While tidying the blue room yesterday, I watched Hannah Arendt for the third time, and now I have to write to my friend Eric and tell him that there are only three scenes in which Arendt is shown on the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (That’s how you got to Jerusalem in those days.) The fourth bus ride, the trip that would have taken her back to Tel Aviv after her rejection by Kurt Blumenfeld, is not shown. The film cuts directly from Arendt’s dejected walk through Jerusalem to the pile of hate mail that has accumulated in her New York apartment in the wake of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that many condemned without having read it.

When I saw the movie the first time, I had recently read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and, long before, The Origins of Totalitarianism. The “book by Hannah Arendt” that I really loved was the collection of her correspondence with Mary McCarthy. I knew that there had been an “affair” with Martin Heidegger, a philosopher about whose work I seemed to be incapable of understanding a thing, and that was pretty much it.

Now, I know rather more.

Last night, reading after dinner, I put down Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt and picked up Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, because, really, it was easier to keep track of the Serbian factions that destabilized first the Balkans and then all of Europe in the years before 1914 than it was to follow the competing Zionist interest groups that squabbled in 1940s New York.

Most of what Clark discussed was new to me, or only very vaguely familiar — the 1903 military coup, for example, in which the king and queen of Serbia were murdered in their bedroom. I knew that that had happened, but I had no idea of the context or the consequences. I didn’t know that the new Karadjordjic régime shifted Serbia’s international relations away from Austria-Hungary, making the country a client of France.

But what I did know was something else about Serbia — from much more recent history. Clark’s account of “Serbdom” — the self-righteously opportunistic movement to annex all of the western Balkans, something that really did come about in 1918 with the creation of Yugoslavia — made for vertiginous reading: the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s seems in retrospect to have taken the players right back to the state of play in 1900. Another thing that I had learned about were the Serbian epics that were sung, to the accompaniment of a one-stringed guitar, by bards who, if you squint, look a bit like Homer; for hundreds of years, their performances kept the peasantry viscerally aware of the tribal tragedy of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. I had learned quite a lot about Serbia and the Balkans from current events as they unfolded over a period of roughly fifteen years. So had anybody else who paid attention. Now, for the first time, I was seeing how passions of much the same kind prompted the roiling undercover activities that climaxed in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

Do I think that the Serbians caused World War I? No, but they lighted the fuse that, for once, didn’t squib. It burned all the way to Germany’s paranoia about being vulnerable on two fronts. And that is what turned the war on the Western Front into the weirdest siege in the history of warfare. It was a projected siege that would not have been technologically possible in earlier times. Germany basically projected its perimeters into France and Belgium and dug in, forestalling the enemy “attackers.” The trenches were strangely inverted battlements, sunk into the ground instead of towering over it, but they were more effective than any fortress had ever been. And although the siege went on for years, it ended for a very conventional reason: the besieged (as the Germans saw themselves, even though they had invaded other countries to plant their defenses) ran out of food, and had to sue for peace.

Conventional warfare in World War I was limited to the East, or to Italy at the westernmost. The Russians were dealt with almost immediately, at Tannenberg in East Prussia. Because the Ottomans had made the mistake of aligning with Austria-Hungary and Germany, there was a great deal of confused activity in the Middle East, of which was born another muddle with which we’re all too familiar. But the important part of the war, the part that engendered the senselessly punitive “peace conference” at Versailles, was the projected siege in France and Belgium. Had the German invasion been summarily repulsed at the start, the war would have ended almost as a skirmish. France would have been happy to repossess Alsace and Lorraine. But the Germans would have remained just as paranoid — at least until they learned what their English cousins had been trying to tell them for a hundred years: economies are more powerful than armies.

(Hitler replayed the game in 1939, extending German’s perimeters to the shores of Europe. This time, the enemy prepared its attack for years, doing little or nothing in the mean time. Instead of four years in the trenches, there were four or five days on the beaches. This time, the Russians had not been so easily dealt with.)

The most interesting question about World War I is this: what was it about the conflict itself that prompted the massive reconfiguration of Europe’s postwar frontiers, creating a continent of discontent? This will probably always be the most interesting question.

The most interesting question about the short century of conflict between liberal democracies and dictatorships that began in 1914 and ended in 1989 is this: how does Vladimir Putin’s Russia really differ from that of Nicholas Romanov? That is the most interesting question right now.

So, after dinner last night, I watched Roger Michell’s Enduring Love. Before the first half hour was out — once the London Review Bookshop scene was over — I couldn’t wait for the whole thing to come to an end.

It wasn’t the faithlessness of the adaptation per se. Ian McEwan’s novel is an intensively literary document, abounding in quietly reverberant echoes from and references to other books and even to older styles of reading books. As a work of art, it cannot be adapted to the screen without sacrificing what makes it a literary achievement. Adaptations are necessarily violent affairs, which is perhaps why so many people, whether they prefer movies to novels or the other way round, feel obliged to make a choice as to which is “better.” Since novels enlist the reader’s imagination to supply the countless details that novelists, over the past two or three hundred years, have learned to exclude from their texts, anyone who “loved” the book is almost bound to be disappointed by the movie, because of course the filmmaker will have imagined many of those details differently.

But Joe Hall’s screenplay does something besides translating the novel into film. It brutally reconfigures the characters of Joe and Clarissa. Why, I don’t know. Clarissa, a Keats scholar in the book, becomes Claire, an oppressively non-verbal sculptor. Worse — far worse — Joe’s clear-eyed sense of adventure is chucked in the course of transforming him from a contemporary Candide into a standard-issue, mid-century, disaffected British intellectual, the sort of crank that obsessed John Fowles. No longer a science writer, Joe is now just another teacher of some vague humanities course; the film’s most tedious scenes show him bloviating cynically in front of his students. Daniel Craig invests Joe with a distinctly uncivilized fury that does not fit his professional milieu. I am sure that the actor is simply providing what was asked for, but neither his performance nor anything else in the film can explain why Joe is so self-absorbed and unpleasant. The heartbreak of the novel is that the aftermath of the balloon catastrophe might have destroyed not just one man’s life but the equilibrium of many others’. There is no equilibrium in the movie worth worrying about. Claire turns away from Joe not because he is obsessed with Jed but because, for some reason or other, Joe has become a dreadful boor.

Jeremy Sams’s score is lovely, though.

***

The other day, needing something to dip into, I pulled The Pillow Book off the shelf. I didn’t read very much of it, but then it doesn’t take very much to bring back the world recorded by Sei Shonagon nine hundred years ago. To bring back, that is, what one already knows: the fastidiously acerbic observer of courtly mores, with her eye for beauty and her unblushing contempt for the lower orders; the preoccupation with garments; the understatements about love, so discreet that one wonders if the lovers are ever actually in the same room (that they keep most of their clothes on is hard to doubt); the annual round of glacially-paced festivals; the fragrance of unimaginable antiquity that betrays more recent inventions. These are the things that you can learn from simply reading The Pillow Book, or at least understand a little better with reference to Ivan Morris’s notes, or to his book about Heian high culture, The World of the Shining Prince.

But never has that world seemed so lost, so twisted by time and change into inaccessibility. Nothing can bring Sei Shonagon’s world back. It has vanished into the interstices of living language. The courtier filled her notes and accounts with descriptions of the details that interested her, but she never attempted a comprehensive survey of court life. Why should she? Her readers would know all of that already. Her scribbling is like the decoration of a fan — highlights and accents marking up an implicit context. That context would be disrupted within the century following Sei Shonagon’s death. The pudgy gentlemen with their bows and quivers would give way to leaner and far more martial aristocrats; the life of the court would shrink into a parenthesis from which it would not emerge until the Nineteenth Century.

The Pillow Book is one of the great works of literature, partly because it encompasses an aesthetic vision that is unhampered by preciosity — always a problem in the West — and partly because it places strenuous demands on the imagination. Unlike a work of science fiction, it does not describe an alternative way of life, but rather takes such descriptions for granted. The reader knows only that the world of The Pillow Book really did exist at one time, in a Kyoto much farther off in time than it is in space. (You can visit only the latter.) How to make sense of what Sei Shonagon has to say? Morris is a great help, of course; it is also very likely that he himself is salient in his inflection of her ancient text. But how do you flesh out the following?

When one is sitting in front of someone who is writing, it is very unpleasant to be told, “Oh, how dark it is. Please get out of my light.” I also find it painful to to scolded by someone when I have been peeping at his calligraphy. This sort of thing does not happen with a man one loves.

True, modern verse — inspired to an enormous extent by contact with the elliptical, symbolic styles of China and Japan — has accustomed us to open-ended, tentative meanings; we don’t have to be told everything. But what it is it, exactly, that does not happen “with a man one loves”? Is the light better? Is the lover more forgiving of inconvenience? What does “sitting in front of someone who is writing” even mean? I ask that as someone who rarely writes a word when another person is in the room.

And yet, just by turning the page, I come upon a note of clearly recognizable humanity that brings Proust to mind:

A man’s heart is a shameful thing. When he is with a woman who he finds tiresome and distasteful, he does not show that he dislikes her, but makes her believe she can count on him. Still worse, a man who has the reputation of being kind and loving treats a woman in such a way that she cannot imagine his feelings are anything but sincere. Yet he is untrue to her not only in his thoughts but in his words; for he speaks badly about her to other women just as he speaks badly about those women to her. The woman, of course, has no idea that she is being maligned; and, hearing his criticisms of the others, she fondly believes he loves her best. The man for his part is well aware that this is what she thinks. How shameful!

What is shameful is listening to other people’s criticisms. I always assume that what people say about others gives a good indication of what they will say about me — the best possible encouragement to keep my business to myself.

One thing leads to another: I read Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina, a collection of letters that Stibbe wrote to her sister when she was nanny to the two sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers.

Mary-Kay Wilmers is the editor of the London Review of Books. The London Review of Books operates a bookshop (or perhaps it’s the other way round) that served as the set for a scene in Roger Michell’s Enduring Love (2004), a movie that I saw a long time ago.

The recollection of this scene kindled a desire to visit the bookshop, which I did on my last trip to London, in 2012. It is in Bury Place, close to the British Museum.

Now that I’d not only been to the bookshop but learned all sorts of fascinating things about Mary-Kay Wilmers (she is dry and droll), I wanted to see the movie again.

But when the DVD arrived, so did the novel, by Ian McEwan. I hadn’t read the novel, either when it came out or later, which was very odd; but there was an explanation. I was still angry with Tina Brown for excerpting a particularly lurid bit in The New Yorker. Out of context, the violence of the scene was shockingly gratuitous; the whole point seemed to be to make the reader jump. Why I should take this out on Ian McEwan, I don’t really know. Interestingly, the movie itself did not make me want to read the book. The movie made a very muted impression on me, actually — as indicated by the fact that what I remembered most was the London Review Bookshop. When I saw the movie the first time, I don’t think I really believed that there was such a thing.

Well, of course I remembered the beginning. Everybody knows the beginning of Enduring Love. (A man dies in the attempt to restrain a helium balloon with a little boy in its basket.) But as I read the novel, I found that I had no idea how the story ended. So I read Enduring Love in a day, in a blaze of grim suspense.

(Needless to say, there is no London Review Bookshop scene in the novel. I wasn’t expecting one.)

***

What struck me early on was the tone of the novel, which is largely narrated in the first person by a science journalist called Joe Rose. His idiom is contemporary, but his manner and pacing go way back, to the “accounts” of travel and exploration that began to appear in the Eighteenth Century, in which the detailed pursuit of accurate description is lightened by wide-eyed wonder.  Joe’s absolute faith in his own reliability as a narrator (and, of course, as a witness) sparkles like a lake on a sunny day. He regards the doubts of others as perverse, as if there could not possibly be a good reason to question him. This offended obstinacy, of course, drives his friends to doubt not only his story but his sanity. Meanwhile, reading along, we have to ask what sort of games the virtuoso novelist might be playing with our credulity. Enduring Love, a briskly-told tale to begin with, is therefore something of an infernal machine.

But, if there is no putting it down, that’s very much because Joe’s account is not only richly comprehensive but also morally sound. Here he is, walking up to the body of the man who has just fallen hundreds of feet from the end of a rope drifting from the rising balloon.

Not until I was twenty yards away did I permit myself to see him. He was sitting upright, his back to me, as though meditating, or gazing in the direction in which the balloon and Henry had drifted. There was a calmness in his posture. I went closer, instinctively troubled to be approaching him unseen from behind but glad I could not yet see his face. I still clung to the possibility that there was a technique, a physical law or process of which I knew nothing, that would permit him to survive. That he should sit there so quietly in the field, as though he were collecting himself after his terrible experience, gave me hope and made me clear my throat stupidly and say, knowing that no one else could hear me, “Do you need help?” It was not so ridiculous at the time. I could see his hair curling over his shirt collar and sunburned skin at the top of his ears. His tweed jacket was unmarked, though it drooped strangely, for his shoulders were narrower than they should have been. They were narrower than any adult’s could be. From the base of the neck there was no lateral spread. The skeletal structure had collapsed internally to produce a head on a thickened stick. And seeing that, I became aware that what I had taken for calmness was absence. (25)

Is it right to call this naive? And if so, with regard to what? To the self-conscious awareness of everyday psychopathology, perhaps, that might motivate a sophisticated observer to attend more to the propriety of approaching a corpse than to its description.

