When I was a boy, I thought that the title of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was highly unlikely. Okay, maybe one tree. Which would be more depressing, in a way, than no trees at all.

I knew that there were no trees in New York City. The trees were all out in the suburbs, where we lived. That was what the suburbs were for: living with trees.

My mother did not like the city, and whenever we had occasion to drive in — we always drove; we never took the train — she had a knack for the unsightly route. On our way to a theatre matinee, for example, we’d pass through a number of side streets in Hell’s Kitchen. My mother made certain that we knew what the neighborhood was called and why. My stomach sank into my shoes. I knew that it wouldn’t take much for her to stop the car and order me to get out. I knew that this was what she wanted to do, even if she never did. I knew that I exasperated her, and that in some profound way she had given up hope of not being exasperated by me. And I knew that the tough Hell’s Kitchen kids would make short work of me.

There were no trees in Hell’s Kitchen. Nor were there trees on Third Avenue, beneath the El. Once, perhaps twice, we drove to Yorkville, where the charity shops were, to drop off old clothes, before the elevated tracks were demolished. The El horrified me. It blocked out the day, and it made a growling racket. It was more hellish than Hell’s Kitchen. If you’d told me that I’d spend most of my adult life in an apartment a couple of blocks away, I’d have sobbed, and, in a way, it would not have been true. The charity shops are still here. Everything else is different. Fewer and fewer of the old tenement buildings that lined Yorkville’s avenues still stand. And there are trees, if perhaps not as many as there might be.

When I was twelve, I was allowed to take the train to Grand Central and to walk a predetermined route, along 42nd Street and then Fifth Avenue, to Polk’s Hobby Shop, near the Empire State Building. I would buy something for my electric trains — the most that I could afford was an unimpressive shunting engine, but at least it was the model of a kind of steam locomotive — and then retrace my steps. Thus began my discovery of my New York City, very different from my mother’s. Eventually, I discovered Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were easily as many trees in Central Park as there were in Bronxville.

Now I am reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Kathleen bought it at an airport bookstore on her way to a conference last month. She read it and was very moved by it. When she told me that she saw a lot of herself in Francie Nolan, I knew that she really wanted me to read the novel. I don’t believe that I would give it a try for any other reason. As Roger DeBris says in The Producers, “It’s too depressing!” There’s the poverty of Williamsburgh at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and there might be — I couldn’t tell, but “Betty Smith” certainly pointed in this direction — pedestrian prose.

But the prose is not pedestrian; it is very tricky. Not hard to follow, but full of winks and implications. It is, in short, Brooklyn Irish. By the same token, the poverty is effervescent.

***

It is not unusual for our after-dinner conversation to turn to some aspect of history. It is really a kind of mythology, only with “actual people.” (How “actual” is my grasp of the character of, say, Elizabeth Tudor? Worries on this score do not prevent me from spinning my yarns.) I am always talking about people, not movements or trends, and the people to whom I recur become a few atoms more massive every time I revisit them. Kathleen claims to learn a lot from the stories that I tell (which utterly lack beginnings and endings), but in fact I learn even more. Every now and then, as I’m talking about something familiar, an unforeseen suggestion steps out of my words.

This happened the other night, and the suggestion that emerged concerned the disappointment of reform.

The other night, it occurred to me to ask why I associate historical reform movements with disappointment. Why are programs of reform so vulnerable to incompetence? Pick a reform movement — the Reformation, the French Revolution, The New Deal, it doesn’t matter. Reforms begin with bold moves and striking changes, sometimes quite violent ones. But they almost always seem to fizzle out without accomplishing the intended goals. (Not only did the first Reformation — Luther’s — fail to reform Rome, but it also engendered a second — Calvin’s. Instead of universal Christianity, there were three and soon more implacable antagonists.) Why is this? “Too much too fast” seems to be a constant failing of reform movements. Might this not be because reforms are invariably envisioned in terms of years, of decades at the most? Because reformers expect to implement their reforms themselves?

If we can dream up a better way of doing things, then we can put it into practice — if only everyone would cooperate! But everyone never does cooperate. Making reform universally congenial requires multi-generational planning.

Because we don’t see the need for it, we don’t know how to engineer intellectual evolution. We don’t know how to devise development plans that will take several generations to unfold. We don’t know how to teach children how to carry on our missions — we only know how to present our missions as fully-formed things, and we exhort children to maintain them. If anything, we teach children to react against our missions.

This is a hunch, not a finding. It mirrors my thinking about environmental reform and the development of positive human stewardship — whatever that might turn out to mean.

In this connection, I’d like to mention Albert O Hirschman’s elegant tract, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, which not only analyzes the reactionary disdain for reform but shows that the reformers exhibit a complementary confidence that stands on no firmer ground.

At Crawford Doyle, I was asked if I had read any grand novels lately. The question surprised me a little, because I try to make a point of buying fiction that promises to be grand, or even just plain engaging, right there at the bookshop. But how would one staffer keep up with that? I stopped thinking about the question and considered an answer. I couldn’t think of any novels that I’d read lately, aside from a few short things on the light side, including two or three by Ruth Rendell. But, as if to make the staffer sorry that she’d asked, I pulled out my iPhone and consulted Evernote. (I’ve been keeping track of my reading there since November.) The Golden Bowl bottomed the list. Between then and now, no, no grand novels. “Was she impressed?” Kathleen asked at dinner. “Not at all. But I was impressed.” Nearly thirty years into digital life, I couldn’t quite believe that I had all that information at my fingertips. Not just what I’d read, but all the passages that I thought worth copying out! Right there on my iPhone.

Returning to the question, I was there to pick up a novel that I’d asked them to order for me. It got a brief but favorable mention in The New Yorker, and I was pretty sure that Crawford Doyle wouldn’t have stocked it. (And if they had, tant mieux, but I was right.) This was ages ago. The book duly arrived and I was duly notified by phone message. More than two weeks passed; I called the shop yesterday to apologize for not having come round to get it. I didn’t say when I’d be in. I had this feeling that if I called today, as it then was, I just might, following some incomprehensible but familiar perversity, actually venture forth from the apartment to pick the book up tomorrow, which is what happened.

The novel is Famous Writers I Have Known, by James Magnuson — a new name to me. So far, it is keen and funny. I don’t know how keen and funny it would be if were not also a literary satire, and I have not yet taken the measure of the satire. But the tale has hooked me, and I would still be sitting in a nearby café, engrossed, sipping Calvados — but the waiter there takes good care of me and does not facilitate overservice. The impulse to linger passed, and I bundled up to go back out into the cold. Now that I am home, however, and sipping tea — oh, I almost forgot: the action takes place in Austin, Texas, so there is the possibility of Texan satire as well — I am going to sink into my cozy chair with it.

Right now.

***

Delicious! I cannot recommend this entertaining book highly enough. It banished our midwinter for a day. I read it within twelve hours, breaking for meals and a few chores. You can probably get through it faster, not that hurry is the thing.

Forget writing programs, forget Texas. Famous Writers I Have Known is a glorious con, with a con man to love. And, in creating Frankie Abandonato, the author proves himself every bit the sterling con man that a good novelist ought to be. I’m not going to try to write about it at this hour; I want only to type out two passages. They’re not far apart in the book, as it happens, but they do compass the range of the con. Emphasis supplied.

I hate it when people think they can take advantage of us writers. They think we’re naïve, that we have our heads in the clouds, that we’re so hungry for any crumb of praise they can treat us like children. (239)

*

“I’m not flattering you. You know that poem by Rilke?”

“Which one?”

“The one where he’s looking at a statue of Apollo? And the trick of it is that the headless torso is somehow scrutinizing him … And the last line is, ‘You must change your life’.” I stared at him, speechless. That didn’t sound like much of a poem to me. (244)

One wonderful thing that James Magnuson has done is to give us readers a view of literature that’s uninfected by chatter. This is what we look like to the secular world.

I’m sorry; there’s a third must-quote.

How far I had fallen. It had been just a few months before that I’d been sitting at a table, surrounded by adoring young women, discussing point of view.

I nearly w— my p—s.

It has come to this: photographs of the apartment. Yesterday, I dashed across the street for breakfast and then paid a visit to the madhouse that is Fairway on Sunday. Aside from that outing, I had not left the building since last Tuesday. How much of this can be attributed to the postponed Remicade infusion and how much to what used to be called “the vapors” is unclear. What’s certain is that the beastly weather makes things worse.

I slept very late — too late. The penalty for oversleeping is bad dreams. I found myself in Battery Park, with no wallet, no money, no nothing. I had searched my bag for a blank check, but not only had I not found one but I’d left the bag behind as well. So: no camera. That’s what must have roused me: it’s one thing to fret about money and “the material things,” quite another to worry about the quality of blog entries!

The waking world wasn’t much of an improvement. The Times was a parade of horribles, or so it seemed. The vanishing middle class, the vanishing American behind the wheel of a taxi, the vanishing Wikipedia editors vexed by the difficulty of working with a smartphone — everything was slipping away. Then, The Nation. The Nation now arrives with the Monday paper, don’t ask me why, instead of in the mail. I always read the back first; that’s where the reviews are. I stopped in the middle of a long piece about neo-evangelical movements during the Cold War, because I had to eat something. Also, I couldn’t take the onslaught of distress. I’d read about a wicked judge in Pennsylvania who jailed naughty kids willy-nilly, the crazy hyper-development of China’s urban areas, and the Romanian New Wave in film. The Romanian New Wave sounds more hopeless than novel.

Whilst boiling an egg, some residue of Paul Krugman’s column about the soft-headed, hard-hearted Republican Party made contact with an ongoing conversation that parts of my mind are having on the subject of commercial concentration. Commercial concentration — the consolidation of business activities — makes sense from many short-term economic viewpoints (it increases efficiency, improves systems of control, and guarantees a reliable output), but it inevitably slashes jobs, at every level from the factory floor to the executive suite. What hit me in the kitchen was that the process of concentration is aided and abetted by peace, by stable social conditions. With everything running along smoothly, it is easier than ever to merge and to acquire. The result is all around us: wide income disparity, increased executive control. One neighbor loses a job, then another, but as long as you’ve got cable you’re assured that things are fundamentally okay.

Nobody wants war or social instability. But I’m not seeing much creative destruction. Where’s the capitalism?

***

I have been reading every essay in Simon Leys’s collection, The Hall of Uselessness, on the alert for the gratuitous disparagement of same-sex marriage and parenting. As noted here, I had been shocked to discover the bracketing of “homosexual families” with such evils as “incestuous fathers” and “despotic leaders” in a footnote to Confucius, and I wanted a better sense of the extent of this tarnishing tendency of mind. I came across another gem, this one not quite so ripe, in an essay on Chesterton.

On society: “It has been left to the very latest modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility … the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially sexual morality. And it is coming not from a few socialists … The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, much more in Manhattan.” (He was writing this is 1926.)

And this — which is ominously apposite to our present situation (I do not believe for instance that it is a mere coincidence that we are witnessing simultaneously the development of a movement supporting euthanasia and the development of a movement in favour of homosexual marriage):

Leys goes on to quote a chunk of Chesterton. (He was writing this in 1997.)

My sympathies are usually with Leys. He appreciates the wealth of tradition. He is somewhat more horrified than I am by the arrogance of modernity and the disasters wrought by its incompetence — but I’m horrified, too. Where we cannot agree is, I venture, on the place of Augustine in Christianity. Very simply, I believe that Augustine has no place in Christianity. A preachy bully, he imposed his sexual peculiarities — he could never sleep with a man, but he could never fully love a woman — upon Western orthodoxy. Perhaps these peculiarities are not so peculiar; I daresay they’re not exactly rare among heterosexual males. That doesn’t make them any less stunting, especially for the majority of human beings that doesn’t share them.

***

Authority and power. The trick is to imagine an authority that doesn’t depend upon power, and then to realize it. Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi come to mind, two fiercely courageous moral leaders. I’d be happier if neither of them took office (thereby attaining political power), instead of continuing to shine as beacons of high humanity. Power is a toxic substance, easily mishandled. Mandela handled it well; we can only hope that Daw Suu, if she gets it, will do the same. Better not to have to worry. Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan used to be an admirable man.

Closer to home, I look for cultural authority. Some will argue that cultural authority has been dissipated in the recent past, but I’m of the opinion that there has never been a cultural authority, just the cultural preferences of the powerful. Over centuries, these preferences have spurred important human achievements in the fine arts, but now, the powerful have developed other preferences, and are no longer committed to maintaining the fine arts. How is opera to survive without millionaire patrons? How are the fine arts to be made approachable by ordinarily intelligent citizens? How to salvage and promote courtly grace, if only as a habit of mind?

Writing that last bit, I feel as foolish as Cicero flying from Mark Antony.

“Conceptual art” is an oxymoron to me. Such a thing simply cannot exist, and every time I come across the term, I think of Confucius and his gu. Turning the matter around, I seek out a better rubric for the products described in this blithe, brainless manner. Lately, I’ve been fond of “applied philosophy,” but let’s be honest: I have no use for regular philosophy. “Cognitive criticism” might be more apt, because the purpose of most “conceptual art” appears to be a realignment of the viewer’s awareness. It casts a spotlight on habits of mind and half-conscious assumptions. It “makes you think.” That’s why it has nothing to do with art. Art stops you thinking.

It’s interesting to me that so much of this stuff is created by young people. They’re criticizing a world they’ve barely discovered. Perhaps criticism is a mode of discovery? The natural response of clever people to new things?

I want to get these ideas out of the way before writing about Susan Orlean’s piece, “Man and Machine,” in this week’s New Yorker. I want it understood that none of the activities described in the report struck me as having any relation to “art.” Orlean begins one paragraph with the statement, “Art has never been easy to define…” That may be, but for all its relevance to “Man and Machine” it might as well be a polynomial equation.

