Fairway is, and not down on 79th Street. Ideally, the weather would be fine for a stroll instead of crushingly unpleasant. Ideally, I shouldn’t have to rely on my developing winter rhythm, which sends me down to Agata & Valentina every Monday with little or no idea of the cooking that I’ll be doing during the week. Hence the need to prep.

Last night’s first course was more successful, if only because I liked it as much as the ladies seemed to. It was a salad of fresh corn and chopped shrimp, tossed in olive oil and oregano before being sautéed togther, and sliced roast beets, which I tossed into the pan at the last minute. (I also tossed in some quartered cherry tomatoes, but they contributed nothing to the dish and will be omitted in future.) This continues my experiments with adding beets to an already established combination of shellfish and corn.

They say that Whole Foods will be opening next week, just around the corner, on Third and 87th. I have never been to a branch of Whole Foods, and I’m not sure that I’ll like it, or like it any better than the wildly expensive Eli’s. But I pray that it will ease up the crush at Fairway.

Thinking about The Photograph this morning — I finished reading Penelope Lively’s novel for the first time early last night — I was obliged to remember how large a role disapproval used to play in my reading of fiction. I freely disapproved of many characters, especially those appearing in English books. They were selfish, mostly — I was very turned off by that. And disappointed. Why, I pouted, were the English so unhappy? As you can see, even into my forties I was looking to fiction for a better world than the one I live in. I wanted inspiration. Very few realistic novelists were interested in providing this, or even equipped to do so.

In this mindset, I decided, whenever it was — more than ten years ago, I hope — not to read The Photograph. Another thing that I didn’t like about English fiction was that nobody liked anybody else. Now I would say that I found the lack of generosity dispiriting.

Without noticing it (usually), we grow and we change. My priorities for fiction are different now. I still require good writing. But it’s not enough to say that, because everyone demands good writing, of one sort or another. My sort of good writing assures me, from the first sentence on, that every word has been chosen with every other word in mind — in the ear, really. I want the writer to make certain assumptions about what I already know. (I do not want to be told that London is “the English capital.”) I want to be addressed as a reader of fluent novels. (I do not want it to be pointed out that a character is remember something from the past.) Although I delight in the occasional tirade, I prefer a regular diet of understatement — quite aware that it is flattering to me. (This reminds me that I am as foolish as the people I am reading about, something that I now find deeply satisfying when I don’t find it totally horrifying.) I want to be expected to take an interest in how human beings act, or try not to act, on what’s going on in their minds, while, at the same time, I want each character’s way of thinking and speaking to tell me who that character is. My idea of good writing, however, has probably not so much shifted over the years as focused. Like every old dope, I know what I like.

Somehow, the old disapproval — which I remember being triggered for the first time by John Fowles’s The Magus — has melted away. I don’t really know why, but I’m happy that it has. Now I believe that the only proper target of a reader’s disapproval is the writer. In any case, reading The Photograph entailed confronting an older, evidently less sophisticated self.

(And what do I mean by sophisticated there? I mean “detached,” in the sense of being able to form dispassionate judgments. We ought to be detached from art in the very way that we are attached to life. Sophistication is appropriate to judgments about the world (as Hannah Arendt had it; what Marilynne Robinson calls “history”), but very inappropriate to judgments about people. Our judgments about people ought to be cosmopolitan — cognizant that everyone is unique and was shaped by unique circumstances, some of them quite difficult for us to imagine, but, nevertheless, there they are. It is not uncommon to treat sophisticated and cosmopolitan as synonyms, but clearly a mistake to do so.)

***

In The Photograph, Glyn, a historian in his sixties, discovers a photograph in a closet. The photograph, together with an attached note, gives evidence that his late wife and her brother-in-law were at one point conducting a love affair. Glyn is shaken by this, of course, but, perhaps because he is a historian (a “conceit” of the novel), he immediately resolves to study the nature of his wife’s hitherto unsuspected infidelity. How many, he wants to know: from the moment of shock on, Glyn is preoccupied by the number of such affairs. His jealousy burns off quickly, leaving a peculiarly wounded vanity. That his wife would seek other lovers does not bother him nearly so much as his failure to have noticed. Therefore, he must find out exactly how much he missed.

It is quickly established that Glyn is one of those gotta-do-what-you-gotta-do guys, and this made him less attractive to me than he might be to other readers. Additionally, it might have tightened my critical squint. In the third chapter, Glyn shares the photograph with his late wife’s sister, who is still married to the erstwhile lover, thus setting off a chain reaction of events and responses, many of them mordantly comic. As the novel moves along, however, it becomes clear that Glyn is peripheral to the group of people whose lives he has startled (to say the least). This, too, made me look at him more keenly. Why has he been out of touch with everyone for so long? Don’t they mean anything to him?

There are two aspects of The Photograph that seem to be to be magisterial, to make this a book that ought to be taught in literature courses. The principal one, which I am only going to mention here, is the artistry with which Lively judges attentive readers to an understanding of the story that makes the denouement both unsurprising and highly satisfying. As if she were reversing the mechanism of the mystery novel, Lively seems to hope that her readers will have “figured it out” before she tells them what happened — “what happened” being a matter that is quite brilliantly shrouded in background obscurity. When I say “brilliantly shrouded,” I mean that Lively is almost ostentatious about deflecting our attention. It’s as though she stands in the middle of the road, wearing clown drag and carrying a huge arrow marked Thataway. Young readers will probably miss much of this, and be agreeably amazed to find that it’s all there, which is why the novel ought to be taught.

The other masterstroke is the portrait of Glyn — the double portrait. There is the lively sketch of Glyn the man, which we can sum up here as showing an imposing man with a successful career as an academic on television. Although he would hate to hear it said of him, he is an entertainer. It’s a sideline for him; his real interest is history, research, the hunt. Thinking about him now, I see a sort of all-purpose service dog, possessed of all the useful canine virtues, from the patience of a St Bernard to the remorselessness of a Cairn terrier. So much for the outward Glyn. What took my breath away as I read about Glyn, however was the sculptural manner in which his thoughts and suspicions betrayed, line by line, a monumentally self-contained, monumentally stunted man. It’s unclear that other human beings mean nothing to Glyn, because it’s unclear that he means anything to himself. But he has an insuperable resistance to intimacy.

No, they didn’t mean anything to him.

Near the end, the devastating revelation, which one knew must be in store, is delivered by a figure of severe impartiality.

And at some point then, Glyn has had enough. He can’t manage any more of this, he wants out, he wants to get in the car and head away from Mary Packard, from what she has said. Except that nothing can now be unsaid, her voice will be there always. He must walk down her garden path with her words in his head, and take them home with him.

You will have to read the novel yourself to appreciate how grandly this passage connects tragic irony with the finality of the Expulsion from the Garden: Glyn, as his wife would often tell him, in her gentle way, never listened. Now he won’t be able to help it.

What a shock it was, to read in this morning’s Times that Walter Liedtke was killed in the horrific Metro-North commuter train crash on Tuesday. Liedtke, a Vermeer specialist, was the Curator in European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I recognized his name, printed under his photograph, but could not believe my eyes; so I went to the art bookcase and pulled down the catalogue for the Delft School exhibition and there it, or he, was.

It turns out that Walter Liedtke and at least one of the other victims who were also prominent in their fields, Eric Vandercar, chose to sit in the first car of the train because it was the quiet car. The location of the quiet car ought to be reconsidered. Grade crossings in northern Westchester ought to be reconsidered. Metro-North ought to be reconsidered. Every Senator and Congressman who has ever acted in derogation of this country’s passenger railroad system ought to be sent to Guantánamo.

As for the Taconic State Parkway, its hair-raising curves designed to accommodate the estates of millionaires — shut it down! Turn it into a bike path.

***

Last week, I had dinner with a woman who lived in Bronxville — served by the same Metro-North branch, but much closer to the city — for twenty years. She doesn’t live there any more; she has returned to her home town, a major European city. She moved to Bronxville initially because her husband worked for an international corporation that found him housing there. (On the very next street to the one in which I suffered through adolescence and from which I was gratefully packed off to boarding school — but my dinner companion, whom I shall call Joan — didn’t arrive until nearly twenty-five years after my family relocated to Houston.) She went on to have several other Bronxville addresses, and I knew each of them. It was very strange to talk about Bronxville at this level of detail. It’s not only that Bronxville is a very small town; for generations, its population has held steady at about five thousand. Most people with a history of Bronxville don’t have much to say about it, beyond that it’s lovely and safe and endowed with a great public school. Joan and I were talking in detail because we were both very uncomfortable there. Joan told me that a bunch of her friends took to calling it “Deathville.”

These friends did not live in Bronxville themselves. Joan didn’t make any real friends while she was there. But she did make the acquaintance of a grand old lady. This lady was one of Joan’s best customers. I can still recall the prickle of resistance that swept over my skin when I heard that Joan and her husband had run a business in Bronxville. It was just a prickle, possibly because Joan is European, and not to be expected to understand how things work here. It turns out that the grand old lady did more than prickle. She gave Joan some advice. “Don’t tell anyone that this is a business, Joan. Tell them that it’s a hobby, that your husband indulges your desire to do this while he works at the bank in the city. If you let anyone know that you depend financially on this business, they will boycott you.”

It sounded so strange! I had never heard of such a thing. And yet I instantly knew that the old lady’s advice was the best that Joan could have been given, and I said so at once. If I never knew of any instances of boycotting and so on, that’s because, to the best of my knowledge, the provocation never arose. None of my mother’s many friends, nor even the people whom she didn’t care for, ran a business, even as a “hobby.” The dawn of my social consciousness was the realization that it was “funny” that nobody who worked in Bronxville lived in Bronxville, and that everybody who lived in Bronxville worked, if he (or the very occasional she) worked at all, in the city. I grasped that this arrangement did not prevail in most places known, as Bronxville so insistently was, as “villages.”

(I honestly do not remember not knowing that it was wrong that Jews and blacks were not permitted to live there.)

Bronxville had been a village, once, a long time ago. A rather frontier-looking place, from the look of the old photographs. Then, in 1889, along came a millionaire, William van Duzer Lawrence, with a vision for development. Such visions were almost commonplace at the time; the oldest suburbs of New York, many of them within the city line now, were built as middle-class utopias. There must have been something mildly progressive about Bronxville, because support for an excellent public school arose early; but it would also have been “progressive” to exclude blacks and Jews, who were, in most middle-class minds, associated with poverty. (Prosperous Jews were believed to be dishonest.) Over time, Bronxville’s proximity to midtown Manhattan, not to mention a train station that anyone could walk to in half an hour or less, became a powerful magnet. Houses there are now very expensive, and of course the school is supported by high property taxes.

There are two Bronxvilles, the real or legal one (roughly a square mile in size) and “Bronxville PO,” the area covered by ZIP Code 10708 that is not within the legal Bronxville (another square mile, give or take). Most of Bronxville PO is in Yonkers, a city that stretches from the Hudson River to the Bronx River, but some of it lies within the unincorporated town of Eastchester, with a slice in Tuckahoe. (Both Bronxville and Tuckahoe are incorporated villages within Eastchester.) If you live in the real Bronxville, your kids go to Bronxville school (K-12) for free. If you live in Bronxville PO, your kids can go to Bronxville School if you pay a lot of money. William Lawrence’s former estate, now the nucleus of Sarah Lawrence College, sits in the middle of the part of Bronxville PO that is known as Lawrence Park West.