The novel is not about that corpse but about the Joe’s encounter with another man who, appearing out of the blue, as they all did (as did the balloon itself), to try to prevent the accident, seems unable to walk away afterward. At a strong moment, Joe smiles at this fellow, and that warmth engenders, he soon suspects, an inappropriate, possibly psychotic response. The man, Jed Parry, attaches himself to Joe, much to Joe’s dismay. In the course of the ensuing story, Jed makes three claims over and over, beginning the moment he arrives at Joe’s side by the dead body. (1) He is responding to Joe’s offer of love, (2) he represents the love of God, and (3) Joe is no longer free to ignore him. As Jed’s subsequent harassment becomes insupportable — he loiters outside Joe’s flat, he leaves strange messages on his answering machine, and he sends Joe disturbing letters — Joe rummages through his science lore and realizes that Jed is suffering from a rare erotomania known as de Clerambault’s Syndrome. That’s all well and good, but, because Jed times his appearances so that only Joe sees him, and because Joe makes the mistake of erasing the messages, Joe’s wife, Clarissa, gradually comes to believe that the whole business is sheer fabrication on Joe’s part.

Enduring Love is tense with narrative ironies. As a successful author and journalist working in a field noted for its “objectivity, Joe is cannily aware of the role played by persuasion in the success of his writing. But when the subject of his report is his personal situation, and not some body of facts for him to bone up on, professional shrewdness takes a back seat to an almost self-righteous ingenuousness. Believing himself to be under attack by a madman, he also believes that the rest of the world ought to respect this belief as conclusive. Such candor is the very opposite of convincing, and the dawning realization that no one is going to help him intensifies the appearance of a mania. When Joe decides that he needs a weapon, the reader cowers.

I think that it was the name “Clarissa” that first tipped me off to the novel’s debt to the English literature of Jane Austen’s day. Clarissa is very beautiful, and very loving, too, but she is not a goddess; she makes mistakes, and to some extent they’re the mistakes that a modern professional woman would be likely to make. After Jed’s illness has come to a crisis and Joe has been vindicated, Clarissa cannot simply repent her lack of faith in her husband. No, she has to blame Jed on Joe, by claiming that, had he handled the matter differently, Jed’s madness might have been defused without violence. There is no reason to think that this is true; Clarissa is simply yielding to the cant of emotional counselors and other problem solvers. She is also resisting the full recognition that Joe came to her rescue at the climax. That he came to her rescue by acting alone (as heroes always do) constitutes an offense in itself — one smells the resentment of “male chauvinism.” The real question is whether this modern marriage can survive the irruption of a very old-fashioned evil.

Now I can watch the movie. But I already wish that it were Vera Farmiga, and not Samantha Morton, playing Clarissa.

Oh, how sorry I felt for myself this morning! Having to get dressed and go out — for two doctor’s appointments! Well, the dentist. And then the dermatologist. I had already canceled the dentist once, having been gastrically distressed, and I couldn’t cancel again; as for the dermatologist, I was scheduled for a new treatment. The dermatologist doesn’t even come into the office on Tuesdays! But she wanted to get me started, and the rep who sold her the apparatus (an array of ultra-blue lights) was going to show up to see how the first treatment went. I didn’t know about the rep, but I knew that I had to show up, too.

So I did. I showed up for both of them. The dentist wants me to have two of my wisdom teeth extracted. “Will it hurt?” “Not at all.” “Things have changed, then, since my last visit to a maxillofacial surgeon,” I said with a smirk. “That’s what they’re called, right?” “Right,” said the dentist, and then he asked, did I want to go back to that guy? I said that I didn’t think so, because that visit was a long time ago; the Nixons were in the office. Later, on the street, I realized that he must have thought that I’d said, “Nixon was in office.” But no, this was ten years after that, and the Nixons, Dick and Pat, were in the maxillofacial surgeon’s office. Pat was the one with the problems, so while the doctor oscillated between treating me and treating her, a secret service agent chitchatted with the former president in the waiting room. You could hear the agent, but not make out what he was saying. Nixon, in contrast, seemed to think that he was making a stump speech. His voice boomed into every cranny of the surgeon’s complex. At one point, we all heard him say (and this on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, mind), “Sammy Davis — he’s Jewish, isn’t he.” I also remember that the extraction was very painful.

Everyone has to go to the dentist, but I am going to the dermatologist because I am old. I am old, and my body is at last yielding to the sun damage wrought upon my scalp by the suns of childhood summers. The new treatment is supposed to kill all the pre-cancerous cells that crop up these days like corn in Iowa. The doctor is tired of taking biopsies, much less cutting bits out. Also, there is not an unlimited supply of scalp. So, let’s hope.

In the current issue of the LRB, Jenny Diski, who is only six months older than I am, reports than a correspondent in her eighties recently scolded Diski for claiming, at 66, to be old. I’m with Jenny. Might as well get it over with. Stop pretending that this is late middle age, that we have lots of spry years left. Why not be young for being so old, instead of the other way round? If, as they say, ageing isn’t for sissies, then courage must be exercised.

On top of which, I feel that my mind is finally beginning to work. What I’m getting out of reading everything by Hannah Arendt really does require all the bits and pieces of history and philosophy that I have piled up over long years. I didn’t pass the critical mass of understanding until somewhere between five and ten years ago. So, I more or less have to be as old as I am to be thinking as richly as I am.

But I had to nod with Diski about the downside.

It comes to you that whatever ailment you’ve got at this point is decay inflected by decay, in one form or another, and, to people who aren’t you, only to be expected. It is, to put it simply, which they won’t, a recognition of the beginnings of the approach of death. And it can come to you in many ways, none of them alone necessarily recognisable. Things happens, this and that, which don’t in themselves mean anything, until the incremental signs pile up to the fact that there’s nothing to be done that’s worth doing. You are old, getting older, you won’t get younger, you are physically wearing out. You will die, sooner rather than later. Some things about ageing, such as whether we mind showing our wrinkled arms or living alone, are perhaps a matter of choice and decision, but then there comes the ordinary decay and breakdown of the old body. Eventually it’s out of our control and even our social and economic situation will affect only the conditions not the way in which we die.

Call it the hillside. No one ever knows how quickly the slope is going to steepen.

Diski talks a lot about being a boomer. We are both of us elder boomers; we sensed from the start a swelling phalanx of younger kids behind us, and we were both in the abyss of adolescence when the Beatles and the Stones enchanted us with their siren songs. The Beatles and the Stones were not themselves boomers, of course; nor were the Beats or the first hippies. But they got the party going just in time for us, and nobody much minded until our lot showed up. They were adults; we were still “children.” Kids today.

I did not stay for very long. For one thing, “the Sixties” took a long time fully to reach South Bend, Indiana, where we were insulated by many factors. My intense engagement with the famous decade lasted for no more than about two and a half years. I went along partly because the values to which my parents paid lip service were obviously as flawed as Henry James’s Golden Bowl. I didn’t understand until much later that what had broken was the centuries-old towrope of the rising bourgeoisie: respectability. It had begun to fray during the First World War, and had snapped by the end of the Second. In the massive recovery from all that nightmare, people just went on behaving as they had done before, but now it was mere behavior, obviously insincere. Infractions that would have been severely punished excited nothing worse than polite disapproval. (There might be an argument for explaining McCarthyism as an early panic attack at the collapse of respectability.) The history of Hollywood movies from the War to 1967 can be assessed as an onslaught against the censors, who finally gave up the ghost in the season of Bonnie and Clyde. The old rules were hollowed out, and then they were swept away.

And the new possibilities were plausible, for a while. I joined a food co-op; I considered living in a commune. I did let my hair grow — so not a good look for me. But I was a naturally monogamous sort of person, and I never cared much for real rock ‘n’ roll. Drugs — we’ll talk about that some other time. But by 1973, I was rolling my eyes whenever the “New Age” was mentioned. In fact, it was the obvious crockery of New-Age metaphysics that eventually led me to reject any and all metaphysics; flimsy, all of it.

Being an elder boomer, I came to have almost as much contempt for the bulk of the cohort as its successors. My first negative reaction to new developments occurred when course evaluations were introduced during my undergraduate years. This seemed a very bad idea to me, and it still does. Students are students because they don’t know much about anything. I was unusual in not having trouble accepting this fact. Being the smartest person in the room is still a horror on a level with being pinned under a bed.

Whenever the dentist or the dermatologist or one of their assistants asked me how I’d been, I would tell them that this winter made an old man out of me. I was never pressed for details. I myself took it only slightly more seriously than the Marschallin’s complaint to her hairdresser.

On the surface, of course, Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is just a cartoon, or a book of cartoons, executed in her trademark scratchy style, and sounding the same kind of humor. People living humdrum lives are made to look crazy by an artist who passionately believes that you have to be crazy to live a humdrum life. As soon as possible, Roz Chast escaped the world of dingy paint, funny smells, and screaming tenants that she grew up in, and she has been entertaining us for over thirty years with the brilliantly-captioned drawings with which she offloads her dreary memories. Woody Allen’s alter egos joke in several movies about their mothers’ gift for removing all the flavor from the food they cooked. Until very recently, Roz Chast didn’t talk about her parents, but it is no surprise to learned that they were expert at taking the fun out of everything. That’s not quite right: Elizabeth and George Chast had a lot of fun on their own. But it was their own private brand of fun, one that they did not try to share with their daughter — who wouldn’t have shared it, anyway. For her — for Roz Chast — childhood was a bleak Gobi Desert of dull joylessness, periodically interrupted by her mother’s critical outbursts — self-styled “Blasts from Chast.”

What sort of book might she have written if her parents had died earlier, and more suddenly, after brief stays in the hospital or perhaps at home in bed? I am not sure that she would have written about it at all; she would simply have gone on producing drawings inspired by her memories. But Elizabeth and George did not die like that. Elizabeth lived to be 97, and George (born in 1912 just a week or so before her) made it to 95. They lived to be too old to take care of themselves. They lived to be so old that their only child had to take care of them. Elizabeth, sensing perhaps (the thought just occurred to me) the book that would be the ultimate result, stubbornly resisted her daughter’s attempts at intervention, but the complications of a fall (from a stepladder) ultimately forced her to concede dominion. She consented to take George to settle in what is no longer called an old folks’ home. George lasted about six months; his senile dementia was already far advanced upon arrival. Elizabeth lived on for another two years. That doesn’t sound like a very long time, but anyone who can remember what it is like to have lived with a two-and-a-half year-old child since its birth know what an eternity can be compressed in an apparently short span.

Elizabeth’s longevity was complicated by the fact that, to understate, she was not her daughter’s favorite parent. By profession an assistant principal in New York City’s public elementary schools, Elizabeth was no fan of children generally — perfectly normal in a day when adults were expected to represent the opposite of everything that children were being taught to outgrow. Having a child was a duty to be discharged responsibly, but not necessarily with displays of warmth. Elizabeth prized her own hard-headedness, her inborn resistance to dreamy speculation of any kind. She was a “no-nonsense” sort of person, which is hardly objectionable in itself. But as a mother, at least in her daughter’s account, she was an enforcer of tedium, a monster of banality.

(The muffled voice of Elizabeth’s ghost will be heard to bellow, “Tedium Schmedium! George and I were world travelers! We even went to the Galápagos Islands!” Aside from the mention of this trip, however, and of two others to Israel, Chast’s exclusion of this aspect of her parents’ life is troublingly sonorous.)

Elizabeth’s daughter believed that she took after her father, George. George was a born linguist but not good at much else. “Around the house,” he was a catastrophe, breaking everything that he handled. He seems to have been something of a hypochondriac, and he yielded gratefully to Elizabeth’s firm advice, no matter how minute the point. It would not be complete exaggeration to say that, for him, assisted living began with marriage, or, at any rate, soon after his service in World War II. To say that he was genial in comparison with his wife is not saying much, but in his daughter’s telling, he was given to smiling whenever he wasn’t panicking. A firm believer that “mother knows best,” he did not stand up for his child, or would probably not have done so had she thought to seek his support.

From a very early age, Roz Chast put her head down, and dreamed of growing up and leaving home.

And, when she did leave home, she left Brooklyn as well. For eleven years, from 1990 until 2001, she did not set foot in King’s County.

(Did her parents come to visit her in her new home in Ridgefield, Connecticut? They must have done, just to see their grandchildren, but we’re not told.)

When she did go back (two days before 9/11), she was appalled by the grime that had accumulated in her childhood home. That is the discovery with which Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? begins.

***

The other day — in last week’s Home Section — Times reporter Sarah Lyall (excellent choice) paid a visit to the house that Roz Chast shares with her husband, in which she raised her two children. Photographer Randy Harris tagged along, and the images reproduced in the paper focus on the quirky things that Chast has acquired — one can almost hear her saying, with profound mockery, “curated” — over the years, such as the shelf of “amusing cans.” But the corner of the living room with the sectional sofa is inviting. Light, color, and simplicity govern the atmosphere. Considerations of interior design are muted, and somewhat subordinated to the art on the walls. There are lots of windows.

There are no windows in Chast’s drawings of her parents’ apartment. The only windows that I can find in Can’t We? appear in rooms at the assisted living facility, toward the end.