It’s not that I want to belittle the projects of Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, two young men who have been friends and co-conspirators since the third grade. I just believe that they’re easier to consider if the associations of “art” are swept away. Art draws your eye away from yourself. It does not require you to provide its meaning, because, if it is good, it has no meaning at all.

***

Orlean discusses what I count as five major Bakkila/Bender projects: Cowboy, This is My Milwaukee, Pronunciation Book, Horse_ebooks, and Bear Stearns Bravo. (They were all news to me, which is not very surprising, given the falling-off in my attentiveness to once-absorbing Web sites that marked 2013.) Of these, Horse_ebooks caught and held my attention, not because of what it “did” but because of its effect upon followers. Originally a spam bot controlled by a Russian seller of ebooks such as Sexual Fun and Games for Christian Couples, Horse_ebooks was acquired by Jacob Bakkila in order to provide him with an existing Twitter account with which he could gradually replace the mindlessness of the bot with his intentional imitations. He exploited the bot’s incompetence at capturing complete sentences, so that a text that he discovered, “Everything happens so much faster when you’re retired,” became the “koanlike” “Everything happens so much.”

Bakkila never wrote anything original for Horse_ebooks; like a bot, he just combed the Internet for text. (He had pulled the phrase that I watched him tweet at our first meeting from The Essential Beginner’s Guide to Raising Swans.) “There are so many weird, unindexed sites out there. When you go down the rabbit hole of spam, it’s an infinity of infinity.” He added, “One person could curate or remix endless amounts of information.” The first pulled text that he chose to tweet was “You will undoubtedly look back on this moment with shock and,” on September 14, 2011.

Following tweets of this nature appears to have become obsessive for thousands of people, many of whom were wounded when they learned that the tweets at Horse_ebooks were not a natural occurrence: “they felt cheated that Horse_ebooks wasn’t … an unintentional oracle but the work of one person who plotted its course.”

You’re probably waiting for me to roll my eyes and throw my hands up at this massive waste of time. I agree that it would be ridiculous for me to make a point of savoring a daily dose of amputated banalities, but I’m an old man, and an old man who hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be young.

One of the things that I don’t miss about being young is restlessness. Restlessness seems to enliven many people, but it enervated me. It was simply uncomfortable. I regarded it as a physiological problem, and I still do. In my day, there was nothing to be done about it, but now there is Twitter. Twitter shapes the pointless distraction of restlessness by providing it with a minute terminus, making aimlessness feel purposeful. There is no need for focused effort, no need for any kind commitment. You might just as easily look up into the sky to see a passing balloon, although the variety of tweets is more comparable to counting stars. That’s certainly what made Horse_ebooks attractive: it was accidentally interesting (or so followers thought) on precisely the scale of a tweet. “Everything happens so much” is the compleat tweet, and yet at the very same moment it constitutes an anti-tweet. There is no more to be said, no link to be followed. The thread begins and ends in four words, offering the relief of stillness in the torrent that is Twitter. In my twenties, I might very well have made a religion out of Horse_ebooks, retweeting its Delphic nonsense with vigor. I understand the appeal very well.

It also occurred to me that the “big data” generated by Horse_ebooks — what if you could tabulate the location of all the followers, the time of day at which they registered the tweets, which ones they retweeted, the commentary of those retweets; what if you could treat the following as an organism, and anatomize it in detail — has something to tell us about curiosity and cognition, something unavailable at the local level.

In short, I propose a joint humanities/computer science program of sociological cognitive study.

Bakkila and Bender are aficionados of corporate babble and the unintentional humor of bad advertising; in the course of ordinary conversation, they often quote commercials and sales pitches. They thought that tourist-promotion videos, with their unalloyed cheerfulness and obfuscation of inconvenient truths, were wonderful in an awful way, and therefore perfect for repurposing.

The repurposing of language intended to gull the naive into entertainment for the sophisticated is not just idle fun. It illuminates the nature of sophistication itself; it puts some precision into our grasp of things like “irony.” It might do so more efficiently without the obfuscating talk about art.

Everyone, but everyone who was anyone in le monde, circa 1950, appears in Thierry Coudert’s rather dispiriting tome, Café Society — everyone but Nancy Mitford. I made the mistake of picking the book up this morning, after reading the Times, because I hadn’t felt up to the chore of excavating it from the pile on the writing table in the living room yesterday. (It used to be at the bottom, but now it rests atop Allure.) I feared that I was on the edge of a cold yesterday morning, and exploited this worry to take it pretty easy all day. This morning, I feel somewhat more robust. I must make myself devote a few hours to paperwork this afternoon, or I shall be thoroughly demoralized. I shall listen to Der Rosenkavalier and plow through.

In Café Society, I encountered the faces of many people I’d been reading about in Diana Cooper’s letters, thanks to which, in many cases, they’ve acquired stable places in my memory. That many of them were interesting and amusing people cannot be doubted, and they seem to have had a lot of fun when they weren’t dolled up for dancing. When they were dolled up for dancing, they frequently had their pictures taken, and the pictures are not pretty. Money, couture, gilt, starch, disdain, envy, beauty products, the ravages of ageing, and more money — these are what the cameras captured. It’s a kind of hell. That’s how Diana Cooper seems to have felt about balls, although she never missed one. Noblesse oblige, I suppose.

I remembered that, in The Last of the Duchess, Caroline Blackwood paid a visit to Lady Norwich (Lady Diana Cooper that was; when her husband was given a peerage, she complained to her son about her “big step down”), and I thought I’d revisit the interview to see how closely Cooper’s voice resembled the one in her letters to her son. I found there to be a perfect match. To Blackwood, the octagenerian complains about hating being old, but she has a way of making her complaints amusing. It’s as though she knew how to infuse her speech with her great beauty. Eventually, Cooper got round to talking about the Duchess of Windsor. She told a story about an embarrassing evening at Elsa Maxwell’s, followed, at the Duchess’s insistence, by a frolic at a nightclub called Monseigneur, throughout which the Duchess found various ways of humiliating her husband.

It’s about the worst thing that I’ve ever read about the woman, and I’d like to hear a second account, because Diana didn’t find Wallis congenial. Anyway, I returned to the letters, where, wouldn’t you know, I came upon the very same story, this time written days after the event, not recounted decades later. The earlier version is, as you might imagine, less pointed in its details, and the bad behavior seems sillier and less nasty. Years of retelling made the story shapelier, and nowhere moreso than at the end. Cooper shared a ride with the demon of the evening, Jimmy Donahue, the gay Woolworth heir with whom the Duchess was conducting a flagrant, and possibly even unchaste, affair.

In the car he came quite clean. “Lady D,” he took to calling me. “Do you hate me for all the scandal? — it’s not our fault you know, it’s the newspapers. Isn’t Wallis your favourite duchess? She is mine — or would you rather have Alice Gloucester? I adore Wallis — she knows she’s only got to call on Jimmy and I’ll anything for her, I love her — like my mother you know — not any other way because I’m not that sort,” etc etc. I don’t write what I answered, it seemed useless to say much to someone quite beside themselves. I said the indiscretion of it all was idiotic and wounding and unsuitable to the Duke. Isn’t it all desperately sad? He showed nothing, I have to admit, on his royal wizened face but it it’s true and he learns it, the wife is gone, the legend dead, he’ll have to throw himself off the Empire State Building.

I include the peroration because it contradicts what Cooper told Blackwood all those years later: “The Duke immediately started to cry, he felt so humiliated.”

“It was ghastly,” Lady Diana told me. “The whole evening was ghastly. And once it was over, I ended up alone with Donahue. I had to drop him home in a car. I couldn’t bear him. He was so pleased with himself. He lolled around on the car cushion looking as puffed as a toad because he had proved he had the power to cause distress. I thought he was seriously cruel and common. I really loathed the way he talked about the Duchess. The car had no glass partition and he embarrassed me because the chauffeur could hear everything we said. “Don’t you love ‘Our Duchess’?” Donahue said to me. “Don’t you think ‘Our Duchess’ is fantastic?”

Lady Diana had tried to snub him. “I happen to be the daughter of a Duchess,” she said that she’d hissed at Donahue. “So Wallis can’t ever be ‘Our Duchess’ to me.”

Trust me, if Cooper had actually wound off such a zinger, John Julius would have been the first to read about it.

It’s fun to read about these shenanigans, at least when retold by someone clever. That’s what makes Nancy Mitford’s omission from Café Society so galling. It’s true that she wasn’t really part of it, and rarely appeared even at the fringe. She got an invitation to Charlie de Beistegui’s famous ball at the Palazzo Labia — the high point of both the 1951 Venice Film Festival and café society itself — but decided against going because the costume would cost too much, plus Venice. Mitford didn’t have the money. She didn’t have a husband with money, either. She was the mistress of a man who preferred not to be seen with her in public. But she knew all the interesting society folk in Paris and London, and she wrote about them in her copious letters. She’s the only reason, really, why I know anything about all of this, and why I care.

The pictures in Café Society, alluring as they occasionally are, make me rather ashamed of caring. I did get what I was after, though, a knockout photograph of Lady Diana Cooper being walked into the grand ball. She seems deeply frightened beneath her stunning looks, and that’s part of what makes them stunning. (She was very shy, I read, although I find it hard to believe.) It’s as though she has gotten stuck playing the Madonna in The Miracle, and can’t move. Having experimented, lightly, with plastic surgery, she looks magnificent for her age, 59. But she does look 59, if only in the eyes.

She doesn’t mention the ball in the letters, apparently because their recipient joined his parents in Venice just before the Film Festival crowd broke up; she would have told him about it in person. Then again, what was there to say?

While I was watching Hannah Arendt last night, Kathleen came home and said that she was too tired for anything but sleep. (It was about half-past ten.) I put the DVD on pause and went in to sit with her while she got ready for bed. She had lots to say about work — she usually does, these days. The stream of mordant commentary seemed to rouse her, so, when it subsided, I ventured an idea that had come to me the other day while we were on the iPhone with Megan and Will. She seized my proposal with interest, and was soon lost in “the one thing the Internet is good for.” She was still at it when I came back, over an hour later, after I’d seen all of Margarethe von Trotta’s film.

***

It occurs to me that some readers might raise their eyebrows at my interrupting a movie that I was watching for the first time for a chat with my wife, but I rather think that I got more out of the picture for the break. More and more, worthwhile movies seem to handle like worthwhile novels, and need to be put down from time to time, especially around the middle, just to settle the mind. I know, for example, that the two keys to the film’s narrative climax were more on my mind than they might have been, for having bobbed up repeatedly while I was in the bedroom with Kathleen. Both were introduced with barely more than a glance in the earlier part of the film.

In the first, one of the three judges in the Eichmann trial puts it to the defendant that, had there been more “civil courage” in Germany, the Nazi scourge might have been resisted. In the other, the young Hannah is seen telling her mentor and soon-to-be lover, Martin Heidegger, that his talk of “passionate thinking,” bringing together two things that everyone is taught to keep separate (passion and reason), deeply unsettles her. At the end of the movie, as Arendt was losing dear friends who were alienated by Eichmann in Jerusalem, it was clear to me that her stubborn display of civil courage was motivated by her passionate thinking on the subject of Eichmann and the “Jewish leaders” with whom he so adroitly interacted. My insight enlarged what was in any case a powerful drama — with a performance by Barbara Sukowa, in the title role, that I can only call enchanting — into perhaps the most compelling movie about the actively intellectual life that I have ever seen.

Part of me wants to rattle on about the fantastic, almost lurid sexism in Hannah Arendt. It is all a matter of words, but it nonetheless makes the male offenders look grotesque. The gravamen of the charge against Arendt was that she was “arrogant,” committed to her convictions no matter how much pain they might cause in others. She is accused, in effect, of unwomanly behavior. But the glory of Hannah Arendt is that she was essentially a brilliant thinker and only incidentally a woman or a Jew. This would not be so remarkable in a man; indeed, the gender aspect wouldn’t even come up. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt carefully constructed the argument that the “Jewish leaders,” with whom Eichmann became so palsey when it was a question of encouraging Jews to emigrate, steamrolled the delivery of the unfortunates whom they represented to the death camps. This was, perhaps understandably, mistaken for “blaming the victims,” but that isn’t what Arendt was doing at all. She made it clear that the members of the Judenrat didn’t see themselves as victims; they believed that they would be given special treatment. This delusion took a very long time to dissipate. If Eichmann in Jerusalem had a message for contemporary readers in 1963, it might well have been a warning to be wary of the old men who were used to being in charge. In charge of Israel, especially.

Part of me is more interested in a distinction, which I think von Trotta’s movie illuminates with attractive clarity, between courage and heroism. I called Arendt’s courage “stubborn” just now; it certainly wasn’t heroic. The filmmakers take pains to show how uncertain Arendt was of the virtue of her position. She could not convince herself of a preferable alternative, so she stuck with it, but doubts assailed her. She was deeply wounded by friends who turned their backs on her, and she showed it. There was none of the reckless self-regard that characterizes heroism, even if her enemies charged Arendt with it. She suffered for being right, but she never reveled in her suffering.

Having read Eichmann in Jerusalem for the first time late last year, I can’t say how well Hannah Arendt might stand up for viewers unfamiliar with the book, but perhaps my suspicions would be best expressed by my advice to anyone who has read the book: Re-read Chapter VI, “The Final Solution: Killing,” and the four chapters on deportations. (This might well kindle a desire to re-read the book in toto.) It’s not the contents of these chapters that is so important as the blend of evidence and sarcasm. In the end, Arendt wasn’t arguing a point in Eichmann in Jerusalem so much as showing that those who thought that they were doing justice weren’t doing a good job of it. She detested the sentimentalism that infused the proceedings. She was appalled that Eichmann might be taken to be the victim of a show trial. And she wanted to show that the intellectual mediocrity that made Hitler appealing to millions was still a force to be reckoned with.

