Gotham Diary:
Zonked
23 August 2012
Yesterday was a very good day. I worked in the morning, ran an errand after lunch, and read all afternoon. I took my walk on the beach. At least, I suppose that this was all to the good. In the evening, all it took was one glass of wine to send me into a Zone of Zonk. I was physically present, but something less than fully responsive. Megan made a pizza for Will that promised to be a big success, but the idea behind it was that it would be utterly normal, like a worm on a hook. “Let’s not make a big deal about it, okay?” she said in an aside to me, quite reasonably not wanting to heighten Will’s expectations. “Wow!” I exclaimed. “Doesn’t that look great!” I was on AutoStupid. Happily, the pizza was utterly normal, and Will ate quite a bit of it. Else the dog house for me.
It was true, as Megan charged, that my mind was elsewhere. I had written a passage or two for Inventory and made a few notes, nothing great but not bad for the second day. Then I had read Lucas on Style. What a formidable book! I wish that I had never used the word “formidable” before, so that I could use it now with force. It is really the only word for Style. Lucas’s tone is somewhere between gravely genial and unabashedly omniscient; you get glimpses of this manner in the nicer dons who show up (and have a way of dying) in Inspector Morse. The gentleman wouldn’t dream of making you uncomfortable, but everything about him highlights your puniness. The trenches in World War I, Bletchley Park in World War II, a Works of Webster (writer of The Duchess of Malfi), and an intimate familiarity with poets and writers ancient and modern, displayed throughout a long career at Cambridge. I am not sure that Lucas’s relations with women were all they might be — he married three times, and he never mentions (much less quotes) Jane Austen in Style — but even so I am a goth by comparison, a barbarian at the gate.
All I could think of on my walk by the sea — aside from “The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” (Arnold) — was the stupidity of not having learned Latin and Greek in school. (How clever I thought I was. Now I wonder if I will ever really understand poetry, or how to write at all.) And then all I could think of was the paltriness of my morning’s work. The walk left my body in an agreeably ruddy glow, but my mind was a sunk ship.
 ***
Just had my final paragraphs deleted by this idiotic program, which I should so like to replace, but there is nobody to advise me how. I’m talking about WordPress, which to my mind is little better than Gmail, which I should never use as a word processor. It’s almost enough (it quite often is, once a month or so) to make me think of giving up blogging — or, worse, of going back to MovableType.
I was going to say something about Ivo Stourton’s new novel, The Book Lover’s Tale, which was so exciting that I cut my walk on the beach a little short in order to finish it. But I’ll say nothing for the moment, because, gee, what I already wrote got deleted by the moronic software (and it is moronic, and I must leave it behind, no matter the cost). I also said something about how marvelous Will was after dinner. He watched a movie on his iPad and let me have a long talk with his mom about Stuff; to use a cant word, I almost felt that he was enabling us. But it was all good.
The first week of vacation is almost over, and I have sailed through so many stress tests that I’m beginning to think that I may just relax. Which would be terrible!