Joan told me that, while she was in residence, the Clintons were thinking of settling in Bronxville. But the Secret Service nixed it. According to village scuttlebutt, the Secret Service will not permit a former president to live on a property smaller than three acres. I don’t believe that there is a parcel of that size in Bronxville. The three-acre rule sounds slightly dubious to me, but I can understand the squeamishness about a relatively densely-packed suburb.

I haven’t been to Bronxville in a long time, but I expect that its principal beauty is still its trees. I have never heard that there is an official village forester or arborist, but I shouldn’t be surprised to discover one. (The village will, however, mow your lawn if you neglect to do so, and charge you punitively for the favor.) When I was a boy, before the Dutch Elm blight, Elm Rock Road was a cathedral of leaves, a truly exalting interior space. It may be that I am largely unimpressed by wilderness woodlands because I grew up in a sort of park that offered all the beauty of the forest without any of the inconvenience. As for the houses, however, they are for the most part not village houses, which is to say that they are too large and too formal for their small lots.  In Lawrence Park, which sits athwart the ridge that rises from the train station to the northeast, some houses are preposterously huge, perched on steep hillsides with only a patch or two of grass.

In one sense, though, Bronxville really is a village. Joan recounted several anecdotes attesting to the abiding absence of cosmopolitan mindsets. Having been married before, and having kept her maiden name, she ran into endless red tape at the school, because her name was different from that of her husband and two of her four children.

And I forgot! An exception is made for doctors. Doctors and dentists can both live and practice in Bronxville. I suppose that a lawyer might get away with doing the same, but I never knew of one to try. I know I haven’t spent any time in the village for decades, but Joan’s stories strongly suggested that not much has changed.

Two further but convergent thoughts inspired by the Charlie Hebdo massacre — both of them opposed to the editorial policies of that publication.

First: Why are images considered speech? Confucius never said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when we consider the immediate emotional impact of images, the proverb is a gross understatement. Since the Charlie Hebdo killings, it has often been noted, mockingly, that the attack was launched not against serious policy makers who might influence and even shape socio-political circumstances but against cartoonists, the implication being that nobody takes cartoonists seriously. If this is literally true (and I believe that it is), then what is the virtue of protecting images from legislative prohibitions intended to prevent graphic insults to religious beliefs? All kidding aside!

Second: In the United States, insulting speech is judged preliminarily by the public standing of the victim. The idea seems to be — and I find it an eminently sensible one — that people who step forward into public life (not including those who are pushed into public attention by accident) can be expected to bear with a certain degree of mistaken allegations. What is a libel to a perfectly private citizen becomes punishable, if directed at a public figure, only if the statement has been made with reckless disregard for the truth.

The victims of religious libel are, surely, not the long-dead prophets and deities made to look ridiculous, but the private citizens who observe the religion in question. Making an exception for living religious leaders, I should welcome a ban on the publication of derogatory representations of sacred figures and their associated ethnicities, if any. I cannot believe that anyone would defend the broadcast publication (anywhere but in serious works of history) of any of the numerous, purposelessly disgusting antisemitic caricatures that began appearing soon after Jewish emancipation in the late Eighteenth Century.  

***

A few weeks ago, the always-interesting Adam Gopnik published a Paris Journal entry in which he wrote up Howard Becker, a sociologist of whom (no surprise) I’d never heard. If Gopnik hadn’t been the author, I’d probably have skipped the piece, as my opinion of sociology is fairly dim. Actually, Becker’s work, of which I now know something, having wasted no time ordering a copy of his new book, What About Mozart? What About Murder? and then having read about half of it, is free of sociology’s worst vice, the persistent search for normal. Becker has developed a method for conducting rigorous if not always “scientific” experiments without a “control.” He divides experimental groups, yes, but in such a way that the behavior of each tells him something that he didn’t know about the other.

In the New Yorker piece, Becker observes that he is more interested in how people come into power than in the fact that some people are powerful. At last, I thought to myself, thinking of my problem with “elites.” People talk endlessly (although not as endlessly as they used to do) about what the “elites” do or don’t do, but nobody seems to be very curious about entry into elite status.

In the book, Becker takes apart the relationship between users and drugs, a relationship that almost always involves permission. He begins with the startling and counterintuitive history of opiate addiction. In the last century, this was associated primarily with impoverished black men. Earlier, however, it turned up far more often among middle-aged white women. What happened? Shortly before World War I, the United States joined an international convention that forbade the unlicensed sale of opiates, that’s what. The women, mostly post-menopausal, went “more or less cold turkey,” while the opium business descended to neighborhoods too shaky to defend themselves from illegal activity. The irony simply could not be richer. There are, happily, few more ludicrous stories of official, “progressive” backfire — except that, if you had told the responsible officials what would probably happen by sharply limiting the sale of opiates, you might have perceived a very wicked gleam in their eyes. Becker is tremendously interested in how the people who give or withhold permission are chosen. To say that permission is granted or denied by “elites” is to say nothing at all.

***

An ecstasy of agony: I keep putting off The Blue Flower, and, with it, the last chapters of Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. I cannot believe that I will find it to be Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, so I’m afraid of being disappointed. Everything of Fitzgerald’s that I’ve read — seven of the novels (all but the first and the last) and the collection of wildly different short stories (different in length and setting, but all distinctly Fitzgerald) — is a masterpiece in some way or other. She tells good stories, certainly, but she tells them strangely, so that you dwell on the things she doesn’t tell you. Not that you try to work them out for yourself; it’s more like rubbing the gum from which a tooth has been extracted — an obsessive, haunting sensation. She spins in the opposite of Wagner time. Wagner’s operas go on for hours, but if you’re in the grip of one, it passes in a few blinks. Fitzgerald time vastly prolongs the experience of rather short books, not by making them feel endless to read but by creating the illusion of having read a Victorian triple-decker. As with Jennifer Egan, expansiveness springs from the unnoticed common ground between any two featured episodes. It is enchanted stuff.

On the strength of a photograph in Penelope Fitzgerald, I have shifted my attention to Penelope Lively, a novelist of the next generation after Fitzgerald’s. I’ve read the novel that won her the Booker, the awfully-titled Moon Tiger (graced, in the edition that I found most available, by an equally embarrassing graphic); I liked it, but I much preferred the more recent How It All Began, a roundelay in which the mugging of an elderly woman derails not only her own but at least six other lives. The mugging victim, Charlotte, is an appealing, retired teacher of English, famously gifted at inspiring her good students to be even better ones. Charlotte is dismayed to discover that she cannot rely on her project of re-reading classic novels to ease the tedium of a long convalescence. (Her hip was broken by the tumble.) I’ve read about this sort of thing before, always with profound alarm. Is there really a point at which good fiction no longer has anything to say? That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard about ageing — which shows you what a spoiled brat I am.

Very curiously, Charlotte finds that she can read Henry James, of all writers, and she plows through What Maisie Knew, in my opinion James’s most difficult book. Sometimes, I simply don’t know what, precisely, James is talking about, while at others the basic scheme of retailing unpleasant behavior through the eyes of an uncomprehending child threatens to collapse from implausibility. That this should be open and available to the suffering Charlotte was very surprising, but while I have my doubts about Maisie, I had none about Charlotte. And then something absolutely uncanny happened. I don’t think that there is anything about How It All Began, aside from a certain fine, dry humor, that would remind a reader of Henry James — except this one tiny detail, which for all its tininess set off an alarm that wailed with pleasure.

The setting is the V & A, and never you mind about the lovers, whom for freshness’s sake, I have rechristened A and B.

The ceramics galleries did indeed turn out to be less frequented. A and B wandered alone past case after case, in which were gathered the crockery and the ornaments from everywhere, and every age, the plates, bowls, jars, tureens, vases, figures. The eye was caught by color, by shape, by glaze, by all this variety and ingenuity. They stopped, time and again, to admire, to comment, and came to rest at last in a far room which offered a comfortable seat from which you could contemplate more homely and local material…

They came to rest at last in a far room. Isn’t that exactly the blend of vagueness and specificity that James patented? How far? Far from what? Answer: the everyday, the ordinary — the licit. Far from “the reality” to which the couple will have to make separate returns. The oeuvre of Henry James was incorporated by sense memory.

Next up: The Photograph, which seems to be Lively’s most popular novel. We had a copy once, and I gave it away, in a fit of pique. Reading the first couple of pages, I was assailed by a sense of déja vu: I had read this before! But I couldn’t have done! There was nothing to do but get rid of the thing. This time round, I have no sense at all of a previous encounter, which underlines how thoroughly unreliable the power of déja vu really is.

David Brooks and Ross Douthat — I always read their columns in the Times. I want to see what they’re up to. Both are appealing writers of conservative allegiance, which, ordinarily, I should find repellent. But both write a good deal about faith and religion, and this is what draws me to them. What have men of faith got to say for themselves?

It is difficult for them to talk about God without sounding like the Dominican nuns who taught me in the first years of elementary school. Belief in God is good because it makes you behave. There is always a whiff of scolding.

Here is David Brooks this morning, listing the things that “secularists” are missing.

Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies. Religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.

Secular individuals have to build their own communities. Religions come equipped with covenantal rituals that bind people together, sacred practices that are beyond individual choice. Secular people have to choose their own communities and come up with their own practices to make them meaningful.

Secular individuals have to build their own Sabbaths. Religious people are commanded to drop worldly concerns. Secular people have to create their own set times for when to pull back and reflect on spiritual matters.

Secular people have to fashion their own moral motivation. It’s not enough to want to be a decent person. You have to be powerfully motivated to behave well. Religious people are motivated by their love for God and their fervent desire to please Him. Secularists have to come up with their own powerful drive that will compel sacrifice and service.

The point is not that secular people should become religious. You either believe in God or you don’t. Neither is the point that religious people are better than secular people. That defies social science evidence and common observation. The point is that an age of mass secularization is an age in which millions of people have put unprecedented moral burdens upon themselves. People who don’t know how to take up these burdens don’t turn bad, but they drift. They suffer from a loss of meaning and an unconscious boredom with their own lives.

One other burden: Past secular creeds were built on the 18th-century enlightenment view of man as an autonomous, rational creature who could reason his way to virtue. The past half-century of cognitive science has shown that that creature doesn’t exist. We are not really rational animals; emotions play a central role in decision-making, the vast majority of thought is unconscious, and our minds are riddled with biases. We are not really autonomous; our actions are powerfully shaped by others in ways we are not even aware of.

“Unconscious boredom” is pretty sneaky, don’t you think? But vintage Brooks: The Doctor Is In.

