Daily Office: Monday
Morning
¶ Hot: It’s too hot to do just about anything but read, and that’s what I spent all day yesterday doing. But inactivity on that scale is depressing, and I’m bedeviled, this morning, by a sense of the futility of things.
Noon
¶ Onward: Paul Krugman writes very optimistically (I think) about the “de-racialization” of American politics.
Night
¶ Sudden Death: The whole day was overshadowed by the looming of power cuts. Just when I’d decided that the crisis was past, I got a phone message from Con Ed. Here’s the gist.
Oremus…
Morning, cont’dÂ
§ Hot. The heat makes me anxious not only because it’s inherently uncomfortable — even in an air-conditioned room — but because it’s also very risky: the menace of power outages (a/k/a “blackouts”) looms nightmarishly. Without electricity, the conveniences of my city life instantly become liabilities, as I am deprived of water and effectively locked up in my aerie on the eighteenth floor.
And we’re only in the middle of June!
After the papers were done with, yesterday, I turned to a book that Kathleen bought for me a while ago, Search Engine Visibility, by Shari Thurow. (No subtitle: isn’t that nice.) For the moment, I’ll just say that it’s worthwhile beginning to my summer projeck of re-thinking Portico.
Then I read a few chapters of A Splendid Exchange, which really does look to be the must-read non-fiction book of the year. Seriously! If you can read this, you will learn a great deal about your world from William J Bernstein’s lively survey of the history of trading. When I wrote, the other day, that A Splendid Exchange is paradigm-shifting, what I meant was that it foretells a replacement of the history of armed nation-states and their predecessors — a story of war — with that of cosmpolitan trading institutions (and, then only incidentally, the armed nation-states that occasionally propped them up but far more often attacked them) — a story of peace.
Then I picked up Jonathan Ames’s Wake Up, Sir!, and read nearly a hundred pages of it aloud to Kathleen, who was beading. How we laughed! I heard Mr Ames read a passage from his very funny book a few months ago, when it was cold outside.
Noon, cont’d
§ Onward. And I take note. The fact is, I have absolutely no way of knowing whether or to what extent racial anxiety is a factor in American life. If I were an expatriate living in the Western Ghats of India I would be no more out of touch with what’s going on in the United States.
How different that would be if I lived in a city state, or a country the size of Luxembourg. Then I would know. Â
Night, cont’d
§ Sudden Death. If I’d been planning ( or not planning, as one does) a quiet evening at home, I’d have pouted a bit and waited for the inevitable. But what I was planning was the first dinner in over a year for M le Neveu and Ms NOLA. Our incredibly overbooked lives finally permitted a resumption of prandiality. Kathleen and I had solemnly agreed, in the morning, that, in view of the heat and whatnot, we would go out for dinner, but I was mndful that I had promised M le Neveu a steak. So I broke the promise and cooked.
As reported this morning, I was feeling pretty blue. I wanted to crawl into my nautilus shell and just read. Let the world go by for a day. Interestingly, it was the idea that the power might go out at any minute that concentrated my mind on the here and now. First, I paid the bills. I have recently ceased putting off the paying of bills until D+3 (where “D” equals both “Delinquent” and “Dead”), but this month has been a disaster for every domestic routine. If paying the bills had meant spending next weekend in debtors’ prison, I think I’ve done it, just to get back on track.
As debtors’ prison was not really in the cards, I proceeded to work on the Book Review review. Thus, as you can see, I was working full time all afternoon, even though the power might be cut at any moment! (As indeed it might still.)
To pile a steak dinner atop this heap of accomplishment might have been reckless, but the curious thing about my depression was the nice way that it had of morphing into health. Dinner was great.
And the power is still on. Thanks be.