If I told you how I feel today — listless, achy, mildly anxious and even somewhat depressed — you might urge me to take either a quick nap or a long walk, depending upon your philosophy. Even I regard my low spirits as just that — low spirits, nothing somatic. But spirits are no less somatic than the rest of my anatomy, and the cure for what ails them awaits me on Wednesday, in the form of a Remicade infusion. I have to remind myself that the infusion will make me feel better, because I don’t feel sick at all, in the sense of needing medical attention. But I do need medical attention. It’s very odd, to have grown up in one medical environment, and then to be growing old in an entirely different one.

I did nothing yesterday but go to the movies and read. I saw Crazy Stupid Love, which, aside from its crazy stupid title, is a sweet if quirky films, one of those romantic comedies the shared fondness for which will lead some people to discover that they are soul mates. The plot, such as it is, is both abrupt and vague, a combination that certainly makes you pay attention, which you’re happy to do because the actors are so engaging. I am not a fan of the flamboyant strangeness of Steve Carrell’s impersonation of ordinary guys, but I thank him for reminding me that ordinariness is no more to be trusted, expected, or relied upon than is extraordinary behavior. It’s possible that Julianne Moore was miscast; it’s so much easier to see her as the smiling but unhappy wife of a John C Reilly or a Dennis Quaid than as the confused but happy wife of a Steve Carrell. (And better than either is seeing her as the assertively insecure drinking buddy of a Colin Firth.) But Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are perfect for this film, and they hang together, usually silently, in their scenes with other characters in the way the real couples do; perhaps they will make some more movies together. I couldn’t make up my mind about Jonah Bobo, but there’s no doubt that this kid will have a future if he plays his cards right. Analeigh Tipton is a lovely young lady who has the ability, exhibited best by Japanese actresses, to absorb what is happening around her and to register it for the viewer’s sake, as if privately. And don’t let me forget Marisa Tomei, whose role is something like a brick in a clothes drier — it’s the “crazy” part of the movie, structurally — but who makes the absolute mostest of what she’s been given to work with, as indeed she always does. Kevin Bacon’s role, as the man who cuckholds Steve Carrell’s character, is just about as thankless as a part can be, and it shows off the ageing of his lean good looks pretty gruesomely. I can’t say anything about the story, not only because it hinges on some well-contrived surprises, or because the loverboy spends what ought to be the big sex scene confessing an addiction to buying things that he doesn’t want or need on the Home Shopping Network. But when Steve Carrell gives Ryan Gosling’s cheek one of those friendly alpha-male slaps, and Emma Stone murmurs, “This is going to be fun,” you quite agree, and then Mr Carrell delivers another slap and it’s a wrap.

As for reading, I finished Anthony Flint’s Wrestling With Moses and began Rachel Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen. The Epilogue of Flint’s book cleared up a big puzzle for me, which was how it came to be that The Power Broker never mentioned Jane Jacobs. It seems that there was to be an entire chapter about her tango with Moses, along with chapters on the Port Authority and the City Planning Commission, but these, together with “detail on the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers,” were cut from Caro’s massive tome. I haven’t written about The Power Broker as a whole, but I did notice that the narrative becomes somewhat miscellaneous after 1940. I hope that a complete edition, the “directors cut,” including all of Caro’s work on Robert Moses, will be published at some point, and I’m quite shocked that it hasn’t been republished as a two-volume set, especially given the sprawl of the author’s ongoing work on Lyndon Johnson, with its fourth volume forthcoming.

Why did I buy Why Jane Austen?? It was recently reviewed somewhere along with William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Eduction, and I was drawn to a book by a professor who is no longer sure about regarding herself as “feminist critic.” Actually, a lot of things have changed since Brownstein “came to consciousness in the mid 1950’s, when students were enjoined to keep an author at arms length, until just before the beginning of this century, when “Jane” (aka “Austen”) became a symbol of her sex and close to a sex symbol, a “name” and a star and in the common phrase an icon.” In other words, Brownstein’s appreciation of Austen is an autobiographical matter, and thus flouts a principle that students were even more stringently enjoined to observe fifty years ago: the ban on personal references. There are still curmudgeonly readers out there — some of them, even, are women — who won’t fail to smack a critic with the remark, “I don’t care what you think of Jane Austen.” Most of them are deep into Social Security territory, though. We have by and large outgrown the childish dream of objective, impersonal criticism. (Smart people no longer believe that all intellectual activity ought to be patterend on the conduct of the physical sciences.)

Opening up Why Jane Austen?, I was immediately drawn to the last chapter, entitled “Why We Reread Jane Austen.” The simple answer is that we reread Jane Austen because she gets better with reacquaintance, but I wanted to hear what Rachel Brownstein had to say. The chapter turns out to be almost entirely about Emma, which I’ve just reread for the sixth time (seven readings in all), and about which I have a few things to say — namely, that I detect a four-movement structure beneath its somewhat languid narraive course. I may write about it here, but eventually my thoughts will form part of a suite of pages about Jane Austen’s fiction collected at Civil Pleasures. And while I’m writing up my notes, I ought to read what I’ve already written at Portico, which is where the collection is currently lodged. Brownstein said nothing of Emma‘s structure — “there’s not much of a plot” — but her unpacking of the novel’s concept of “information” is spellbinding. When I was through, I went back to begin at the beginning, and in the Introduction I encountered a truth that needs to be universally acknowledged, at least among people who love to read Jane Austen.

As Juliet McMasteer wisely observes, “We all want to write about Jane Austen, but we each of us want to be the only one doing it. We want everyone to admire Jane Austen, but we each suspect the others do it the wrong way.”

Because when you’ve overcome the urge to have the last word about Jane Auste, you can enjoy reading about her, secure in the knowledge that this is going to be fun.

Before going to bed, I watched Douglas McGrath’s 1996 adaptation of Emma, which Brownstein mentions several times in the final chapter, and I was astonished, having just read the book myself, by the extent of its fabricated upholstery of dialogue and scenes. (Archery, indeed! Jane driving about in a gig!) The finished product seems largely true to the novel, but it gets there by an alternative route.

In the middle of the afternoon, yesterday, a wave of sleepiness nearly knocked me down. Nothing odd about that, given that I’d been up early as usual and had an unusual amount of wine to drink the night before. Instead of napping, though, I read the Times, which I hadn’t read, for the first time ever, first thing in the morning. (By “first time ever,” I mean that I’ve either read the newspaper upon getting out of bed or I haven’t read it at all.) Reading it in the middle of the afternoon was certainly odd, but it was also easier to tell the interesting stories from the Pravda ones. (The Times is as pigheadedly uninformative about Washington as The Economist is about corporations.) I particularly liked the story about Sheila and Peter Potter, a well-born couple possessed of more paraphernalia than moolah. The Potters set up house in various Charleston properties in order to enhance their curb appeal, moving out when their magic has been wrought, having inhabited the premises for as little as ten days. They’re called “stagers,” and if I had known about their line of life when I was a young man I would have set out to follow it. (I certainly have the stuff.)