Anyone can be a hero, if the circumstances are just right. But only a deep thinker who is truly engaged with the world can be courageous. True courage is never foolish, and without deliberation we are all likely to be fools.

***

Another part of me wants to shriek: “All that smoking!” Smoking indoors has become so unusual (at least in my part of the world) that I felt that von Trotta was overworking the old vice to a distracting degree. That was only one of many small imperfections in Hannah Arendt. Another was Janet McTeer’s portrayal of Mary McCarthy. One of the bonds between Arendt and McCarthy was their formidable self-possession: like brilliant generals, they were in full command of their resources as a matter of course. McTeer’s McCarthy struck me as too loose, too noisy. Another bumpy presentation was that of The New Yorker‘s Frances Wells (Megan Gay). Neither of these actresses is an American, much less a New Yorker, and it showed. (Nicholas Woodeson was, however, quite good as William Shawn.) Manhattan was represented by views across the East River from Brooklyn and Queens, but Arendt lived on the Upper West Side (of course), and it would have been more interesting to show the view of the Hudson from the front door of her apartment building, at 370 Riverside Drive. Overcoming all of these little defects was Barbara Sukova’s utterly convincing impersonation of an émigrée in New York. She was magnificent when addressing students, and I was left with distinct regret at not having been lucky enough to take one of her classes.

When I opened the fridge this morning to fetch milk for Kathleen’s tea, the light bulb sparked and went out. At the very same time, it seemed, the fridge stopped humming. I feared worse than a blown bulb. As the morning wore on, I stepped into the kitchen to listen, and the fridge was always silent. I emptied the cubes from an ice tray and filled it with water. An hour later, the water was beginning to freeze; but whenever I listened, the fridge was silent.

By the time that the ice started forming in the top ice tray, I had called Ray Soleil to ask if he was up for visiting the sick. He didn’t ask for an explanation, and he agreed to pick up an appliance light bulb on his way uptown. His coming was a great kindness, as I had been teetering on the edge of self-pity. I’d read the paper and eaten an English muffin, and, if there was more to life, it was too much work. Surely everything could be put off until tomorrow! Surely not: tomorrow, it will probably be snowing again. So I called Ray, as a way of getting myself out of the house.

With Ray’s company at lunch to look forward to, I found the resolve to change the sheets, a task for Tuesdays, and then to deal with a batch of small paper jobs. Meanwhile, I got dressed — for indoors. At this time of year, I can’t wear outdoor clothing in the apartment without boiling. When Ray arrived, I wasn’t feeling too shabby, especially as the fridge was humming. We wouldn’t have to check out the stock at PC Richard for a replacement after all. While Ray changed the bulb, I popped into street clothes.

At the restaurant, I saw two gentlemen of my vintage, neighbors from the building who often have lunch together; we’ve never been introduced, but I enjoy more than a nodding acquaintance with them, especially with the bigger of the two, whom I ran into once at the midtown big and tall shop where I buy clothes. For no particular reason, I asked him how long he thought Gristede’s would stay in business. I was just making conversation, preparing to repeat my joke the grocery chain’s owner, who ran for the Republican nomination for mayor last year, and lost. But my neighbor, who tends to know what’s really going on, gave me a far more detailed answer than I bargained for, and I am still whistling.

I am also frowning at something else that he told me: when the excavators withdraw from the scene in the fall, they will be replaced by the construction workers who will actually build the subway station — laying tiles, installing escalators and lighting, and so on. I do hope that the newcomers won’t take up as much surface area aboveground as their predecessors. Meanwhile, our building’s balcony railing replacement project is running behind schedule, which is dismal because the scaffolding that surrounds the building on three sides (covering — and narrowing — all sidewalks) cannot be removed until the entire project is complete. The unexpected news about Gristede’s (and not just Gristede’s) provides a welcome diversion from the dreariness of our war-torn building site of an intersection.

I asked Ray to come back to the apartment with me for a cup of tea. I knew that there were things I wanted to ask him about, or to tell him about, concerning the apartment and its problems, but I couldn’t think what any of them were, and I hadn’t been keeping a list. As we sat in the blue room, Ray entertaining me with tales of his adventures with obnoxious locals — “I told her, ‘If you turn that radio on again at midnight, while I’m trying to sleep in the next apartment, I’m going to cut your head off and shove the radio down your throat” — the little matters came to mind. There is a stain on a ceiling. That corner needs a can light. And what about the light fixture over the sink? After an hour or so, I called the barber to ask when I might come in. (That was what I really had to do today; I couldn’t touch my face without feeling shag-carpeted.) Forty minutes, he said. After about twenty-five, we left the apartment, and Ray walked with me to the barber. I was so lost in chitchat that I almost overshot both the correct side street and the barber shop itself. I thanked Ray for getting souls out of Purgatory — that’s what Fossil Darling said Ray would be doing by coming up to see me — and he went on his merry way.

Tito, the barber, told me about seeing 12 Years a Slave at the theatre in Queens, where he and an equally dark-complected Peruvian friend were the only non-blacks. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be white,” he said, meaning me. I couldn’t have agreed more. I haven’t even seen the movie here in Yorkville. I’m waiting for it to come out on DVD, so that I can stop it every few minutes and take a deep breath. I know that I have to see it, not just because of the cast — it was news to Tito, by the way, that Chiwetel Ejiofor had made any other motion pictures — but because I have to be reminded how much worse the life of slavery was than I imagine it to have been.

From the barber shop, I went round the corner to the Video Room, just to see what I hadn’t already seen elsewhere, and after a while I spotted Hannah Arendt. That’s what I’m going to watch after signing off here.

My next stop was Eli’s, just a block up Third Avenue. I ducked in to buy frozen croissants. These are treats for weekend breakfasts. They come packaged in threes, so I buy two, which makes for three breakfasts. I hardly ever go into Eli’s for any other reason; it’s both somewhat out of the way and very dear.

Then I headed for Fairway, where I thought I’d better buy a new bottle of milk, not that anything was wrong with the old one — not yet. Along the way, I passed both McDonald’s and Burger King, having crossed neither threshold in many a year. Kathleen would be working late, and ordering in with her team at the office, so I was on my own. — You can’t be serious, half of me said. — I can’t imagine anything I’d rather eat, said the other, the half that is ordinarily rather inconspicuous but that swells up to grotesque proportions when I am deprived of Remicade, and teetering on the edge &c.

At Fairway, I bought a chicken Caesar salad, knowing that it would be nowhere near as good as one that I made myself. It looked almost unappetizing in its plastic shell. After paying and walking out of the store, I turned left instead of right and headed straight for Burger King, two doors away.

That I brought the Whopper &c home instead of consuming all of it right there tells you how long it has been since my last descent into fast-food hell. French fries don’t travel well, nor do they wait for you to change back into indoor clothes. This didn’t stop me from eating them, however, and the Whopper,  I have to say, was indecently satisfying. As I ate, I read the letters that Diana Cooper wrote from St John and St Elizabeth’s hospital, where she spent several weeks in an as-yet unspecified malaise at the beginning of 1949. Nothing could have been more congenial than reading these very letters — short, that is, of crawling into an adjacent hospital bed and writing letters to Will, were he old enough to receive my nonsense. I wallowed heartily, like one of Cooper’s pigs.

Only then did I roll up my sleeves and sit down at my desk. In my inbox, there was a note from a friend asking me if I’d read a certain story mentioning Kathleen. I hadn’t; I hadn’t had to. It was the subject of much weekend conversation here. But I did take a look and was glad to see that everything had been straightened out. Kathleen learned from the experience that it is not a good idea to talk to a reporter about Project A when you are about to speak on a panel about (related but distinct) Project B — and are really thinking of nothing else.

After completing the first stage of my work on Analects 13.3, I turned to another passage, signaled by James Legge’s notes as a functional correlative: 12.11. Here is Simon Leys’s translation:

Duke Jing of Qi asked Confucius about government. Confucius replied, “Let the lord be a lord, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son.” The Duke said, “Excellent! If indeed the lord is not a lord, the subject not a subject, the father not a father, the son not a son, I could be sure of nothing anymore — not even of my daily food.

This is Confucian conservatism — fundamentalism, really — at its most stringent and least imaginative, and it’s the sort of thing that I’ve got to work around if I am to get anything out of the Analects. To do so, I turn passages such as this one upside down. Let us understand what ought to be expected of lords, subjects, fathers, and sons. Is the hierarchy implicit in this passage still useful? Confucius would argue that, if it was ever useful, it must still be, but on no point do I disagree with the Sage more sharply. Everything changes, over time, including human nature and the constellation of values on which human beings depend in order to make sense of the world. Justice today is not what it was circa 500 BCE. I find hierarchy distinctly useless for our times. I don’t have to worry about how I would answer the Duke of Qi, precisely because we have largely done away with rulers of his kind. We have different, more complicated problems that do not yet yield to elegant formulations.

There was nothing surprising about 12.11, but Simon Leys’s note on the passage was something else altogether. I already knew that Leys, whose real name is Pierre Ryckmans, is a Belgian Catholic of orthodox faith. (Ryckmans has lived since 1970 in Australia.) I should have to re-read all of The Hall of Uselessness, the NYRB collection of his essays that I mentioned last week, to cite the glinting references, but there is something rather handsome in the man’s harmonious blend of Christian piety and grave respect for the heritage of traditional Chinese scholarship, even if his contempt for the mainstream of modern thinking in the West is less appealing. But I was surprised — surprised and horrified — by the reactionary bent of his annotation to 12.11, a part of which follows.

In the Confucian view,  the sociopolitical order rests upon a correct definition of each individual’s function, identity, duties, privileges, and responsibilities. It is a teaching that, even today,  has lost nothing of its relevance: the moral chaos of our age — with its infantile adults, precociously criminal children, androgynous individuals, homosexual families, despotic leaders, asocial citizens, incestuous fathers, etc — reflects a collective drift into uncertainty and confusion; obligations attached to specific roles, age differentiations, even sexual identity are no longer perceived clearly.

What is “homosexual families” doing in that sentence? That’s not the only problem that I have with the statement, but it certainly the biggest, and nothing less than excision would satisfy me if a new edition of the translation were forthcoming. I doubt that Leys can have known any “homosexual families” well enough to pass judgment, but Leys would argue that that is not the point. He is not reporting on the world but concluding from values. Homosexual families can be no more permissible that incestuous fathers. I’m hugely embarrassed to have spoken so enthusiastically about Leys’s writing without knowing of this dreadful stinkbomb.

Leys was writing in the late Nineties, which was another world so far as same-sex marriage goes. But more than ten years earlier, Kathleen and I submitted affidavits testifying to the good character of a friend who sought to adopt her partner’s natural daughter. We supported what Leys dismisses as “homosexual families” from the first that we heard about it. Because we utterly reject the traditional prohibition of same-sex relationships, we cannot see a reason for preventing same-sex partners from raising children, whether natural or adopted.

As for the other alleged sinners on Leys’s list, I wonder why “incestuous fathers” doesn’t come first. (And I would insist upon mentioning “pederast priests”!) Despotic leaders are nothing new; most people in most places at most times in history have lived under some form of military dictatorship, usually with despotic tendencies. The  Communist Party in China, which Leys clearly hates so intensely that he doesn’t seem interested in its mutations, clearly wishes to minimize its own despotic features, however ineffectively. “Androgynous individuals” is a curious entry. There are certainly men and women who play with androgyny, and they make me uncomfortable precisely because they enjoy creating confusion, but I would not call robust women or delicate men “androgynous,” although I suspect that Leys might. I have the good fortune to have been spared acquaintance with any precocious criminals. (I don’t, in fact, know any criminals — but then, I don’t get around much.) This leaves “infantile adults” and “asocial citizens,” two categories that I should prefer to collapse into one. It is precisely in search of guidance for long-term adolescents that I’m combing through the wisdom of Confucius. Perhaps my reply to the Duke of Qi would be this: “Let the child be a child, and the adult an adult.”

***

Stricken as I was by the shame of possibly appearing to endorse Simon Leys’s benighted views on sexuality, I was grateful for the surprise itself, because it left me in no doubt of what I must write about this morning; otherwise, I’d have been at wit’s end. I’d have been tormented by the difficulty of deciding how much of my anxiety to “share.” For I was very anxious indeed. During most January, it was uncertain that my next Remicade infusion, which ought to have taken place this week, would be approved by our health plan, the operation of which has been upset by the surge in new plans mandated by much-needed amendments to our health-care laws (please note what I am not calling this). It appears to have taken a long time to find out whom the hospital ought to contact for approval. Last Wednesday, the request was finally submitted. This morning, approval was granted — I found that out as I was writing about Simon Leys — but, as no appointment can be made without approval, I now face the problem that I foresaw when I began this process about the tenth of last month: the seats are booked! There are only nine, I believe, at the infusion therapy unit, and it is unusual for any of them to be empty for more than twenty minutes. No, the unit is booked for a few weeks, in fact. If there’s a cancellation, I may get to go sooner, but it’s best not to count on that. Rather, I’m going to see what happens to me as I push two weeks beyond the furthest space that there has ever been between infusions.

The normal dosage is an infusion of some hundreds of millilitres of Remicade every eight weeks, making for six infusions a year. For some time now — the tenth anniversary of my receiving these treatments will occur in April — I’ve been getting by on four infusions per year. Expense is not the issue, although it would quickly become one if I were no longer insured. Rather, it’s the possibility that the drug will cease to be effective that guides me. It will take longer for this to happen, the reasoning goes, if I take it less often.