I can’t help thinking of this memoir as a book about homemaking, perhaps because there is so little of it in evidence. To me, homemaking is something that has to happen when two or more people are living together. Not just occupying the same residential unit but living together, and doing so with conscious self-expression. Homemaking creates a home — the anchor of your sense of self, the fixed abode from which “who you are” is free to explore the world. But it is also a place that is shaped, partly, by “who you are.” A home encourages its dwellers to live and to grow.

Without homemaking, a household is more like the slime that a snail leaves in its path, a residuum, a byproduct. It will be characterized for outsiders who visit it by thoughtlessness or heartlessness or both.

The arrivistes of the Victorian age were notorious for living together under pre-determined conditions, following conventions set by others. After World War I, sociologists and advertisers spoke of housewives as “homemakers,” but this was soothing flattery: housewives were expected to master and to practice “home economics” — a priceless redundancy. These oppressive environments did not amount to homemaking.

Chast tells us that her parents grew up in (relative) poverty, and that her more distant forebears endured terrible hardships. In such circumstances, staying alive would be the important thing. Elizabeth and George Chast seem never to have outgrown a certain hand-to-mouth disregard for the values that take hold when rude survival is no longer challenged. “Do not die” is in fact, the last item on Roz’s childhood “to-do” list. On page 29, there’s a “Wheel of Doom,” a sort of mandala to the inescapability of death, which can be brought on by playing the oboe or being hit by a falling flower pot.

When people live together, they eat together. Among Chast’s childhood recollections, Elizabeth’s gifts, or lack of them, as a cook are never alluded to. George’s self-diagnosed delicacy made him a picky eater, to say the least, and Chast, writing about the time he stayed with her in Connecticut while Elizabeth convalesced from the fateful fall, is almost merciless.

Dinner was tough. I felt as if I was dealing with a child who had never been taught how to behave normally at a table. It wasn’t much rudeness as his idiosyncratic approach to food, which was lifelong and unrelated to senility.

I loathed watching him cut with a knife. He didn’t plant the blade and saw back and forth while applying pressure. He sort of scraped away at whatever morself he wanted to place in his mouth. It was not only ineffective, but somewhat disgusting.

When I was growing up, all the serving utensils would always end up on his plate, which drove my mother bats.

Perhaps Elizabeth and George were beset by a superstitious fear that any attempt to live more comfortably than their parents had been able to do would amount to courting disaster. Perhaps Elizabeth and George did their “living” elsewhere — at work or on their travels. For whatever reason, though, they denied their daughter a true home. They fed and sheltered her, they looked after her health and her schooling. But although Roz lacked nothing important in a material way, she grew up in a spirit of domestic subsistence, of forever getting by. One has only to think of Francie Nolan, the heroine of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and a girl familiar with real deprivation, to see what Roz Chast was missing.

Elizabeth must have sensed something of this when, not long before moving to Connecticut, she wrote one of her poems (now we know where Chast’s gift for mock-treacly greeting card verse comes from), this one about the apartment in which, no longer capable of traveling and long-since retired, she found herself stuck.

Her parents’ lives are empty
No excitement, no change,
As days melt into each other
In a stillness so strange.

They, who once traveled
All over the map,
Are forced to lie down
For their afternoon nap.

To be sure, this is in part the inanition of old age. But it also makes clear that excitement, change, and travel all involved leaving the house.

The brutality of the second half of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? lies in the immense difficulty that Chast experiences when it becomes her job to make a home for her parents. That she cannot share one with them is a given. That she must do so in the artificial terms of “assisted living,” with its monumental expense and its hired caregivers, is maddening, not least because her parents are almost completely beyond being able to take pleasure in life. She is old enough herself to foresee, and to dread, her own end.

I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly “done,” there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you became addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors from the extremely aged. Big art picture books and music. Extreme palliative care, for when you’ve had it with everything else: the x-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don’t do anything at all. Would that be so bad?

She almost sounds like her mother — except for the books and music.

Can’t We Please Talk About Something More Pleasant? is, for the most part, a very funny read. But when it is over, it is the darker, unillustrated prose passages, together with the photographs of her parents’ abandoned apartment, that dwell in the mind. The sense of loss is matched by the sense of never having had. The reader ought to allow for an hour or two of grief.

Why, then, read this book? Why for the matter of that, write it? Certainly we are not dealing here with some sort of therapeutic transmutation of mourning into art. There is plenty of art, but it stoutly resists any transmutations. What it offers instead is an object lesson in how (not) to live, and a cry of pain for the importance of pleasure. By demanding no more of life than mere survival, Elizabeth and George Chast shortchanged themselves and did something much worse to their daughter. I don’t think that that “something worse” could be better described than it is in the fullness of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Let it be a lesson to us all.

Almost perfect weather for running around! Lunch with Ray Soleil, followed by a patrol of Madison Avenue, from Crawford Doyle to Feldman’s. I bought the new Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, some of which appeared in a recent issue of The New Yorker but mostly not. (“Where, in the five stages of death, is cheese sandwich?“) There are photographs of the author’s parents, sometimes shown with the author. They had been married for quite a long time before Roz came along, and they don’t seem to have been youthful at any period. But I shall read the book before saying more. Also (seen in the bookshop’s window) Simon Thurley’s The Building of England, as much a guide as a history, with plenty of photographs. (It weighs a ton.) At the flower shops, geraniums were appearing at last, and I had some sent home. Lots of walking, though, and now I’m tired.

First thing this morning, I changed the sheets and tidied the bedroom. Kathleen went in to the office, with high hopes of returning in the afternoon — hopes dashed by circumstances. But if she had come home, the bedroom would have been ready for her, dusted and polished and spruce. It was good to be up at a reasonable hour, instead snoozing beyond ten o’clock, but that’s another reason why I’m a bit droopy. We’re going to have a quiche from Agata & Valentina for dinner. It’s just enough for two, and it’s a thoroughly American combination of ham and Swiss cheese.

We were going to watch Nothing Sacred last night, to make a trio of Carole Lombard pictures (we saw My Man Godfrey on Tuesday), but by the time we were done with dinner and talking, it was a bit late to start a video; and now Kathleen wants to watch something more “current,” preferably a comedy. We’ve got plenty of those.

***

Kathleen put in a full day’s work yesterday, mostly from bed, but later sitting outside, and then in the living room. Throughout, she was fuming at Citrix, the application that provides a secure access to her legal documents. When it’s working, that is. I have never used Citrix myself, but I’ve listened to Kathleen complain about it for years. She’s right to complain — without warning, she is occasionally disconnected from “the system” and her work, despite all her efforts to save it, simply disappears. But she’s wrong, I think, to keep complaining: she is, after all, a partner at the firm, and therefore something of a boss. Can’t she do more than complain (to me, mostly)? Everyone complains about Citrix, she tells me; ask any lawyer who has to use it, and you’ll get the same response, according to her. I asked Megan about it once, and Megan rolled her eyes, half at unreliability of Citrix and half at my assumption that Citrix was any different from death and taxes.

Free market economics certainly doesn’t explain Citrix! What does?

It’s that “system,” I think. The system didn’t exist thirty years ago, not outside the military, anyway. Thirty years ago, lawyers maintained word processing departments, using limited precursors of the personal computer. “Word processing” was simply the latest name for the typing pool. Lawyers worked with pen and paper; other people turned their drafts into distributable documents.

When personal computers came along, they gradually erased the need for word processing departments, as more and more lawyers worked on screens. With the explosion of the Internet came the possibility of working remotely, from somewhere outside the office. This in turn brought security problems. Citrix seems to have been a satisfactory solution, and maybe it was at first. But popularity was a weakness. Too many users signed up at the same time could cause crashes (so I understand), while at the same time security risks mounted with the ever-increasing sophistication of hackers. The result is the probability of working remotely, with the considerable possibility of merely wasting one’s time.

Year after year, Kathleen has been complaining about Citrix. On more than one occasion, she has gone in to the office because she absolutely could not afford to risk its caprices.

We’re not quite at Idiocracy yet, but when the smartest people in the room are obliged to work under conditions of stupidity…

Smartest people in the room, sure, sometimes. But not necessarily the best managers. Lawyers are like cats: they really don’t herd. As the spectacular recent failures of some of New York’s most prestigious law firms demonstrates, senior lawyers can make terrible business decisions. There’s a saying that lawyers who have a gift for business go into business, and make even more money. Lawyers working at a large firm collectively lack something that many of their clients collectively enjoy: an ability to deal with “the system.” Law firms themselves are not systems; at best, they’re federated provinces, each of which comprises numerous fiefdoms. An operational problem that causes nothing worse than a lot of inconvenience and hair-tearing is not likely to increase the collegiality of partners whose mutual esteem depends on keeping one another at arm’s length.

Thinking about all of this from the perspectives afforded by my new guide to thinking, the lady Virgil who used to live at 370 Riverside Drive, I’ve imagined a conciliar solution. A task force ought to be constituted, consisting of senior associates (not partners, but lawyers approaching the partnership threshold, which not all are invited to cross), Internet technology workers, and engineers from Citrix. This task force would be charged with thrashing out the problem of unreliable connections and finding solutions, including workarounds. But for the very reason that partners prefer to work at arm’s length, the lawyers on this council ought to be drawn from as many large firms as possible, with only one lawyer representing any one firm.

The council would proceed counterintuitively: in place of the lawyers hectoring the engineers with their demands, the engineers would explain “the system” to the lawyers, who in turn would have to make an untiring effort to understand what they were being told. This would, I suspect, give them unprecedented insight into why Citrix is unreliable or, as very well may be the case, it is perceived to be unreliable by the lawyers who use it, but don’t know anything about how it works. The lawyers would do most of the learning, but the engineers would learn something, too, about the relationship between the lawyer’s mind and a very large document on which a number of lawyers are working at the same time. It is not really at all like the collaboration that produces large bodies of code.

By understanding “the system,” lawyers might be able to make it disappear.

There was no need to take NyQuil last night, and I slept for about ten hours in deep comfort — even the dreams were entertaining — so, yes, I’m feeling much better this morning, thanks, my cold a one-day misery sandwiched by decline and recovery.

But I’m not feeling quite up to researching what I might have said in the past about a favorite movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr and Mrs Smith, which Kathleen and I watched last night, laughing all the way through (Kathleen especially — she hadn’t seen it in years).

First, let me say that I have always loved this movie for itself. I don’t love it because nobody else does. In his otherwise exhaustive masterpiece, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, James Harvey doesn’t discuss it, even though he’s rightly keen on Carole Lombard. The Hitchcock crowd, on the whole, tends to dismiss Mr and Mrs Smith as a labor of love for Lombard, not for his craft. The humor is indeed pretty subtle. It is almost entirely expressed by Lombard’s ever-changing face, which betrays her character’s slides from pretension to loss of control and back again with the eloquence of a silent-screen goddess — but toned down for sound. You have to want to watch her to catch what she’s doing; neither the actress’s fine-grained shifts nor the filmmaker’s setups cast her performance in high relief. To some degree, Lombard hides behind lavish outfits and her beautiful blonde hair.

You have to want to watch a woman who is being a pain in the ass, is what it comes down to. If you don’t, she remains a pain in the ass, and that may explain the the film’s unpopularity. If you do, though — and why wouldn’t you? this is Carole Lombard we’re talking about — she becomes a figure of fun. Great fun.

Prowling beneath the sleekness is sex. Hitchcock always made sexy movies, but none moreso than this. Robert Taylor doesn’t work his face quite as hard as his costar does, but when he’s not looking boyishly absent or eager, it is registering some aspect of lust. That great sex is what holds the marriage of Mr and Mrs Smith together is basically the moral of the story.

This moral must be demonstrated because David and Annie Smith are living under false pretenses. Their marriage is “officially” founded on rules of conduct that Rousseau might have dreamed up. Annie insists on absolute honesty at all times, no matter what. David complains that this rule gets them into a lot of trouble, but he complies. Annie wants her marriage to be exceptional, ideal. She wants her marriage to be something that she doesn’t really want.

The film begins with a manifestation of one of the rules. The Smiths have been in their bedroom for three days, as they have obliged themselves to do until they have made up after a fight. It’s a funny, almost vaudevillian scene, with trays of dishes littering the carpet, surrounding the unshaven David as he plays solitaire, waiting for Annie to wake up — or to stop pretending that she is asleep. Reconciliation amusingly effected, Annie shaves David while singing the praises of their high-minded marriage, and the discussion of rules continues at the breakfast table (a second breakfast), where the two of them indulge in a sweet duet of apology and self-recrimination that, for the repeat viewer, reveals the dynamic of this marriage. (Annie remarks brightly that she shouldn’t make David so jealous — why, you might think that there would be a rule about that, but there isn’t, because Annie’s flirtations are subterranean and in fact designed to attract her husband.) David, now spruce and dressed for work (he is an attorney), truthfully answers Annie’s question of the day — would he marry her again if he had it to do over again? — with an honest negative. On the whole, he would prefer to be free — no marriage. Since Annie has promised not to be angry at the truth, her withered response to David’s candor is muted, but it does take a while to bring an honest smile back to her lips. Ideal marriage, indeed.