Kathleen suggested that I take a walk. I was totally disinclined to take a walk but i took her advice anyway. I went down the street to Carl Schurz Park, which I saw with new eyes now that I knew that much of its charm could be attributed to the fact that Robert Moses, who used to live on Gracie Square (the bit of 84th Street east of East End Avenue), would begin his day by walking through it on his way to Gracie Mansion, four blocks to the north, for morning conferences with the mayor of the moment. I’m far more embarrassed about not having known that, for all of the years that I’ve been visiting the park, than I am about my persistent uncertainty about exactly who Carl Schurz was. No wonder the park is so tightly packed with promenades and grottoes!

On my way home, I stopped at Fairway to pick up things for dinner. My first stop was the vast downstairs island where meat is offered on one side and fish on the other. I didn’t want beef; I didn’t want chicken; I didn’t want pork. Shrimp, perhaps? But before I got to the shrimp, I saw a mound of bay scallops, and I thought to myself, “I think that I know how to cook those now.” Back in the Eighties, I wasted a lot of money trying to reproduce the sautéed bay scallops that made up one of the signature dishes at Christ Cella, a late lamented midtown steakhouse. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the recipe so much as that I didn’t understand the fundamentals, which may be put in a few words: hot pan and clarified butter. Also, I thought, it wouldn’t hurt to toss the scallops in oil and chopped herbs a few hours ahead of time.

When I dumped the scallops into the hot sauté pan, they didn’t stick, which was gratifying, but they did release a lot of liquid, which had to steam off before they could begin to brown; and to brown the scallops properly I found that I had to shake, rattle and roll the pan in high sauté style. Afraid of toughening them with overcooking, I passed up the richer flavor that would have come from more browning on the stove, but the result was still very much a success. At the last minute, I poured in a tablespoon of white wine to deglaze the pan and robe the scallops in all the brown bits that they had cast off in the cooking. Kathleen was thrilled. She loves bay scallops, but she loathes sea scallops, which are a lot more common (although no longer much cheaper). She hates sea scallops so much that she was sure, when I told her what we’d be having for dinner, that I’d made a mistake and bought the larger shellfish. I make many kinds of mistakes, but that isn’t one of them.

***

Instead of all this culinary chitchat, I was going to write about an interesting blog entry that I read yesterday, tipped off by my good friend JRParis. The Web log is called Steelweaver, and I don’t know a thing about it. As I read the entry, though, I felt that it was clarifying an insight that has struck me ever since 9/11, which is that deeply conservative Americans and deeply conservative Muslims have a lot more in common with each other than either of them does with me.

The point, for the climate denier, is not that the truth should be sought with open-minded sincerity – it is that he has declared the independence of his corner of reality from control by the overarching, techno-scientific consensus reality. He has withdrawn from the reality forced upon him and has retreated to a more comfortable, human-sized bubble.

In these terms, the denier’s retreat from consensus reality approximates the role of the cellular insurgents in Afghanistan vis-a-vis the American occupying force: this overarching behemoth I rebel against may well represent something larger, more free, more wealthy, more democratic, or more in touch with objective reality, but it has been imposed upon me (or I feel it has), so I am going to withdraw from it into illogic, emotion and superstition and from there I am going to declare war upon it.

So, from this point of view, we can meaningfully refer to deniers, birthers, Tea Partiers and so forth as “reality insurgents”, and thus usefully apply the principles of 4GW to their activities – notably, they are clearly operating on a faster OODA loop than the defenders of mainstream reality, and thus able to respond more quickly, with greater innovation, than the sclerotic bureaucracy of institutionalised reality. the

Even before 9/11, I had decided that the only surviving casus belli in modern life is foreign occupation. Foreign occupation is doomed to fail in the long term, at least so long as the occupiers are felt to be foreign. It is a problem of personal intimacy, really; we find it intractably unacceptable to live in forced proximity to hostile strangers. A better way of putting it might be to say that having to live with people who despise us is a good definition of prison. What Steelweaver showed me was that just as the Arabs and the Persians of the Middle East have struggled against imperial oppression dating back to the Eighteenth Century, so Christianists and libertarians have struggled against what they perceive to be an intellectual oppression of roughly the same vintage.

I wish that there were a way of setting these people free, not because I support or sympathize with them but because their captivity isn’t working; they very nearly wrecked the American government in July. I wish that we could draw a few new frontiers in this big, largely empty country of ours. I would happily abandon the Appalachians and the Rockies to lawless vagabonds, in order to insulate the cosmopolitan coasts from the self-absorbed heartland.

Among other things, I baked a loaf of date-nut bread yesterday. Thomas’s, the only company that knows how to make English muffins, used to offer a date-nut loaf; that’s how I came to like it. At some point, I learned to make it myself, from a recipe in one of James Beard’s books I believe. You begin by soaking a clutch of pitted, chopped dates in a mixture of baking soda and boiling water — not very appetizing. Brown sugar gives the loaf an agreeably burned flavor; if you could grill a piece of cake, this is how what it would taste like. Date-nut bread is hardly more complicated to make than banana bread, but of course nobody has a pile of overripe dates cluttering up the fruit bowl asking to be made better use of. I put walnuts and dried apricots in my banana bread, but even with this “cockaigne” treatment, it still tastes to me like homework. I can still enjoy date-nut bread, either by itself or sandwiching a thick slater of cream cheese.

While I was making the bread and prepping dinner and generally reacquainting myself with my kitchen, I watched My Geisha, the 1962 feature that gives Shirley MacLaine an opportunity to purr on all cylinders. She plays two roles. First, she’s Lucy Dell, a big American movie star, a popular comedienne something like what MacLaine herself was but bigger and more sophisticated — more French, somehow — than Hollywood had room for in those days. Married to Paul Robaix, a Frenchman who has become eminent largely by directing her films (Yves Montand), she is piqued when he decides to make a film version of Madame Butterfly, shot on location in Japan and using real Japanese actors. She thinks that she’d be great in the part, but Paul tells her that Cio-Cio San is “out of her range.” Unless you’ve been living under a rock all your life, you know right away how Lucy is going to respond to this challenge. She’s going to make herself up as “Yoko Mori” and snag that part, with lots of giggling from the geisha who train her to tame her American sprawl. Paul discovers the deception at the last minute, and is deeply wounded — this movie was to be his declaration of artistic independence, but Lucy has stolen it from him — and he retaliates by pretending to make love to Yoko, which of course breaks Lucy’s heart. The final scene of the movie is a tremendously effective reconciliation. While Paul sulks in the wings after the film’s premiere, Lucy comes onto the stage as herself. She was supposed to appear in full geisha fig, and then surprise everyone by pulling off her wig. But Lucy has lost the taste for this kind of stunt. When she tells the audience that Yoko has entered a convent, and that “We will see her no more,” Paul instantly forgives her, and then, while the couple take their bows, he reveals that he made love to her knowing perfectly well who she was. She bows a few more times and then plants her head ecstatically on his chest. It’s terrific.

My Geisha was one of eight-odd titles that came to me while I was out on Fire Island. Black Widow and Brief Encounter were also on the list, along with Compromising Positions, which seems never to have come out on DVD. I didn’t want to see any of these movies while I was on vacation, but rather I enjoyed looking forward to seeing tham, something that doesn’t happen at home. If I conceive a desire to watch a film at home, I want to see it right away. But then that’s what vacation is all about — not doing the thousand and one things that fill up everyday life.