Sometimes, I begin to feel a bit off as much as ten days before the infusion. This seems a small price to pay. I don’t know how I’m really feeling right now, though, because anxiety about the insurance approval has jammed a lot of signals. (There are few things that I fear more than an uncertain bureaucracy.) We shall see how I feel — shan’t we. But I shall feel what I feel. That is not at all what anxiety is about. Anxiety is a state of not knowing what to feel. And when it ends, it vanishes — at least for me. I remember that I was anxious, but I don’t — can’t — remember being anxious. My body refuses to go there. That’s why I don’t like to write about it, even when I’m worried sick about something. One doesn’t like to leave traces of transitory unpleasantness lingering behind. It is a matter of hygiene, not stoicism.

***

Something else distracted me from my appointment worries — the sorrow of losing Philip Seymour Hoffman. I neglected to mention that I watched Charlie Wilson’s War the other day, and was once again hugely entertained by the deadpan exuberance of Hoffman’s impersonation of a disaffected CIA officer. I’ve been hugely entertained by everything the actor did. His films will continue to marvel, but the thought that there won’t be any more of them is oppressive. Philip Seymour Hoffman was, simply, a great artist.

When did this happen? When was the Alan Garage disfaced? Who let the barbarians in?

Somewhere, I must have a photograph of the old facade, a terra cotta triumph. You can read about it in a “Streetscapes” column from way back in 1989, when Christopher Gray was writing up the development of the old Orpheum Theatre site. Thanks to his piece, I learned how the old garage, built in 1930, and the small hotel next door (the Franklin) got their names.

One shudders at the illiteracy of the Meyers Parking people. Why not just junk the old name? Why mount “Allan’s Garage” on a brutalist sign? Getting it wrong adds insult to injury. And the injury is not inconsiderable. The Alan Garage was one of the minor marvels of Yorkville. (There are no major ones.)

I took the picture, however, because I have always been curious about the “Shaftway” signs that appear on buildings throughout the city, presumably to signify that the windows (which are usually blacked out) open onto elevator shafts. Or maybe just shafts, in the very old days, with pulleys at the top. Here’s my question: who is the intended reader of these signs? Whom are they designed to notify, and about what? All I can think of is that second-storey men might find the warnings useful, but why would the city fathers worry about the likes of them breaking their necks?

Ah, these modern times! I have but to ask. Firemen, that’s who the signs are for. D’you know what? I think I knew that, and then forgot.

***

Yesterday, I devoted about three hours to translating three sentences of Confucius. Why do I say that? Translation had nothing to do with it. In fact, I was learning how to read the three sentences in Chinese.

How much time you devote to following the rest of this entry is, of course, entirely up to you. I’ve taken it upon myself to explain a few things about written Chinese that may be of no earthly interest to you — but you never know. I thought it worth the exercise. Can I make this intelligible? Can I make it interesting and intelligible? Can I convey the great but rather serious fun of dissecting an ancient text that seems to have unusual pertinence? All I’ll say is, I’m sure that it might be better done. I won’t find out how, though, until I give it a try.

My objective is to understand Analects 13.3 as well as I can, and on a matter of importance that I have mentioned before and for which I should like to conceive a better label than “rectification of the names.” I could trust the translations, and in fact I do trust them, but I want more; I want to get a feel for how Confucius expresses himself. To do that, I have to know something about Chinese (namely, how to look up characters in a dictionary), but I’m finding that I also have to know something about teaching myself. I have to devise a practice for studying Confucius in his native language. I have always played with Chinese before, as you might play with a bar puzzle or a word game. My present inquiry — studying Confucius — demands method as well as rigor. How do I find them?

I begin with the text — the Dover reprint of the 1893 edition of the work of Confucius prepared, with a translation, extensive notes, and a glossary of characters, by James Legge, an Oxford professor who set out in 1839 as a missionary to China, returning to England in 1873. There are seven sentences in 13.3. Being me, I began in the middle, with the fourth sentence. The first three sentences are relatively shorter, and I’ll find out how long it takes to work through them after I have posted this entry.

Once I have found a character, in the dictionary or elsewhere (I’ll come back to that), I write down its Pinyin romanization. This is invariably a syllable with an accent mark that signifies one of four tones. Then I copy the character. If the character has been simplified, I copy that as well. I have learned to write down the number of the character’s radical directly beneath the Pinyin. Then I write a word or two of definition, unless the character is one of the many that don’t yet have a clear meaning to me.

Given favorable winds, I find each character in the normal way, by recognizing its radical. Until very recently, Chinese characters, which were and still are pronounced differently throughout the country, were organized around the idea of radicals. There were 214 of these. They were all characters in their own right, but they were also components in other characters, which were formed by adding strokes to the radical elements. To get anywhere in written Chinese, you had to know your radicals; you had to be able to “see” one of them in any given character. Once you got used to it, it was fairly straightforward. Radical 50 (which looks like a small square or rectangle), plus four other strokes: jÅ«n: “monarch,” according to the dictionary (Oxford), but for Confucius the first half of a compound translated as “superior man” by Legge, and as “gentleman” by Simon Leys. Some radicals, however, were hard, at least for me, to discern. One dictionary that I used to use had a listing of “difficult” characters, grouped by total stroke count. You will see, then, that you have to know how to write a Chinese character before you can look it up. The little box of Radical 50 (formerly 30) is comprised of three, not four strokes.

In contemporary dual-language dictionaries, characters are organized by their Pinyin romanizations. The Pinyin convention for representing the sounds of Chinese as it is spoken in Beijing is officially recognized by the Chinese government. Dictionaries still provide tables of radicals at the beginning, but if you know how a character is pronounced, you can dispense with them.

The winds are frequently unfavorable: I don’t recognize the radical, or can’t find the character listed under the radical that seems clear to me. More often than I’d like admit, I simply miss the character, overlooking it where it belongs; I have correctly identified the radical. Sometimes this is the result of carelessness, but often its a failure to recognize the character in a different typeface. The 1893 typeface is massively woodcut: it looks tremendously Chinese-ey. (I spent twenty minutes looking up what I took to be a different character for “foot” because of a defect in one of the woodcuts.) The dictionary’s type face is far more rectilinear, and the lines are really lines, not the brushstrokes of traditional Chinese writing.

And, not infrequently, the character has been simplified. That’s to say that a less complicated character, with far fewer strokes, has been substituted for the traditional one — the one that appears in Legge’s 1893 edition. Simplified characters are official in the People’s Republic of China and, increasingly, used by scholars around the world. (They are, after all, often the work of scholars of the past, constituting a shorthand that allowed notes to be taken more rapidly.) The simplified characters are not, however, in use in the Republic of China (Taiwan), or — last time I looked — in the Chinese-American press. What makes simplified characters such an awful pain for anyone schooled in traditional Chinese characters is that many quite common radicals have been simplified. Take the traditional 149th character, which means “words.” In my traditional dictionary, the characters classified under Radical 149, and all of their more common compounds, run from page 1482 to page 1529. As it happens, the traditional radical has been retained as a character, but it is not much of a radical anymore, as most of the characters formerly classified with it have been reassigned to a two-stroke radical that doesn’t mean anything.

Having taught myself the traditional table of radicals pretty well, back in the early Seventies, I effectively stopped studying Chinese for a long time rather than deal with the simplified characters, radical lists of which, unlike the traditional one, are not standard. I don’t know how many there are, but I have two right here on my desk, the one in the Oxford dictionary (the one that I use), and the one in a devilishly handy study guide, published for I can’t imagine whom, called Reading and Writing Chinese: A Comprehensive Guide to the Chinese Writing System. Quite often, I go straight from the dictionary’s table of radicals to the study guide, via the Pinyin — which is why the Pinyin is the first thing that I write down. Chances are that the study guide will show me how to write the character properly. I know the basic rules, but I’m making more of a point of doing things properly. As you can see, I eventually got over my “sunk costs” attachment to traditional characters. Happily, both the dictionary and the study guide provide the traditional versions alongside simplified characters, or else I’d be lost.

Sometimes I find the character in reverse. Knowing what it means, I look up the word in the English half of the dictionary and then trawl through the listing in search of the character that I’m looking for. The Oxford dictionary, as is conventional now, will give both character(s) and Pinyin, for the Chinese half of the dictionary is arranged alphabetically — by Pinyin. And a funny alphabet that makes: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, W, X, Y, Z — the letters omitted from this list never appear at the beginning of Pinyin romanizations, and the omitted consonant — V — isn’t used at all.

Traditional Chinese-English dictionaries work differently. They arrange the characters in the traditional manner, by radical. On the first page of the dictionary proper (after the tables of radicals), you will find the first radical — the straight horizontal stroke that signifies “one” — followed by the characters that add one stroke to the radical; in my traditional dictionary, a rebarbative tome that dates from the Legge era (also a reprint, of course), the second listing is the character for “seven.” And so it goes, all the way to Radical 214, which consists of seventeen strokes and denotes, among other things, a flute. The last character in the dictionary adds nine strokes to this radical, to mean “implore” — one almost suspects a Christian interpolation, as all the compounds listed for the character suggest a distinctly Occidental fervor. But I’ve forgotten to mention: the table of radicals in a traditional dictionary directs you to the page where the definition is given.

Three characters that appear in the sixth sentence of the passage that I’m studying, meaning “ceremonies,” “music,” and (more or less) “flourish,” consist of many strokes — and positively occult radicals. (Well, they give me trouble.) I had a very strong, and, it turned out, correct, hunch that they had been simplified, so there would be no point looking for them in the Oxford dictionary. Following the basic method, I should have had to look them up in my traditional Chinese dictionary, which employs not Pinyin but an older system, known as Wade-Giles. Assuming that I found the characters in the traditional dictionary, I should have to hunt for the corresponding Pinyin, something I’m not very good at. Avoiding this headache, I looked up the three words in the English half of the dictionary, found what I was looking for, and copied the simplified versions of the characters alongside the traditional ones taken from Confucius. In two cases, identifying the simplified character’s radical was easy, but the one for “music” really stumped me for a while, until I got to the end of my rope, and there it was.

Hunting for radicals even after I’ve identified a character isn’t really necessary to attaining a better understanding of Confucius, except, who am I to say such a thing? If I want to understand Confucius’s text, I have to know the characters, and to know the characters implies knowing the radical, even if the character in use today no longer resembles the one in Confucius. In short, instead of beginning by deciding all the things that I don’t really need to bother with, I’m bothering with everything that seems pertinent to the text. This seems to be a more properly Confucian method.

The last step is to write out the Pinyin romanization of the text. This will help me to read the text aloud, and eventually I’d like to be able to read straight from the original, giving Kathleen the romanized text (and showing her how to follow it). Only then will I try to parse the characters that are at all obscure. Confucius was writing, after all, two and half millennia ago (roughly), and even as conservative a language as what used to be called “Mandarin” is bound to change a bit. We have in any case moved far from the agrarian world, dotted with watchtowers, that provided the meaningful referents in Confucius’ time. I want his words to tumble in my mind.

I don’t assume that Confucius has the answers. But he does seem to have a method, a line of inquiry, that stresses virtue as a social good. In the West, we have come to regard virtue as optional, almost vestigial. As long as you don’t break the law, you’re doing fine; and one man’s virtue is another man’s vice. I don’t like depending on law and order; a police state is no better than a nanny state. Our only hope of doing without either is to develop a flexible sense of social virtue, modest in scope but clear and comprehensive as regards public spaces, and considerate of the consequences to the world tomorrow. I think that Confucius can help me to identify a few basic principles. He has, for a start, inspired me to read him with respect.

I said something about fun, didn’t I. Oh dear.

At the bank yesterday, I slipped my card in and out of the ATM machine at the right-hand rear of the ground floor. I asked for a certain amount of money, and I typed in my PIN. Much to my unpleasant surprise, the screen announced that it did not recognize my card, and urged me to contact customer service.

Really! I decided to try another ATM. This time, the process netted me the desired oodles. After I tucked the receipt into my wallet and pulled on my glove, I strolled over to the greeter who stands by the door welcoming customer and directing their inquiries. I told her about the malfunctioning ATM, pointing it out specifically. She said that another customer had had that problem, and, with vast vagueness as to time, she added that she would inform the branch manager.

Later, I scolded myself for not climbing the stairs and telling the manager myself. It’s a very rude shock, especially for an older person living a settled life, to hear that one’s bank card doesn’t work, and it ought never to be transmitted in error — certainly not more than once. Naughtibank!

Earlier, I read of a ghoulish movie that’s showing at the Film Forum, Charlie Victor Romeo in 3-D. In this claustral film, a troupe of actors impersonates the crews of doomed flights, the script transcribed from “black boxes” recovered from the wreckage of crashed planes. Nothing is seen of the passengers. In the Times, A O Scott wrote,

A few of the scenes begin with playful banter, and even a hint of flirtation between a pilot and a flight attendant. As things go wrong, the language is dominated by a mixture of technological jargon (heavy on numbers and abbreviations) and profanity. Jaws clench, beads of sweat appear on brows, and breathing accelerates.

You might have a similar reaction. Whether you will find it pleasant, cathartic, thrilling or just dreadful is another question. After the third chapter of this 80-minute movie, my screening companion, a somewhat nervous flier, excused herself and went to wait for me in the Film Forum lobby. It was not only duty that prevented me from joining her, but also a morbid fascination with catastrophe.

Just dreadful. It’s just dreadful to know that this movie exists.

***

Especially on a day when Kathleen was flying.

For about half an hour in the early evening, my body was a septic tank of cortisol. Kathleen wasn’t answering her phone. She was at the airport in Miami, waiting for a delayed flight. It had probably been a mistake for me to watch Random Hearts while working in the kitchen before making myself an early dinner.

Random Hearts, which I haven’t seen in a long time, has aged very well. I think that that’s testimony to the skill of its director, the late Sidney Pollack. When the movie came out, fifteen years ago, it had an old-fashioned feel, and not in a good sense. Harrison Ford was a tad too old for the role of a hard-hitting Internal Affairs sergeant, and Kristin Scott Thomas seemed cautious in her first “American” role. (Her accent was much improved when she made The Walker some years later. In Random Hearts, she says “scare” and “care” in a way that, while not sounding at all British, doesn’t sound quite right. The French would say that elle venait de nulle part.) The unlikely romance between the cop and the congresswoman was almost swamped by its catastrophic premise. (Their spouses were having an affair, and died in a plane crash on their way to a tryst in Miami.) The Washington setting, replete with campaign managers and their sausage grinders, was too highly seasoned to serve as a backdrop.  As a title, Random Hearts was blandly uninformative.