So, even before the action begins — with the news that Mr and Mrs Smith are not in fact married, not legally married, owing to a technicality — we know that they are not really married, not yet. They will have to get married again. The immediate and only serious casualty of this brilliantly foreshadowed reversal is Annie’s list of rules, and Annie breaks them as ruthlessly as David. To anyone watching the movie for the first time, what follows is a more or less madcap version of the Grecian Urn’s chase and flight, but anyone who has seen Mr and Mrs Smith before will recognize what’s really going on: foreplay. Out in the open, finally. Right there on screen, for all to see, with little or no help from cigarette smoke (no time for that) — and the only bared skin is Jack Carson’s bust.

Perhaps that explains the film’s poor reception: its banked carnality is too intense for the screwball audience, and at the same time no substitute for a murder.

***

It is actually pleasant today, so the papyrus plants finally got potted. I had worried that they would die in the shipping boxes — they arrived on Monday — but there was no way that I could drag myself out onto the balcony in the cold, damp rain. It was arduous enough to lug two sacks of potting soil across the street from Gristede’s. The plants were of course just fine, packed to endure delays in replanting.

On my way to the store, I ran into my old French prof, the retired restaurant manager (a very famous one in its day) with whom I spoke French for a few hours every week for a few years, starting about ten years ago. During the time of his tutelage, I built up a ready stock of greetings and everyday remarks, but afterward, abetted by the fact that I only rarely seemed to run into him in the building, and then often with Will in tow, I lost such proficiency as I had attained, and now, meeting him in the narrow walk along our driveway, I froze. What swept over me was not français but “FRENCH!” — a tongue-tying panic. Had I felt less awkward (and had I not been preoccupied by the hope that my errands would not prolong my cold, which promised to be ending), I should have backed up toward the lobby to continue our conversation.

If I did not, on the contrary, push on, so as to avoid blocking pedestrian traffic, a capital sin in my book, it was because I had been thinking of the prof ever since the suicide of our neighbor. On the day that it happened, I was talking about it with the fellow in the package room, curious to know if he had seen anything. His windows would have provided an unobstructed view of the body, had it not been for the scaffolding surrounding the building in connection with the balcony re-railing project. When he said that he heard a noise but saw nothing, I thought of the prof, because he lives on the second floor, at a level with the tops of the scaffolding, directly beneath our neighbor’s apartment.

I got no further than mumbling Were you at home when… “J’étais là. J’ai téléphoné la police.” He described hearing an incredible sound; he thought that the scaffolding itself was collapsing. When he looked out, there she was. Before I could commiserate, however, he moved on quickly to complain about the building, which as of yet had neglected to remove the slipper that had fallen off during the fall and been left behind. He has spoken to the management, to no avail. At first, they made references to the inviolability of a “crime scene.” Then they more frankly counter-complained that they didn’t have the time. There it lies, outside his window, from one day to the next.

If we had talked longer, I might actually have voiced two rather dark questions. Did you know who it was right away? and May I take a picture of the slipper from your balcony? When I see him again, I may pose the first question. I hope that he’ll be able to tell me that the relic has been removed.

At first, I was very angry with Maureen Dowd — and I’ll come back to her. But, thinking it over, I realized that, once again, I was disappointed by Barack Obama, and, as usual, disappointed for reasons largely the opposite of Dowd’s.

I very largely approve of what the President is doing. But I do wish that he would find a better way of going about it. His “how” is all wrong.

What I am learning from the Obama Administrations (thanks to the thinking of certain German émigrée who died in New York in 1975) is the profound difference between politics and government, and the problem that this differences poses for any successful politician — a leader. As a politician, Obama was a natural at inspiring hope in his listeners — hope for a better America. As chief executive, however, he discovered that the only way to make America better is to abandon superpower pretensions in favor of a strong major-power position. Such a position would require clearly-defined interests and policies, and a thorough jettisoning of hot air abstractions about democracy and freedom. The President seems to be working out the details of this position. But he is no longer acting politically: he makes little or no effort to persuade Americans that the new position is better than the old one. It is almost as though he were forced to choose between governing and leading, and made the responsible choice in favor of governing.

Is that the case? Must one choose?

Or is it rather that, in trying to lead Washington, he has neglected the general population? When Maureen Dowd complains that “we’re speeched out,” what she means, whether she knows it or not, is that only the pundits are following the President’s speeches. Only the educated people who still care are aware of what the President has to say. His orations are not pitched to the general public.

Not only that. He is not working to convince Americans that the worldview of columnists such as Maureen Dowd is wrong in many ways. For example, on leadership itself:

It doesn’t feel like leadership. It doesn’t feel like you’re in command of your world.

What is this “command” thing? Leadership is not command, or, if it is, it is no more than a command of the situation on the ground, in other words a realistic grasp of the limits of one’s resources. I detect in Dowd’s gibe a call for action, action against Putin and the pro-Russian Ukrainians. Action in the South China Sea. Action in Syria. I am holding my breath until these crises change complexion in a way that either makes action unnecessary or makes the nature of the required action, including the likelihood of its effectiveness, crystal clear. Nothing the President himself can do will bring about that clarity. He must wait on events, and he must convince us that he is right to do so. That’s leadership.

He himself must understand that references to spectator sports (or to games of any kind) are terribly wrong-headed in government. He must not resort, as he seems to have done in Manila, to deploying metaphors drawn from baseball to describe his projects. The hold of sport on American “thinking” has reduced too many smart Americans (such as Maureen Dowd) to a moral depravity, in which “winning” is equated with virtue. Sometimes, the only way not to lose is not to play. There needs to be much more room in our political discourse for sport-free talk. Comparisons to games are not-thinking.

Most of all, the President needs to tend the fire of hope that he kindled in his first campaign. It may be that he needs to rekindle it. Right now would be a good time: I can think of no better to draw the young voters who tend to sit out midterm elections to show up and be counted in November.

***

What’s worst about Dowd’s catcall is its faith in short-term effects. This is, of course, an adjunct of the game theory that has effectively licensed the importation into high-level discourse of vernacular sports metaphors. The problem with game theory is that it does not allow for the players to change over time, from person to person (from parent to child), to make moves that might (or might not) guide successive players to make moves that are not at present possible or even thinkable. Reversing course on the depredation of the terrestrial environment is the most urgent example of a game that cannot be played to the end within a generation, much less an Administration. The final moves in this clean-up cannot be imagined today — which is why so many commentators indulge in despair, for catastrophe is very easy to imagine. Thinking ahead means most of all not forcing the game into a premature conclusion.

An American president should never say, as you did to the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, about presidents through history: “We’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

Mr. President, I am just trying to get my paragraph right. You need to think bigger.

This is almost stupid. Or depraved. By depravity, I mean the conviction that one’s course of action is the correct one, even the virtuous one, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. My favorite example of everyday depravity is the response of the ship’s bursar to the capsizing of the SS Poseidon: even though approaching the bow means walking downward, away from the water’s surface, the bursar has been instructed to lead passengers to the bow in an emergency, and, perhaps out of shock, he cannot see that the emergency at hand is radically different from the ones envisioned by his training.

It is in this sense that, I conclude, it is depraved of an educated man or woman to spend any time at all watching commercial television — refusing to recognize that it as bad for the brain as smoking is for the lungs. Smokers used to get away with claiming that, without cigarettes, they would never be able to relax. Similar claims are made for television, and they are equally spurious.

The President is absolutely right: we’re part of a long-running story. A very small part. This is not a traditional conservative view. The story, like every story, changes as time passes: characters die and characters are born. It used to be that the story could change all it liked, slipping from peace into bloodshed, without harming our habitat, but that has changed. We have to learn how to tell a story that has never been asked for. We are not going to conceive even the outlines of this story in a hurry. The need for action is outweighed by the need for thinking.

But not ivory-tower thinking. No: what’s needed is thinking in public, and that’s what the President ought to be doing — and inspiring others, especially the young, to do. We need to grow beyond our current world of professional writers and silent readers. Those readers mentally equipped for the task must hone skills of articulation at or near the professional level, not only because this is the only way to avoid the kind of vacarme that erupts in comment threads but, more importantly, because it is the only way for any reader to know what he or she actually thinks.

If you are not going to write about what you read, you might as well watch television after all.

I did come down with a cold — if that’s the right way to put it. (I was told once that the symptoms of a cold are actually the cleanup operation that follows victory over the virus.) It is not a very bad cold, but alongside Kathleen’s flu (from which she is recovering nicely) it makes for a domestic dreariness. Everything is an effort, and nothing sparkles.

In this morning’s Times, there’s a story about fallen ratings at MSNBC, attributable in large part to relentless CNN coverage of “the missing Malaysian airliner.” This is the kind of story that takes me right to the brink of abandoning all hope for the future of American civilization.

It’s not just that the plight of the plane does not merit anything like the attention that it has been given — that is not really the worst part of it. The worst part of it is the hunger for official narratives, narratives whose “official” quality derives not from the issuers but from the size of the audience. This is what bothers me about all those screens at Madison Square Garden, where the official, televised view of the game being played trumps one’s own eyewitness account from the stands. In both cases, the audience is relieved of the need to decide what is important about a story, while at the same time every viewer has the satisfaction, if that is what it is, of knowing that many other viewers are tuned into the same presentation.

Faits divers and spectator sports might be considered harmless entertainment, but it is in the context of entertainment that the guidelines for representing political events are honed. And the highest form of entertainment on commercial television is advertising. It has to be.

It is not wrong to watch television. It is wrong to watch television that you have not paid to see. (The cost of cable service is irrelevant to this argument.) In fact, you do pay for it, by subjecting yourself to the depravity of advertising, a dark art devoted to the erosion of human character. The advertiser wants to adjust your thinking about something, but surreptitiously, without direct discussion. The advertiser wants to persuade you, while sparing you any boring arguments, that adjusting your way of thinking will make you feel better about yourself. That many commercial messages are funny does not eliminate the corruption at the heart of the transaction.

Ideally, television would be like the old British gas meters: pay as you go. I don’t think that many people would pay, day after day, to keep abreast of a missing plane that is now almost certainly a coffin, ghoulish to contemplate beyond the feeling of sorrow that passes through us whenever we hear of remote suffering.

And I don’t think that very many voters would pay to watch political news, not as it is currently presented. Paying voters might consider entertainment at best a secondary consideration in the the mediatization of candidates and issues.

***

She incorporated deep conservatism in combination with radicality, an impulsive protectiveness toward the world and all the natural and cultural things it comprised along with a love of novelty, new beginnings — desires that seemed to others contradictory. People whose imperatives make them sheerly traditionalists or sheerly innovators appear as extremists to the independent minded. As Arendt once remarked, “Man’s urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order.” (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, second edition, xv)

Things are so much more out of balance now than they were in Arendt’s day: the urge to innovate has been almost entirely abducted by technologists, who have steadily removed themselves from public, political life and set up something like the bubble that Dave Eggers describes in his grim satire, The Circle. Within this bubble, and despite all the displays of social consciousness (especially in matters relating to the environment), the technological elite live lives as detached from social mores as were those of the aristocracy of the ancien régime. (If they seem to behave better, that’s only because they’re working so hard.)

Meanwhile, the “traditionalists” are busy trying to tear down the world in which they grew up, in search of a bogus and cartoonish version of life as lived on the frontier.

But what struck me the other day was that conservative activists are following Arendt’s advice: they have formed councils. It’s true that the actual funding and organization of these counsels has been seen to, in a behind-the-scenes way, by the Koch brothers and others, but the Tea Partiers have indeed shown up to be counted, and their politically informal gatherings have had a mighty impact on government at every level.

The “Occupy” movement, which ought to have corresponded on the progressive side, was from the start non-conciliar. The protestors dropped everything else in their lives to man camps and demonstrations. They sought to interrupt business as usual. They seemed not to understand the greater effectiveness of trying to influence it, as the Tea Partiers have done. The Occupiers recapitulated many of the bêtises of the student movements of the Sixties, the worst of which is believing that Chanting Makes It So.

The secret to the success of local councils, never yet revealed, would be the ability to motivate participators during ordinary times. I’m not sure that Arendt would put it this way, but politics is inherently so exciting that it ought never to appear to be exciting.

In any case, Young-Bruehl’s characterization of Hannah Arendt’s political outlook can be taken for that of my own, and it is this sympathy, or harmony, or whatever, that has plunged me into the reading — I won’t say the study — of Arendt’s writing, which is really nothing but her thinking set down on permanent paper.

***

If I weren’t feeling lousy, I’d dilate on my reading of Elaine Pagels’s Revelations. I had a hunch that the Book of Revelation is at least a partial template for totalitarian rule, and Pagels’s book convinced me that I was right. The elements of totalitarianism that Arendt sets out in her study are mostly present: ideology (not so much Christian doctrine as the scenario of the end-times), an enemy to be eliminated (those who only appear to belong to the faithful, but who in fact espouse heretical ideas), terror (that lake of fire, those horrible beasts, the four horsemen — even Jesus on a horse!), enthusiastic movement in the place of political deliberation, and an acrobatic flexibility. This last is the most interesting thing about Pagels’s account.

Whoever actually wrote the Book of Revelation was a Jew who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, and he grounded his prophecy in the Old Testament tradition of voices in the wilderness. He was, in short, an outsider who opposed righteousness to power. By the time of Constantine’s conversion, however, Revelation had proved its usefulness in power struggles among the righteous, as factions — notably the Arian heresy — broke out in the new state religion. Now the book became a cudgel of force in the arms of the powerful. The original prophetic message was interpreted out of the text.