Was that a ray of sunlight just now? It was. But then it vanished. The air is cool and damp and altogether autumnal. The tables on the balcony are splattered with blobs of rainwater that seem in no hurry to evaporate. We’re told to expect a “seasonably warm” weekend, which I think means a high of about eighty; it’s also going to be humid. I do miss the sea breeze that blew through Robbins Rest almost uninterruptedly, just as I miss walking up and down the beach every afternoon for about an hour — both incomparable tonics. But for the most part I”m glad to be back in town with my fall projects. I had a great break in August: I understood better than ever how lucky I am to have the regular life that I do.

Although far from pleasant — perhaps because it was so far from pleasant — yesterday’s horrible weather offered the most gracious way of ending a summer vacation. Gedouddaheah!

Did we mention the Vital Transportation driver who sped us from the Bay Shore ferry terminal to our own front door in one hour and ten minutes? Terrifying as it was, that early-August drive came fondly to mind yesterday as we occasionally inched our way along the Southern State Parkway. Conditions on the Cross Island were smoother, and traffic on the Grand Central Parkway was surprisingly fleet, given the tropical-storm grade downpour. Miraculously, the FDR wasn’t flooded. But it was a terrible day to be on the road, even if we weren’t doing the driving. 

The first thing I did when we got home was to make a pot of tea. The second thing was to order Chinese. Perfect weather for steaming bowls of pork lo mein.

We camped out in the living room. The dining table has been serving as a distribution hub all summer, piled high will all manner of printed and stamped information, but, thanks to the agreeable balcony setup, we haven’t been inconvenienced. No sitting on the balcony last night, though! I read Anthony Flint’s Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. That would be a better title, I think, if it wound up with “…and Put an End to Urban Renewal.” Fifty years later, American cities remain largely untransformed (if you ask me), and that has made it possible for some of them to become charming. “Urban renewal,” in any case, was a euphemism to rank right up there with “ethnic cleansing,” which it substantially resembled. Flint’s second chapter, “The Master Builder,” necessarily retraces ground so ardently mapped by Robert Caro, in The Power Broker, and I haven’t seen anything that I didn’t encounter in the bigger book, echoes of which still haunt me weeks after I read it. But Flint is certainly more temperate about Robert Moses — so far, at least. In case you just tuned in, let me remind you that the three parkways that I mentioned earlier were all early works of the “commissioner for life,” as Moses came to be known. 

At some point before eleven, I decided to turn in. I took my pill and climbed into bed with my book, put on my reading glasses, and got comfortable. Then, without reading a word, I took off my reading glasses, put the book down, and turned out the light. That was it for me.

At some demented moment yesterday morning, I ventured to suggest to Kathleen that we didn’t need to ship any boxes of stuff home; there wasn’t so much that we couldn’t ferry it across the Great South Bay and into the trunk of a commodious Town Car. Happily, she paid no attention to this — pretended that she hadn’t heard it. We packed our four boxes of stuff and mailed them off and we still had four groaning tote bags — the ones that are so big that Kathleen has to put them on her shoulder, because otherwise she can’t lift them off the ground — and Will’s Maclaren (taking which out to Fire Island was the dumbest thing I did all summer, by far) to haul. As I lugged these through sodden lanes and sandy stretches toward our final ferry ride, I could only bless Kathleen’s providence.

Like Klingsor’s flower garden at the end of Parsifal‘s second act, Ocean Beach and environs were drained of all summery pleasures in an instant. For me, the instant fell when Will and his parents left, yesterday; what had been an iffy but not unpleasant day became a maelstrom of loss. This morning, something like an actual maelstrom showed up, sending curtains flying and drumming rooftop rain. A more miserable hour for lugging boxes to the post office — we sent four, stuffed with clothes and books and whatnot — cannot have been imagined, without making the weather actually exciting.

I am eager to leave; I’m dying for a cup of tea. The propane ran out (again!) on Saturday, and a boatload of food went to waste because we couldn’t cook it. It seems that the propane tank was unmoored somewhat by the storm surge; by the time it was reattached, it had leaked considerably. (It had been a fresh tank as of the previous Friday, as I should know only too well.) Saturday was the first day of the holiday weekend, of course, and although I was assured that someone would stop by (I knew whom to call), no one ever showed up, and no one has even yet.

I did read Emma, all in a great gulp; never have I gone through one of Jane Austen’s novels so briskly. I was right to think that speed would cause changes in tone to register more clearly, and the novel presented a four-part structure as if in a satellite photograph. More about that when I can enjoy a cup of tea! Now it’s time to put the computer away, along with everything else that we are carrying back to the city, and prepare to vamoose.

For some time, I’ve been hankering to re-read a favorite classic, and I suppose that my simply putting it that way assured that Emma would be my choice. I love no book more. And, familiar as it is, the novel still bristles with complicating mysteries. It seems to be more shapeless than Austen’s other novels, but the appearance must be deceptive, because comedy of such civilized intensity cannot possibly emerge from haphazard construction. Rather, it is my taste that is at fault, too gross to discern the pattern. On this reading, my seventh or eighth, I sense Austen’s slyness. She begins with an ending, the end of Emma’s happy enjoyment of Miss Taylor’s company. The entire first chapter is a novel in its own right. Where can the story go from there? The novel gets going in earnest — not that you’d sense this if you hadn’t read the novel several times — at the end of the third chapter, with the introduction of Harriet Smith. Chapter 5 shifts the point of view away from Emma, as Mr Knightley tells Mrs Weston (as Miss Taylor has become) that he doesn’t think that Emma’s association with Harriet will do either girl any good. For the first time, Emma’s defects are stated rather than implied. “I am much mistaken if Emma’s doctrines give any strength of mind, or tend at all to make a girl adapt herself rationally to the varieties of her situation in life. They only give a little polish.” This is not a declaration of war — that comes three chapters later, with Mr Knightley’s thundering tirade, “‘Not Harriet’s equal!'” — but it more than hints at hostilities to come. Knowing that the enemies (the heroine and her brother-in-law) will ultimately negotiate a peace that flourishes in true love only (and oddly) increases the suspense.

Was it the second or the third time that I read Emma that left me feeling slightly scorched?

She had always wanted to do everything, and had made more progress, both in drawing and music, than many might have done with so little labour as she would ever submit to. She played and sang, and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of. She was not much deceived as to her own skill, either as an artist or a musician; but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.

Ouch. This passage used to make me feel found out, as it would Emma itself. Now it just makes me sad, because, like Emma, I got used to doing things too surprisingly well without much effort to strive to do anything really well. My piano teacher warned me again and again not to play “by ear,” but it was so much easier for me to do so  than actually to learn to read music that I can follow a score only when I’m listening to the music. In a similar way, I dodged every occasion on which I might have been obliged to study Latin; victorious over Caesar, I never captured Horace. Above all — and out of vanity exactly like Emma’s — the thing that I worked hardest at was avoiding the appearance of working hard.

