Holiday Journal:
Under Cover
Monday, 20 December 2010
The blagueurs have been packed off on vacation, with instructions not to fall too far behind on the feeds. The change in routine is unpremeditated, but it doesn’t discomfit me as it once would have done. I need a holiday, so I’m going to take advantage of the holiday season as a cover. You probably need a change of routine, too.
I need to think a bit about the Daily Office. I’ve had great fun taking it over, as it were. Until November, the Office was little more than a frame for longish extracts from Web pages that I found interesting. There wasn’t much for me to say about them — without repeating them. Then, in one of those ironic developments that keep life interesting, I decided to make things simpler by summarizing the material myself. This immediately resulted in lots more writing by me, but it really was easier. Instead of quoting Frank Rich, while trying to come up with artful paraphrases of what he was saying, I could simply fold the gist of his remarks into my response to them, writing more or less off the top of my head. (What a curious expression that is!) The Daily Office much easier to do and much more quickly done.
But if writing the Daily Office took less time, it still took a long time to prepare. In order to write about Frank Rich, I have to read Frank Rich, and in order to find a bit of Frank Rich that engages something that is on my mind, I have to read a lot of other interesting but, for the moment, not particularly relevant material. For that’s what the Office is about: the frankly egotistical business of sharing bits and pieces of writing that reflect what I’m thinking about anyway.
Many bright people prefer to think things through on their own, but my cast of mind is essentially sociable. I don’t have much to say unless somebody else says something first. I can’t understand why anybody would listen to me — I don’t listen to me. I listen to good writers. The number of good writers used to be manageably, if disappointingly, small. Like everybody else, I used to read books and magazines. It takes a while to read a book, which means that you spend a while in the company of one mind. Magazines offer more variety, but if they’re any good they’re filtered through a distinctive editorial outlook — a handful of minds at the most. But then the Internet was invented, and my mind was suddenly engaged by hundreds of others.
Thinking about this change lately, I’ve recurred to a thrilling experience that I had at the age of fourteen. Accompanying my parents on a business trip to San Francisco, I was staying at the Fairmont Hotel, atop Nob Hill. The hotel had recently added a modern tower at the rear of its imposing pile (which survived the earthquake), and to surpass the competition across California Street (the “Top of the Mark”), the designers mounted an outdoor elevator that ran between the lobby level and the top-floor bar. Outdoor elevators were remarkable in those days, but this outdoor elevator offered something much more remarkable.
As the elevator began its climb, Powell Street receded, but the view of bland neighboring buildings did little to challenge the excitement of being in an outdoor elevator. Higher up, though — I don’t remember how much higher — the neighboring rooftops fell away and, with them, the whole world: suddenly, there was all of San Francisco, with the Bay and its bridges, and Oakland and the mountains and, for all you knew, Sacramento. The excitement of being in an outdoor elevator dissolved in the excitement of seeing the city from a rocket ship. The view was amazing, but it was the sudden transformation of the view that book your breath away.
That’s what reading the Internet has been like. From a few dozen books and magazines, I’ve passed to a horizonless panorama of ideas and expressions. Most of it isn’t very interesting, but there are so many orders of magnitude more of it that a very great deal of it is. I could get lost in it — and that’s what I’m afraid of doing. That’s why I’m taking this little break, under cover of the holiday season.