Gotham Diary:
Break
2 January 2015

Here we are in the year P. Although I never believed that there would be a Y2K disaster, I wasn’t happy about all the zeroes that the new century was going to impose on filenames in YYMMDD format — as most of mine are. (Letters, photographs, and most other documents are filed by date, in appropriate subdirectories.) Bearing in mind my age, should I live to need the letter Z, I decided to turn to the alphabet instead.

Perhaps it is time to revert to conventional figuration: instead of being P0102, today might be 150102. Especially since I already tripped over the alphabet and named the photograph above “N0102,” as if the year N had never been. It is time, I conclude, to be conventional whenever being conventional is simpler. This conclusion prompted our decision not to paint the walls of the new apartment. They had just been painted, in what we both found to be a depressingly drab mushroom color when the apartment was empty, but that quickly revealed itself as a decorator’s miracle hue, subtly changing in different lights and borrowing (or complementing) the colors of nearby objects. The lease obliges the management to repaint the apartment every so often, but only in its chosen shades — which is how we went eighteen years without fresh paint in most of the apartment upstairs. No more of that, say we!

Sticking to conventions is also helpful when you’re tired, and we’re still very tired. Not as tired as we were yesterday, or on Wednesday night as we were packing. We’ve had a good night’s sleep in our comfortable hotel bed, and a lazy morning over room-service breakfast. But we’re tired, and it shows. I have not been quite lazy, actually; I have finally set up an account with Uber. This is something that I have meant to do since Thanksgiving 2013, because it is the only way to get a ride from Outer Sunset back to downtown San Francisco. Setting up the account and installing the app on the iPhone are more or less straightforward processes, but I encountered difficulties installing the app, because I could not remember my iTunes password. Only after a great deal of moaning and groaning did I remember where I might find it. Then I forgot the password that I had just used to set up the Uber account! With a little guesswork, I recaptured it, but this time I made a note of it where I found the iTunes password.

We shall give Uber a try when it’s time to go out to Sunset for dinner. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll take a taxi and I’ll get Megan or Ryan to show me what I’m doing wrong. Either way, the ride home will be on us. It felt pretty dreadful to have to ask Megan to arrange the ride last night.

We found everyone well, and a great deal more relaxed than we were. (You can’t relax if you’re really too tired, even though that’s exactly what you need to be doing.) Will blew out all the candles on his birthday cake in one go. (Because Megan was short of matches, we used a piece of uncoooked spaghetti to light them all.) Tomorrow, we’re going to go shopping to buy him the serious presents that he really wants. Superheroes are involved. Remind me to write about Megan’s fascinating thoughts about the importance of superheroes for the moral guidance of children Will’s age — I need a few days to let them sink in.

***

It’s a good thing to be in San Francisco, good both to be here and not to be there, at home in New York, if only for a weekend. We had reached a natural break time in settling in to the new apartment, and the coincidence of the year’s beginning contributes a symbolic oomph. Life in the hotel room, while comfortable enough, has a certain desert-island quality. Or perhaps the quality is monastic: few of the special comforts of home are on offer. I can’t make a fresh pot of tea at will — I could have one sent up, but it would be strange and expensive — and I haven’t got any music on hand, having decided not to lug iPods and their accoutrements for just a few days. There is also the simplicity of a retreat in the withdrawal of everyday routines. Laundry, grocery-shopping — they’re not there to forestall the encroachment of boredom, which in this case would be the inability to think about what I’ve got think about.

And what have I got to think about? Right now, it seems time to organize all the things that I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of years, not only because all of them seem to be profoundly interrelated — the worrisome tell-tale sign, I’m aware, of the paranoid mind — but because the interrelationships occlude conventional standards of importance. In my new view, it is not always more important to think about art than it is to think about closets; moreover, there may well be a connection between the two. Books pose the most formidable example of widely distributed significance. The problem of finding shelf space for books seems mundane enough, but at a certain point in life it becomes anything but, by involving the very question of book ownership itself. Why have a personal library? And why have a personal library in what appears to be a new era of virtual books, which occupy so very little physical space that they seem to be positively immaterial? The worth of a personal library is very much an unexamined idea.

As I organize these newly-examined ideas, I have to decide on a rubric, and here, too, I range between the unglamorous particularity of “householding” and the intoxicating ether of “humanism.” From an academic standpoint — and it is still the academic standpoint that determines the worth of any serious discussion — householding utterly lacks the importance of humanism; but I have determined that this valuation is an uninformed prejudice, and there’s no doubt that my “subject” is the continuity that I find between everyday questions of household management and no less everyday questions about decency, self-respect, and generosity that, for me, comprise the interactions of human beings in a healthy world. As I sort my observations, which labels will be most helpful?

Bon weekend à tous!