When did I read Emma for the first time? I don’t recall. The copy of the novel that I have with me, a leatherette-bound Collins edition of 1953 that was part of a boxed set, has a note on the endpapers indicating that I read the novel for the third time in 1970. That seems a little precocious — but I loved Emma from the start. And yet, like any true classic, it is always a different novel. This go-round, what I’m noticing is that Mr Knightley is indeed a bit rough, “knightly” or not depending on your ideas of men in medieval armor. He is no prince. He makes me just as uncomfortable as he does Emma; almost every complaint that he has against her, adjusting for gender, was made to me, many times, by teachers and other grown-ups; like Emma, I wouldn’t listen. It was only Jane Austen herself, the second or third time that I read her masterpiece, who could get my attention. By then, I had gotten in more scrapes and created more havoc than Emma ever dreamed of, but I was not beyond repair. Whatever else might have been better in my life, my marriage to Kathleen cannot have been improved; almost always a source of happiness, it has, as it approaches its thirtieth anniversary, become something more than that, something that I can’t quite (or daren’t quite) name. I can’t think of anyone who deserves more credit for my side of the business than Jane Austen.

The morning is sunny and calm. Raindrops caught in the porch screens tell of a shower in the night, but the sky is clearer at the moment than it was yesterday. (We have had some very bright days since Irene. On Monday, it was as though the sun had just been invented and was being shown off to an admiring public.) Evidence of the storm is not striking, not at first. At first, you’re surprised and relieved that the houses, and the trees around them, look pretty much as they did before. For the most part, they look exactly the same. But when your eye drops to the ground, and you notice that you’re walking in sand, sand which has drifted everywhere, quite as if it were a new kind of snow, you notice the splintered bulkheads and fallen fences. You see that the slabs of pavement at the beach end of Sextant Walk have been heaved from the ground. And when you get to the beach, well, the beach is not the same. High tide reaches much further than it did before. That’s because the storm surge swept away the crest of sand that builds up at the shore in normal conditions. It swept the sand inland, onto the pavement and into drifts that are every bit as annoying as their wintry counterparts.

So now I have proof that the peace and quiet are deceptive. Of course I knew that peace and quiet don’t last forever, but now that I can see it, I’m strangely reassured. I don’t feel any better about getting old and infirm — where was the wave that could knock me down when I was twelve! — and I don’t feel any less anxious about the political and environmental future that threatens my grandson’s future. But I don’t feel like somebody who’s having a bad time at the beach. I’m having the right kind of time.

***

I chose the photograph above from the ones that I took this morning not because it was the nicest to look at but, on the contrary, because it accorded with the mood that reading Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme put me in. When the book was published in Britain in 1994, Dyer was all but unknown in the United States (although, as he points out, he was living in New Orleans during the Gulf War), and his meditation on the Great War and its R(r)emembrance would have been a hard sell. Now that Dyer is as fashionable as good writers ever get, it’s another story. Here’s a nugget from the closing pages:

There had been military disasters before the Battle of the Somme, but these — the Charge of the Light Brigade, for example — seerved only as indictments of individual strategy, not of the larger purpose of which they were a part. For the first time in history the Great War resulted in a sense of the utter waste and futility of war. If the twentieth century has drifted slowly toward an acute sense of waste as a moral and political issue, then the origins of the ecology of compassion (represented by the peace movement, most obviously) are to be found in the once-devastated landscape of the Somme.

Earlier, Dyer writes about searching, when reading about the War, “for what is not there, for what is missing.” Missing from The Missing of the Somme is an assessment of the purposeless of the Great War. This is taken for granted rather than explained. I found myself thinking about it on every page. How did something as hugely pointless — and as huge — as the Great War ever get going? As Dyer shows, commemoration of the “fallen” began almost at once, while men in all the belligerent countries were still enlisting with enthusiasm. We can explain the “origins” of the Great War in the usual geopolitical terms — the indisuputable first cause is the vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire’s dominion of the Balkans — but doing so overlooks what was new about this War: the popular enthusiasm. Far from the “scum of the earth” conscripts that had made up so many armies in the past, it was enfranchised citizens, aflame with nationalist pride, who went to war in 1914. You couldn’t stop them from signing up, donning uniforms and heading for the front lines! Their enthusiasm ought to have given the monarchs pause; if it was jollier than the bloody-minded zeal of the French armies of the 1790s, it was not a whit less populist.

As Chou En-lai said of the French Revolution, it’s still too early to tell what the Great War was all about, but it seems clear that the political objectives that pushed the European powers to war were among the first casualties; that is why the War stopped making sense by the time the trenches were being dug. Had it not been for popular enthusiasm, kings and prime ministers could have called for retreat, but the genie was out of the bottle. The citizens who had gone off to war to crush the enemy for the sake of national honor became what the War was about. N

Typical. You pray for normal, so that you can back to all the things that you want to do, but when normal comes, you just goof off. “Want to do” is  a spongy phrase. There are things that I want to do, but not right now.

So, instead of goofing off, I went to the movies this morning. Our Idiot Brother is a quirky, sometimes goofy movie with a warm caramel center, so I’m not recommending it to anyone, but I liked it a lot. A lot more than anyone else in the theatre, if laughter means anything. The cast was terrrific. Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer, and Zooey Deschanel play three sisters who think they’re so smart when in fact their almost as idiotic as their brother, Ned — who is not so idiotic, really, although he is excessively trusting. You’re led to expect a comic variation on King Lear, in which the girls have to take turns looking after their brother, but instead he straightens out their confused lives. Elizabeth Banks, whom I’ve adored ever since Seabiscuit, is Rachel McAdams on a less blazing scale, and she suits the cut of Bob Rafelson’s film-making down to the ground. And that’s just the core. I’ll be here all day if I start running through the excellent supporting roles, but Rashida Jones simply must be mentioned for her ultra-convincing portrayal of a butch corporate lawyer.

It seems that I’ll be going out to Fire Island tomorrow; Kathleen heard from the owner of the house that all is well out there. One or two screens needed to be replaced, and that was all. So it looks as though Kathleen will have the long weekend on the beach that she’s been looking forward to all summer after all. She had certainly given up on it a few days ago, when Irene was threatening widespread devastation. Actually, Irene delivered on the widespread davastation, jsut not in the places that concerned us. 

After I’d finished putting everything back out where it belonged on the balcony — for good measure, I washed the mud-spattered bedroom windows — I sat for a while beneath what I realized was the last of Irene, a counter-clockwise roil of lowering clouds from which rain did not fall. Then I got dressed and persuaded Kathleen to take a short walk up and down our block, just to see what was what. And what we saw was that most of the restaurants were open. Gristede’s was open. It was comforting to note that the new storefront medical center across the street was also open. We decided to go to a restaurant that we haven’t been to in a while, but it was too early in the day for that, so we went back upstairs, amused at the gusting raindrops that had come out of nowhere, as if to remind us that we’d just dodged a hurricane.

Later, just before bed, I brought my nightcap out to the bench and sat down again. Splotchy grey had given way to velvety midnight blue. Beneath the transcendently clear sky, thousands of lights gleamed from thousands of apartment windows, here and in Queens. The red light atop the New York State Pavilion was blinking nicely (it lies beneath the approach to LaGuardia). All was in order, or appeared to be, and I felt enormous gratitude.