This history only hardened my conviction that the Book of Revelation has no place in Christian Scripture.

My mind is humming along on several planes at once, making coherence rather difficult. I am reading Elaine Pagels’s book about Revelations, the final book in the New Testament, because I was attacked by a hunch that totalitarianism has strong roots in this dismal revenge fantasy.

Meanwhile, I’ve begun The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt’s principal posthumous work. And I’ve started Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography, For Love of the World. Arendt herself does not disappoint: she continues to have surprising thoughts and to present them without much contextual preparation. I’m used to this momentary vertigo now — I know that’s temporary. I’m reading the biography out of a sense of duty: it is often quoted as an interpretive source. But to the extent that it captures Arendt’s life when she wasn’t thinking, it’s bound to be a difficult read, because Arendt’s life was hard, at least until her middle-aged flourishing in New York. There can’t be, in any story about her, the joy that there is in listening to her think — unless of course she is telling the story herself, something she rarely does.

Last night, I found one of Arendt’s interviews — the first of the four collected in The Last Inverview, the one in which she is interviewed by Günter Gaus. The interview is in German, of course, but I was able to trot along with the Last Interview translation, and anyway the principal attraction was hearing Arendt speak. The interview lasted about an hour, much longer than it takes to read. I didn’t mean to stay up so late, and I’m a bit headachy today as a result. (Also sniffly. Kathleen is feeling “better,” but only to the extent of speaking with gusto when she complains that she wants to cut her head off.)

Meanwhile, the papyrus arrived from White Flower Farm, and I’ve got run out to buy some potting soil.

***

On Saturday night, once I was sure that Kathleen was sound asleep, I came into the blue room and watched Being Julia, one of my favorite movies. Something about it had shifted, or rather it was I who had changed. I saw it quite differently. I realized that I’d always wanted the relationship that the ageing actress has with the young cad to work out. I understood that it wouldn’t and couldn’t, but I’ve always been pricked by the hope that the lovers would behave themselves. If they were behaving themselves, of course, they’d never get into bed together, and in fact there is no good reason to call them “lovers.” Why my perversity?

It hit me that I have a penchant for overlooking desire in seeking desirability. These are not good words; they’re too carnal. From the carnal standpoint, the actress and her beau are both quite desirable, certainly to one another. But my standpoint is a moral one. It is captured beautifully by Hannah Arendt’s idea of the imperishable possibility that people will refrain from doing things that will make it hard for them to live honestly with themselves. (If this is “existentialism,” then I’ve finally got it.) Tom, the young man in Being Julia, is a fairly amoral snob — he couldn’t care less about living honestly with himself. (It’s a care that it’s very easy for young people to shuck.) As for Julia, as an actress, living honestly with oneself doesn’t mean quite what it means with civilians, although I can’t say quite how it differs. I just know that it does.

My idea of “working out” does not imply that I want the affair to continue. Rather I want Julia to extricate herself from it without ludicrous and humiliating displays of jealousy. It’s only when Julia recovers from this very unpleasant and unattractive emotion that she is able to map out her sweet revenge — which, as revenge goes, is harmless at worst and probably somewhat salutary for all of its several targets. It is this marvelous scheme, cooked up not by Somerset Maugham, whose Theatre provided movie’s original inspiration, but by screenwriter Ronald Harwood, that makes Being Julia the delicious treat that it is. When, in the middle of the movie, Julia sobs through her cold cream, I want her to snap out of it and remember her job. So does the ghost of her drama teacher (played by Michael Gambon).

Desire has a funny way of making us undesirable.

The tempest of Julia’s fight with Tom is followed by a sweet scene with Roger, Julia’s son, who, a few years younger than Tom, wants to tell his mother that earlier in the evening, ironically on an outing with Tom, he lost his virginity to an aspiring actress. “I thought it was time,” he says. So it’s no surprise that he found the experience disappointing. You have to bring desire to bed with you; sexual acts aren’t going to produce it. (Without genuine desire, what sex usually produces is disgust.) Someone who thinks that “it’s time” is probably not even unconsciously ready to make love. But I always used to overlook this, because Roger is so sweet and decent. His “first night” doesn’t seem to be anything to be ashamed of. But the inauthenticity of it just might come back to bite him.

A new question: why do I blame Sigmund Freud for normalizing the swinish disregard for others where male desire is concerned? I am certain that the great doctor had no such intention. But I’m not at all sure that it’s better to live in a world in which frank sexual discussions are, under certain circumstances, considered “healthy,” than to live in a more buttoned-up place. The “evolutionary” view of sex strips the urge to use another person for one’s own personal gratification of its colossal ethical problem.

I don’t mean to say women are somehow more virtuous than men on this point. They’re merely obliged to appear to be, by social conventions.

In any case, yet another recognition that I can’t help feeling I ought to have made forty years ago at the latest.

When I dressed for lunch at Demarchelier and a visit to the Museum to see Goya’s Altamira family portraits, I expected to have a few hours alone in the late afternoon for writing here. I knew that Ray Soleil, my companion for these outings, had to be somewhere else at four o’clock, so I put off two errands until after the Museum. It was between the first and the second of the errands that I learned that Kathleen was coming home early: the malaise that she felt in the morning had congealed into something feverish and flu-like. I hurried home, arriving moments after she tucked herself into bed. And I spent the next eight hours sitting with her in the bedroom. That’s what I do whenever Kathleen is in bed: I sit nearby, reading. I do little things for her, mostly to do with food and drink. But please do not think of this as a sacrifice, at least until I officially complain. For seven of those eight hours at least, I was reading, with helpless gusto.

One of my errands had been to pick up a copy of Nina Stibbe’s memoir of life as a nanny in the home of an important editor at the London Review of Books. The book is a sort of Devil Wears Prada in reverse, because it’s the nanny who does the awful things, and, what’s worse, usually at the expense of the elder child of the editor, a boy afflicted by nameless disabilities that seem more physiological than psychological. Sam Frears is not even on the Asperger’s spectrum, much less autistic, and he is subject to terrifying fevers. (Update: it’s Riley-Day.) Even so, although the nanny is a gifted prankster, she is not cruel; she is not turned out of the house, as you might at first be led to expect from the letters that she wrote to her sister that constitute the text of Love, Nina.

This was back in the mid-Eighties, when there was no email, and long-distance, or trunk, calls were fearsomely expensive. The letters have an element of buffing, of “improvement”; even as a relatively uneducated girl of twenty (at one point, Nina observes that reading The Return of the Native is not like reading The Thorn Birds — a moment of literary awakening that children like her posh charges would experience no later than the age of fourteen), the correspondent displays an enviable knack for writing. The most regular of the the regulars in the editor’s household is neighbor Alan Bennett, and his distinctive voice is almost unnervingly captured — captured, I say, as if by the opposing team. This ought not to suggest that Stibbe doesn’t like him. But she knows how to twist his pride at being a butcher’s son into a foodie’s conceit that might or might not be endearing. The humor of the book is cumulative, so that it is very difficult to excerpt: things become funny and funnier as you read on.

As it happened, I was already in the middle of another exciting, engrossing book, Walter Kirn’s Blood Will Out, a personal account of the career of “Clark Rockefeller,” a German imposter who may or may not have been behind the collapse of the Knoedler Gallery but who was certainly brought to trial for the murder of a young man from San Marino, California, twenty-eight years after the victim disappeared. At a certain point in the early evening, I put down Nina Stibbe to be done with Walter Kirn, not because his was the lesser book but because I sensed an occult Arendt connection with the latter book that it would take a few days’ half-conscious thinking to work out. It’s for that reason that I’m not now going to say anything about Blood Will Out, beyond recommending it as a very good read and possibly something much more seriously valuable than that. For the moment.

Last night, M le Neveu came to dinner. We haven’t seen very much of him since the end of his relationship with Ms NOLA (now quite happily married to someone else, a wonderful man), largely because the breakup coincided with a series of out-of-town fellowships on both sides of the Atlantic. Now he is back, however, living not far from where Megan and Ryan lived before they left for San Francisco. We had him to dinner in the the fall, and meant to see him again much sooner than, in the event, last night, but stuff happened, mostly the awful winter.

Another thing happened: I read a lot of Hannah Arendt, and a lot about her as well. And it so happens that my nephew is the only person among my acquaintance with whom Arendt might be discussed bilaterally. He hasn’t read as much as I have, but he has been professionally familiar with the outlines of her thinking, and the critiques of her commentators, for a long time. What happened last night was a very pleasant sequence of ka-chinks, as I demonstrated again and again, sometimes quite nonchalantly, that I knew, as his grandfather and my uncle used to put it, my onions. M le Neveu was so impressed that he sent me a text message this afternoon in which he described the evening as “a joy” — an absolutely unprecedented remark. There were no skirmishes, no arguments over fine points, nothing competitive. He kept rolling his eyes in pleased surprise, as though I were a student who had wildly exceeded his expectations. Now I think of it, I have always been that student, disappointing my teachers with lackluster performance until some chance attraction would draw me out and show me off.

It was no less agreeable to me, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to talk about what I’d learned to anyone who knew more. I was as familiar with Arendt’s weaknesses as with the strengths that, weaknesses notwithstanding, make her a vital thinker for us, a thinker whom, the more I know about both strengths and weaknesses, I regard as the most vital thinker.

I’m not alone, apparently. Several times during the evening, M le Neveu repeated the criticism that he had heard from colleagues: “Arendt is the new Rawls.” Graduate students who used to write about A Theory of Justice are now writing about Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism. Bully for Arendt, bully for the graduate students — bully for us all. There’s hope yet.

Waiting for the handyman to come and snake the kitchen sink drain, I re-read In a Summer Season, arriving at the final, one-page chapter just as the doorman called to say that the handyman was on his way up. My relief was extravagant. Not only would the kitchen situation be set to rights (I considered this as good as done — backed up by thirty years’ experience), but the novel had triumphed in that most crucial literary test, the Second Reading.

The first time you read a novel, it is merely another new novel. The second time, it is either a disappointment or literature itself.

Anxious about the handyman —when would he come? when?— I was anxious about the novel, too. When would it happen? When? As the pages flew by, the pace seemed to slacken. After a nasty rudeness, Kate and Dermot even seemed to be on their way to making up. I knew that this would never quite happen, but when would it be ruled out? Ten pages before the end of the penultimate chapter, Kate has some bad news. There is much worse news five pages later. Within a few paragraphs, she is a widow, and, very shortly after that, the daughter of the widower whom she will marry at the very end (a year later, on that last page), a girl whom Kate’s son hoped to marry, dies as well. I knew that it was going to happen, I knew it — but I began to lift my brows in doubt. Then, bam! The dashing sportscar, recklessly driven, spins out of control and overturns. Most tremendously satisfying!

For many connoisseurs of fine fiction, a last-minute catastrophe that clears the way for a happy ending must seem both slapdash and melodramatic, and such resolutions usually are signs of inferiority. But not here. The re-reader, who can’t possibly have forgotten how the novel ends, so shocking is its finale the first time, sees hints and augurs at every turn, from the very start. Kate, a wealthy widow in her forties, has married Dermot, a half-Irish charmer ten years her junior. The word for Dermot is “feckless.” He has never held a job or completed a project. He has never sustained a relationship before, and for a while he is borne up by the honeymoon of really loving Kate from day to day. Kate doesn’t mind his not working, and she regrets that he is shamed by his idleness. That is indeed the problem that all the love in the world can’t salve. Dermot is deeply unhappy with himself, but he lacks the character for change, because he invariably positions himself as the victim. We understand from the very beginning (although not because Dermot himself understands it) that this life of his with Kate is to be his last chance, and that if he muffs it, there will be nothing but bitter ingloriousness after.

And there is no reason to believe that Dermot won’t muff it, just as he has muffed everything else.

From the very beginning, the accident at the end feels inevitable, because Dermot is already somewhat out of control himself. Then, midway through, two new characters arrive on the scene. They are the husband and the daughter of Kate’s best friend, who died some time ago, before Kate’s first husband’s death. Charles Thornton shut up his house and took his daughter off to Europe. Now he has come back, and so has his daughter. Charles quite smoothly slips out of his role as “best friend’s husband, no man more forbidden” and into that of the man with whom Kate will find happiness if and when Dermot disposes of himself. Araminta, educated abroad, has grown out of recognition. She is a sylph — a sylph and something of a minx. She commutes to her job in London as a fashion model, drenched in the perfume of stylish heartlessness that, in retrospect, seems to have foreshadowed the wave of feminism that would presently transform the Anglophone world. Araminta cares deeply about absolutely nothing, and she does so enchantingly. (She is the only principal character whose point of view we are never allowed to share.) She responds to Tom’s affection with a “chilling friendliness” that nevertheless falls far short of outright discouragement. Meanwhile, she lets Dermot take her to the pub by the station whenever they happen to meet on the homebound train — Dermot’s commute is to a job that exists only in Kate’s imagination — and, fatally, she eggs him on to higher speeds when he takes her out for rides in his new car.

Araminta is probably never going to make anyone else happy, and Dermot cannot be happy with himself. They make a perfect couple, especially in death.