These defects, such as they were, appear to have died with the novelty of Pollack’s film. Ford looks, if not young, then not too-old, and Scott Thomas is at her prettiest, and possibly her sweetest. There is in her performance a touch of little-girl gracefulness that makes a change from her trademark tart, sometimes swaggering, sophistication. Together, the stars create a convincing and affecting instance of what might be grossly called grief sex. They’re bereft and outraged in different ways, but, they are bereft and outraged, and they are further united as the victims of the same infidelity. He wants to know what the guilty lovers’ plans were, and also (being a detective) what was the last thing about his wife that he knew to be true. She is angry at being denied the satisfaction of getting a divorce. He wants to visit the scenes of the illicit liaison; she doesn’t, but she learns from him that this might be evasion on her part. When you’ve been made a fool of, you ought to want very badly to know the how and the why.

The movie does not ask you to judge the long-term prospects of a romance between two people from such very different milieux. In many subtle ways, it minimizes the difference; for example, the two homes, one in the northwest quadrant of Washington, the other somewhere in New Hampshire, seem to have been designed and lighted by the same eye (which of course they were, but that’s usually to be hidden). The congresswoman has a flat in Washington that is, clearly, not home. I was never very sure of just what the cheating wife’s job at Saks entailed, but she was no blue-collar housewife. The cop has a shack in the country near Chesapeake Bay; when the congresswoman pays a visit, she seems perfectly comfortable. If these people are ill-matched, it’s not for economic reasons.

Instead, Random Hearts, which like a certain legendary movie ends at the airport, allows you to indulge your fancy. In the last exchange of dialogue, the cop says, “How would it be if I called you up sometime and asked you to go out to see a movie.” The congresswoman drops her forehead onto his chest. Then she looks him in straight the eye with the film’s first full blast of Kristin Scott Thomas’s alluring ambivalence. “Wouldn’t that be something,” she deadpans, grinning slyly. Then she turns away and, without looking back, walks off to catch her plane. In the final shot, Harrison Ford is smiling. We’ll always have DC.

Kathleen got home more or less in due course. Tired and a bit cross, but utterly intact.

***

Morbid fascination with catastrophe. Needless to say, this phrase, which seems to signal moral depravity when connected to a movie about plane crashes, pretty much sums up the attraction of Stranger by the Lake.

Reading The Wings of the Dove, I’m almost knocked over by the theatricality of the text. The text is a theatre, complete with play in progress; all you have to do is to open the book, and you are there. This is not to say that the novel is the adaptation of a play that might be performed in a conventional theatre by human actors. It isn’t. It is the play, complete with theatre to house it. It could never be staged otherwise. But it works like a play.

It might help to remember George Bernard Shaw. If you’ve ever read one of Shaw’s great plays, you’ll recall the lengthy stage directions. I remember hearing, in college, that actors hate those stage directions, because they’re so confining, but they certainly make the plays easy to read at home. Strip them out, however, and you have drama of more or less conventional length. Speaking the lines, getting on and off stage, and so on, will take a few hours. And no one in the audience is likely to miss the stage directions.

I wonder how many people have become fond of filmed adaptations of Henry James’s novels without having read those novels first. Not very many, I should think. Merchant/Ivory produced the best ones that I’ve ever seen, the ones most likely to make an interesting impression upon viewers who haven’t read the books; I’m thinking especially of The Golden Bowl, which, despite its many eccentricities of casting and scripting, I should be sorry to be without. But the run of earnest BBC productions that began appearing in the Sixties is rather starchy. They have their fascinating moments, but they remain somewhat pale reflections of more powerful originals.

My point is that, if you strip away everything that isn’t dialogue in Henry James — and a great many of his conversations are not quoted, as it were, but rather indirectly reported by the narrator himself — if you boil his books down to the words between quotation marks, you lose most of the book, and what’s left is fairly lifeless.

In my Penguin edition of The Wings of the Dove, the first part of Book Second begins on page 85. The first line of quoted dialogue appears on page 94. Everything leading up to that line might well be considered as a kind of stage direction, with the narrator arranging the stage just so. He does this by telling you things that you can see with your mind’s eye. Consider the second paragraph.

He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on certain sides, to classification — as for instance by being a gentleman, by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally sound and generally civil; yet, though to that degree neither extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed play straight into an observer’s hands. He was young for the House of Commons —

in today’s English, we would say “too young for the House of Commons,” and it might be helpful to read in the intensifier at the appropriate spots in the following string of ruled-out possibilities —

He was young for the House of Commons, he was loose for the Army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the City and, quite apart from the cut of his cloth, sceptical, it might have been felt, for the Church. On the other hand he was credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry and yet too little in them for art. You would have got fairly near him by making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas; but you would have quite fallen away again on the question of the ideas themselves. The difficulty with Densher was that he looked vague without looking weak — idle without looking empty. It was the accident, possibly, of his long legs, which were apt to stretch themselves, of his straight hair and his well-shaped head, never, the latter, neatly smooth, and apt into the bargain, at the time of quite other calls upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and, supported behind by his uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him for unconscionable periods in communication with the ceiling,  the tree tops, the sky. He was in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly clever, liable to drop what was near and to take up what was far; he was more a prompt critic than a prompt follower of custom. He suggested, above all, that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals more or less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for comparative coolness. And it was a mark of his interesting mixture that if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable subtlety — a law that in intercourse with him it might be of profit, though not easy, to master. One of the effects of it was that he had for you surprises of tolerance as well as of temper.

This is superb example of James’s late-stage approximations of straightfowardness. The syntax is dense, but it is complete. The last two sentences — I very nearly left them out — are not quite as clear as what precedes them; we’re told nothing about the “law” of Densher’s temperament save that it is subtle. But everything else is quite clear. It is the portrait — we can be frank about this now — of a young man on whom Henry James might have a great crush.

There is simply no other way to present all of this information, this deftly woven network of the professional possibilities open to an Edwardian gentleman that at the same time foregrounds Densher’s predilection for thinking. Nor could Densher’s unconcern with material success be so pointedly hinted at. But observe that James never refers to anything that we couldn’t see for ourselves if Densher were standing before us. James makes him stand before us, all the more substantially, I should argue, because James sticks to the apparent surface of the man. What Densher thinks about when he stares at the ceiling is elided so suavely that we are quietly assured that we don’t need to know. James tells us everything that we do need to know; he presents it for us to see.

An actor charged with impersonating Merton Densher in an adaptation of the novel for the screen — I can’t be brought to call such thing a “dramatization”; de-dramatization would be more like it — would be only doing his job to absorb as much as possible of the paragraph that I have extracted in shaping his role; at a minimum, he ought to strive to represent Densher’s as yet unstamped character, for it is this “fusion and fermentation” that makes Densher the right man for the scheme that Kate Croy will unfold. But no staged “version” of The Wings of the Dove will ever afford us a dramatic experience to rival the one provided by the novel.

It’s very much a question of language. To get the most out of Phèdre, you have to understand French. To get the most out of Henry James, you have to be a close reader. The only difference is that nobody is a born speaker of the latter tongue.

At about nine, this morning, I canceled my lunch date. I didn’t want to be dependent on the availability of taxis in the terribly cold weather, and any other mode of transportation would entail overexposure to the Vortex or the Clipper or whatever it is. Tomorrow will be a warmer day, or so they say.

The prospect of bundling up and setting forth for lunch kept me from going back to sleep at 5:30 this morning. I tried to think, as I usually do at such times (and it usually puts me under right away), of what I might write about this morning. This broke off into the question, when this morning? Or this afternoon? This evening? In no time at all, every uncertainty in my life at the moment, amplitudes raised by Kathleen’s absence, paraded through my imagination, and although I was quite comfortable under the blankets, I could not manage the slip into oblivion. Eventually, I got up, grabbed the paper, and read yesterday’s news. Then I turned to Bookforum, a new issue of which arrived yesterday. Pretty soon, I was back in bed, dozing. What an existence!

Tomorrow, Kathleen will be coming home. That will buoy me up.

***

When I finally got to my desk, there was a letter from a friend who mentioned, among other things, that he was reading The Other Persuasion. This Vintage collection of “gay writing,” published in 1977, features, my correspondent told me, excerpts from the work of Proust, Forster, Stein, and so on. It’s long out of print, although it’s available. Looking at the online photograph of its quietly tasteful cover, I thought how assertive it would have been to carry the book around, in 1977, outside of a few urban enclaves. Assertive and/or bold. Thank heaven that’s over. Or at least the enclaves are much, much larger.

It was in the 1970s that readers were invited to consider such categories as “women’s fiction” and “gay fiction.” I wasn’t comfortable with either. Insofar as works in these categories were primarily concerned with issues of gender and sexuality, they could be of interest — interest not merely anthropological — to similarly endowed readers. To the extent that women and gay men wrote novels that fully engaged me, the categorization was empty. Thus I stepped away from the question, and read what I liked, much of which was written by women and gay men. Actually, more and more of it was written, as my novel-reading years passed by, by women.

There’s one thing that women and gay men have in common: the need to pay pretty close attention to the world around them, in order to avoid harm of some kind. This makes the fiction that they write more interesting; it is actually about the observed world. More interesting, that is, than fiction written by straight men. Straight male writers seem always to be wholly wrapped up in themselves, possibly because this is their only topic, they only thing that they’ve had to become familiar with. I don’t mean that these writers are necessarily self-absorbed. I’m thinking here of Augie March, whose Adventures I put down in the middle, not because the book was all about Augie, but because it wasn’t about anything else, either. No other character held the stage for very long. Augie was like a chimp swinging from vine to vine, and when he reached the vine that would take him off to Mexico, I closed the book. I suppose that what I’m confessing here is that I don’t care much for the Bildungsroman — not in its American form, anyway.

I’ve picked up The Wings of the Dove — it has been a while since I read it last. Quite a while. I love the novels to either side of it, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, so I turn to them when I’m in the mood for late James. The Wings of the Dove does have the most extraordinary beginning, the drama-ness of which reminds us immediately of the Master’s frustrated career as a playwright. A woman alone in a room, pacing, impatient. Then she stops before a “dull,” “tarnished” mirror, and while she appraises herself, the author tells us a few things about her family’s fall from prosperity to dinginess — a very few things. But the drama is deeper than that. We are told absolutely nothing of what Kate Croy is thinking. I had already noticed that about James: he never burrows behind physical manifestations to tell us his characters’ secrets. So much for being a “psychological” novelist! It was agreeably ratifying to see Wendy Lesser say the same thing, on an early page of her new book, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books.

Despite James’s reputation as a novelist of great psychological depth, there are virtually no scenes in which he peers behind the verbal surface, telling us that whereas So-and-so appeared to think this, she really thought that.

So much of the excitement and suspense in James come from this reticence — this very loquacious reticence. Like a beautiful actress on the stage, his wheeling prose diverts us from the unsightly tangle of semi-conscious mentalities. Reading some of that prose just now — Lionel Croy’s surprising support for his sister-in-law’s plans for Kate, notwithstanding their hostility to himself — I felt something else: when James’s characters converse, they are either negotiating or gainsaying the need for negotiation. There is a transaction in every scene — sometimes more than one. It is odd to think of James as a businessman, but we forget how much more there is to business than money.

***

Kathleen has just called to tell me that the greatest of my current uncertainties, one that gave rise to an anxiety that I worked hard to conceal from everyone else, has been favorably resolved. The worst of it was, Obamacare was “to blame.”

Confucius often said that if only a ruler could employ him, in one year he would achieve a lot, and in three years he would succeed. One day a disciple asked him, “If a king were to entrust you with a territory which you could govern according to your ideas, what would you do first?” Confucius replied, “My first task would certainly be to rectify the names.” On hearing this, the disciple was puzzled. “Rectify the names? And that would be your first priority? Is this a joke?” (Chesterton or Orwell, however, would have immediately understood and approved the idea.) Confucius had to explain: “If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible — and therefore all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible. Hence, the very first task of a true statesman is to rectify the names.”

That’s from Simon Leys’s introduction to his translation of the Analects, which also appears in a fine NYRB collection, The Hall of Uselessness.

Now, for a bit of rectification.

***

To consume something is to destroy it. Buildings are consumed by fire. Prey are consumed by predators. The English muffin with which I might begin the day does not survive my breakfast.

I have read Jane Austen’s Emma six or seven times. Not only have I not consumed it literally — I still have two or three books that contain the novel, and I hope that there’s at least one such on your shelves — but I haven’t consumed it figuratively, either. I look forward to reading it a few more times. I’m not done with Emma.

“Consumer society” is a phrase that first appeared around 1950. I’d like to know more about precisely what it meant at the time — what was felt to be new about it — but it clearly referred to a shift in attitude toward durable goods. Previously, durable goods were intended by buyer and seller alike to remain in reasonably good working order, with repairs as needed, for a period approximating the buyer’s lifetime. The consumer society rejected this notion. “Consumers” would replace such goods for reasons other than need. Durables would now be discarded while still in working order or without recourse to repair. Unless, as in the case of clothing and automobiles, goods could be cleaned or refreshed to a degree that erased the palpable traces of a previous user, they were to be junked.

At the same time, the marketplace was newly awash in patently ephemeral goods, toys for adults as well as for children, that were not designed to last for a very long time. Many were actually labeled “disposable.” Bic pens, for example, could not be refilled, which made them prematurely worthless: the ink was consumed, but the pen was not.