(I’m not one of those people who has to know to whom or what gratitude is owing in order to feel grateful. A small portion of my gratitude is, however, earmarked for Mayor Bloomberg, who’s a firm but well-intentioned grown-up if there ever was one.)

Walking on the beach at Fire Island, two weeks ago, I thought about being tumbled by the surf and the inherent dangerousness of what we call Nature. I lost the taste for natural wonders very early, if, indeed, I ever had it; the only bit of scenery that has ever impressed me deeply is the view from the hotel at Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, because there, for once, Nature got it right, and arranged the mountains and the glacier and the lake and even the sky just as a gifted landscaper would, given the power to do so. For the most part, Nature’s effects — canyons, waterfalls, Matterhorns — strike me as the products of a very troubled adolescent, a kid who needs help. This is a minority view nowadays, but, prior to the Nineteenth Century, it was an almost universally shared understanding. Nobody, except perhaps for philosophers, ever used to walk on the beach, not back then.

By the time Irene reached Manhattan, it was just another summer storm, as incapable as they all are of dinging our town. And, just like every other summer storm, it wreaked havoc in the suburbs. Being a very big summer storm in terms of expanse, it wreaked havoc in all the suburbs, and cleaning up after Irene is going to take a long time and cost millions if not billions. How long will it take for people to grasp that the suburban way of life is not sustainable?

Ultimately, Nature prevails. If nothing else, tectonic plates will eventually drag New York City into the ocean, or push it underneath New Jersey. But there is something meaningless about that destiny, because it will take so long to happen that no one human being, nor even a human civilization, will see it happen. People will come and go too quickly to notice. On the storm-tossed time scale that does register with me, I’m not cocky about Irene’s failure to make Manhattan life miserable. I’m just grateful that it didn’t, grateful that it did no harm to my family. For a few moments last night, looking out at the world I love, I was touched by serenity. I won’t forget it.

When I told Kathleen that I was going to right the table, she sighed, “Well, if you’re sure that we’re not going to have any more high winds…” I groaned. “Whatever winds we’re going to have, my dear, they’re not going to be hurricane winds.” Irene had long since been downgraded to tropical storm status. What was puzzling was its complete dissipation. As the eye crossed over Brooklyn, our local weather became understandably calm. But that never really changed afterward. What happened to the rest of that huge mass of wind and rain?

The balcony floor is drying up rapidly. As soon as I get the hutch back up on the dresser, all the extra glass- and china-ware that I store in it (all of it having been run through the dishwasher yesterday) can take leave of the dining table, which will be convenient. I’ve already started taking the potted plants back out to the étagères, which I weighted down with bricks. Soon, everything will be back and in place, and I will have only one little problem: water, water everywhere.

There are the bottles of Deer Park and Poland Spring meant for drinking, and the gallons of some cheaper stuff that I kept in my bathroom. There are various household vessels, ranging from a humongous lobster pot to a wine carafe, filled nearly to the brim with water. There’s even a stovetop teakettle ready to go. Because we’re by no means through the hurricane season yet, I’m going to find a place for the store-bought water. As to the rest — my hope is to conserve it for watering plants. Given the reduced number of plants (I threw away anything the least bit scraggly), we’ll see how long that lasts.

Power was cut to Fire Island at 6 PM yesterday. That means that I’m in for a treat when I get out to the (presumably undamaged) house in the next few days. The prospect of cleaning out the refrigerator tempers, if only slightly, my rejoicing at seeing the last of Irene.

I took great comfort throughout the ordeal from Andrew Thompson’s history of the reign of George II. I wouldn’t want to have to live in the 1740s, but I never tire of dreaming about them.

Back in town, waiting for the hurricane to show us what it can do, I’m haunted by the image of the crepuscular party boat that I captured the other night at dinner, out on Fire Island.  Was it a party boat? It seemed to be a ferry boat that had been fitted out with an upper-deck awning and a few colored lights. It drifted by in no particular hurry and seemed to be heading nowhere, although it could easily have pulled up to a dock at Ocean Beach, behind me. It passed in silence, either too far away or too subdued to pour forth noise. Perhaps it was on its way to pick up more partiers! Perhaps I have an over-active imagination.

When my imagination steps in for information that I don’t have, the result is usually uncomfortable. I’m very familiar with the twists and kinks of my imagination, but that doesn’t weaken its grip.It doesn’t stop, for example, the flood of pseudo-foreshadowing irony. Below almost any peaceful, everyday scene, it can paste the caption, “This is what it looked like before the unforeseen disaster struck. Stay tuned.” Little does this old fellow over here in the corner, reading the Times as he sips his morning tea, know that he is about to be gobbled up by Godzilla — or, in this case, Irene. Strike that. The old fellow knows that he is being stalked by Irene. But what does that mean? Cue my imagination.

I’m hoping that, by now, Megan, Ryan, Will and Astor are tootling along in their Zip Car to Pennsylvania, where they’re going to weather out the storm with Ryan’s family. Aside from normal worries about highway driving, I’m glad that they’re not stuck in their flat in flood-zoned Alphabet City. (Nor will they be marooned uptown with us, where there are no extra beds of any kind, in case the power goes out — up eighteen flights of stairs and with no running water.) Once I hear that they’ve arrived in Easton, I’ll stop worrying about them. Meanwhile, there is plenty to do here, including the evacuation of the balcony. I’m saving that exercise for the later part of the afternoon. This morning, I’m going to do a few things in the kitchen that will probably be helpful later, and then I’m going to straighten up the bedroom and the blue room, which have gone untended for nearly a month.

Are we prepared? Prepared for what? Who knows. The MTA shutdown means that everyday commerce is going to be severely constrained until the storm has passed through and the grosser damage has been sorted out. Maybe, here in Yorkville, the hurricane will amount to nothing worse than high winds and pouring rain, but most parts of the metropolitan area are going to be far more sorely tested — I think. (Maybe the winds will blow our apartment building down. That would confirm the opinion that long-time tenants hold of its construction.) When will life “get back to normal”? I put it in quotes because we seem to be living in a time when normality is elusive. (When the chairman of the Federal Reserve calls the nation’s policy-making system “broken,” things are not normal.) And, beyond the storm and its aftermath, what will remain of Kathleen’s dearly longed-for Labor Day break on Fire Island? What will remain of Fire Island?

Maybe what draws me to the photograph is that it’s a bit out of focus.

 

23 August

One of the things that I have to do today is find one of those three-prong plug adapters for the beach house, so that I can keep the laptop powered while I’m sitting at the dining table. I may have one here in the apartment, but I’m not going to look very hard; it’s easier to go the hardware store and pick one up. Already taken care of: meds refills; clogged bathtub drain.

After lunch with Ray Soleil yesterday, I asked if he’d mind crossing the street to go to Williams-Sonoma. “I’ve got a craving to go to a store selling things that I might actually want to buy.” Really glam items: hot pads and an apron in the latest W-S stripe. Vac-U-Vin’s pineapple gizmo, for extracting a spiral of the best fruit without attacking the skin. (Good heavens, it has its own Wikipedia entry!) Stuff like that. Then we progressed to Crawford-Doyle. There were two books in the window that I had to have. That’s a figurative “two,” because, while Andrew Thompson’s George II consists of a single volume, the Dumbarton Oaks edition of the Douay-Rheims bible consists of three, with more to come.