The weakest item on the list is the one about the Sabbath. Strictly speaking, the matter has already been covered by the first item — to which I should argue that there is nothing to prevent a secular person, somebody like me, who doubts very much that one’s thoughts about God are anybody else’s business, from weighing and considering existing moral philosophies and adopting whatever seems right. Having been educated in moral philosophy since childhood, I am hardly forced to dream up one of my own from scratch. It’s true that I was somewhat self-servingly eclectic in my youth. But life had a way of showing me the error of my ways, and encouraged me to think a little harder about the wisdom of the ages.

But Sabbaths! It seems desperate.The idea of setting an entire day apart for everyone to “drop worldly concerns” strikes me as both invasive and primitive. Hearkening back to Iron Age behavioral precepts always “reminds” me that life without bathrooms is much simpler, because you never need a plumber. Less is, quite often, just less — and “simple” a euphemism for “impoverished.”

I completely agree with the final item. I have been aware of this problem — that we are not rational animals — for all of my adult life, and I’m somewhat mystified that it’s news to anyone. It’s true that I have also tended to find manly talk about rationality perfectly ridiculous. Human beings are almost absolutely irrational by nature. But it’s also in their nature to want to do better. Hence diets and reading lists.

At the end of his column, Brooks writes, “The only secularism that can really arouse moral motivation and impel action is an enchanted secularism, one that puts emotional relations first and autonomy second.” “Enchanted” sounds agreeably poetic, but I can’t make sense of it. Enchanted by what? And with whose consent? Enchantments are usually involuntary, or at least unasked for. I’m seeing fairy dust here. Otherwise, however, I agree. I might put it a little differently: “… one that better weaves together emotional commitments and the irrepressible longing for autonomy.” Only in miserable situations do human beings like being told what to do. We need to work harder on preventing miserable situations.

My belief is that robust self-respect is fully capable of the moral heavy lifting that compels religious people to follow commandments. I’m aware that the word “robust” might be guilty of the same special pleading made by Brooks’s “enchanted,” so I’d like to try to be clear about it. Robustness requires a number of positive circumstances: good health, particularly mental health; a reasonable degree of prosperity; social tranquility. The whole point of civil society — which may be seen as a slowly-evolving dialogue between human beings and their human nature — is to ensure these circumstances. Yes, we have a lot of work to do. Yes, it would be much simpler just to believe in an invisible supreme being who, to top it all off, created us.

I am not keen on community. In my experience, community is a platform for subjugation and renunciation, offered as a sort of insurance premium that promises to minimize the desolation of bad times. I frankly regard communities as herds: no thinking, please! I support civil society because it is based on conventions that can (with care) be changed, not dogmas that lead to fighting words.

Which takes me right to France, where Islamicist unrest is also featured in today’s paper. (“France’s Ideals, Forged in Revolution, Face a Modern Test.”) I have not had a chance to study (ie, to read about) the growth of France’s impoverished maghrébin community, but following recent developments has led to two conclusions. First, the presence of unassimilated North Africans in France reflects an irresponsibility on the part of the French state. Whether these people were allowed into France for economic reasons or to grant political asylum, it ought to have been clear that immigration was the first step in a long process, not the last in a short one. Successive governments have built the ghastly banlieues and imprisoned the newcomers and their descendants in meaningless lives.

Second, we have been through this religious freedom business in the United States. There are limits. Human sacrifice is not permitted. Nor is polygamy. I am no less opposed to distinctive headgear for women than I am to polygamy — no matter how “meaningful” either may be claimed to be by subscribers, the practices are both patently degrading to women and flattering to men. (The idea of flattering men makes me angry.) I am also opposed to minarets, if only because their primary purpose is to facilitate the call to prayer. I am all for bells, however, if French Muslims are willing to consider a shift.

But the faults of French Muslims are decidedly secondary. It is up to the government to envision a radical improvement in the quality of life in the banlieues. And the people of France must do everything to cooperate. They cannot at this time repudiate the mistakes of earlier leaders. The maghrébins are in France now, not the Maghreb, and they’re not going anywhere. France, just like everywhere else in the developed world, is in desperate need of good leaders.

It is hard to think today. I had a couple of shocks late last week, and the worst of them was the very unexpected news of an old friend’s death. Although I don’t know quite why, this loss seemed to pack a warning to me, and I don’t know where to begin deciphering it.

That my friend had cancer I knew, but it wasn’t the cancer that killed him. On his birthday — we were almost the same age, he two weeks younger — he went into the hospital with pneumonia. Things just got worse and worse, and he died of sepsis after renal failure. Was it the chemotherapy? I watched chemotherapy kill my mother, but that was nearly forty years ago. Questions are idle. My friend never told me the nature of his cancer; he was too much the Southern gentleman to expose himself to pity. On the few occasions when we exchanged messages, he minimized the importance of his treatments, highlighting instead their nuisance value. I knew better than to press.

Our friendship had long had an emeritus quality. We had been colleagues for six years in our twenties, at the radio station. We both worked very hard to conceal the fact that we were in competition with one another, a task made easier by the fact that our jobs were in parallel. I was the music director — a rather jumped-up title of my own devising — and he was the program director, a vital position at any broadcasting station. He oversaw the announcing staff, produced the spots (commercials), arranged interviews, and in general ran the operation. I sat in a little room with my immense card catalogue, shuffling the month’s musical programming and then typing it up. My friend interacted with everyone; the only person I had to deal with was not even at the station: he was the offset printer who had to cope with my perpetual tardiness.

So our competition was not really professional. It was more professorial. We were both smart, presentable young men — actually, we would have been more presentable had we not been so damned full of how smart we were — who, instead of going to law school or doing something else to make money, were throwing our lives away (our nice families’ view) doing something “meaningful.” We were above, or below, the struggle for filthy lucre. We competed at playing this role, the object being to look cool and brilliant and not too shabby. I was better at brilliant, but somewhat unreliable; my friend was never not very cool. He had a beautiful voice that was most comfortable at the microphone, to which you might almost say that he made love. In person, he was inclined to mumble, so devoted was he to understatement, but on the air he was perfectly clear, if not loud.

Even though we were not at all alike, or thought that we weren’t at all alike, he served as my alter ego for almost all of the time that I spent in Houston. Another way to put it is that we were bound together during the passage from boyhood to manhood. And then I did go to law school, and, after leaving Texas for good, saw my friend no more than a dozen times during the rest of his life.

My friend was born and raised in Galveston, got a degree from Rice University, and until later life hardly ever traveled, but you would never have known that he was a Texan. A Southerner, perhaps — but one who had, long before I ever met him, scrubbed his voice of any trace of Dixie. This isn’t to say that he sounded like a Yankee, or a Midwesterner, or any other kind of American. That was an important part of his cool, as it is of mine.

***

Texas. One of the things I like most about Manhattan is that manhood doesn’t come up much. You don’t see young men worrying about whether they measure up to Clint Eastwood. No; they’re far too worried about their professional lives, real and projected. They’re not wondering what it takes; they’re just trying to prove that they have it. If you can make it here, you probably ought to stick around.

Over the weekend, I came upon an interview with Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm and now the director of three documentaries about war. In a nutshell, Junger believes that war is a good thing because it puts an end to doubts about masculinity. We ought to be grateful that war exists, because otherwise we would be menaced by hordes of insecure men looking for penny-ante ways of proving themselves. Just look at chimps &c.

To agree with this set of arguments — because they do seem to be correct, on the rough evidence — is not, however, to concede that war is any kind of ideal solution, or that we might not come up with something better.

And war — really, how long has it been since there was one? Nuclear weapons put an end to war as it was known from the dawn of history until the stalemate of Korea. “War as it was known” was an affair in which armies of roughly equal character confronted one another en masse, and at some distance from densely-populated areas. The only such war that I can think of since 1950 is the one that raged between Iraq and Iran in the Eighties. All the other recent conflicts have been what used to be called guerilla wars, and now are called insurgencies. In an insurgency, there is a profound imbalance between the opposing forces. One is massive and organized, the other local and improvised. Almost all recent conflicts have involved foreign occupation — usually, despite its refusal to see things as such, by the United States.

I doubt that the people of Syria have anything positive to say about war. Junger’s idea of war is effectively a sophomore-year-abroad program for men too poor or too lacking in intellectual firepower to attend a university. These “wars” are very far away, so much so that its veterans struggle with the cognitive dissonance between here and there. It was not very nice, or thoughtful, or productive, or anything else positive, of Chris Kyle to dismiss the people of Iraq as “savages,” but I can understand that it was one way of solving the conundrum that Fallujah and San Diego are on the same planet. If these wars were bought within the United States itself (as I sometimes dread will soon be the case), there would be very little talk of chimpanzees.

It is chastening to read the essays Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam with such warm, even enthusiastic concurrence — only to realize that Robinson’s thoughts, with which I so closely agree now, were published in book form in 1998 (and presumably published elsewhere earlier than that), at a time when I, as they used to say of the British in the days of Rameses II, was living in caves. My enthusiasm is itself something of a betrayal, indicating how recently I have come to see things as I do.

I don’t take it too badly. I have stumbled and muddled my way to current clarity, helped by a series of thinkers whom I “discovered” just when I needed them. Albert Hirschman, Hannah Arendt, John Carey and Marilynne Robinson. More than for what they taught me, I owe these writers gratitude for helping me to see the figure in the densely-woven carpet of my mind. If Robinson, who is only a few years older than I am, had a twenty-year lead on my intellectual development, I don’t begrudge it or shrink with shame. In addition to greater brainpower, she was given a boost by a lucky fit between her temperament and her stubborn attachment to the faith of her fathers. Although her prevailing tone is one of complaint, she is never a scold. She is in calm possession of a right understanding.

Could I please be specific?

***

When I say that I can’t believe that I’m 67, what I don’t mean is that I never thought I’d ever get old. (If I ever thought that I’d never get old, it was because I doubted that I’d live long enough.) What I mean is, what happened in the past twenty years? The answer is: nothing much. To put it simply: Kathleen and I lived in the same apartment for thirty-one years. People died, got married, were born; some people came to New York, while others left. Yes, there was 9/11. But I’ve begun to regard that catastrophe as an event that brought what was already a sluggish pace in civic life to a near-complete halt. We have been going through the motions ever since — one plausible explanation for the financial crash of 2008 — and bending ever more desperately toward the screens of our devices, as if what was most real about life could be presented as a video game.

In the middle of the last century, there were some big shakeups. You could take three-quarters of it, 1914-1989, as an ongoing nightmare. But a shorter period, 1945-1965, witnessed a series of violent changes in the way many people were expected to live. Totalitarianism went into high gear in Russia and then China, while a seemingly milder but no less corrosive coerciveness was introduced into American life. In one of history’s grosser ironies, it was the need to make a parade of American virtues that prodded practical politicians to launch an extremely unpopular reform, by putting an end to Jim Crow and assuring black Americans equal voting rights and access to public goods. At the same time, European governments permitted the entry of “guest workers,” mostly of Islamic background, who, it was rather naively expected, would return to their homelands when their jobs were done. All of these moves were perceived as “progressive” — that is, they were thought to cap the progress of Western Civilization (even in China!) from the primitiveness of the ancien régime to something — something much better. Edicts and new laws would transform society. The naïveté was very nearly universal.