Both cases retained a meaningful connection to the idea of consumption, but they introduced an element that had nothing to do with it. This was the notion that the “consumer” would make use of a thing until his desire to use it was exhausted. For example, someone might be concerned with owning the “latest” model of an appliance. This intangible value, whatever it might be, did not inhere in the object, and could not be consumed. When a dishwasher, for example, ceased to be “the most quiet” of available dishwashers, nothing was consumed.

Let’s call this new element “novelty.”

At some point within the past twenty-five years, people began to speak of consuming things when in fact all that had occurred was the novelty of those things had worn off. Thus began the improbable era of immaterial consumption, a period to which I should like to put an end with this entry.

You do not “consume” news, even if you burn your newspaper after you’ve read it. You do not “consume” art by visiting museums. News stories live on indefinitely in archives, and the most important function of a museum is to prevent the consumption of the works in its collection, by fire, theft, or otherwise. News stories and artworks are catalysts: they induce changes in receptive minds, but they themselves remain unchanged. Minds that remain unchanged are ipso facto not receptive: nothing happens, certainly not “consumption.”

The evil of this usage lies in this: it not very surreptitiously posits a value in news stories and artworks that is determined by the frequency with which they are “consumed,” and, as if that were not bad enough, “consumption” is equated with both “exposure” and “exhaustion of interest.” Having consumed the Mona Lisa, you move on to The Girl With the Pearl Earring. Two items off the bucket list.

Don’t get me started on bucket lists! Just try not to be somebody else’s marketing tool. Consume as much junk as you like, but bear in mind that you cannot consume anything truly worthwhile, except of course by physically destroying it.

Daily Blague news item: Circenses

Barclays Capital Grove! One sputters, wanting the eloquence of Pope and Swift. How to express, ineffably, the desire that this plaque won’t be around in ten years. One wishes its erasure more than to know What Were They Thinking?

It is almost not today anymore; shortly, it will be tomorrow. But what a wonderful day it was — a New York impromptu. Such as never happens, or only very, very rarely. It began with Fossil Darling’s decision to take today off, which he made yesterday, when someone at work pointed out that, in view of what we’ll call the inequality of income, he was in a very bad mood. So he decided to take the day off. Consubstantially — it would be a grievous doctrinal error to assert that his “next” realizaation preceded or followed the first — he remembered that today would be Ray Soleil’s birthday, something that Ray himself would never admit to doing. I was asked to join the two of them for lunch at Demarchelier (meaning that they would come over to my part of town), and, when I told her, Kathleen invited herself along even before I could tell her that Fossil had asked me to do so.

In the event, Kathleen, bedeviled by an upset stomach and crying clients, didn’t have lunch with us, but only showed up for a minute to wish Ray a happy birthday. As it happened, the widowed father of her oldest friend was having lunch at a table nearby, with a most interesting-looking lady, about whose age Kathleen and I later argued, Kathleen thinking that the lady was younger than herself, a position I emphatically pooh-poohed. The lady was very interesting, and semi-familiar. I won’t be surprised to learn, down the road, that I met her once. With her upswept, almost turbaned hair, and her complete eschewal of makeup, she looked like one of Edward Gorey’s dance mistresses.

Anyway, I had a plan. I had already looked into movies showing in the neighborhood after lunch, and found the tally wanting. But something made me look a bit further, and at Demarchelier I found myself proposing that we head over to Fossil’s neighborhood after lunch, to the Walter Reade theatre, to see the four-o’clock showing of Stranger by the Lake, the Alain Guiraudie movie that has elicited all the latest wide-awake reviews. Ray and Fossil had already talked about seeing it, and we needed but to cross town, buy tickets, and see it.

I might write about the cold here. It was terribly cold. We walked from the taxi at Broadway to the theatre (where we bought tickets for the 4 PM show ahead of time) and thence to Fossil’s flat across the street from Lincoln Center, freezing in the process. We could not believe that the distance between 65th Street one one side of Broadway could be so far from 64th Street on the other, but it was, absolutely, terribly cold. I suppose that the fact that we survived means that it couldn’t have been all that cold. But death did at times seem a sweet option. Later, walking back to the theatre to see the movie, and walking to Fossil’s from seeing the movie, it wasn’t so bad.

I have never in my life been so happy that a movie ended on an ambiguous note. That is all that I’m going to say about L’inconnu du lac at the moment. No, there’s one other thing. It’s not unlike The Swimming Pool, the François Ozon movie with Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier. Deliberate as hell.

After the movie, we got comfy at Fossil’s flat. By now, we had decided on a dinner at Shun Lee West, with the young marrieds and Kathleen. Presently, the former arrived, the  couple of which Ms NOLA is a married half — we haven’t agreed on the proper nom du blog. We progressed to the restaurant, where we waited for Kathleen, although we didn’t wait to eat. She materialized at last.

Everyone agrees that Kathleen is an angel, but nobody can say why. I don’t have to argue, because I can see her wings.

Here it is, nearly four, and I’m just sitting down. Well, I went out today. I wrapped myself up nicely, and I grabbed a hospital cane — one of those metal, adjustable things — on my way out the door. I was glad I had it, just outside the building, where a patch of iciness was resisting the scattered halite on a sloping stretch, but, otherwise, the cane was more a comfort than an aide. The sidewalks were clear, if damp. There was slush here and there, and even a few puddles, but no ice aside from that patch alongside the driveway.

Although I set out to buy “only a few things,” I spent nearly seventy dollars at the discount cosmetics shop and nearly twice that at Fairway. You tell me. I had the Fairway stuff delivered, the first time I’ve done that there. I took with me some chicken and a couple of limes, to get the marination going for these evening’s dinner. The delivery took place about forty minutes later, and I put everything away. I’m trying to avoid putting off the little things — which sounds virtuous enough but is in fact tricky to the point of treacherousness, as the little things are numerous enough to swallow up an entire day. And they make writing more effortful; writing, for me anyway, is a carefree pastime, and if I’ve just applied my brain to the organization of a closet shelf or even to emptying the dishwasher (the household task that I’d like most to be spared — and putting away dishes that have been washed and let to dry in a rack on the counter is no better), the free play of ideas that Matthew Arnold mooned about is hard to get going.

***

I have a few books to write about, but I’m not in the mood just now to talk, or even to think, about either of them. I finished one of them late last week, and copied out all the tagged passages (nearly thirty) on Sunday. Whereupon I promptly lost interest in the subject (CIA Arabists in the early Cold War). The other book, Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715, I reached the end of last night, and have yet to copy out the tags. Not that that’s what holds me back. It’s rather that Hazard is so vastly erudite. As Anthony Grafton notes in his introduction to the new NYRB republication, Hazard appears to have read all of his source material in the original languages — Latin, Italian, German, and English, as well as French. He also seems to have exhausted the bibliography, so to speak, perusing the output of an alarming number of writers whose names were unknown to me.

More often, I’m happy to say, Hazard taught me things about writers whose names I did know, but not much beyond. (St-Évremond, for example, whose name was rather wickedly appropriated by Dickens for use in A Tale of Two Cities and whose work appears to be out of print even in France.) And I was able to follow Hazard’s narrative about the shift in worldview, from the static, classicist outlook that prevailed through the early part of Louis XIV’s reign, to the fractured currents of criticism and longing — sense and sensibility — that coursed through the Eighteenth Century. But I got no closer to understanding Spinoza. The Crisis of the European Mind is meant, I think, as an appetizer, as an invitation to read much more deeply. As such, it is intellectual history at its best.

At least I’ll have my notes.

***

What snagged my interest earlier today was a piece by Wyatt Mason in the new New York Review of Books (LXI/2), entitled “Make This Not True.” It purports to be a review of Tenth of December, the story collection by George Saunders that came out about a year ago, but it’s not quite that. (And what would be the point at this late date?) It’s partly a discussion of

two distinct directions fiction might take as it moves into the twenty-first century — two paths that have, in fact, been debated through recent years and that we may see, in Franzen and Saunders, flowering into competing visions, not merely of fiction but of being.

And partly an unlooked-for analysis, if that term is allowed in such a context, of the Buddhist ideas at work in Saunders’s writing. Actually, it is both things at the same time. In Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, personal salvation is shown to be (quite literally) a matter of togetherness, of bodies pressed together for warmth. Meanwhile,

Saunders’s stories suggest that the ambition to connect outwardly isn’t the only path we can choose. Rather his fiction shows us that the path to reconciliation with our condition is inward, a journey we must make alone.

No sooner do I type this out than I see the two currents that I mentioned earlier, springing apart at the end of Paul Hazard’s account of European intellectual (and spiritual) life at the end of the Seventeenth Century. This time, the cliff over which both currents tumble is the passivity and superficiality that communications technology, from broadcast television to the iPhone, has inflicted on so many otherwise intelligent minds. Jonathan Franzen writes copiously, and sometimes cantankerously, about resisting these effects, perhaps by dispensing with the technology; while George Saunders writes, in his fiction, about transcending them. (In several stories, such as Escape from Spiderhead, dead characters literally rise up into the sky over a receding earth, their understanding swelling with the altitude.) I would say that Franzen is an optimist, while Saunders’s outlook is not countervailingly pessimist but rather post-tragic. The awful thing has already occurred; it’s too late for it not to happen. In the bleakest imaginable way, there is nothing to be afraid of.

Call me a cantankerous optimist. I’m especially cantankerous these days because the Super Bowl is coming up, and for the first time in my life I’m seeing the game not as a non-event on my calendar, which it has always been, but as an arguable evil. Whether American football was ever a pardonable sport, it isn’t one anymore. We know too much about the lasting damage that ensues when men make a game of tearing each other apart. Evidence of the mental degradation that is caused by repeated concussions has piled up into an obscene mass. No less unpardonable — because no less degrading — is the dereliction that has allowed the Super Bowl to slide into standing as the pre-eminent cultural spectacle of American life. We celebrate our freedom by lavishing vast sums on luxury-raddled stadiums while not only neglecting to teach our children how to use and enjoy their minds, but showing them how to abuse them.

George Saunders knows how to make the forces that deaden American lives look lurid and ridiculous. He lights from within the mindlessness that reduces humanity to monstrosity. His writing is so powerful that it catches me off guard, and makes me laugh against my will. But it leaves me feeling hopeless. The people who are reading and responding to his stories don’t need them, and the people who do need them don’t read. I’m more heartened by Jonathan Franzen’s complaining. Buddhism seems, in contrast, a regrettable means of internal exile.

It seems wildly unnatural to be out of bed today. I got Kathleen her tea and toast before she went to work, but then I crept back under the blankets. The best way not to get sick is to stay in bed, right? I managed to read a few pages of Ruth Rendell before falling into a doze.

(I’ve just started A Demon in My View. Arthur Johnson is a creepy person. When Anthony Johnson, in the flat downstairs, finds out just how creepy Arthur is, what will befall? I am also soldiering through Bryan Cartledge’s history of Hungary, The Will to Survive. I don’t know when I last read a book printed in such small type. The accent, I can see, is on modern times; the reader arrives at the year 1825 less than a third of the way in. At least I know where to look when I need a refresher on the Principality of Transylvania.)

***

Yesterday, we had a bit of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt festival. We watched Don Jon in the afternoon and 50/50 in the evening. (Kathleen had not seen either.) I’ve been disappointed that Don Jon was shut out of the Oscars, but then, when I wrote about the movie in September, I did warn that “some early audiences may find it dissatisfying.” Watching it with Kathleen heightened my sense that viewers might find it obnoxious or even repellent. It is a genuinely daring movie, all the more for not particularly looking like one.

Don Jon is front-loaded with a lot of rather mindless vulgarity — guys hanging out around a bar, talking trash about the babes they want to squeeze. Then there is the hero’s apologia for his Internet porn habit. This is very well done, but, also, as they say, it is what it is. The second act, which begins sooner than it might but perhaps not soon enough to redeem some unfavorable first impressions, is a very subtle comedy slinking under a very brassy surface — the surface being Scarlett Johansson’s channeling of Barbra Streisand. This comedy is resolved in a manner that is not comic. The third act involves a major mood swing that doubles as a slow-motion climax, if such a thing is possible, at the summation of which the movie quietly ends. You don’t really know what Don Jon is about until the last couple of minutes. On top of that, Mr Gordon-Levitt has written for himself a role that departs from the ones for which he is known in two abrasive ways: Jon Martello is a bit nasty around the edges, and he doesn’t seem to give a damn about anybody else. Don Jon, I have to concede, asks a lot from its audience.

But that it’s worth the trouble I’m even more certain than I was in September. Every review of Don Jon that I remember reading at the time pointed out that the film had borne the working title, Don Jon’s Addiction. The ultimate emendation was wise. Don Jon is not about porn addiction. It looks like it is, and the hero’s “consumption” of porn not only takes up a fair amount of screen time — not too much for me, but almost, and probably too much for most women — but it also brings the second-act comedy to its unfunny climax. But the point of this pastime is not the pursuit of orgasms. All along, Jon is telling us something else about the release that he finds in responding to sex online. He loses himself.

That’s the key, not to his sex life, but to his entire life. Don Jon’s life is fully scripted: it is a matter of moves. The persona that he has built up in his short life is already a carapace, because there is no room for hesitation in his world. Jon is on all the time — with his friends, with his family, at the gym, in the confessional or in his car (we don’t, interestingly, see him at work) — even when he is alone, keeping his apartment spic and span. His only release from this relentless role-playing is online, where he has created a space in which to be private even from himself.

The pace of the film, in its first two acts, emphasizes this. It is fast, and the camera work is sure — bada bing! There’s a lot of sarcastic banter that passes for humor, and the scenes involving confession and the Mass are frankly satirical. We are invited to laugh at this New Jersey world of more respectable, but less affluent, Sopranos, where the men take off their dress shirts before they sit down to eat in their “dago Ts” and proceed to yell at each other. Jon seems very happy in his milieu; he’s just a naughty little boy who likes to whack off a lot, and surely that’s nobody’s business but his own.