A book about George II! As Andrew Thompson points out at the beginning, “He figures not at all in Sellars and Yeatman’s immortal guide to British history, 1066 and All That.” A no-kind of king! Even worse: “Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support the story often associated with George that he began the tradition of standing for the Hallelujah Chorus during performances of the Messiah.” Hell, there’s no evidence that he ever even heard the Hallelujah Chorus! Very exciting stuff. Principle understatement so far: “The circumstances of Ernst August’s marriage were unusual, even by seventeenth-century standards.” I had to restrain myself from calling up Ray with the story.

24 August

In the end, I’m left with the impression that if only Maria Callas had had a little more Tyne Daly in her makeup, her life would not have been quite so sad. This is not to fault Ms Daly’s triumphant performance. Master Class is a parlando opera about the sunset recollections of a highly gifted, highly temperamental diva. The life of Maria Callas provides Terrence McNally with such rich dramatic material that the point of the show is very much not to bring Callas to life, as it were. We can leave that to the female impersonators. 

Everyone in the cast was great, even the genuine tenor, Garrett Sorenson, but I found myself looking to see what Jeremy Cohen, playing Manny, the suppressed/repressed piano accompanist, was up to. There’s a moment when Callas puts her hand on Manny’s shoulder, during the tremolo run-up to Lady Macbeth’s first-act aria, and I thought that I was going to faint, because surely that’s what Manny was going to do, now that he had been touched by La Divina — and Mr Cohen did not disappoint. Manny did faint, you could see the shock flash across his face. But it was a very quick fit, and Manny’s hands were never tripped up on the keyboard.

I went to see Tyne Daly, but I came away hugely warmed by the playwright’s belief, which I share, in the absolute primacy, in opera, of following the score. “It’s all in the score,” Callas tells her audience. All the singer has to do is listen to the music. There is no need for directorial accretions. How much I’d like to see a Macbeth stripped of everything but what Verdi explicitly calls for.

***

Although I heartily recommend Jeff Madrick’s The Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, I wish that it were a stronger book. Madrick and his editors appear to have felt obliged, unfortunately, to provide the general reader with a chronological narrative that is not as comprehensive as it ought to be — there are many rushed, and more than a few nearly incoherent, passages — but that is also fairly unnecessary. Instead of attempting to write a capsule history of the financialization of American business, Madrick ought to have concentrated his eloquence upon the object lessons that lie at heart of each chapter. In that way, his thesis would glow compellingly in a moral constellation instead of blinking unsteadily through a thicket of disttracting facts. That thesis is most clearly stated in a couple of sentences near the end:

The collapse was the product of decisions by individuals, set upon making fortunes and becoming kings of the mountain, not an inevitable failure of the system.

It was a handful of individual men making bad, self-serving decisions that placed the entire credit system at risk.

There was nothing wrong with “the system”; nor was the damage of this or that bubble unforeseeable. A few inordinately powerful men (Sandy Weill, Jeffrey Skilling, two name but two) screwed things up for everybody. They did so because they could, and they had the power because Washington and the press had both been drugged by the purest streams of snake oil. That anyone could listen to Alan Greenspan and continue to respect the quality of his thought is what still astonishes me. I doubt that Madrick could have the answer for that one. But if he had focused more rigorously on the abuse of permissions that would-be “kings of the mountain” wrought upon the nation’s economy, we might have a better idea of how to put an end to the cycle of euphoric greed and exorbitant bailouts that has plagued the United States since the waning of the Cold War.  

***

How about that earthquake! Never felt it. But when I took a taxi down to Kathleen’s office in midtown, the taxi driver said that she hadn’t felt it either. But she suggested that it had spooked the truck drivers. Since we were speeding down Park Avenue at the time, I couldn’t look around me for corroboration — trucks are by and large banned from Park — but I did notice that we were driving very fast. Considering that it was 5:30 on a weekday afternoon, Park Avenue was a speedway.

No, it’s Irene that’s on my mind. Current forecasts call for the hurricane to reach these parts, if it does bounce off of the Carolinas or even shift course entirely and aim for a more northeasterly landfall, no earlier than Sunday, which is when the weekenders (everybody but me) would be leaving anyway. But if the storm picks up speed as well as heft, it might be imprudent to bring a toddler into an evacuation zone. We shall see. I still intend to return to the beach house tomorrow. (I would have gone today, but I’m waiting for the replacement credit card, v infra.)

***

Later: Some day, get me to tell you the story of the replacement credit card, and how it arrived yesterday. Then again, don’t. The important thing is that I’ve got it. I’m whole again.

At Bayshore, this morning, my back pocket was picked, and a credit card was stolen from my wallet. I had no idea that I was missing the wallet until the boy who collected fares for the bus between the ferry and the train came up to me at the station and handed it to me. I’ve never lost a wallet from my back pocket in my life, and I was flabbergasted at the idea that it could have happened. On cursory inspection, it seemed intact, and I didn’t miss the credit card until I got into town. A quick call to the credit card company informed me that the card had been used at an ATM in Jamaica, Queens — a town that I had passed through on the train from Bayshore to Penn Station. I have my ideas about how it was done, but for the moment I’m shuddering in a strange relieved shock. I’m not wondering where I lost my wallet, and I’m not wondering where I left the missing credit card. I know almost everything about what happened, and, on Wednesday, when the replacement card arrives, I’ll be whole. But still shocked, I expect.

I’ve just returned from the beach, where I was tumbled by a wave in water too shallow for me to regain my footing. I scooted as best I could toward the sand, but Megan and a nice young father had to help me to my feet. Kathleen was terrified that I’d broken my neck, and Will, in his father’s arms, was just plain terrified.  What a dope I was! I was never in serious danger, not for a second, but I certainly appeared to be in distress, and now I’m exhausted. I ought to have been a better judge of the surf.

From The Power Broker, I’ve moved back to Jeff Madrick’s The Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present. It’s not quite as depressing as Robert Caro’s book, possibly because so much of the material is in the air, as it were — the public conversation about the “financialization” of American business would be hard to ignore, if I wanted to. But both books have set me to thinking even more arduously than I usually do about the problem of regulation — why it so often fails. It’s clear that a big part of the problem is the word itself, “regulation.” Like so many words in common parlance, it has taken on an insidious mechanical connotation. For example: “He couldn’t take the pressure anymore; no wonder he blew up!” We may no longer be conscious that this figure of speech derives from the behavior of faulty steam boilers two hundred years ago and more, but we persist in thinking of many human processes as if they were mechanical — dependably mindless. Another example: A Machine That Would Go of Itself, the title of Michael Kammen’s insightful 1986 book about the American Constitution. No constitution could be a machine (much less one that “would go of itself”), because the men and women whose actions realize its force in the real world would not be machines.

Machines invariably do the same thing with whatever power they’re given. Men and women invariably don’t. When we speak of “regulation,” we’re dreaming of “systems” that could be “put in place” to “maintain” public “order.” In Europe, where the Frankish passion for uniformity has been imprinted on the bureaucracy of the European Union, the size of almost everything has been prescribed down to the last millimeter by fiat. Americans like to think that we’re more flexible, but by giving our regulators greater discretion we also give them more power, and it is power, above all things, that needs to be regulated. Who regulates the regulators?