***

The handyman is replacing all the pipes under the sink. That’s new.

***

A month or so ago, Kathleen went to Madison Square Garden to see a Knicks game. She did so, of course, as the guest of a client whose invitation could not be politely declined, and even I told her that it might be interesting. She certainly wouldn’t have to pay the game any mind. She could sit comfortably in the skybox and chat about other things. I knew this partly from experience (not in a skybox) but mostly from Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. And I was quite right, too. Kathleen had a very good time, so much so that she remembered to tell me that the Knicks actually won.

What intrigued Kathleen was the plethora of video monitors, both in the skybox and throughout the arena. The monitors all showed the same thing: the game being played on the court. Even at the distance of a skybox, the game was not hard to follow, and presumably the fans in the bleachers, sitting that much closer, had no real need of the gigantic screens hanging over the court. Kathleen found this mystifying — why all the screens, with the game itself right there.

I wasn’t mystified. I couldn’t quite explain it, but I knew that it made some kind of dark sense. I was in the middle of The Human Condition, or perhaps I had moved on to Margaret Canovan’s book about Arendt’s political thought. I was thinking (almost all the time) about the plurality of points of view (one per human being) and the collapse of this plurality in the mass society that might or might not be swept up in totalitarian movement. I knew, somehow, that the real game was being shown on the screens. The actual game was only the raw material from which cameramen were fashioning the official game, the one that everyone could see from anywhere.

This image, of thousands of spectators watching the mediated version of an event taking place before their very eyes, has surcharged my mind ever since Kathleen sparked it. More to come, you may be sure. For the moment, I’m too distracted by the countdown timer on the dishwasher as I run it through a cycle to sit thoughtfully at my writing table.

This will be brief, not so much because I’ve got a lot on today as because the point that I wish to make is very concise. The idea behind it was one of those recognitions that you have from time to time that arrive with an air of such intense obviousness that not only do you bow down to them at once but you think yourself quite stupid for not having grasped them sooner. Later, you see that other people sort of said the same thing — but not exactly. And you can’t even say — not for a while — why the insight seems so tremendously important.

I had been wanting to say something clever about Elizabeth Taylor’s way with fiction, a way that is as palpably distinctive as any great novelist’s, but, in this case, much less studied, less covered by critics, less grappled with. Nothing very impressive came to mind, and I chalked my failure, perhaps rather opportunistically, up to Remicade, and to how rather exhausted I always feel the day after an infusion. This was very good thinking, because, the moment I absolved myself of any duty to think of something clever, something clever occurred to me. Something clever about Elizabeth Taylor, anyway.

Throughout the novel that I just re-read, In a Summer Season, what one person says is often “answered” by what someone else thinks in response but does not say. Here’s a good example, from the little picnic that Kate and Charles have near the end of the novel.

“Minty is overtired,” he insisted, dwelling on the safer issue. “That’s perfectly plain.”

“I do hope that she’s in love, too,” Kate thought. She could not bear it for her son if the girl were not.

Somewhat parenthetically, I want to note that it is “perfectly plain” to the reader that Araminta (“Minty”) is not in love with Tom, Kate’s son — or with anyone else, not even herself.

Sometimes, as in this acute passage from the “disastrous” dinner party that ends the first part of the novel, nobody says anything, and we’re only given an exchange — an exchange for us only, not for the characters — of thoughts. Here are Edwina and her son, Dermot:

She had glanced up and seen the pleasure and pride upon his face. “We were so very close in those days,” she thought now. He noticed tears in her eyes and felt that he could understand. “We are poles apart,” he thought, “but she was always concerned for me. The antagonism is my fault — I neglected her.”

Are mother and son “poles apart”? Probably not.

The contrast between what’s said and what’s thought in these passages — something that is generally called “irony” — is so beautifully textured, so piquant, as it were, that I found myself reveling in Taylor’s daring to presume to know not only what her characters think but that what they think is usually somewhat off the mark; these “thoughts” always signal a mismatch, a state of being out of step. It is a very common state in this novel, and perhaps in all novels. It was the sheer piquancy, however, that threw me back on an observation that I’ve been making repeatedly in recent entries. All that we know about other people is what they say and what they do. Their minds are otherwise closed to us. And that is all there is to be said about it.

The magic of novels is the appearance of precisely this thing that is never to be known in real life: what other people are thinking, how they are feeling. That’s why we read novels, because, psychoanalytical case studies aside, they are our only window — utterly imagined as it may be — into the souls of others.

And that is why it is best to read old novels, lots of old novels that have appealed to generations of readers. That fame, that sustained attention over generations, is the closest thing to proof that we have that the old novelist got it right, or was at least plausible. Great novelists remind us of how we ourselves think, of what we don’t in fact say. And they remind the readers who come after us as they have reminded the readers who came before.

Every now and then, a new novelist casts a spotlight on a new way of thinking, a new manner of thought, and everyone rushes to read his or her books. Sometimes, the new manner is a fad; sometimes it’s more lasting. I think that we’re still trying to decide which was true of Ernest Hemingway, who was without a doubt a reporter of arresting novelties. But no serious reader in the English-speaking world fails to recognize that Jane Austen and George Eliot captured vitally elemental interior experiences — thoughts — and made them available for all to consider.

I will say up front that, in my opinion, women are much better at this hunt than are men. But, man, does that figure.

It’s cloudy and wet now, but a few hours ago, it was spring out there, sunny and balmy. After this morning’s Remicade infusion, I walked homeward from the hospital along the East River. The current was rushing up toward Long Island Sound.

I left the embankment at the bottom of the new ramp that leads to the 78th Street pedestrian overpass. One of my favorite lunch spots, The Hi-Life was only minutes away, on Second Avenue. Once installed in my favorite banquette, I resumed reading the book that kept me entertained all the way through the two-hour infusion, In a Summer Season, the first novel by Elizabeth Taylor that I have re-read. That I shall have re-read. And very soon, too; I can’t put it down. I can’t put it down because I know what’s coming. I know what’s coming, but only in gross outline, and I’m greedy for all the forgotten, savory details. I can’t quite remember what Mrs Meacock, the cook, does at the end. Does she take another world cruise? Does she publish her long-nursed miscellany of humorous anecdotes? I’m 99% certain that Mrs Meacock does leave the employ of Kate Heron, the novel’s leading lady — unlike the cook in Taylor’s next novel, The Soul of Kindness, a woman who pines for the sounds of the deep countryside while toiling away in St John’s Wood. And — getting back to In a Summer Season — what becomes of Father Blizzard? Does he go over to Rome? I’m not quite halfway through: the fateful return of Araminta Thornton is about to occur.

This was perhaps my favorite Taylor novel the first time round, so it’s no surprise that, casting round for some substantial fiction the other night, it’s the one I chose. I have to say that it is very satisfying to know how the muddle of Dermot Heron is going to be cleared up. A relief, really.

***

The dishwasher is working, but I’m trying not to use it until the kitchen sink drain has been snaked, because clogged pipe is what caused the machine to shut down last week, happily without doing itself any harm. The repairman cleaned out what he could reach without plumbing tools. He did not suggest that I refrain from using the dishwasher (which he didn’t so much fix as reset; I could have done it myself if I’d deigned to fiddle with it), but I’ve rather fallen in love with washing dishes by hand. This is best seen as a spring fling, doomed to last no longer than the petals on the Bradford pears.

I’ll try to get a handyman up here tomorrow to look into the drain. I’m planning to spend the day at home anyway, as I often do on Wednesdays. I’m going to make a batch of madeleines, to serve to the neighbor who is coming to tea on Thursday. Also on Thursday, dinner with M le Neveu, who has not been here for several months. He is living in the city again, and although he has weathered well in the thirteen years since his arrival in New York as a graduate student, I like to make sure that he gets a very square meal now and then.

Although the dishwasher is fine, the refrigerator has me throwing tantrums. All too literally, I’m afraid, this afternoon, when I could not get the door to close completely. Shall we not talk about the plastic shelf on the door that has been held in place for several years with now-failing duct tape? A shelf crowded with half-empty, rarely-opened bottles, most of which I threw away in the course of throwing the tantrum. (See title of this entry.)

I often say that I want a bachelor’s refrigerator: a few condiments, a few dairy products, and a bottle of champagne. I’d like to keep most of the shelving empty and available for use in the preparation of dinner parties.

Instead, I have tons of condiments, an embarrassing amount of spoiled dairy and vegetable matter, and an appalling array of leftovers. As I don’t care for leftovers, the frugality that obliges me to wrap them up in plastic is either misguided or demented, I can’t decide which.

It would help to have the right kind of refrigerator, which I periodically beg Kathleen to buy. That would be the kind with the freezer in a drawer, at the bottom, obviously the preferable configuration for a portly gently with an immobile spine whose waist is not even two inches farther from the ground than the top of the door to the refrigerator compartment on the standard unit currently in the kitchen. The difficulty is that very few models will fit in the space allotted — none will, in fact, unless I remove the cabinet over the refrigerator. (Stuffed but never opened; I couldn’t tell you what’s in it.) Ray Soleil assures me that getting rid of the cabinet will not be difficult, but what keeps me from pestering Kathleen more vociferously is knowing that the swinging kitchen door will have to be removed in order to get the old refrigerator out of the kitchen. (Ask me why I know this.) Removing the kitchen door is just tricky enough to reduce my desire for a new refrigerator. But it does nothing to reduce the tantrums; on the contrary.

If I were starting out now, in our current tax bracket, I should undoubtedly replace everything in the fridge whenever I bought a new bottle of milk — everything aside from those “few” condiments and that bottle of champagne. But when I first had my own kitchen, I was very poor, and I held onto everything. Later, when we had the house in the country, there were emergencies to consider — getting to the store was not always easy, especially in winter. But now I live across the street from Fairway, which is rarely crowded on weekdays from morning until mid-afternoon. (But: the store will certainly teach you to sing “Never on Sunday.”)

In other problems, I cannot bring myself to dilate on the shipment of five books, either by or about Hannah Arendt, that Amazon shows as having been delivered, by the Post Office, last Friday afternoon at 12:45. No — I cannot. Not until the shipment has actually been delivered.

***

“St John’s Wood” — how do you say that, anyway? I turned to the Internet for help and it was immediately forthcoming. I have always said it by putting more or less equal stress on each of the words. Writing the name down a few sentences ago, however, I was seized with humiliated fear: what if it’s Sinjin’s Wood? But it’s not. It’s Sen John’s Wood, with a strong accent on “John’s.” While I was at it, I checked out St James’s Park, which I pronounced as though “James’s” were a word of one syllable with a sort of little growth at the end. According to the nice Brit at howjsay.com, it is a word of two very distinct syllables. Sen Jamzus Park.

In case you were wondering, Bogota, New Jersey, is pronounced to rhyme with “pagoda.”

When I woke up on Saturday morning, I wished that everything scheduled for the weekend could be postponed until next weekend. It had become clear that the rheumatologist was right to put me down for an infusion eight weeks after the preceding one (not that I ever disagreed with him). Kathleen noticed a day-by-day recession that couldn’t be attributed entirely to my immersion in Hannah Arendt, and on Friday I was actually in a bit of pain owing to the kind of spontaneous inflammation that would be my lot without Remicade. By next weekend, I should have the infusion behind me (I’m on for tomorrow morning at 11:30, just confirmed), and I’d be in better spirits for the festivities of Kathleen’s birthday and Easter Sunday.

But Kathleen’s birthday and Easter Sunday could not be postponed, so I rose to the occasion, and found that it was not very difficult to do so. Now I am trying to deal with the slight malaise that always follows a bit of having too much of a good time.

The cuisine at La Grenouille, the last but also the greatest of the grand French restaurants in New York, is superb — of course it is! But it is also something of an excuse, giving the patrons something to do while they sit in this corner of heaven. For me, the experience is rendered slightly peculiar by my spinal immobility. I can hear the people at the adjacent tables, but I cannot, without calling a great deal of attention to what I’m doing, get a look at them. Meanwhile, I can’t hear a thing that the people ranged along the opposite wall are saying. What with the famously immense arrangements of budding boughs and flowers, the brocade wall hangings, and the thick carpet, the restaurant is not noisy, and yet the atmosphere is very lively. The bustle of the staff — the maître d’, the headwaiters, and the waiters, in dark suits and bright ties; the white-jacketed servers and busboys — is ceaseless, but not at all agitated. The purr of discreet voices and the flash of sparkling jewelry, the ectoplasmic delight of all that good food — I have never experienced a more refined degree of exhilarating jollity. Kathleen, as (almost) always, had the Dover sole, and it made for a very happy birthday.

We were addressed by name as we walked in. We were reminded that it had been a long time since our last visit (four years!), but without a trace of scolding. Kathleen chalked our welcome up to my lavish tipping practices, and I’m sure that smiles might have been a shade brighter for that, but no, such crassness is inconceivable. La Grenouille is simply but extraordinarily a very pleasant place, much too relaxed for its comforts to be an illusion.