Into this life walks Barbara Sugarman — very much at Jon’s invitation. Barbara is a princess, who has to be treated just right at all times. She is also a source of inspiration: she more or less commands Jon to take a night-school course in order to get a college degree. She wows his parents. She’s great. But misgivings arise from an unlikely source: it turns out that Barbara doesn’t think that it’s at all sexy for men to do their own housework. This revelation is all that the discerning viewer needs to know in order to see that Jon and Barbara are not made for one another. When, much more predictably, Barbara erupts in outrage upon discovering that Jon has been watching porn even after they’ve been to bed together, Jon’s crew rallies to his defense: the broad must be crazy to take offense. Jon’s life goes back to normal, to his mother’s dismay. Or so it seems.

In fact, Jon has entered another world, thanks to Barbara’s pressing. This world looks very different, and the camera shoots it differently, too; it is not always clear (as it has been, earlier in Don Jon) just what the focus of a wide shot might be. There are no bright lights; everything is in shadow. This is a world without moves. It is centered on a college campus, where the basic idea is to learn things you don’t know, and it is embodied in a woman called Esther, played by Julianne Moore.

We first encounter Esther in a doorway, sobbing, as Jon, nonplussed, passes by. Next, we see her apologizing for the sobbing. As her apology goes on, we see that she is offending against one of the cardinal rules of Jon’s world by sharing too much information. Jon is astounded when he learns the extent of this information: Esther reveals that she noticed Jon watching porn on his phone. He is almost unhinged when Esther presents him with a DVD of “better porn than what you’ve been watching.” But he is also confused by something entirely unprecedented: Esther, a woman, wants to be his friend. This is wrong, in Jon’s world. But he doesn’t really dislike it.

It turns out that Esther has a good reason for acting a bit strange. She has suffered some terrible losses. But she also breathes a richer air than what’s provided by the ventilation system in Jon’s microcosm. Esther knows what love is.

And you realize with a slap that love does not exist in Jon’s daylight world. Are his parents in love? It’s hard to tell. But they’re the only ones about whom one might entertain the question. Jon’s friends don’t know about love, the girls he beds don’t know about love, Barbara Sugarman most certainly does not know about love, and, as for the priest in the confessional —

We’re so inured to hearing that love is a commitment that we overlook its liberating side. Love certainly requires that it be honored and not betrayed, but that is not a lot to ask — it is nothing, really — because love, as it grows, expands the possibilities of being. Barbara Sugarman is right to ask Jon why he watches porn when he has her. She is right to doubt that he really loves her. But she can’t teach him about love, because she doesn’t know anything about it herself. Esther, who has lost love to an accident, is not sure that she can ever love again, but she is happy to teach Jon what it might be like, and, at the end of Don Jon, he is happy to learn. He is almost the Joseph Gordon-Levitt we recognize.

***

It’s interesting, in retrospect, that Adam Lerner, Mr Gordon-Levitt’s character in 50/50, doesn’t drive, because cars are so unsafe. Adam is not entirely logical about this, because he depends on friends and family for rides to and from his house on the outskirts of Seattle; he doesn’t always take the bus. One senses that, had the actor taken part in the screenwriting, the inability to drive a car would have been given some more satisfactory explanation.

50/50 is about a young man who develops a rare sarcoma along his spine; the movie title announces his chances of survival. By and large, however, this is an upbeat romantic comedy, albeit one with occasional gloomy moments, usually showing Adam’s shaved head on a pillow, his eyes glistening in the twilight. Adam has a problem with love, but, unlike Don Jon, this problem is not rooted in ignorance. No, Adam is very familiar with love: his mother’s. His mother suffocates him with loving concern. So he goes out with narcissistic “hot” girls who let him down. We can hope that Adam’s ordeal teaches him to accept his mother’s way of loving him, but in fact we don’t see him with her after he is wheeled into surgery at the climax. We only see how relieved his mother is when she learns that the operation has been a success.

Diane — Adam’s mom (played beautifully by Anjelica Huston) — is not lacking in self-awareness; she even says, at one point, “I suffocate him because I love him.” There. She can’t help herself. We see enough of her to know that the love is real, that it is not a cloak for discontented scolding. She doesn’t want anything but what a normal mother wants: her child’s health, and, eventually, upon finding the right partner, marriage. But she has no idea, I think, that she herself is making it impossible for Adam to find the right girl on his own, because she is forever teaching him that love leads to suffocation, to unlimited expressions of worry.

(Adam finds the right girl because his cancer throws him right into her lap, and he gets to know her in an unromantic context. Ideally, that is how lovers would always meet, whilst doing something other than looking for love.)

Me, I’m like Diane by nature. Only with effort — and not very pleasant effort, either — can I eat my worries about my daughter. There is no reason to worry about her, except that what happens to Esther’s husband and son in Don Jon might happen to her. Cars are unsafe! That is the level of my worry. People get pushed in front of trains. They fall through lose gratings. Stuff happens. I like to know that such things aren’t happening to my daughter. But I have to keep that worry to myself. I have to remind myself: Dude, you’ve seen too many movies.

I’ve seen so many movies that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s flouting of cinematic convention, in the interest of showing us something of the greatest importance about life, makes Don Jon a fountain of joy.

Nebraska is a light comedy that ends with all the satisfactions of a well-told fairy tale. Alexander Payne rarely allows his film to stray far from a laugh line. The funny bits would not be out of place in a good reel of Laurel and Hardy. It’s important to stress this at the outset. Watching Nebraska is fun. It is, arguably, a bit slow; several people walked out of the screening that I attended yesterday. Nebraska is probably more fun for viewers like me than it is for people who have never taken a film course. But I was certainly not the only person laughing.

Strangely, however, this fun is consumed by the viewing. As soon as I walked out of the theatre, it was difficult to recall anything about Nebraska that wouldn’t sound depressing in the telling. Within the hour, I was seized by a virtual panic, imagining what it would be like to spend as much as an hour in the fictional town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, where most of the action takes place (a town called Plainview served as the location, according to IMDb). Shot in black and white, Nebraska unrolls a massive collection of stark images that recall the work of the great American photographers of the early-to-mid Twentieth Century, such as Walker Evans and Edward Weston. Visually, Nebraska is bracingly austere. There is nothing remotely amusing about the look of the film, which is, rather, intensely haunting.

What makes Nebraska special is, of course, Alexander Payne’s secret powder, the ingredients of which become a little less secret with each new release. Payne has a way of looking at American life that, while frowning, falls far short of scolding. It occurred to me after Nebraska that Payne is not so much a social critic as he is a collector of bad habits, some of them worse than others but most only faintly vicious. The worst, or at any rate the most pervasive, of bad habits on display in Nebraska is the discounting of beauty in everyday life. Any kind of beauty that you can think of — from handsome architecture and well-tended appearance to interesting conversation and disciplined imagination; call it “poetry” if that suits you better — is absent from the lives of these people. Decoration is meretricious, and entertainment banale.  These are settlers who have settled down but stopped there, with the erection of structures that are only more durable than the ones they have replaced. There is no evidence that anyone is aware of the surrounding natural beauty; Payne has a way of shooting it, of putting it on film, that somehow underscores his characters’ non-recognition. Without beauty, these folks lead very small lives.

The trick is that we don’t see this while the film is running. We’re caught up in the slow-motion adventure of David Grant, a decent, if not very focused man with a modest living in Billings, Montana.  David’s father, Woody, believes that he has won a million dollars from one of those magazine subscription outfits, and that all he has to do is get himself to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect his prize. The problem is, Woody is not allowed to drive anymore. He drinks too much. He has been drinking too much since he got back from Korea, a long time ago. Just how well his brain works remains something of a mystery, but I think it fair to say that he seizes on the clearance-house letter, which his wife and sons insist means nothing, as a vital antidepressant. His motivation is quite literally Quixotic.

If no one will drive him to Lincoln, then Woody will walk. But he’s not well-prepared to do that, either, and he never makes it out of town. Kindly cops detain him, and bring him home. At just about the right moment in the film’s running time, Woody wears down David’s resistance. While Kate Grant, Woody’s wife and David’s mother, hurls imprecations from the driveway, father and son strap themselves into David’s car, and take off in a south-easterly direction.

Owing to minor misadventures, they land in Hawthorne, the town where Woody and Kate grew up. It is sort of on the way to Lincoln, but Payne keeps us guessing whether that city will ever be reached. Stalled in Hawthorne, David learns a lot about his parents, mostly in comic episodes. And when the townspeople hear about Woody’s million dollars, they get pretty funny, too. But when the movie is over, all you remember is their venality, and David’s brooding resignation.

Bruce Dern, playing Woody, is the big star of this film, and he does a wonderful job at keeping Woody’s inscrutable cussedness from becoming repulsive to the audience. Woody’s eruptions of lucidity ought to be exasperating, but they’re too funny, too well shaped and aimed. But as far as I’m concerned the picture belongs to Will Forte, who plays David. His good looks incline to the delicate and boyish, and in black and white his eyes are large, soft, and dark. there is a crinkle to the left side of his mouth that approaches but stops well short of a sneer. His voice is somewhat querulous. George Clooney has nothing to worry about (although he seems much more than nine years older). Mr Forte is perfect in the part, a quiet giant of modest decency. His David is a boy who becomes a man before our eyes, reluctantly but resolutely. He shows us David beginning to see his parents as fully three-dimensional human beings for the first time in his life. The adventure is truly his; Woody may be Quixote, but David is no sidekick. Years from now, it may be wondered why Mr Dern got the Best Actor nomination, and not Mr Forte. That’s what sometimes happens when an actor’s first serious performance is a great one.

June Squibb plays Kate Grant with a wickedly unhurried exuberance. She is the film’s social critic, and her relentless exposure of the hypocrisy of others has the effect of telling us things about Woody that he cannot. We learn that Woody is good-hearted and trusting — the most irritating thing, to Kate, about his belief in the million-dollar letter is that it is so tiresomely characteristic. Tim Driscoll and Devin Rattray make such a well-matched pair of toothy, knuckleheaded cousins that it’s hard to believe that they’re not brothers in real life, or even related. Mary Louise Wilson, as their mother, busies herself with keeping her heartland shine from being tarnished by too much reality. Stacy Keach gives us, effortlessly, it seems, a small-town bully whose opening gambit is the unctuous word delivered with a dreadful smile.

So sweetly appealing is Angela McEwan’s Peg Nagy — an old flame of Woody’s and now the town’s newspaper publisher — that she really must have her own paragraph.

The actors playing Woody’s many brothers are too numerous to mention, but they compose the most awful scene in the movie: a roomful of men, still and silent as corpses, staring at a football game. The shot captures them head-on, with the game offscreen. If they knew what they looked like — but how could they? They see only what is supposed to be there. That’s another bad habit, if one not unrelated to the discounting of beauty.

It was my plan to stay at home yesterday, and not to go out, but in the afternoon, Kathleen called to say that she’d be working late, and grabbing a bite at the office — and would I mind picking up a prescription at Duane Reade? At first, I rather did mind, just a little, because I should have to change into outdoor clothes. But I rallied quickly. I would pick up the prescription, mail a few letters from the post office, and then treat myself to a fried chicken dinner at Jackson Hole. Amazingly, Jackson Hole had survived the onslaught of Second Avenue upheaval associated with the construction of the new subway station, even though it was only a few doors away from the south entrance, currently a covered-over hole in the ground about seven storeys deep.

Had survived. When I reached the restaurant, it was dark, and its windows were papered over. Yet another casualty.

I turned around and walked back up Second. A new restaurant has opened in the space formerly occupied by Elaine’s. Well, according to Time Out, it opened in August, but I didn’t notice, even though I pass the place every time I go to the local hardware store. (This is why walking has ceased to be very interesting. When I’m in motion, my neck locks my view onto the pavement. To see what’s going on around me, I have to stop and turn. People often ask me if I suffer back pain, and I’m happy to say that I don’t. But the price is not inconsiderable: in my spine, there are no moving parts.) When I did notice the new restaurant, a few weeks ago — wouldn’t you know, Ray Soleil and I had just been to the hardware store, and it was Ray who noticed — it didn’t seem to be open, although I could see people through the windows. It turns out not to be open for lunch. It’s called The Writing Room.

Once again, I looked through the windows. Even at six-thirty, the place seemed to be packed. And there was a loud bar buzz, as if everybody knew or was getting to know everybody else. Maybe the old Elaine’s crowd had magically reconstituted itself. I never set foot in Elaine’s, and the same may go for the new place. If it’s open only in the evening, it’s probably not my kind of place, no matter how enticing the menu (buttermilk fried chicken). It’s very possibly a virtual club, open to the public but patronized by regulars who, again virtually, own the place. I don’t want to talk to strangers when I go out for dinner. I want to eavesdrop.

So I walked back a few steps to Café d’Alsace, which had been my fallback from the moment I’d shed a final tear for Jackson Hole. I sat in the back, because the restaurant was very dim and I wanted to read; in the back, there was just enough light. In a nearby corner, a man and a woman sat side by side. I didn’t get a look at them when I sat down (see above), but I was harpooned by the woman’s voice. She did not speak especially loudly, and I couldn’t make out much of what she said, but she modulated her voice so expressively that I felt that she was giving a performance. For a long time, the man seemed only to mumble unintelligibly. The woman, from what little I comprehended, appeared to be worldly-wise, even a tad cynical. What was her relation to the man? It was clearly not a romantic one; nor, however, did she seem to be talking to a business associate. And why did I take a dislike to her tone? Where there might have been friendliness, there was something else.