Society was not transformed. What the flurry of reform produced was resentment and caution. These are what we are living with today. I need say nothing about the resentment. All you need do to take its measure is to follow an online argument about American Sniper. In America, resentment was never directed so intensely at newly enfranchised black people as it was at the government that had ordered the enfranchisement, and that resentment persists, ever more pure, ever more tied to the right to own guns. And blacks, by the way, are still not treated equally. Lot of good &c.

The spectacle of this resentment only intensified the caution of those who understood that societies cannot be changed by plans and programs. It seemed clear that positive political action was prone to unintended, unwanted consequences. And no matter how rooted sentiment remained to the past, a new legal structure provided new opportunities for opportunists. The world hadn’t changed, and yet it had. Which way was up?

This was the perfect climate for the advent of free-market capitalism. What free-market capitalism does best is the dissolution of responsibility. Nobody is responsible for what happens. Or, rather, everybody is only a teensy-weensy bit responsible. Political action is reduced to the purchase of a pair of running shoes — you’ll vote for that. Free-market capitalism suited the cautious — but only, of course, until it didn’t. Eventually, there would be a crash. That is the downside of “free-market”: nobody is driving the car. Capitalism is more than just “crash-prone.”

Caution is also not a long-term response to anything. It degrades into cynicism. There is only so much mess that you can resist trying to clean up because you might make things worse, after which you become merely cynical. Why even see the mess? Play a game.

***

The next move, beyond caution, is not to indulge a new fit of enthusiasm for programs of reform, except on the most local scale. The next move is to get a really good grip on the intellectual foundations of the contemporary worldview, from the perspective of the “elites” who run things as well as that of the ordinary citizens who are supposed to be putting those elites into power. What are the assumptions that we make without thinking about them? What do we expect to happen, no matter how unrealistic that might be? Who are we, anyway?

I’ve been poking at answers to these questions for several years now. Hirschman gave my (rather rudimentary) understanding of economics a humanizing bent. Arendt showed me how to organize my own worldview, by way of understanding what she called the human condition. Carey taught me that intellectuals created modernism as a means of prolonging their own specialness in a democratizing age. Robinson, at the very least, is renewing my understanding of morality and reinforcing my belief in the vital importance of setting a good example. I try to write down my findings here, as soon as they occur to me.

Right now, though, I want to close for the week by pointing to another period of caution that followed upheaval. It stretched for nearly a century and a half after the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648. A prolonged war had burned off a good deal of the resentment, but the caution was even greater than it has been in our time. Historians see in the Peace the inauguration of the age of Nation-States, and they’re not wrong to do so. What’s too often overlooked is the profound conservatism of those newly secular governments. Rather than reform, there was retreat — retreat to the overarching arrangement of the three orders of society that had first been sketched out in the early Eleventh Century.

It was a dispute over the relative precedence and privilege of those orders that ushered in the catastrophe that brought the ancien régime to an end.

Bon weekend à tous!

What magic is there about the word “modern” that makes us assume what we think has no effect on what we do? [In 1925, William Jennings] Bryan wrote, “Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.” This being true, how could a cult of war recruit many thousands of intelligent people? And how how can we now, when the fragility of the planet is every day more obvious, be giving ourselves over to an ethos of competition and self-seeking, a sort of socioeconomic snake handling, where faith in a theory makes us contemptuous of very obvious perils? And where does this theory get its seemingly unlimited power over our moral imaginations, when it can rationalize stealing candy from babies — or, a more contemporary illustration, stealing medical care and schooling from babies — as readily as any bolder act? Why does it have the stature of science and the chic of iconoclasm and the vigor of novelty when it is, pace Nietzsche, only mythified, respectablized resentment, with a long dark history?

This passage appears near the end of Marilynne Robinson’s impassioned critique, “Darwinism.” By this point, she has traced a line of selfish, uncompassionate thinking from Malthus, through Nietzsche and Darwin, to Freud, and what stings is the last serious word, “resentment.” Why did these men invest so much energy in the debunking and discrediting of Christian ethics? What was their passion? I meditated on this, guided only by a rule of thumb that I’ve learned from the reading of history. The practical opposite of conspiracy theory, it suggests that whenever something later deemed to be worthwhile is overthrown or destroyed, the revolution against it is waged openly and in the name of something deemed more worthwhile at the time. Hatreds and other “dark histories” have a way of emerging, and asserting control of these coups, once they’re in hand, but initially, the overthrow is designed to bring about an improved dispensation.

This rule of thumb worked principally to rule out any explanation in terms of a “hatred” of Christianity, or of organized religion such as Voltaire espoused. Indeed, aside from Nietzsche, always something of an intemperate madman, the other thinkers, especially Malthus and Darwin, do not “take on” Christian values. Their resentment appears to be aimed at the beneficiaries of Christian charity: the poor, the disabled, the weak — people whom both men regarded as degenerate. Did they hate the poor? But my rule of thumb rules out the prevalence of negative impulses. There must be love of something else. What could this thing be?

When the answer came to me — my provisional answer, anyway — I really did have to laugh, because it was hiding in plain sight, at the very beginning of Robinson’s passage. The cover word is “modern.” The word that it conceals, the word whose place it has taken, and whose meaning it has so completely absorbed that “modern” now means far more than it did fifty years ago, is “progress.”

Progress is what Malthus and Darwin and Nietzsche and Freud embraced. Not the crass progress of enhanced appliances, or even improved health care — definitely not improved health care! The progress that they had in mind was moral. Man, in their view, stood poised to advance by leaps and bounds, to leave familiar traditions behind as his human potential was realized to an extent hitherto undreamed of. But there was a catch! Man would advance only if men, certain undesirable kinds of men, were cleared away, the burden of caring for them and of sharing environmental resources with them eliminated. The poor, the disabled, the weak — the degenerate unworthy.

We don’t talk about progress anymore. The word fell into disrepute even as Ronald Reagan was making a small fortune telling the world that progress was General Electric’s most important product. The fall into disrepute was overdetermined. Weapons of mass destruction, when their existence if not use became familiar, proved to be noxious flowers of progress indeed. At the other end of world-historical importance, GE’s brand of progress took on, during the later Sixties, a sheen of ticky-tacky. (Avocado and harvest gold! What were they thinking?) According to the growing environmental movement, “progress” was just another word for “pollution.” Eventually, the history of the idea of progress, with its run of about three hundred fifty years, was subjected to academic scrutiny, and pronounced spurious.

It is difficult to imagine, now, that anyone ever regarded the music dramas of Richard Wagner as partaking of progress. But not just anyone but everyone did, and for decades after Wagner’s death. Now it is embarrassing to consider such claims. In many ways, the idea of the modern gestated as a way of doing away with that of progress — in so many ways, really, that I could go on for hours about them, if I weren’t aware that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. One way will do. Progress had ever more sharply been considered as a matter of linearity, very much like the evolution of a living creature, but with a now-discredited teleology plugged in, holding that later iterations were always superior, somehow or other, to what came before. (Progress was by no means confined to science and materiality. Consider what Herbert Butterfield called The Whig Interpretation of History.) Modernism introduced chaos and discontinuity, an aesthetic counterpart to quantum theory.

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it was difficult (for anyone not sacrificed to it) to believe that progress would not produce a demonstrably better world — and who could be against that?

The curious thing is that Progress was opposed by not one but two avatars of Christianity. First and more notoriously, there was the institutional Church, which steadfastly opposed the course of progress, rejecting heliocentricism as heretical and burning, when it could, books and their authors whose titles appeared on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Forbidden Books (which was still going when I was a boy). Second, however, and far more crucially, was the Christianity of Jesus, centered on the austere rejection of worldly goods whenever they might be given to those needed them more. Jesus would have foreseen, I believe, that the progress envisioned by Malthus and his Enlightenment forebears would denature rather than enhance the humanity of mankind. As indeed it has almost done — we hang by threads far more delicate than our Wi-Fi connections. What prompted the “resentment” of thinkers like Nietzsche was not so much ecclesiastical reaction against progress as it was Christ’s dismissal of progress as immaterial and irrelevant.

I’m no great fan of William Blake, but a famous poems comes powerfully to mind.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

It is difficult, after what was born at Los Alamos in 1945, not to shudder at the idea of those reflected gems and beams divine.

Notes are piling up in one of my inboxes as prep school classmates mourn, or at least regret, the death of one of our number — although Fossil Darling wasn’t quite sure that the fellow was actually in our class. I remember him quite well, but I did not know him at all; I doubt that we exchanged ten words. I am assuming that the email writers are sincerely sorry to hear of his death (not as of yet explained), and, while I feel that I ought to join in, I can’t quite bring myself to do it.

For one thing, I rarely join these circular correspondences. Within a year or so of graduation, it was pretty clear to me that I had made two lasting friends at Blair, and one of them, who grew up to be a not untroubled man, dropped out of sight a few years ago. His brother, also an alumnus, would presumably notify our class secretary, or at least the school, if my friend had died — although perhaps not in a case of suicide. My own belief is that he is either lost in a deep depression or leading a new life, bridges burnt. (It would not be like me to speculate on which was more likely.) A few years after his disappearance, the class tom-toms took up his disappearance, and a division promptly opened up between the majority that wanted to locate him, by whatever legal means were available, and the minority that respected a privacy from which no plea for help had issued. I sadly joined the minority. As someone who had kept up with him over the years — Kathleen and I got together with him several times in his adopted hometown — I wanted rather badly to know how my friend was doing, an all-too-human mix of curiosity, concern, and self-centered anxiety. But the idea of hunting him down was repulsive. That, in any case, was the last time I spoke up.

Now, as I struggle to do the right thing with respect to this more recent news, it so happens that I am thinking generally about something that, I quickly see, is the crux of my problem. This is the idea — and the practice — of “community.” Community is a much-abused notion in our times. When I was growing up, it referred almost exclusively to the quality of cohesion in a small town. Not every small town was a community; to be a community, the small town had to have a sense of common identity and purpose that was reflected in positive events such as charity drives and annual fairs. In a community, the leaders of local sub-groups, such as, say, the pastors of Protestant churches or the chairman of the chamber of commerce, would share a vision for the future of the town, however modest, and they would use their influence to realize this vision, however humble.

Then the word began to be used to describe the membership in those sub-groups. The congregation of a church became a community as well. After that, it was not long before the country sprouted innumerable communities of interest groups. The passionate element in the idea of community has increased with the self-consciousness of communities. Obedience is exchanged for security and a sense of meaning. Loyalty — the determination to stand behind the other members of the community in cases of all but the most egregious lapses — is the primary expression of belonging to a community. It will be seen that, with regard to sincerity, community is the opposite of convention.

As someone constitutionally insistent upon thinking for myself and acting accordingly — I don’t mean to trumpet that as a virtue; I know all too well how selfish and obstructive it can be — I have never been drawn to communities. I find them somewhat suffocating. And I also find that they make strangers of my friends, at least to the extent that community purpose overrides personal predilection. I find loyalty troubling — seriously overpriced. It is a natural human impulse, and, to that extent I indulge it; but never as “a matter of principle.” While I can imagine being loyal to a friend — I have been loyal to friends — I can’t see being loyal to a group, especially one in which the distinctive personalities of my friends are suppressed.