Asked by her granddaughter about the array of silverware at each place, the matron sitting to the left of Kathleen advised beginning with the pieces farthest from the plate and working in, “as they do on Downton Abbey.” That, and a lot of other things that the old lady had to say, brought a muffled laugh to my lips and Kathleen’s elbow to my ribs. Whenever we dine in high style, Kathleen and I shamelessly violate the categorical imperative. Aside from the sporadic exchange of muttered commentary, we say almost nothing to one another, offering nothing to be overheard. Talking would distract us from the feast of eavesdropping.

***

Meanwhile, a very different scene was plying out only yards away, out on Fifth Avenue. Fifth Avenue — Fifth Avenue in midtown, that is — is a memory to me; it hasn’t existed for decades. The people who now patrol it prevent its revival. What they’re doing there, I’ve no idea. Calling them “tourists” seems overconfident; they almost make one believe in zombies. New Yorkers themselves, and snappier visitors from out of town, have recreated something of what Fifth Avenue used to be in Soho, especially along Broadway. Down there, pedestrians are stylish — and they’re shopping. The parade on today’s Fifth Avenue’s sidewalks is inexplicable. It is a horde of colorless, shapeless people who exude no sense of destination. They are merely moving along in great blobs of unconvincing humanity. Seeing them from the car as we waited for an opening through which to turn into Fifty-Second Street, I felt that I was confronted by Mass Man, that bogey of 1950s. This is what Communism looked like — shapeless, colorless, pointless, and astonishingly indistinguishable. This was why we must win the Cold War. What an ironic taste of our victory it is to witness such a massive display of the lack of self-respect.

Kathleen said, “You don’t get to midtown much. I see this every day.” That might explain why I don’t go to midtown much.

Once upon a time, the pedestrians on Fifth Avenue wanted to look as much like the patrons of La Grenouille as possible, and they dressed accordingly. You might say that the times we live in are more relaxed, but I don’t. La Grenouille is relaxed. The pedestrians are manifestly demoralized. Thank you, commercial broadcasting.

The other day, I pulled out the big Everyman edition of Joan Didion’s nonfiction, having been inspired to re-read “Goodbye to All That” by Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation. Last night, I got round to it. I remembered the great story about “new faces” (“… there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men..”) but I had forgotten the profound, ab initio alienation.

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and I knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later — because I did not belong there, did not come from there — but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

Later, she puts on a seesaw some suggestive names that are also very specific, familiar to those brought up “in the East” (at that time: FAO Schwarz, Best & Co, the Biltmore clock, and Lester Lanin) and the suggestive terms that are complete abstractions, having figured in her Sacramento dreams of New York  (Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue: “Money,” “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters.”). To her,

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane: one does not “live” at Xanadu.

Nevertheless, she kept putting off leaving, and was almost done in by the place. The sojourn, intended to last just a few months, went on for eight years. Didion finally did leave when her new husband, John Gregory Dunne, decided to relocate to Los Angeles. It’s hard not to think that he rescued her, because she was reduced to spending days in her underfurnished apartment, incapacitated.

I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.

I felt something very like this in Houston, and at about the same age. My solution was law school, in a faraway place. I have not been to Houston since Megan’s graduation from high school, in 1991, and I have no plans to pay another visit in this life. That’s by way of saying that I understand the roots of Joan Didion’s despair to have been her living in the wrong place, an unreal place, a place too imaginary for genuine responsibility.

I went to Houston not because I had ever dreamed of it but because it was convenient: my parents lived there when I graduated from college. I meant to stay only a short while, but I got a job at the radio station right away, and only left the job to which I was promoted when I left for law school all those years later. In between, there was marriage, fatherhood, divorce, and, for a while, despair. I never think about it unprompted. Some of the people whom I knew during that time have, in becoming Facebook friends, ceased to be people whom I knew during that time.

Nobody knows what it is like to live in any town without having actually lived there; but it helps to arrive without the baggage of romantic expectations. Every time I see Breakfast at Tiffany’s, though, I understand how hard this must have been, and might still be, for some people.

***

Something from The Attack of the Blob that seems well worth savoring (and Guess Who isn’t mentioned): of Carol Gilligan, Hannah Fenichel Pitkin writes,

Gilligan speaks accordingly of two competing “voices” in morality: one emphasizing general principles, the other emphasizing personal attention and care, the former more frequent among men, the latter among women. Although it is easy to jump to the conclusion — as numerous interpreters have — that the feminine tendency is more moral, the masculine tendency ruthless or hypocritical, Gilligan holds that a mature morality is the same for all, regardless of gender, that it requires combining principled impartiality with sensitive attention to particular persons and cases. What differs by gender is not morality but characteristic ways of falling short of morality. Morally immature men tend to a defensive, macho pretense at objectivity and impersonal authority, immature women to a reluctance to judge, take a principled stand, or defend their own views in the face of opposition. Reaching morality by different psychic routes, the two genders characteristically find themselves in different places along the way: men too coldly abstracted, women too abjectly adjustable.

This is wonderful. “What differs by gender is not morality but characteristic ways of falling short of morality.” It’s precisely what I mean when I say that there is no important difference between men and women.

***

Inevitably, The Attack of the Blob has led me to question the meaning of “society,” as applied to a mass of people. Romans invented the word (societas) to describe groups of people who got together to deal with a particular matter, and this sense survives in the names of the Royal Society and the ASPCA. The members of this kind of society can be made known to the society’s leadership, and possibly to all other members as well. There can be no such familiarity among members of “society” in the broad sense. Suddenly, the term seems to me to be worse than useless, because to talk about it is to animate an abstraction.

“Civil society,” however, is an extremely useful idea. It connotes the specific groups that recognize and share conventions and mores. People who live on Manhattan Island — not the same as the group of people who ride the subways in New York City. People who fly in commercial airliners. People who live in a gated community. Even incarcerated people. The conventions and mores of any group develop over time, and when they break down, because too many members disregard them, that particular branch of civil society stops functioning — something only very young people are likely to regard as a favorable development. You learn the rules of a given civil society by paying attention to how its members behave — how they act, that is, when they are doing everyday things to which they may not be paying much attention at all. Every now and then, you will run into a scold, someone who overtly calls attention to someone else’s breach of the rules, but civil society is hostile to few things more than it is hostile to violence of any kind, so the scolds themselves are usually in breach as well, and not only of civil society’s rules. The foundation of civil society is the belief that no one is in charge of it. What looks to one person like an infraction may simply be the way of the future. Civil society does not exist to act.

Everything that you do in civil society sets an example to other members. Setting a good example was highly esteemed among Victorian gentlemen, but they didn’t get it quite right, and moderns were quick to abandon the practice as empty hypocrisy. Setting an example works only if you set out to set an example to yourself, an honestly good example. You may be grateful that “nobody noticed” a lapse on your part, but you may never be relieved.

The dishwasher is on the blink again, and I ought to be in a state, so I’m wondering how long this strange calm will last. I did have a bad moment when I discovered the problem, but the bad moment was quiet and contained. It did not take long to find the receipt from the repairman’s last visit (I couldn’t believe that it was where it belonged), and now I’m scheduled for a visit on Monday.

By the time the first stage of the dishwasher crisis was taken care of, my phone was ringing an alarm: time to call Jazz at Lincoln Center! The last day to renew our “Visionary Voices” series seats (and they’re very good ones) was last Friday. I called on Monday, but it was after hours. I did nothing on Tuesday. I thought about it several times yesterday, and almost went to the phone at one point, or toward it, but I was distracted on the way, and forgot about it until too late in the day. That’s when I set the alarm. The seats were still available. I used the charge card that I reserve for purchases in this price range.

There had been some loose talk about having lunch with Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil — Fossil is making a four-day weekend out of the holiday — but I’ve had my excitement for the day.

***

What to make of Lydia Davis? She’s fun to read, in a dark, scraping sort of way. By that I mean that many of her stories are satisfying in the way that taking a brush to a Le Creuset casserole and swooshing out the stuck-on bits is satisfying. There is a feeling of accomplishment rather than of achievement. There will be more pots to scrub and more stories to read — lots and lots of (very short) stories. It is as though Davis figured out how to bottle housework; rather than writing about it, which she does from time to time but often with reference to the other people who are actually doing it, she has instead captured the thing itself and transmuted it into prose. Here, in the entirety of its single sentence, is “The Cornmeal”:

This morning, the bowl of hot cooked cornmeal, set under a transparent plate and left there, has covered the underside of the plate with droplets of condensation: it, too, is taking action in its own little way.

Just to think about this quietly dynamic tale is to do housework. Like most housework, it is largely undiscussable — more tedious than analyzing jokes.

At the same time, the stories are aimed at sophisticated readers. Consumers of vernacular material won’t get very far before tossing the book aside, with an exasperated WTF? On the page facing “The Cornmeal” is “Letter to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer,” a story that I can imagine making certain male readers actually angry. The letter to the manufacturer complains that the color of green used on the frozen-pea package is misleading because it is so much less attractive than the green of the peas inside. This is housework, too: not so much the thinking about the color of green on a package, or the judgment that the complaint is absurd in some way (if not in several), but the appraisal of the care with which the letter has been written. The premise of the story may be funny, but letter itself is not. The letter is reasonable and painstaking. There is nothing in its composition to make the reader laugh; indeed, effort has been made to prevent laughter. As the letter approaches its end, it flattens out in statements of the painfully obvious.

Most food manufacturers depict food on their packaging that is more attractive than the food inside and therefore deceptive. You are doing the opposite:

[Yes, you already told us!]

you are falsely representing your peas as less attractive than they actually are.

Finally, a statement of grievance and a demand for improvement:

We enjoy your peas and so not want your business to suffer. Please reconsider your art.

Instead of a laugh line, Davis delivers an echo of Rilke.

These stories come from her new collection, Can’t and Won’t. (The title story has a different title: “Can’t and Won’t.”) Shortly before it came out, I bought The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which contains all or most of her earlier short fiction. The story that I find most striking is “Jury Duty,” a stunt of sorts in which the Q part of a Q&A, or interview, is omitted. We’re given only the answers. A woman is being asked about jury duty. In order to make sense of her replies, we have to imagine the questions. This is not difficult — not for anyone who has read interviews that follow the Q&A format. (Interviews that “degenerate” into discussions between two well-matched voices are more interesting precisely because they have discarded the formula.) But the ease with which we fill in the blanks is somewhat discomfiting. Why would we read such an interview, if we know what the questions are and where they are likely to lead? Haven’t we solemnly sworn never to pick up a copy of People? And yet the interviewer’s silence throws the answers into higher relief. The interviewee is a bland and ordinary sort of person, and there is some sense that she is being hung out to dry. But we don’t laugh at her. We don’t even look down on her. Rather, we look into her, into the fine grain of her expressed self. The look is long and slow, but not critical. We are not distracted by the interviewer; on their contrary, our attention is heightened by the interviewer’s absence. I flagged one response the first time I read it:

Yes, I thought of the word patient. But it wasn’t that. Patience is something you need in a strained situation, a situation in which you have to put up with something uncomfortable or difficult. This wasn’t difficult. That’s what I’m trying to say: we had to be there, and so it relieved us of all personal responsibility. I don’t think there is anything else quite like it. Then you have to add on to that the spaciousness of the room. Imagine if it had been a small, crowded room with a low ceiling. Or if people had been noisy, talkative. Or if the people in charge had been confused, or rude.

This is not exactly “revealing,” but it is certainly suggestive. But I sense that it is suggestive only to people who read a lot and who also do housework.

The kind of housework that Lydia Davis specializes in, I believe, is called “teaching.”

And that’s what I’m making of Lydia Davis right now.

Hannah Arendt everywhere…

Even at the Lost Kingdoms exhibition at the Museum, which I took in at a “preview” last night. (The show has already opened to the public.) I felt her presence beside me, respectful and very much prepared to discover something remarkable, but also somewhat impatient, as I was, to be done with it.

Lost Kingdoms gathers objects — statuary mostly, but also architectural elements — excavated from sites in Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, that reflect the spread of Indian religions to those regions a long time ago. Most of the objects date from the Sixth to the Ninth Century, and most were locally produced. There are Buddhas and bodhisattvas, Vishnus and Shivas, in sandstone and copper alloy. (The works in stone are large, but badly weathered; the works in metal are small, but in pretty good shape.) The religions that these images represent were taken up, not very systematically one imagines, by the rulers of long-vanished kingdoms, and their wealthier subjects. One of the pieces that sticks in my mind is the head of a “male devotee” of one or another of the gods. With his intriguing turban, his “earplug” ornament, and his pleased expression — he smiles like a child who is about to be given an ice-cream cone — he has a lot more going for him than the bland divinities. I don’t know why I kept imagining the bloody slaughter of the defeated in the temples where these statues once stood.

Lost Kingdoms is no display of Yankee loot. Almost every wall card named a museum from one of the Southeast Asian nations as the owner. Perhaps because I was simply underwhelmed by the exhibition itself, I began to see it as the wing of a diplomatic stunt of some kind. After all, the United States has been on very bad terms if not actually at war with half of the contributing countries. And in my lifetime, too.

As usual, the postcards were disappointing. Museum postcards go for the timeless and avoid the quirky. Quirkier than anything in the Lost Kingdoms show are the makara, or “aquatic monsters,” that grace the ends of lintels. These creatures are all jaw, studded with big, blunt teeth. Seen in profile, they show one enormous eye, and they seem to rest on one foot, but that is all there is too them: they exist solely to devour. But they look very jolly, and I’m sure that Will would be tickled, not frightened, by them. But I am not going to buy the catalogue just to get a picture of them.