Across the table, our laptops back to back, Kathleen is working on a document. She worked all through yesterday afternoon as well. In a well-regulated working world, big deals would not simmer during August. Just the sun.   

Kathleen thought that she was going to miss the 8:10 ferry. The 6:27 out of Penn Station was detained at Jamaica because of  “signal problems,” which in the LIRR’s low Stalinist manner were persistently announced but never explained. I was all the more glad, then, that I’d decided not to wait dinner for her arrival. In fact, we were just finishing up when she called to say that she might have to take the 9:00.

Well, some of us were finishing up. Others hadn’t eaten — “others” being the parents of a little boy who has been having a lot of excellent fun out here on Fire Island, swimming, running, climbing onto chairs; checking out the screen doors to see if, maybe, for once, they’ll open to his touch; and religiously following his new diet of milk and french fries. More fun, alas, than his developing constitution can handle, given — I forgot to mention this — his disinclination, what with all the fun on offer, to take naps. The meltdown began while I was setting the table, and it had not entirely subsided when Kathleen called again, to say that she had indeed made the 8:10 — as happens on weekends, the boat had been held for the train — and I scooted off with the wagon to meet her.

It was very still, and slightly humid, not our best weather, when I walked to Ocean Beach.  Distant flashes of sheet lightning lit up the sky in the west, but the air barely moved. When I reached the dock, I spotted the tiny constellation of gliding lights that I knew to be the Fire Island Belle (or its sister, the Queen) and thought how good it was going to be to see Kathleen. Maybe she would want to have a quick bite in the town. I would give The bars were overflowing with young people, but Rachel’s was almost empty, and that’s where we went, straight from the ferry; Kathleen did indeed want a quick bite in town. The moment we took our seats, the hanging baskets of plants in the window begin to sway in a gusting wind that put me in mind, not entirely unhappily, of Twister. We were sure that we’d be soaked in the impending storm. But the storm impended elsewhere. The breeze kept up, but the rain never came. When Kathleen had finished her crab cakes, and the orders of buffalo wings that I’d ordered in lieu of dinner for me were packed up (we’ll find out tonight how well they kept), we headed home in the dark, we were surprised by the nightscape of the band of National Seashore that separates Robbins Rest from Ocean Beach: it looked like snow. The sand almost glowed white, and the tops of the reeds and the scrub seemed vaguely phosphorescent. We trudged along thinking that we were ridiculously underdressed; we ought to be wearing boots and parkas!

As we neared the house, we listened for Will but did not hear him. Coming up the ramp, we heard the amiable chatter of a group of adults, but no child, sobbing or otherwise. Will had finally gone to sleep, and his parents, grandparents, and great-uncle were gabbing in the living room. We were happy to join them. I would occasionally tell Kevin to keep his voice down, and Kathleen would tell me to keep my voice down. We didn’t stay up long. We had all shared Will’s busy day of doing nothing at the beach.

 

About two minutes before Megan’s father-in-law pulled up in front of the house, shortly ahead of the rest of the party, I closed The Power Broker. Everyone who had seen me plowing through the 1162-page text had been kidding me, “What are you going to do when you finish it?”, and now I felt the edge of the situation. What, indeed? Never mind what I’ll read next. What will I think, and how will I feed the thoughts aroused by Robert Caro’s ultimately baroque portrait of a man who was far more singular and even more powerful than I ever imagined. One of the pebbles in my ruminative shoe is the fact that Robert Moses was 39 years old when he attained his first salary-paying job; no wonder he held on to power in his eighties! Something else: Moses was still very much alive in 1975, when The Power Broker appeared. (He would live until 1981.) Having, by then, lost just about every shred of that power, he was now insulted (I use the word in its medical sense) by an impassioned compendium of his crimes against humanity, compiled with Dickensian outrage. I am not going to say that I feel sorry for the man. But his bewilderment — there must have been much of that, because, like anyone who becomes addicted to and intoxicated by arrogance, he seems always to have been convinced that he was doing the right thing — is sad and embarrassing. So is the humiliation. It was bad enough that influential people had stopped consulting him; now they were judging him.

But, as I say, I was not left with these thoughts for long. Mike was no sooner sipping a Corona and chatting with Kevin than Fran arrived with Megan and Will. I set out to buy a few boxes of wine, an errand that I’d deliberately postponed until after the O’Neills’ arrival in case there was something else that was needed from the town (there wasn’t). When I got back, I started cooking dinner. And so on and so forth. A storm approached as we sat at the table, and later, when the dishes were all washed and the men were enjoying a nightcap on the front portch, it put on quite a good show, with several flavors of lightning, plenty of thunder, and buckets of racketing rain. The new day has dawned mild and fair. And I can’t give Robert Moses much thought until I take care of the propane problem. It seems that we’ve run out.

“Dickensian” — not a word that I use often. I don’t like Dickens. He overdoes the scenery and underdoes the psychology. I have never found his fiction to be truly adult. But guess what — I’m reading Dickens next. I’m re-reading the first real novel that I ever read, A Tale of Two Cities. It came loaded on my new smartphone, and I thought, “Why not?” I plan to put all of Jane Austen and most of Henry James on the phone, so that I never have to carry just-in-case reading material again, but, just as Fire Island was the right place for reading about Robert Moses (he wanted to pave it with a highway), so a beach house in August is the right place for revisiting a novel that filled me with an abiding dread of civil war in general and of jacquerie in particular.

Everyone’s up, and we’re glad to have a toaster oven, a coffee-maker, and (for the time being, anyway) hot water. At eight we phone the landlord.  

Sunday may have been poundingly wet, Monday morning miserable and Tuesday morning grim, but Monday afternoon was sunny and fair, and Tuesday afternoon was nothing less than glorious. At about four, I walked toward the sun for twenty-five minutes, then I turned around, and it took half an hour to get back where I came from. The waves were breaking a little farther out than on Monday, and when one of them rumbled my footing a bit, I decided that I had better get out while I could. (I used to love being tossed in the surf, but now it’s quite terrifying.) Kevin and I went into town for an early dinner, and this was our view (above).

After dinner, I received a note from Ray Soleil describing some work that he had done for us at the apartment. He got through the worst of a big, messy project (repainting the balcony door, which had been so neglected over the years that paint was falling off in big chips that Will happened to find interesting), and I wrote back to congratulate him. Shortly thereafter, a tumbler fell. I remembered Kathleen’s telling me that she had left her cell phone at home (she was at the office at the time). So I couldn’t alert her, in the conventional way, to the possibility that Ray might have locked the apartment door a bit differently. (He hadn’t, of course, but I couldn’t confirm this.) My first thought was to have someone at the restaurant where I knew she was having dinner slip her a note, but this sounded fussy. After many other less satisfactory thoughts, however, that’s exactly what I did, only the headwaiter interrupted my tale and summoned Kathleen to the telephone. She was frightened, of course, to hear that her husband was calling — had something happened to her brother? — but when she found out the reason for my call, she was grateful as well as relieved. 