I have never had much school spirit. I always regarded school as something of a prison. It wasn’t the work that I disliked — perhaps I should say that I often liked the work very much — but everything else: the games, the meals, the clubs, the assemblies, the truly awful gossip about teachers. I was not a joiner. My memories of campuses all involve walking, either alone or in deep conversation with someone else. I no longer remember, without some sort of prompting, my nickname, which was “Bougie,” short for “Bourgeois Buffoon.” Perhaps because I am precisely that, a bourgeois buffoon, I never had the sense that a nickname was necessarily a token of membership.

My class is coming up on its fiftieth reunion. Fossil and I have sworn that, this time, we will go. We will put in an appearance. I’m curious to see all the buildings that have been put up since 1965. I’m not particularly curious, though, to see my classmates. Every now and then, a few of them get together, and then there is a Facebook photo of the group, and what dismays me is that they all look the same. Not the same as they did when we were schoolboys, but the same as each other, now. I look just like them, too, only taller and fatter. Anyone would think I fit right in.

***

Nonetheless, it is always a sorry thing to hear that anybody has died — even, no matter what people say to the contrary, after a long illness — and there can’t, therefore, be anything wrong with a brief expression of one’s quickly passing but entirely natural sorrow. Can there?

A bit of excitement here. How much of it is warranted, and how much is pseudo-apocalyptic? You would think that there has never been a blizzard before. (I blame Twitter, which has made emergencies and disasters better than sex.) It is, however, definitely a blizzard. I like nothing better than a nice snowfall. But the winds are not nice at all. I’m glad that Kathleen is in Florida, and not due to come home until all this is over.

I ran a round of errands — well, two. I had to go to our new Duane Reade. The branch has been there for years, just down the street, but there was also one right here, across Second Avenue, that relocated to a little hole in the wall when the subway station construction got underway. It seemed to be intended to hold onto the Second Avenue customers, but management must have decided to consolidate rather than await the end of construction. So our prescriptions were moved to First Avenue, which I had visited only once before, to pick up a small stash of Lunesta, made available, somewhat contrary to company regulations, by an agreement between the two pharmacists. Odd as that was, today’s return felt even more reminiscent of The Bourne Legacy.

I stopped off at the bank and then decided to do my shopping at Agata & Valentina before lunch, rather than after, to get it out of the way. I’m not sure what would have been left for me to buy had I waited. Half of the trays in the butcher department were empty. The lines were long, but not unprecedentedly, and I got everything that I wanted except for veal stew meat. I had to settle for beef; I’ll make a variation, depending on what I have, of carbonnades à la flamande. By the time I walked across 79th Street to the Hi-Life for lunch, the weather was really unpleasant.

So I decided to give Uber a try — a try in trying circumstances. Notwithstanding the short distance, I disliked the prospect of lugging groceries (including a whole chicken) seven blocks in the raw elements. And I was curious to see, frankly, if Uber would work. I’m so conditioned to the impossibility of getting a taxi that I try not to expose myself to needing one at difficult times. Although I saw more than a few empty cabs coast by while I had my lunch, I wouldn’t dream of counting on one when I needed it. So I got out the cell phone and pressed the appropriate buttons. I was told up front that the rate would be 2.8 times higher than normal, and that the ride would cost at least $22.48. That’s exactly what it did cost. The only hitch was that I settled for the GPS guess at my location, which was across the street. Ordinarily not a problem, but that block of Second Avenue is bisected by subway construction fuss — the emergency stairs, has always been my guess. So I waited and waited and so did the driver, until he finally called and I ran across the street, against the light at 78th Street but holding up my arm in an obnoxious manner. In the car, I heard all the latest news about road and public transportation closings. The newscasters sounded like strung-out hyenas. O for the Beeb.

(I had tried to change the pickup address, but it had gone through as my destination address. I gave the driver five stars, but really to have deserved them he ought to have realized what the address change was all about. Perhaps he had already turned left onto Second when the notice came through, and it was too late.)

I went out again, this time to pick up the prescriptions at Duane Reade, even though I didn’t really need them yet, and to stop in at Gristede’s for emergency quality-of-life supplies. (Lays Classic Potato Chips and Triscuits.) For some reason, that Gristede’s has always stocked Belgian beers, in their large, expensive bottles, so I bought a bottle of Chimay for the beef stew. Then I had to stand on line for fifteen minutes, without any kind of carrier or cart. By now I had accumulated some ice cream, and I feared that it must be melting. But I managed to get home without further bother.

OMG! I’ll bet the package room/dry cleaner downstairs would be closing early! This thought hit me when I read that the Post Office closed early today and wouldn’t reopen until Wednesday. Sure that Jerri’s would also be closed tomorrow, I swept everything up and got it downstairs just in time — well, at a minute to five. I don’t think that they were closing early.

***

I propose that we look at the past again, because it matters, and because it has so often been dealt with badly. I mean the past as a phenomenon has been dealt with badly. We have taken too high a hand with it. By definition it is all the evidence we have about ourselves, to the extent that it is recoverable and interpretable, so surely its complexities should be scrupulously preserved. Evidence is always construed, and it is always liable to be misconstrued no matter how much care is exercised in collecting and evaluating it. At best, our understanding of any historical moment is significantly wrong, and this should come as no surprise, since we have little grasp of any present moment. The present is elusive for the same reason as is the past. There are no true boundaries around it, no limit to the number of factors at work on it.

Thus Marilynne Robinson, in the Introduction to her essay collection, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. (4-5). It strikes me as an eloquent definition of what Hannah Arendt means by “the world” in terms of the human condition — and I couldn’t care less whether Arendt would agree. Like Robinson’s history, Arendt’s world is a human creation, nothing more and nothing less. Very grossly, it might still profitably be understood as everything that materially exists on the day of your birth. Everything from art to archives, plus everything that everybody knows. This last quantity changes the most over a lifetime, as older generations die off and take much of their experience with them. Everything that exists has a history, more or less well-known. Sometimes, as Robinson says, so little well-known as to be almost completely misunderstood. She goes on, in the Introduction, to demonstrate for how long and to what grievous extent historians have been misrepresenting John Calvin — whom everybody claims to understand but whom nobody has bothered to read. Ditto Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx. In the first essay proper, “Darwinism,” she shows how Darwin has benefited from the misreading of his work, which, in such late books as The Descent of Man, is ludicrously and unscientifically racist.

History can’t be abandoned to the historians, even if, or perhaps especially because, they make up the rules.

Is there anything more perverse than the pleasure of gripping an exciting book with two hands as it rises to its climax, of galloping toward the last page with a mounting desire never to reach it? The book is so thrilling that you cast aside all obligations, sunk in the spell of the ripping yarn. When at last you reach the end, panting and exhausted by the sustained brush with potential disaster, there is nothing to do — nothing, it really does seem, to live for. There is, of course, plenty to do: all the things that you’ve neglected while in thrall. But it is unbearable to think of them, they are so grossly trivial in the wake of your adventure. Now you really are in danger.

The first thing that I did after reaching THE END of Nigel Balchin’s 1943 novel, The Small Back Room — when did novelists stop marking finis? when did journalists revive the practice with their little boxes? — I returned to the source of the tip that it might be worth reading. At the end of that Paris Review interview that I mentioned a while back, Shirley Hazzard answers, interestingly, I think, an interesting question by JD McClatchy:

INTERVIEWER

What novel from the past do you wish you had written?

HAZZARD

I don’t think I can answer this. Rather, I might speak with a joyful envy of passages that I myself would not have conceivably written. 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). Conrad’s Victory, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse . . . Wuthering Heights . . . Ulysses . . . I can line them up forever–especially scenes to which I feel very near. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is an extraordinary novel that often comes to mind, yet I have no feeling that I could have imagined it or set about writing it. Tess is just about unbearable, a wonderful book in which I participate almost as if I created it. Such a disparate range of books your question summons up! A little masterpiece like Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room speaks to our own time, but with so much literary experience behind it. Then there is nonfiction so personal as to be novelistic–Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, for instance. There are passages in many good novels that I feel affinity for. In responsive reading, one participates, so to speak, in the rainbow of creation.

I had never heard of Nigel Balchin, but if Hazzard recommended him, and did so in a way that made a “little” masterpiece sound like a bigger achievement than a great one, then I should have to give him a try. So I found a used copy at Amazon. The book was reprinted fifteen years ago, as a “Cassell Military Paperback” — I want to come back to that — and on the cover is a still image from the 1948 British Lion film of the same name, which I’ve just now ordered from Amazuke. You have to know the book or the movie to get any excitement out of the still, which shows a man on a pebbly beach fiddling with something. He is defusing a bomb.

The bomb plot — the Germans have been dropping “booby traps” that look more like large flashlights than explosives, and curious passers-by, including several children, have been “blown to glory” by them — is one of the two narrative strands that Balchin weaves to great effect. Our hero, Sammy Rice, is detailed to one Captain Stuart, the Army man who is trying to get to the bottom of this menace — at the outset, Stuart has no idea what the things look like, much less how they’re constructed. Sammy is a physicist working at a Whitehall unit of civilian eggheads, brought in by “the Minister” to advise on weapons projects, and he knows a thing or two about fuses. Together, he and Stuart try to reverse engineer the booby trap, working from the very little that they’ve learned about how it detonates. Sammy, although not very heroic, is readily engaged by the project, partly because he likes and admires Stuart, but partly also because it gets him out of the office.

The office plot is much bulkier, in terms of sheer word count, than the bomb plot, but if we were to compare the novel to the booby trap, we should have to say that the office plot is the explosive material, while the bomb plot acts as the detonator. Midway through The Small Back Room, it occurred to me that I was reading an example of that mythically rare genre, the “work” novel. The Small Back Room is also very much an “office politics” novel — that, as you may imagine, is where the explosives come from — but the absurdities of office life are grounded in judiciously described work. Sammy has his “stuff” (cold-weather lubricants), but there are also reports to crank out and a team to oversee. There are two occasions in which Sammy goes out to a place called Graveley to observe weapons tests. Balchin does not stint on detail.

Perhaps the “work” makes for rewarding reading because of the war background. By now, the dizzying juxtaposition of time scales that characterizes so much writing about the early years of World War II in Britain is familiar enough for me to compare it to the telescoping corridor in The Shining. Everything is an emergency, now now now, but everything takes forever. While the kingdom is under siege, committees respond with glacial caution. The dissonance is quite literally nightmarish.

I am dimly aware that there is a robust British tradition of “action” novels, written for men, and especially for military men, that combine a scrupulous if streamlined literacy with difficult moral questions. Nothing is ever belabored in these books — that’s the one thing that readers wouldn’t tolerate — but the effort to get things right is striking. The romantic impulse that inspired John Buchan, if never extinguished, is tamed, controlled, and restricted. The third movement of A Dance to the Music of Time belongs very much to this line of work. Its guiding principle seems to be that, while essentially absurd, war is too serious to be dismissed as “absurd.”