I thought of the worlds for which these objects were created, worlds of meaning, culture, architecture, government, and so on — all of them, like most human worlds, incomplete worlds, by Arendt’s standards, because they lacked any kind of political space — any forum for political action, discussed by equals and launched by courageous individuals. When The Human Condition came out, in 1958, many readers felt that Arendt had succumbed to nostalgia for The Glory That Was Greece. Her relentless but not analytical references to “the polis” and to its free, but slave-owning, citizens could indeed at times take on the “inspiring” quality of a mural in a public building. But for Arendt, the polis was the first attempt in human history at her political ideal, the republic, and, as a thinker making use of history, but not actually a historian (except, of course, of thought itself), Arendt was free to treat the polis as an ideal — as if it had actually been realized and sustained.

One of the many things that I am stewing over is Arendt’s understanding of power. Power is a problem that, like poverty, has always been with us, but perhaps, again like poverty, a problem that we might continually shrink. Almost everything that goes wrong in government can be attributed to the unwillingness of human beings to relinquish power. (Government, I say; not politics.) I have always tended to regard power as a kind of energy source, not very unlike electricity, over which people in power — whether elected or appointed (or self-appointed) — have control. Arendt has already shown me how stupid this is. Power is not something “out there” that some people are allowed to harness. No: power comes from people themselves, and its manifestations are as different as people themselves. Power is a manifestation of the plurality of human beings: when we say that X is a powerful man, “powerful” is just as general and non-specific, as devoid of comparative detail, as is the predicate in X is a human being.

Then there is the apparent paradox inherent in Montesquieu’s understanding of balanced powers.

Power can be stopped and still kept intact only by power, so that the principle of the separation of power not only provides a guarantee against the monopolization of power by one part of the government but actually provides a kind of mechanism, built into the very heart of government, through which new power is constantly generated, without, however, being able to overgrow and expand to the detriment of other centres or sources of power. (On Revolution, 142-3)

Arendt writes here as if power were indeed a current; Montesquieu almost certainly saw it in the Newtonian terms that were so glamorous in his day. But what I’m puzzling over is whether the quoted passage supports the idea that power can be created to arrest abuses of power. (Only abuses of power involve actual violence.) I think that it does. And I think that the best generator of power-checking power is the local council.

What local council, you ask — quite rightly. Local councils are at present a negligible force in representative democracies. Where they exist, it is usually to sound and express a consensus regarding local affairs. As such, they are far from uninfluential, but their operations are of no general interest. But why should there not be a plethora of local councils devoted to the consideration of such extreme if occult sources of power as the rules by which our two federal legislative chambers govern themselves? These councils would not have the power to alter those rules directly, but I surmise that they might well develop the power to persuade that changes be made.

I can imagine a council for everything, in one or more of which everyone possessed of at least normal intelligence participates.

And I imagine that, a few social gatherings of these councils aside (so as to put faces on names — and so much more that is important about shaking someone’s hand), the business of these councils would be conducted online. Online, not because of the relative convenience, but because the product of every council’s deliberations would be a position paper, modeled perhaps on the Declaration of Independence. (The discussion of the position would be conducted as a series of annotated drafts.) Conclusions and resolutions would be stated clearly, as unambiguously as possible, and in as friendly a spirit as possible (and by “friendly” I do not mean “nice.”). Then they would be circulated to other councils undertaking similar deliberations.  The endorsement of and amendment by every council of any such statement would increase its power — the power, that is, of all its supporters. A point to stress is that these ongoing councils would not resemble popular demonstrations or protest marches. Councils would be myriad and endless, interesting but rarely exciting. They would largely replace “political news,” and certainly wipe away the disgrace of political advertising.

There is nothing in the federal constitution, by the way, that would prohibit the “election” of representatives in this manner.

I myself am considering the establishment of a Committee on Public Manners, whose first position paper would cover the use of handheld electronic devices in public. Not only is there a need for such a manifesto, but the its composition would impel the spread of that expanded consciousness that Arendt is always thanking Kant for discussing: the ability to see things from the point of view of someone else.

I was done with Dept of Speculation, yesterday, by the end of lunch. I liked it, really, because, even if the protagonist aroused my disapproval, she did so in an interesting way. She also seemed to be learning, by the end, to be a less self-centered person, thus freeing her attention for dealing with unconsidered prejudices. (Her husband’s background — he comes from “Ohio,” and his family is a “whole blond band” — excites both her envy and her contempt.) But it was a line from the Acknowledgments page that arrested me somewhat more than even the most startling statements in the novel proper:

Thanks to my agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, who stood by me all these years and knew just when to wrench this thing out of my hands…

That is the narrator/wife in a nutshell: someone who needs to have something wrenched out of her hands.

My surmise is that Dept of Speculation is a hit — with the critics, at least — because it folds beautifully narrated vignettes into a matrix of stand-up comedy. It is not difficult to imagine an adaptation for the stage.

So, now: back to Hannah Arendt. The state of play so far: I have read five major works (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Between Past and Future, The Human Condition, and On Revolution) and one book of commentary, Margaret Canovan’s Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, which tops everybody’s list of must-reads, alongside Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt, For Love of The World (which I have not read). It was Canovan’s book that I had in mind when I compared reading about Arendt to flying (reading Arendt herself is like crawling).

And this is the state of why — why the obsession with Hannah Arendt?: When I read Eichmann in Jerusalem last year, which I did because the fiftieth anniversary of the controversial book’s publication was something of a chattering-class event, nothing more eggheady than that, I found Arendt’s insistence upon the importance of thinking — not systematic thinking, or reasoning, really, but, as she puts in The Human Condition, “thinking what we do” — truly admirable, and I wanted to give her kind of thinking another try. I had been somewhat bewildered by The Origins of Totalitarianism, which I read about nine years ago (I had thought that it was longer ago than that), and discouraged by the book’s leftish critique of imperialism, which I agreed with overall but which struck me as somewhat doctrinaire — a reaction to which I’m prone whenever Karl Marx is mentioned. Eichmann in Jerusalem seemed to have a far more cogent grasp of the catastrophe that motivated Origins. In between these two books, of course, Arendt wrote the three others that I’ve now read, in which she worked her way out of Marx. Indeed, they take the place of a book that she planned but never wrote on the totalitarian aspects of Marxism.

What I discovered, as I read Arendt, was that nobody else even approaches her compellingly articulate analysis of the political problems facing the United States right now. And, make no mistake, the United States never had a more passionately devoted citizen.

You will not be surprised to hear that I am seeing references to Hannah Arendt everywhere. There are two, or at least there appear to be two, in Dept of Speculation itself. The first occurs on page 6.

Life equals structure plus activity.

Can this be mistaken for anything but a vernacular expression of the Arendtian idea (note well that I’m not actually quoting) that “humanity occurs in a world of institutions that support political action”? And then, on page 56,

It seems to me a useful but impressive phrase along the lines of “The Human Condition” or “The Life of the Mind.”

Those are both the titles of books by Arendt.

And then, on the front page of yesterday’s Times, there was a story by  Jason Horowitz, “Obama Effect Inspiring Few to Take Office.”

“If you were to call it an Obama generation, there was a window,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. “That opportunity has been lost.” He said the youth who came of voting age around the time of the 2008 election have since lost interest in electoral politics, and pointed to a survey he conducted last year among 18- to 29-year-olds. Although 70 percent said they considered community service an honorable endeavor, only 35 percent said the same about running for office.

“We’re seeing the younger cohort is even less connected with him generally, with his policies, as well as politics generally,” Mr. Della Volpe added, referring to Mr. Obama. Sergio Bendixen, who worked as a pollster for Mr. Obama, blamed a social media-addled generation accustomed to instant gratification for the drop-off. After getting swept up by the Obama movement of 2008, he said, “They went on to the next website and then the next click on their computer. I just don’t see the generation as all that ideological or invested in causes for the long run.”

It was electrifying to read this within days of digesting the passages in Arendt’s On Revolution in which she shares Jefferson’s concern that there was no space in post-revolutionary America for most Americans to exercise their political freedom, and her endorsement of the third president’s call for a return to the “ward system” that preceded the Revolution — the network of town meetings that not only elected provincial legislators but also oversaw the bulk of local government. Mr Della Volpe’s survey’s figures for community service and running for office suggest that young people are vitally aware of the loss of power that polarizing party politics has inflicted on established government institutions. I would suggest to Mr Bendixen that he is barking up an empty tree. Arendt would have rejoiced to learn that “the generation” is not “all that ideological.” She loathed ideology.

***

When I came home from lunch, there was a package that I didn’t even have to open to know what it contained. The return address named the “Friends of the Santa Fe Library.” The Friends, it seems, decided to de-acquisition its copy (can the library have possessed more than one?) of  Hannah Fenichel Pitkin’s The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, and I happened to be in the market when they were selling. I was both impressed that the Santa Fe Library owned such a book and dismayed that it wanted to get rid of it. I suppose that what happened was that, somewhere along the line, a librarian neglected to read the subtitle, and acquired the book thinking that it was a pop-culture title, only to find out that it is so not. Or that it is about pop culture, but very, very obliquely.

“The Blob” is Pitkin’s name for the strands of inconsistent thoughts that Arendt packed together and labeled “the social,” or, sometimes, “society.” What was worse, Arendt invested this mass with the very same monstrous and deterministic powers that she chided other thinkers for dreaming up. Arendt asserted that “the social” was devouring both the public and the private spheres of life almost as if it were an alien from outer space, and she offered no suggestions about how to stop it. Pitkin believes that The Blob comprises genuine social problems, not just a bundle of notions that Arendt failed to work out, and her book is an attempt to clarify and deal with those problems. So far, it is, like almost everything that I’ve read about Arendt, comfortably lucid.

It’s important to clear up The Blob as part of understanding Arendt’s thinking because it took the place of a confrontation with economic matters for which Arendt had little but contempt. It was still possible, in the middle of the last century, to omit from political discussion any more extensive consideration of the economy than the assertion of the general right to home ownership. That is no longer the case; as Arendt herself feared might happen, the economic has swallowed the political. What do we do now? How can we put down organized money and revive the republic? I’m curious to see if Pitkin is right, and that the clues will be found in the anatomy of The Blob.

The darling novel of the moment is Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, and I am nearly halfway through. It’s an agreeable read, but I am looking forward to being done with it.

I am looking forward to being done with it because I have taken a dislike to the narrator — the first-person narrator who, I’ve been told by all the reviews (which have also previewed many of the novel’s more trenchant passages), will soon disappear into the third person. “Dislike” may be the wrong word. What I’m feeling as I read is more like impatient disapproval.

The narrator is a thirty-something woman is unhappy with herself. This unhappiness is never really discussed, but it is woven into every sentence. Here, in a passage that refers to her husband and her daughter, is a throbbing instance of her unhappiness:

There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it. (44)

Nothing can straighten our hearts, but we must come to terms with them on our own. Here’s how I read the second sentence: “I had thought needing two people so badly would straighten it.” And of course that’s the wrong way round. The only thing that it is at all proper to need from another person (emergencies aside) is inspiration — the inspiration to be a better, happier person than you are. Ideally, you wait to meet an inspiring person before falling in love. Meanwhile, you must prepare yourself for inspiration. You can’t be happier until you find something that makes you happy to begin with, and you must find this for yourself.  Once you have found it, however, the search is over; what follows is the hard, interior work of making yourself more apt at whatever it is that makes you happy, together with nurturing the faith that your happiness is important — that you must, out of self-respect, take care of it.

“Happiness” is a much-abused term, and I wish I didn’t have to use it, but no other word captures the delight-in-the-world that is the most important characteristic of happiness — what distinguishes it, sharply, from the idea of pleasure. Pleasure has been regarded as dangerous since people started writing things down, but it is only rather recently — since the abatement of religious strife in the Seventeenth Century — that happiness was discovered to be safe. Happiness involves pleasure, to be sure; but it turns its back on it, as it were, in order to make the world a more pleasant place. Adult happiness is the state of being pleased to give pleasure.

None of this appears to have occurred to our narrator, and I have to wonder if that’s because she is too sophisticated for happiness — too hip, perhaps. She certainly does not seem inclined to believe in anything. She trusts her husband, but that is not the same thing as believing in him. Belief is a kind of happiness that reaches far beyond contractual trust. The narrator loves her husband, but he does not really make her happy — nothing does — because she has not prepared herself for happiness.

In this she is like countless young people (who eventually become not-so-young) who come to New York in search of something. But there is nothing in New York except a handful of monuments and millions of other people. Aside from the monuments and the millions, New York is just like anywhere else, so there is no point to coming here to find something that can be found anywhere. The people who will succeed in New York already know upon arrival what that something is, and they have reason to believe that the sheer plurality of the city will encourage them.

***

The difference between reading Hannah Arendt and reading about Hannah Arendt is the difference between crawling over the Rocky Mountains on your hands and knees and flying over them in a jet plane. Although fast, easy, and comfortable, however, I’m not sure that there would be much of a point to the flight if it weren’t a return trip. That is all that I am going to say about Arendt today.

Except also this: reading about Hannah Arendt has given me the impression that I treasure her because she is a lapsed philosopher.