In the old days, of course, I’d have called the doormen at our apartment building, and one of them would have tipped her off when she came in; but, under new management, you can’t do that anymore. The headwaiter must have thought that we live in a tree.

It got very wet out here on Sunday. As recently as Monday night, when we came upon this bit of unavoidable pavement, we found every bit of it underwater. (I was surprised to find how far the water had receded in eighteen hours.) More surprisingly, the walks on the shop front in Ocean View were also under water. But as it was only a Monday night — following a dismal, stormy Sunday — there weren’t many people around to complain. The only downside for us has been that Megan and Will have been stuck in town. The prospect of traveling alone (with a toddler) on the LIRR is not encouraging. Last night, Kathleen tried to catch the 8:03 from Bay Shore. But the 8:03 was interrupted by a collision, with some tomfool pedestrian walking the tracks, of all things. So Kathleen took a taxi to Babylon, where she caught a train right away. But still!

Now I know something of what the British must have felt in 1944: we’re winning, but we’re too tired to rejoice. I’ve got about 250 pages of The Power Broker to read. This morning, I completed the three chapters that Robert Caro devotes to the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. It was harrowing stuff, and I was unable to shake the narrative’s powerful correspondence, never made explicit by the author, to the unfolding of the Holocaust — a linkage far from weakened by the fact that the East Tremont residents who were needlessly displaced by Robert Moses’s route (apparently designed to save a private bus terminal) were, for the most part, striving Jews who had come up in the world, just a bit, from the Lower East Side, whose grandparents had been harrassed by the Tsar and whose cousins had perished in the camps.

The comparison might strike some as grotesque. The residents of East Tremont were not, after all, eliminated (although, as a viable neighborhood, East Tremont itself certainly was). At the time, manyNew Yorkers would have agreed (and in fact did agree!) with Moses’s insistence that “succeeding generations would be grateful.” No student of history can read such a statement without a personal qualm, for so many of the evils that we read about in history books have lost their bite, as contexts and priorities and even modes of consciousness have altered over time. As a species, we take the world as we find it; our passion for justice, in contrast, is eccentric at best. But Caro’s account makes it clear that people were lied to and betrayed by officials up and down the city’s power pole, all of them either bent to the will of Robert Moses or silenced by superiors who were. Up to the moment that the East Tremonters found new homes that they could afford to rent, their steps paralleled the doomed Jews’ of Eastern Europe. Even assuming that improved mass transit one day makes the Cross-Bronx Expressway a pleasure to drive, no one will ever have reason to be grateful for Moses’s gutting of a lively and vital neighborhood when an obviously less destructive route lay a few blocks to the south.

What’s depressing about the material that follows the Cross-Bronx saga is that the issues of highway saturation that Caro discusses in his 1975 text remain largely unaddressed today. Yes, construction continues on the Second Avenue subway, but can we believe that it will really be running in 2017? The problem is that the drivers of the metropolitan area have been infected by Moses’s mania for private cars (he may never have driven one himself, but he was one of the first to appreciate the allure of the automobile as a moving bubble of autonomous privacy, which remains the most toxic component of the automotive narcotic). And of course the subways still don’t go to many of the parts of town that were developed in response to Moses’s roads. In the end — I’m anticipating; I haven’t finished the book yet — Robert Moses left New York in worse shape than he found it. But that’s by the way. It’s the failures of democratic process that put autocratic, unchallengeable power in his hands that arouses pity and despair. 

When I got back to the house, after seeing Megan and Will off on the ferry, I sat down and resumed reading The Power Broker. Every now and then, I’d get up for one reason or another — to refill my mug of tea; to move the laundry through its various cycles (including the manual ones of folding it and putting it where it belongs; why isn’t there a machine for that?); to fix myself a sandwich for lunch or, later, a snack of cheese and crackers — but I always came back to the book, andas the hours crept by, I felt increasingly unhappy about being alone. At one point, I wrote a few letters, and that cheered me up, but my thoughts were too dispersed to allow anything more ambitious. I had wanted to make a pasta sauce, but now that there were no immediate mouths to feed, the kitchen was the last place I wanted to be. And so, as the long and glorious afternoon wore on, I sank into a funk that I can only label “Mosesitis.”

And I can only describe Mosesitis as grand opera without the tunes. The fantastic tensions of Robert Moses’s career — why anyone needs to read “fantasy” when there are such tales as these — are never transmuted by the grammar of music into a harmony that, even if it doesn’t render the dark contradictions of human life comprehensible, nevertheless comprehends them. What’s needed is a Wagnerian motif, like the ineffably powerful hook that connotes the fatal (but not fatal!) potion in Tristan und Isolde, a run of notes that reminds us where we are, every time the blackening hero of this astronomically ongoing story discovers even nastier means to justify ever more dubious ends. The handsome but arrogant idealist at the outset is transformed into a monster addicted to power, Dorian-Gray-like, right before our eyes. And the transformation refuses to stop. Just when you think that Robert Moses can’t possibly invent a new way of gratifying his manias, he surprises you with a genius that it would be easier to dismiss as evil, if only the public works that Moses left behind were not so familiarly beautiful or, when not that, at least problematically convenient.

A long part of what seems to be the book’s longest chapter is devoted to the construction of Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway. At its lower end, the parkway runs between the park and the river, but at its northern end it cuts through the surprisingly wild terrain of Fort Tryon and Inwood Parks. For one or two summers, I rode the parkway every morning and every evening, hitching a ride to my summer job on Wall Street in my father’s car. I’d have preferred to take the train, but my father had given up on trains. He preferred to sit in air-conditioned comfort and listen to Frank Sinatra on WNEW — for a spell, Sinatra and Mia Farrow were shacked up on a sailboat anchored just off the parkway. He didn’t mind the inexorability with which, on the homeward drive, traffic slowed to a crawl at 34th Street and didn’t open up again until past the exits for the George Washington Bridge. I hated it, but there was a reward: when we could drive fast again, it was beneath the trees of the northern end of the parkway, which, no matter how badly it actually degraded the environment, gave the illusion of a pristine landscape. As I turned the pages of The Power Broker, I saw the summer sun dappling the trees as Dad’s car sped beneath them, and I was overcome by the recollection of my father’s easy generosity (even if it was motivated by innocent vanity). The complicating overlay of these distilled memories made it impossible not to feel gratitude for the single-mindedness of Robert Caro’s anti-hero, whom a friend of mine calls “that horrible man.”

Boy, was I ever glad when, at the last light of dusk, Kathleen walked off the ferry and into my arms! That was simple.

Megan and Will return to town this morning; this evening, Kathleen and her brother come out. I have no ambitions whatsoever for the day that I’ll have to myself. No great thoughts will be pursued; no foreign languages drilled; no Proust read (probably). I’ll wear my eyes out on The Power Broker, which piles wonder on top of wonder. I thought I’d heard everything, but apparently not: did you know that Robert Moses ran for governor of New York in 1934, and made a complete hash of his campaign, insulting almost everyone who might have supported him, and feeling insulted by those who couldn’t support him because he was running on the wrong ticket? And how did he crawl out of this abyss? With an assist from some overreaching by his archenemy in the White House, none other than FDR. Robert Caro’s study beggars the imagination.