I am familiar with at least one writer who is keeping this tradition alive, Paul Torday, whose Salmon Fishing in the Yemen I have not read (yet) but whose More Than You Can Say made a favorable impression a few years ago. If this tradition has an American counterpart, I am altogether unaware of it. Writers such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut do not share the English take on absurdity. American novelists are reluctant humanists at best.

Two excerpts from The Small Back Room. The first is the quietly brilliant opening paragraph, which explains why the narrator is not in Service, while announcing that he his going to say very little — barely more than what’s in these sentences — about his past. That’s to say that he will resist the urge to explain himself.

In 1928 my foot was hurting all the time, so they took it off and gave me an aluminium one that only hurt about three-quarters of the time. It would be all right for a bit, and then any one of about fifty things would start it off and it would give me hell.

This establishes the particular note of manliness that runs through the entire novel, as well as a harmonizing note of self-pity. The tension between character and woundedness has reduced Sammy to regarding himself as worthless, but the possibility of redemption is heralded by his growing mastery of a drinking problem, which is also reflected in his relationship with Susan, a woman whom he has clearly met at the office. The love interest in The Small Back Room is by no means negligible, but it is elegantly subsumed to what, in the modest framework of this kind of book — a framework of modesty, really — is clearly an epic struggle.

The following passage comes from the other end of the book, or very nearly. Sammy is on the beach, straining to defuse a booby trap. Worn out after a great deal of grueling, terrifying work, he has just discovered the most discouraging thing: the most difficult task of the job so far will have to be repeated at another part of the device. Meanwhile, far down the beach, in field-telephone contact, stands a cluster of Army personnel: Sammy is being watched.

It stuck, just as the other had done; and that finished me. It was the fact that the strain came on exactly the same places as before. I don’t suppose it was as stiff as all that really, and if I’d been fresh I dare say one big heave would have done it. But my hand and arm muscles were all to hell, and instead of giving one big heave I had to keep giving a series of little heaves, which did no good at all and just took what little guts I’d got clean out of me. If I’d had any sense I should have stopped and rested, or thought of another way of doing it; but that never occurred to me. I just went on pulling at the damned wrench, never even believing it was going to move.

I don’t know how long this went on, or why I didn’t shake the thing so much that it went up. I remember hearing myself sobbing with each pull, and that I kept my eyes shut because the sweat made  them smart so much. Finally my hand grip just packed up, my hand slipped off the wrench, and I half fell backwards. I made a sort of half-hearted effort to get up, and then just lay there sobbing and panting with my eyes shut.

You’ll have to read the book yourself to see what happens next.

Surely you remember Hermes Trismegistus? No, he’s not a Levantine con man played by Peter Lorre. He’s much older than that. Older by far than his swanky Graeco-Latin name. According to Augustine, he lived

long before the sages and philosophers of Greece, but after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, yea, and Moses also: for at the time when Moses was born, was Atlas, Prometheus’s brother, a great astronomer, living, and he was grandfather by the mother’s side to the elder Mercury, who begat the father of this Trismegistus.

Plus, of course, he was Egyptian, this Hermes, this “thrice magisterial” figure (priest, philosopher, king). He was also an invention. We don’t know whose, but by Augustine’s day there were (evidently) manuscript references ready to be copied out by the diligent. Hermes seems to be of the same vintage as the Kabbalah, a tasty morsel in the stew of eclectic philosophy stirred by Jewish mystics.

It’s from this Hermes that we get the word “hermetic,” with its two meanings. First, it refers to a body of writings, blending alchemy, astrology, and speculations on the nature of God, that dates from the early centuries of the Common Era. Second, it means a way of talking that is intelligible only to initiates. That’s why we’re talking about Hermes today. I’m tickled to death by the attraction that high-grade mumbo jumbo exercised upon the Renaissance scholars who tried to parse the ancient obelisks that had been unearthed in the course of re-birthing Rome. The attempt to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics was foredoomed by the widely-held conviction that the obelisks were inscribed with ancient wisdom.

Many believed that Hermes Trismegistus himself had devised the hieroglyphs as a way of preserving and protecting the old wisdom, encoding it in a symbolic language that was universal but also indecipherable to everyone but the truly wise.

So writes John Glassie in his delectable book, A Man of Misconceptions, which I ought to have read when it came out (in 2012) but did not, because, well, why would you read a book about someone who misunderstood just about everything?

***

Athanasius Kircher — Glassie’s subject — appears, along with his famous Wunderkammer, in what is perhaps the key chapter of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s strange little book, Ways of Curating.

Though the aim of amassing evidence may sound like a rather scientific way to think about collecting [ — bear in mind that Obrist is a top dog in today’s art world, which is why he wants to excuse his appearing to be “scientific” — ], it is necessary to remember that the hard distinction between science and art which marks more recent centuries was not evident as late as the sixteenth century. The separation of art and the humanities on the one hand, and science on the other, is a fundamental feature of modern life, but it also constitutes a loss.

Looking back in time can be an invaluable tool for this: pre-modern scholars had a more holistic and comprehensive picture of human life than we do today. The hard division between the rational and the irrational that marks modernity has rendered unclear how science and art might relate to one other [sic] — how each is, perhaps secretly, part of the other. The history of the Wunderkammer — in which artefacts, paintings, specimens, sculptures and geological samples were collected in one place — is also the history of the period in which explanations, facts and the scientific method were first being elaborated. To study the Renaissance is to gain a model for reconnecting art and science, sundered by history. (39-40)

It’s when Obrist writes like this that I regard him as a licensed charlatan. I am not going to dwell on the almost idiotic assertion that history separated science from art; I am going to do no more that to suggest that the “loss” caused by that separation could be made good by humanists’ getting better at math. It’s hard to imagine what good might come of taking seriously the proposition that art and science are “perhaps secretly” the same thing. Obrist himself is not in the business of taking ideas seriously. On the contrary, he looks for ways to enact them — to dramatize them, really, or to turn them into physical exercises, thus draining them of intellectual content and stuffing them in allegory. Obrist is an ideal apologist for a crank like Athanasius Kircher.

Born in 1602, Kircher studied and contributed to the understanding of geology, optics, astronomy, perpetual motion machines, Chinese culture and history, clock design, medicine, mathematics, the civilization of ancient Egypt, and an amazing array of the other subjects. (40-1)

There’s no disputing this — although the mention of perpetual motion machines ought to put you on your guard — but what is the value of all those contributions?

That’s why I’m reading Glassie. Glassie quotes a historian, John Ferguson, who said of Kircher in 1906 that “his works in number, bulk, and uselessness are not surpassed in the whole field of learning.”

***

Few things are as frightening as the wrong-headed authority. And nothing is more useful to such an authority than a symbolic language that is universal but unintelligible to all but the truly wise. There’s really no arguing with an authority who wields such weapons. Critical minds eventually wise up and simply ignore the wrong-headed authority, but during his sway he can ruin a lot of research projects.

Plato was, of course, the very worst of wrong-headed authorities. Insisting that the five (known) planets, together with the sun and the moon, orbited about the earth in uniform circular motion — each traveling, that is, in a perfect circle, at a constant speed — he wrong-footed astronomy for nearly two thousand years. Plato also privileged explanation over observation. What a cushy life I’d have had, gifted as I am at spinning armchair theories. Having devised my own multi-step program to overcome this addiction (I’ve trained myself to listen for the peculiar pitch that my voice takes on when I embark upon speculations), I had to laugh, last night, when Kathleen asked me, “Who was the first to use the scientific method.” I kept laughing, as a cover, until I was ready to commit to an answer. (Lavoisier — and not because he discovered oxygen.)

Glassie reminds us that pre-modern science was Platonic in its disregard for mathematics: numbers didn’t explain anything. Aristotle, who was sensible rather than elegant, and in other ways as well the opposite of Plato, was a virtuoso of explanations, many of them based a kind of observation that we would call literary rather than scientific. Aside from ignoring the important advice to keep it short, Aristotle was basically a journalist. The object of his reports on the world was not to understand how the world actually works but to make the world understandable to his readers. This approach to reality stopped satisfying the keenest minds in the Fifteenth Century, and by the end of the Seventeenth Century mere explanation was no longer regarded as scientific at all. tou

But the switch from words to numbers did not happen overnight, and Glassie’s book shows that the transformation was so chaotic that to speak of a “scientific revolution” is itself wrong-headed. The term tells us nothing about the complexity of intellectual ferment during what was, after all, the Age of Baroque.

For the moment, I’m savoring the utterly Baroque idea that wisdom ought best be proclaimed, in universal but unintelligible symbols, by the stone faces of obelisks.

And I’m also pondering Obrist’s notion that presenting Athanasius Kircher as an artist gives meaning to his nonsense.

Bon weekend à tous!

How long has it been since I’ve been to the movies? Four or five months? More? I used to go every Friday, almost without fail. I saw a lot of interesting but not-great movies, and I spent hours in nearly empty theatres. At long last, I’m beginning to miss that.

I almost backed away from the box office late yesterday afternoon. There was a line. Not a long line, maybe five or six parties ahead of me. But this more than whispered the possibility that I might not be able to get a seat on the aisle at the very back. Well, in that case, I’d just walk out — no big deal. It was worth the gamble to wait and see. Having decided to “go to the movies,” taking a chance was the only way to avoid the despond of failure into which I should certainly sink if I slunk back home. It has not been easy to amass the exit velocity required to get me out of my reading chair and then out of the apartment and back to normal city life, and it seemed important, yesterday, as I weighed the pros and cons, not to dissipate the effort that had brought me this far. In the event, I got just the seat that I wanted, and the theatre was only about twice as crowded as normal (normal for midday-viewing me). Which is to say that it wasn’t even half full.

Going to the movies yesterday made sense; the day had already been broken by two medical appointments. The upper left side of my face was bandaged in three places, and, although I wasn’t in pain, I felt, if not violated, then disrupted. Such was the thrust that propelled me to one of the two remaining neighborhood movie houses, to see American Sniper.

It wasn’t the movie that I’d wanted to see; I had thought that A Most Violent Year, which looks keenly appealing, would still be playing — but no. This left three choices. Aside from Clint Eastwood’s movie, there was Inherent Vice and there was Selma. If Inherent Vice, with its louche Seventies setting and Pyncheon background, threatened to be demoralizing, Selma menaced an exhausting uplift — I really did just want to “go to the movies.” The one thing that American Sniper had going for it was Bradley Cooper. I’ve admired Cooper ever since he played the loathsome creep in The Wedding Crashers (although one Hangover was enough), but/and there has been a consistency to his roles that the new movie promised to break with.

I knew nothing of Chris Kyle; I didn’t even know that American Sniper is a “true story.” All I knew was that the film would ring a variation on a theme already visited by The Hurt Locker. A very capable soldier puts his all into fighting for his country on repeated tours of duty in Iraq, only to find that life back home lacks color and meaning. There would be dusty, broken down Mesopotamian cities, whose empty streets would be punctured by armored trucks and gunfire. There would be arguments in a suburban house somewhere in the American Southwest, as a wife waited for her husband, only physically present, fully to come home.

