Gotham Diary:
Rest over Motion
14 May 2013
After days of reading and writing and more reading — with an interval devoted to Will — I’m taking up the active life for a moment. I have never been one for the active life, and now I find it exhausting, tedious, and painfully distracting. But it seems that the balcony is about to be put into some kind of finished state, with the durable plastic bricks on the floor and the other items that we held onto after clearing the balcony last fall. At the moment, a man with a van has been engaged for tomorrow morning, to transport the stuff from the new storage unit to the apartment. Ray Soleil and I will take a taxi uptown to meet him there. I deeply hope that this will be the last time that I’m engaged in one of these hustles.
Last night, I ordered a few more things to replace things that we didn’t save — after Kathleen found them all online and sent me links. A doormat, a reading lamp, a console, and a side table. The pillows for Kathleen’s Lutyens bench arrived yesterday, and they were all in the wrong color, so I had to make a call to change the color of the cushion to match. Happily, that could be arranged. I ought to have caught the mistake when the order confirmation arrived, but I didn’t review it closely. The wrong color is navy, which is quite smart but not very festive. We need to find cushions for the chairs coming down from new storage. I have to make a run over to Eli’s, because they sell fancy Italian seeds for flowers and herbs, and I like to have a pot or two of parsley on hand.
Within a month, I hope, the balcony will be restored as a real fourth room.
I’m also off to the old storage unit today. I’ll be taking the laptop, the MiFi card, and a barcode scanner, in hopes of creating a list of the books that I’m going to donate to HousingWorks. If I can scan the books in the storage unit, I won’t have to lug them home first, but will be able to box them up nicely for pickup. Whether or not the experiment is a success, I won’t be at the storage unit for very long, because I’ll want my lunch, which will be very late, as I’ll have been to the dentist, for a very quick appointment, at two.
Oh, to be done with it all.
***
On Sunday, I dug out Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments, a book that I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out a dozen years ago. Rothschild’s book explores the metamorphosis of The Wealth of Nations from “a very violent attack…upon the entire commercial system of Great Britain” — that’s what Adam Smith himself called it — into the founding text of the cult of 24/7 markets in everything. In other words, from a book that was regarded as somewhat seditious in the 1790s, immediately after Smith’s death, into an establishment bible. (The largish question lurking behind Rothschild’s book is of course Smiths: will I actually read The Wealth of Nations, all of it, as I was supposed to do in college? I’ve still got the Modern Library Giant here somewhere.) While searching for Rothschild, I found two other books that I’d been thinking of. One was Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which I thought I might have lost, and the other was The Opposing Self, Lionel Trilling’s 1955 collection of essays. The last essay in The Opposing Self is “Mansfield Park,” and you’ve got to read it if you want to say anything sharp about Austen’s novel, because everybody else has.
I read the essay and must read it again; it’s dense, but it’s also dated. “[I]n our dreams of our right true selves we live in the country.” Is that still true? I don’t think so, nor do I feel the disgust with life that Trilling pins on the modern condition, although I certainly remember the vogue for it. One passage sailed right over the novel and struck me in the heart.
There is scarcely one of our modern pieties that [Mansfield Park] does not offend. … Most troubling of all is its preference for rest over motion. To deal with the world by condemning it, by withdrawing from it and shutting it out, by making oneself and one’s mode and principles of life the very center of existence and to live the round of one’s days in the stasis and peace thus contrived — this, in an earlier age, was one of the recognized strategies of life, but to us it seems not merely impracticable but almost wicked.
Indeed! I have never meant to shut out the world, but I certainly do believe in making the “mode and principles of life the very center of existence,” and I have often felt that this must be accounted for and excused. It is certainly “un-American.” For me, house and home are that very center, and their upkeep is the salient moral action, because it is aimed at contriving the stasis and peace in which the inevitable complexity of life is contemplated and understood. Housekeeping is only superficially a matter of cleanliness; quite literally it is the economy of possessions thought needful for life. There is always too much, and there is never enough. Because this order of housekeeping is so unfashionable, I have had to teach myself its elements. Unfashionable, as I say — but it is also new, since it is only within living memory that people who spend their days doing what I do have been obliged to see to themselves as servants did in earlier times. (Seeing to myself comprises seeing to Kathleen as well.) How to be your own servant without treating yourself as a slave is a skill that, in my experience, very few people possess.
***
Since I have been only once to the new storage unit uptown, and because the monthly rental is charged to my credit card and not, as the (much larger) downtown storage rental is, presented in a bill — and also because I visit the downtown storage unit not infrequently — the new unit assumed an air of unreality. I had to examine the credit card bill to make sure that the rent was actually being paid, and then I had to find the keys. The keys were, amazingly, exactly where they ought to have been.
Why two storage units? The idea is to empty the old one into the new one, getting rid of a good many things in the process. Books, for example. A few sticks of furniture that we needn’t hold onto. The uptown unit has, rather gloriously, a large window, so it will make a much better adjunct library than the dim downtown unit does. I hope to be fully installed uptown, and out of the downtown unit altogether, by the end of the year. That will be virtuous economy indeed.