What Bradley Cooper brings to this scenario is well worth its familiarity. The accuracy of his impersonation of the heroic shooter doesn’t concern me in the least; nor does the film’s utter neglect of such contextual explanations as what the war is about or why the enemy deserves to be killed bother me at all. American Sniper is not the vessel for such issues; it is, rather, a showcase for the demonstration of a particular American masculinity. The demonstration is so pure, so serenely untroubled by the existential uncertainty that this brand of manliness is dedicated to overpowering, that its exponent becomes a figure of mythic attraction. You might not like him, but you cannot look down on him. Nor can you argue that he is not a good man. You can try, as Matt Taibbi does in his takedown of the movie in Rolling Stone; you can call Kyle “a killing machine with a heart of gold.” But it won’t stick. Cooper’s Kyle does not have a heart of gold. He does, however, have a clear conscience.

Cooper’s best moments are the understated ones, when, embarrassed by attentions paid to abilities that are no more remarkable to him than the ability to tie his shoes, he can only nod, as minimally as a neck can nod, or half-bark, half-murmur the simplest assent, yes, as if straining after invisibility. The frontier between the decent discretion of a man determined not to talk about himself and the pained aversion of a man troubled by PTSD is both infinitely porous and quickly traversed. In the metabolism of the story that the movie tells, Kyle finds redemption in helping others with similar afflictions. This seems perfectly plausible: the disorder is not ignored, but its focus is prised from the secret self and brought out into the open. As long as the subject is not himself — as long as he is not being asked to account for himself in words that he obviously regards as superfluous to the record established by his deeds — Kyle can rattle along like any good old boy. Within the parameters of his firm and stern masculinity, Kyle is warm and amiable.

I didn’t know how American Sniper would end, but I knew that it was going to end, and end badly, when a datestamp suddenly appeared at the bottom of the screen. Earlier, such markers as “First Tour” and “Second Tour” had announced the beginning of each of the Iraqi episodes. Now, there was a date. Clearly something momentous was going to happen, and, given the story so far, and the way the scene begins, it seemed likely what this something would be: Kyle would be shown to have lost his wits to PTSD, and to have murdered his wife and children before taking his own life. He is shown, walking up to his wife with a revolver. But: just kidding! Kyle would indeed die that day, but as the victim of a troubled fellow veteran whom he was trying to help. But that would happen offscreen.

If it weren’t for the regrettable final scene, conceived after Kyle’s murder, Cooper’s portrayal would be altogether majestic. The scene is regrettable because it plays off of the actor’s numerous earlier performances as a manic nut-case. Those who know the Chris Kyle story going in, of course, won’t be misled; indeed, they’ll probably sense an irony that, from what I’ve since read about the real Kyle, was terribly apt. Kyle may very well have been more like Cooper’s troubled young men than, up to this final scene, Cooper’s Kyle has been, but that’s the problem: the kidding-around with guns doesn’t fit the Kyle whom Cooper has shown us. I think that it would have been far more interesting to dramatize his death.

***

American Sniper might well have been hard for me to watch. The reverent presentation of Texan virtues always antagonizes me. But Cooper eschews reverence. So does Eastwood, at least until the very end, where clips from Kyle’s obsequies turn on the waterworks. Instead of making me question whether Kyle’s conscience ought to be as clear as it is — the issue for many viewers, I gather — Bradley Cooper made me wish that Texas could be spun off as a separate planet. Texas is a very large state, but it has to be, because it is also intensely inward. It has little or no use for the outside world. The principle Texan virtue is the ability to see Texas as the Promised Land. It’s a beautiful belief, but if you don’t happen to share it — if Texas brings to mind one of the darker books of the Bible, but one in which the language of King James has yielded to a drawling and immodest demotic, then you might wish that Texas were a great deal more otherworldly than it is.

The call to arms:

We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early [emphasis supplied] to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof. Presumptions of obsolescence, which are often nothing more than the marketing techniques of corporate behemoths, need to be scrupulously examined. By now we are familiar enough with the magnitude of the changes in all the spheres of our existence to move beyond the futuristic rhapsodies that characterize much of the literature on the subject. We can no longer roll over and celebrate and shop. Every phone in every pocket contains a “picture of ourselves,” and we must ascertain what that picture is and whether we should wish to resist it. Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

That’s Leon Wieseltier, writing in a cover story, at The New York Times Book Review, that does not involve a book review. Marilynne Robinson might put it differently, but she, too, is urging us to put up courageous resistance to the ecstatic revolutionaries.

Wieseltier’s final statement sounds, in context, like an exhortation, but it is a statement of fact. How the would-be engineers have tried and failed! Aside from a great deal of suffering, they have accomplished nothing. But no: there is one good thing. They have proved, by their consistent failure, that we are each of us unique, unlike everyone else in some way or other. Of human beings generally, only two things can be said: they are born, and they die. Beyond that rages a blizzard of particular details. We are in fact universally particular — a paradox that neutralizes two ideas that are toxic in isolation.

We used to make idiotic statements, such as “Man is a rational animal.” That’s universalism. At the same time, we stated that human beings of varying description were not really men. That’s particularism. It’s good to know that ever-fewer thinking people make these mistakes.

***

Wieseltier offers a thumbnail syllabus of humanism. He begins with the idea that it comprises a history of thought that is taught with a view to making humanists of its students. This is both elegant and important, but it is not where I should begin. I should begin where Wieseltier ends, with “a moral claim about the priority, and the universal nature, of certain values, not least tolerance and compassion.” I should try to find another word for “values”; it has become confusing, in this age of free-market economics, to speak of moral values. Values are pricetags, statements of relative desirability. I should say, “self-evident truth.”

The moral truth of tolerance and compassion is self-evident because every rigorous challenge to it breaks down. The rigorous challenge is one that does not, to quote Wieseltier quoting, depend on “the importation of another framework of judgment” — a non-human framework. Such “imported” critiques of the human condition abound. All you need do is compare the human being to something more (momentarily) attractive. In modern times, the human being has been endlessly compared to and measured against the mechanical system. Why? Mechanical systems can accomplish great things — although you do have to be on guard against noxious side-effects. The worst of these, aside from all the insults to the environment, is that mechanical systems tend to make the people who control them very rich, and when you have been made very rich by a mechanical system, it is very tempting to prefer mechanical systems to human beings. The advantages of mechanical systems seem to proliferate: not only do they make you rich, but they can be controlled. They can be turned on and off. They can be adapted to new purposes. They can be adjusted to changing circumstances. They can be duplicated precisely. Best of all, they do not talk back. With mechanical systems, you know where you stand — and, if you control them, they make you rich. They make you less like a human being and more like a god. It becomes awfully easy to fall in love with yourself — which, the best tragedians assure us, leads always to tears.

Compared to mechanical systems, human beings are something of a shambles. But the comparison fails of rigor. Rigor requires us to judge human beings as human beings. How do we do that? We scarcely know. We begin simply, naively: those who are taller, stronger, and smarter than others are judged superior. Almost immedidately, these supposedly better human beings quickly learn how to behave badly. We refine our criteria, but the result is always the same: superiority leads straight to wickedness of some kind. The only way to guard against wickedness is to suppose an essential equality: no one is superior.

And, indeed, no one is. To prize the strength of an individual is not much different from prizing a mechanical system. Human nature is not involved. The “human nature” aspect of every gifted individual’s gifts is nothing but luck or good fortune, for all gifts begin with inborn aptitude. To judge yourself superior because of your aptitudes (and the effort that you have applied in developing them) is to cut yourself off from human nature, and that in turns deprives you of the only available expertise: for no one knows how to live except as a human being. It makes much better sense to be humbly lucky.

Every so often, along comes something new, such as circumnavigation of the globe, or the iPhone, and at least some human beings envision changes to human nature. Instead, human nature, given more scope, intensifies. Circumnavigation leads to slavery, but has no impact whatever on human nature, except perhaps to show it up more clearly. I have found the iPhone to be handy to the extent that it has extended the range of convenience — but not increased the instance of it. It is what I bring to the iPhone experience, not what it brings to mine, that makes it useful.

It is certainly not too soon to challenge the engineers who want to try to monetize the mind.

Usually, the difficulty is that I have nothing much to say, nothing ready to pour over the lip of my mind and splash onto the page. It doesn’t happen very often, but when I find it difficult to begin an entry, that is the problem. But it is not the problem this morning. This morning, I am stricken.

I am stricken by the pealing reverberations of having read The Transit of Venus and, for the first time, having understood what was going on in that book, including the horrific, but even more sad than horrific, final moment.

I am stricken by Leon Wieseltier’s call to arms in The New York Times Book Review. I am stricken by it, and inclined to read it as a call to arms, because I can still hear Marilynne Robinson urging courage upon the Nation staffers who recorded a discussion with her.

I am as stricken by these things as so many people seemed to be by the Charlie Hebdo/Hyper Cacher killings two weeks ago.

***

The Robinson interview — it was actually a Q & A — at The Nation made for embarrassing listening. The staffers, only partially identified — I caught the name of Deputy Literary Editor Miriam Markowitz, and I presume that the “John” who kicked off the discussion was John Palattella, the Literary Editor — did not speak particularly well. The women, as so many women do these days, made statements that sounded like questions — almost like apologies. The men correspondingly mumbled, as if terrified of giving offense. These presumably bright and literate people spoke as if they had no very clear idea of what they wanted to ask Marilynne Robinson. At the same time, they could not keep an unpleasant note of challenge entirely out of their voices. The one thing they seemed sure of was that they would not be, could not be hoodwinked. At the same time, they sounded — the men especially — as insecure as the rankest undergraduates.

I don’t think that it would have been much different anywhere else — not, that is, without sounding like a performance. This is how well-educated literate people talk today. They feel themselves to be under siege. Is anybody still reading? Has anyone bought a book lately? Has anyone received a piece of email that it was actually a pleasure to read?

The staffers seemed to be genuinely surprised by the relish with which Robinson embraces being a liberal. Politically, it may be that they found themselves further to the left than any liberal might be, but that’s not quite what it sounded like. What surprised and almost embarrassed them was Robinson’s cockeyed optimism about the United States, her expectation that it might go on to do great things.

Robinson has schooled herself, I suspect, to say as little as possible about the American South; when she mentions it at all, it is to remind us that they owned slaves down there. Her South is a swamp whose atmosphere is poisoned by racist miasmas. She barely hints that these exhalations have wafted north. In the Nation discussion, she attributed the collapse of liberalism to a “backlash” against the Abolitionist Movement, but she did not dilate. Certainly, as Louis Menand pointed out in his 2001 study, The Metaphysical Club, there was a surge of anti-idealism in American thought in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Thoughtful Americans abandoned speculative philosophy for pragmatism. Jim Crow was the price, paid by the very men and women that the late war had been thought to enfranchise. Now the cost of this pragmatism is more generally spread upon all of us. Just the other day, Maureen Dowd was complaining that filmmaker Ava DuVernay knowingly misrepresents the positive role played by LBJ in the Selma moment.

DuVernay sets the tone for her portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights in the first scene between the president and Dr. King. L.B.J. stands above a seated M.L.K., pats him on the shoulder, and tells him “this voting thing is just going to have to wait” while he works on “the eradication of poverty.”

Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.

And that’s a shame. I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant. But the director’s talent makes her distortion of L.B.J. more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.

DuVernay told Rolling Stone that, originally, the script was more centered on the L.B.J.-M.L.K. relationship and was “much more slanted to Johnson.”

“I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie,” she said.

Could it be that the ever-unspooling curse of racism has tarnished the old ideal of an open, free society for men and women of all colors with the tinge of imperialist presumption?

Marilynne Robinson writes about her childhood, and about the personal point of view that developed out of that childhood, as though she had grown up in a pre-lapsarian, or at any rate pre-pragmatic America, as indeed her corner of the Northwest (in Idaho) might well have been. The legacy of the Civil War is in some ways thinnest in that part of the country. In others — the density of Mormons, the popularity of guns — it is very thick. But we must not romanticize the liberal New England that means so much to Robinson. In 1850, Harvard Medical School students staged an effective protest that overturned the admission of black men.

***

I don’t see anything in the past, including the American past, worth trying to recapture. Even the most glorious developments are founded on mistakes, and we almost always fix our mistakes with new mistakes. Our inability to encompass the complications of earthly life is a sad fact of the human condition. I do believe, however, that our understanding grows. Sometimes, it even grows too quickly, as it is doing today in connection with environmental matters. There seems to be no way of grasping the encroachments of environmental degradation without flying into panic or sinking into despair. And yet they were altogether unimagined by our great-grandparents. At the same time, human agency played no role in the advent of the ice ages, great and small, that human beings have survived. The best one can do is to pray: du calme.

Yesterday, the dermatologist took five biopsies, two from my back, two from my forehead, and one from my right arm. Five. I have never had more than two taken at one time, and it’s certainly not the case that it has been a while since my last exam. Today came the good news that only two of the five are a problem, and the even better news that the dermatologist herself will burn one of them off — next week, right before I head a few blocks further downtown to the Mohs surgeon’s office, where a growth will be removed from over a cheekbone. (We’ve known about that one for a while, but there was no hurry and I asked to wait until after the holidays.) Good news, as I say — but it doesn’t have the punch that good news used to have. I don’t dwell on it morbidly, but I cannot overlook the fact that bad news, really bad news, cannot be too far off. It may even come unannounced.

The awful truth is that I didn’t turn sixty-seven last week. I turned “practically seventy.”

***

In this week’s issue of The Nation, there is a review of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (by Roxana Robinson), followed by excerpts from an interview with the members of the magazine’s staff. The full interview can be heard at TheNation.com/robinson-interview, and I’ve just listened to it. It lasts a little over an hour, and so far as the first half of the discussion goes, the excerpts capture Robinson’s thinking more effectively than the more tentative recording. But then Robinson goes on to discuss things that don’t come up in the excerpts at all, such as the relative excellence of American higher education (compared with that of France and the UK, where she has taught), or the oblivion that has descended upon the history of integrated communities in the North prior to the Civil War, or the essential un-Christianity of insisting upon compliance with established Christian doctrines. She talks a lot about courage, too — often the subtextual subject of the essays in When I Was A Child I Read Books. Not battlefield, fireman courage, but what I would call simple, everyday courage — mindful of the paradox. For Robinson, this sort of courage is not unlike physical fitness. If you exercise it, you can depend upon it. You get into good shape. You worry less about offending other people with your thoughtful views on important matters, and, as a result, your views become more thoughtful. As in her nonfiction (and as is implied throughout the Gilead trilogy), the American experiment is held to be a success, something to be proud of. “Liberal” is a good word, conveying the biblical injunction to “open wide thy hand.”

The whole history of liberalism as a movement was lost because the name was removed from the file. Do you know what that is? It’s cowardice: “I’m afraid to say a word that somebody else will react to badly.” How insidious that is! Unbelievable, to me.

Indeed, the audio is studded with what sound very much like moments of stunned silence. And this, in the offices of The Nation! It’s reminiscent of a story that Robinson tells about “preaching” in a Unitarian Universalist church: she was informed even there that the world “liberal” is no longer used.

And yet, listening to Robinson hammer away at this point (with a lovable, grandmotherly insistence that would be very well played by, say, Lois Smith, whom Robinson somewhat resembles), I began to ask myself if it had not been necessary to put the word liberal away precisely because it had for so long represented a movement, a movement disliked by many Americans. Unless the liberal movement were retired from public discourse (at the liberals’ bidding!), would it have been possible to tinker as extensively as we have done, in the past thirty years, with the status of women, with the freedom of men and women to act according to their sexual preferences, and even with our requirements for a President (a black man may well be followed in office by a white woman)? I talk of tinkering deliberately — particularly with regard to changes on the sexual-preference front. There may have been a movement to provide persons formerly known as homosexuals with heterosexuals’ rights, but even its most ardent adherents — perhaps those adherents most of all — were surprised by the speed with which, say, same-sex marriage has been legitimated throughout the land. This happened, I propose, not because of movements or activists, but because people of generous disposition did everything they could do, on a person-by-person basis, to persuade their neighbors that gays and lesbians are also their neighbors. They were already there, right next door, living their lives, and wanting only to live them more happily. It was the opposite of a movement. It required countless, countless acts of Robinsonian courage, particularly on the part of men and women who risked their oldest attachments by telling their families about themselves.

I do think that Robinson’s suggestion (whether she makes it intentionally or not), that liberalism be seen as a mainstream Protestant tradition, every bit as American as Washington at Valley Forge, is a beautiful one — as beautiful as her novels. What makes me bristle a bit is a certain elusiveness on Robinson’s part regarding Calvin and Augustine. Robinson says that it is un-Christian to exclude fellow men and women (such as her wonderful Lila) because they do not fully or clearly subscribe to “doctrine,” but she still wants to claim Calvin and Augustine, both of whom relied upon state power to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy, and both of whom were willing to coerce unto death, as Christians — important Christians. I don’t see how organized Christianity can regain its original holiness without drawing a line against the Calvins and Augustines who people its maturity. I don’t insist on chucking them out altogether, but they cannot be held up as models. They are important historical figures, yes. But we need other models for our piety. My suspicion is that new models will have to come from fiction — fiction very much like Lila. No human being in the real world could be so intimately and widely known to others and yet retain Christian humility.

But Marilynne Robinson herself is right up there with John the Baptist. (It can’t, however, go without saying: mutatis mutandis.)

Bon weekend à tous!

One thing leads to another. Packing the books before the move, I came across Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, and decided to re-read it. At least, that’s what I remember. My book-reading records (a newly-revived aspiration) make no mention of this, but, as I say, it was during the move. I remember thinking about the book constantly, a few weeks later, while I was reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence, a very different novel but one that bears a strong sibling resemblance. Thanks to Amazon, I came across People in Glass Houses, which I’d never heard of. (I wrote about that last week.) It led me to Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case. Which led me, finally (for the moment), to JD McClatchy’s Paris Review interview with Hazzard. I had been looking at Hazzard’s Wikipedia entry, wondering what it might tell me about the reception of the Waldheim book. Here is what Hazzard herself has to say about it (and her other work of UN nonfiction, The Defeat of an Ideal) in the Paris Review interview:

I saw that the truth would never be disclosed except by someone who had been present and was willing to testify. I knew that I could get a book published, and knew where to look for the documents. In all my UN writings, the UN vituperation against me has never challenged the scholarly apparatus appended to the two factual books, and has never questioned any of the evidence adduced.

She mentions something that comes up in Countenance of Truth as well: in connection with a revealing piece that Hazzard wrote in 1980, Kurt Waldheim and his minions threatened the writer and The New Republic with a libel suit that never materialized. Later, of course, Waldheim would say of these charges (about his Nazi past), “Who cares if they’re true?” But he was still Secretary-General at the time of the New Republic piece. That he didn’t follow through with the lawsuit is clarion proof not so much that Hazzard’s allegations were true but that Waldheim could be sure that neither the UN nor the United States would take any notice. Waldheim had been tapped for the top slot at the UN not despite his past but because of it.

Countenance of Truth is a very chilling book. (I should clear up the possibility of confusion by noting that Hazzard was not present at the UN when Waldheim was Secretary-General, or even when he was Austria’s Permanent Representative to the Organization. Four-odd years elapsed between her “separation” and his arrival.) It argues that the United States, not long after the UN was established, perverted the character of its civil service, which had been intended by the Charter to be impervious to political pressures from member nations. (The US, then in the throes of McCarthyism, insisted upon loyalty clearances for Americans attached to the Secretariat.) Countenance also argues that this perversion resulted in the desolation of the UN’s powers as a force for the good of mankind. Finally, it argues that Waldheim, to no one’s ultimate suprise, presided over the irreversible demoralization of the UN. I find these arguments persuasive, but I am aware that anyone of a “realistic” cast of mind, by nature unsympathetic to the very idea of a United Nations Organization in the first place, would be reduced to eye-rolling by Hazzard’s implacable, smouldering outrage. And, for all its marble-veined eloquence — Countenance seems more chiseled than penned — the arguments are not quite so effective at conveying the existential futility of UN operations as the tragicomic fiction of People in Glass Houses.

The Paris Review interview filled me with the oddest feeling. As nothing else ever has, it made me want to have my life to live over again. This was not a feeling of regret but, on the contrary, one of repletion: it was like sitting in a warmly lighted room while snow fell gently into the evening outside a window. It had nothing to do with the different things that I would do or the things that I would do differently — with one exception. In this second-chance of a life, everything would be the same except that I should know, from the very start, that I was a reader. That I should be storing up not so much the content of books as the many-splendored possibilities of the written word. I say “written,” but I should know, as a reader, to read, always, with my ear.

INTERVIEWER

What are you looking to change when you revise?

HAZZARD

It is mainly a question of the ear. If one has read a lot, and especially in poetry, all one’s life, one’s ear signals falsity, infelicity, banality. What one can do about it is another matter.

And with that I sank back, surprisingly content. “If one has read a lot…” No more than I can have my life to live over again can I have started the first one with a good ear. Well, I did have a good ear, for music as well as poetry and prose (and for voices — I fall in love with them), but not an informed one. Necessarily not. So, instead of pining after what cannot be, I shall urge every young reader as strenuously as I can to read deeply and to listen well. I’m not offering this as advice for becoming a good writer, although I don’t believe that anyone who follows it could ever become a bad one, but simply as a tip conducive to joy.

Whatever she is doing — writing fiction about Italy or fact about the United Nations; remembering the austere Australia of her childhood (“provincialissimo”) or the everyday blisses of her life with Francis Steegmuller — Shirley Hazzard persuades the reader that she has enjoyed the hell out of literacy. So have I — lately. How marvelous it would be to have had a life in which the pleasure of reading were never for a moment regarded as idle or pointless or “irrelevant” or — the worst — self-indulgent.

Here in my hand is the first edition of The Transit of Venus, which I bought when it came out in 1980. I shall tell you frankly that I did not understand it. I was never in the dark about what was going on, but I didn’t know why the story was being told: it was beyond me. If I had my life to live over again, I should never be or have been so callow.