I ought to have had the steak tartare, but I asked for a burger instead, something that do only rarely, because they’re always — burgers at good restaurants — such big, juicy messes. There could be no thought of reading through dinner after all. Once I closed my book, I could give my entire attention to listening in, as if to an eccentric radio show. I certainly couldn’t see any better. I could not take a quick glance at the man and the woman; to see them, I should have to turn my entire upper body in my seat. Hardly unobtrusive! Had I been more curious than I was, I’d have staged a visit to the loo. But it was more fun, really, to work with my ears.

I was almost startled to hear the woman ask, “And what do your in-laws think about it?” Aha! She was his mother! Suddenly her trilling laugh, the Amanda Wingfield shade of which I had found annoying, made sense. I could hear his voice better now — it was nothing like his mother’s, but then he wasn’t being a mother, and she very definitely was. She was offering her wisdom while trying to respect his space. At one point, she said that something or other was “all tax-deductible,” with the assurance of an accountant that a friend might have found belittling. Her questions weren’t needling or pointed, but they seemed feinted, as if she were more concerned with how her queries were received than with the actual answers. I waited for something to be said that would disprove my hunch, but nothing was. No note of discord was struck. When the man and the woman got up to leave the restaurant, they passed in front of me, and he was, roughly, a bigger version of her, and definitely a generation younger.

There were so many unanswered questions! Did mother and son often have dinner alone together, or was this a special occasion? (I inferred that relations with the daughter-in-law were not unnaturally cordial.) Did either of them live nearby? (Something was said about books being on sale wherever they were going, so it may have been to a reading, although they were still at table at seven o’clock, which is when most Barnes & Noble events begin.) Did one of them live far away, in another part of the country? (They did not seem to be East Coast natives, although I can’t tell you quite why I say that — more manner than accent.) What did the mother do, aside from mothering? And the son, what did he do? Most of all, what was the woman like when she wasn’t alone with her son?

Was I right about any of this? It couldn’t matter less! One of the greatest pleasures of city life is letting other people’s lives take shape from dribs and drabs of evidence, and the best evidence is talk. Talk can be as entertaining as a play. To be honest, it usually isn’t, largely because people so infrequently pay attention to what the people around them are saying. Woody Allen has devoted his cinematic oeuvre to the demonstration of this cruel truth.

It’s unlikely that I should have overheard such a conversation at Jackson Hole. Decked out to resemble a Fifties diner (compleat with vintage gas pump), Jackson Hole was too loud, even without customers. The staffers were always yelling at one another in Spanish. It was not the sort of place where a mother and son would have had dinner alone together.

It was, it was not… It is not. It is no more. I don’t know about the other branches of Jackson Hole (there are quite a few, including one that’s visible from the Grand Central Parkway on the Queens end of the Triborough Bridge), but I expect that it’s just the one near us that closed, and that it closed for the same reason that so many other restaurants have closed. It occurred to me, as I walked up Second Avenue toward The Writing Room/Café d’Alsace, that the subway planners had made one terrible mistake: they had privileged automobile through traffic at the expense of every other kind of street life. Second Avenue ought to have been limited to local traffic from 97th Street to 63rd, with only the buses allowed to slip through. This would have put a stop to my favorite bugbear, the truck traffic that’s all about getting to Long Island without paying bridge tolls. Had Second Avenue traffic been limited, the sidewalks could have been left intact, instead of being shaved to strips barely wide enough for two people to pass. How ironic it is that a major mass-transit project should have had such a deadly impact on local businesses in the interest of preserving automotive normalcy. Future generations will laugh us to scorn.

At Crawford Doyle the other day, I saw lots of inviting nonfiction titles, and yet at the same time there were no must-haves. I picked up Hugh Wilford’s America’s Great Game, a history of CIA Arabism during and shortly after World War II, and felt pretty sure that this was something that I ought to read, but I groaned a little at the homework aspect. Like 1971, the book about Bangladesh that I read last week, America’s Great Game is about Western influence upon and interference in the development of national sovereignties that succeeded collapsed empires — developments that are roiling the world today, at the cost of massive suffering — and, after I’ve read it, I’ll have another look at James Barr’s A Line in the Sand, which I want to do anyway to refresh my grasp of the history of Syria. I’ve already jumped into Wilford’s book, and I’m happy with his writing, even if I didn’t really need to hear another word about Endicott Peabody and the Groton School (the Haileybury of the CIA).

While I was overcoming my reluctance to acquire yet another tome — not that America’s Great Game is unduly lengthy or at all crabbed; I can already tell that it’s going to be a gallery of clever fellows larking about — I was lingering over the nonfiction counter at the rear of the shop when a staffer placed a book in an empty spot. I looked down at it: The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, by Steven Grosz. In between the title and the author’s name there appeared a blurb by Andrew Solomon: “Impossible to put down.” Indeed it was — by now I held it in my hands. I read the inside jacket copy.

This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening, and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to analyst as to the patient.

Had this been written on purpose to seduce me, it could not have been more effective. “Attentiveness,” “delicate self-portrait.” Flipping through the pages, I could see that The Examined Life would be easy, agreeable reading. But my curiosity was triggered by an alarm. How could a selection of anecdotes from psychoanalytic practice be anything but dubious? Psychoanalysis is a long, hard, slog, and it is bounded, for the analyst at least, by a kind of theoretical mechanics that at certain points is almost inexplicably complicated. (Just read Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives if you doubt me.) I have wasted untold hours trying to understand the finer points of transference, only to be repelled by the relationship’s inherent unseemliness. (I wouldn’t make a good thoracic surgeon, either.) How could such matter be shaped by a light hand and retain any substance?

I read most of The Examined Life yesterday, finishing it in the early evening. I had to put it down several times, and this was always difficult. I would finish one chapter and charge right into the next. No two patients had the same problem, and the analyst’s perplexity varied greatly. Some patients needed to be nudged into accepting the obvious. Others presented nothing obvious at all. There were men, woman, and children, old and young, gay and straight, neurotic and worse than neurotic. Some patients found relief, others not. On several occasion, the analyst was riven by self-doubt. Grosz makes it very clear that his expertise, such as it is, does not make him superhuman; patients might invest him with super powers, but he takes pains to ensure that the reader does not. The reader, after all, is not a patient.

I flagged only one passage.

Psychoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we’re going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.

This sleek nuggest of wisdom — excuse my Wow! — concludes the story of a young woman who came to see Grosz after the sudden death of her father in an accident. She had been very close to him, emailing and talking on the phone often. She was disturbed to find that she wasn’t upset.

Then it emerged that her relationship with her boyfriend was at a standstill — and that this didn’t upset her, either. Instead of facing up to the man’s disinclination to marry and have children, the patient was entertaining fantasies of her father showing up at her wedding. Grosz realized that the young woman was stuck by her refusal to mourn the future — the future that she so lovingly imagined, and that now had been called into sharp question by her father’s sudden death. I think that this is what economists call the sunk-costs problem, but I didn’t make that clever connection until just this minute; reading Grosz’s account of his patient’s plight, I was almost as overwhelmed by her emotional investment as she was.

Grosz doesn’t tell us how things worked out for this girl. That is not the point. The point is that his insight might be useful to people who don’t need treatment. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present. Be careful what you wish for!

***

I used to say, of a late family member, that she was a fetishist. She was wholly unwilling to accept the “good enough.” There was no “good enough.” Something either was or wasn’t satisfactory, and to be satisfactory it had to meet her detailed expectations. She invested her happiness in things and rituals; she could not be happy without them. She did not define happiness in terms of her own feelings; she would never have asked, “Do I feel happy?” She defined happiness in a set of circumstances, so that the question was, instead, “Can I be happy here?” If the circumstances were deficient in some way, then, no, she could not be happy. It also struck me that being happy was not terribly important to her. She would much rather be unhappy than gulled.

So you can imagine your future, as many otherwise intelligent people do, as a sequence of status upgrades. As they progress through the ongoing present, people adjust this imaginary sequence to suit “reality” — they recognize that they will never occupy the White House — but this abandonment of “unrealistic expectations” can leave an abrasive residue of disappointment.

It is better to imagine a future in which you have a meaningful relationship with a special person, and in which you manage to support yourself by doing something that you like doing. These are not sequential dreams. It’s not a matter of going to law school, becoming an associate, and making partner at a big law firm, in that order. It’s much more complex, and it is totally immediate. To have a meaningful relationship with a special person requires you to become a special person yourself, right now; someone who listens, someone who anticipates correctly, someone prepared for unconditional sacrifices. You don’t have to be good at these things to embark on a meaningful relationship, but you must intend to get better at them. And you have to be clear-headed enough to have an open mind about what your special person might look like, because while this is important it is only one of several important things, among which are the ability to listen, to anticipate correctly, and to prepare for unconditional sacrifices. Not to mention quirks and foibles that you, and possibly you alone, find irresistible.

So it is with “work.” However important whatever it is that you make or produce might be to other people, it cannot be as important to you as the making or the producing. Other people get the end result; you keep the process. Ideally, this process not only suits you and brings in whatever income you require, but can also, on the off-chance that it makes you very rich, be adapted to an end that, while not so lucrative, is socially beneficial. Your dream of making tons of money ought to dovetail you into volunteering.

Our society does not make any of this easy, so that’s something else that we’ve got to tackle if we’re to be happy: we have to make the world a better place. Opportunities for doing so abound in everyday life, and they rarely involve real sacrifice. The Golden Rule still obtains, but there is a lot to be learned about it. How, precisely, do you want to be treated? What makes you happy? Take your time answering that question.

Over the years, I’ve read a great deal of Ruth Rendell. But I don’t much write about it. There isn’t a lot to say about escaping into the lives of rather creepy people who manipulate their way, sometimes successfully, more often meeting with catastrophic failure, through the stunted worlds in which they imagine themselves to be living. Rendell’s writing, while always alert, is often desultory, perhaps because of the attempt to open up those stunted imaginations. I find that the creepy people don’t haunt me; most of them are forgotten soon after I’ve read about them, dissolved in the stew of Rendell’s creepiness. Rendell writes about depravity, and depravity, I’m happy to report, does not figure in my everyday experience. I know that it’s out there. But I do my best to avoid it. I don’t always agree with Rendell’s views — liberally dispensed in some of her books — but I heed the message that I hear loud and clear: Stay away from creepy people. Maybe that’s why I keep reading Rendell: to maintain my immunity.

Ever since I got my first e-reader, I’ve been reading Rendell in that format, and not cluttering up the house with books that I probably won’t re-read. Amazon makes sure that I’m notified when a new title appears, and at the end of every book there are suggestions of others. Usually, I’ve already read them, but not always. Rendell is amazingly prolific. Have I read half of her output? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I haven’t.

The other day, I was roused from my state of tending to regard Ruth Rendell as a household commodity by Donna Leon. In a startling passage near the end of her collection of essays, My Venice, Leon sings the praises of Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone — a book that I hadn’t read. In “On Books,” Leon talks about the preliminary decisions that must be made before a crime novel can be started. One of the necessary ingredients, she blandly reminds us, is mystery. “And there should be a mystery,” she writes. Then she immediately discusses a book that ostensibly flaunts its lack of one.

Ruth Rendell’s early masterpiece, A Judgment in Stone, begins, “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” Apparently, then, there is no mystery because we know from the very beginning who done it and why they done it. But the book, as it unfolds, causes in the reader the same gap-mouthed horror as does Oedipus Rex, as he sees nemesis winging ever closer to its victims, sees them ask the questions and make the discoveries that will lead to their destruction, while the reader is forced to remain silent on the other side of the page, unable to save these good and generous people from the evil that has entered their lives. But she’s another genius, and we still are not, so the writer needs a mystery.

Leon is wrong, of course, about the lack of mystery in A Judgment in Stone, and I’m sure that she is aware of this. Rendell’s opening statement is hardly a conventional assertion of cause and effect; illiteracy does not breed murderers. There must be something more, and there is more, a lot more; with a wealth of sharp-eyed detail and sharp-tongued character assessment, the novel fills in the gulf that the first sentence opens. It is harrowing, but not so very remarkable from a technical point of view. Crime novels frequently conclude with detectives re-enacting the events leading up to a crime. In A Judgment in Stone, the re-enactment is replaced by an enactment that takes up almost all of the book.

But what Leon says about the effect of reading A Judgment in Stone is almost sublime; the comparison to Oedipus Rex is not impertinent. Rendell’s writing here is as polished as ever, and the suspense is unflagging. As Alfred Hitchcock repeatedly demonstrated, waiting for something that you know is going to happen can be as agonizing as waiting for something uncertain — something merely “dangerous.” Rendell works through her material with virtuosic dexterity, her text a sequence of exquisite juxtapositions. But I am not going to blather on about the virtues of A Judgment in Stone. What Leon had to say made me want to read it, and I hope that it will make you want to read it, too, if you haven’t already.

***

As usual, however, I didn’t see things quite as Rendell does — or Leon. Leon calls the Coverdales “good and generous people.” But this is easy virtue. The Coverdales are gentry; they’re expected to be good and generous. It’s as much a part of their station in life as shooting and going to university. They are certainly not bad people. But they’re not innocent, either. And while they don’t deserve to die, they do bring their problem upon themselves.

The Coverdales’ situation, at the beginning of the story, is one that becomes very familiar in the second half of Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants, to wit: servants, lack thereof. Jacqueline Coverdale has been unable to find a servant who will keep her house, Lowfield Hall, really clean. Although she cooks and gardens, Jacqueline is not about to take up dusting and polishing. So someone must be found, and, into this need, Eunice Parchman insinuates herself by fraud.

Eunice is not a servant, and never has been one; she fakes her references. What Eunice is is a diligent worker, a natural cleaner and polisher. So Jacqueline Coverdale is delighted to have her in the house, even though no one else is. (Jacqueline’s husband, George, indulges his wife, against his better judgment. Anything to make her happy! The two children who also die, the previously widowed George’s daughter, a university student, and Giles, Jacqueline’s son by a prior marriage, are similarly discomfited.) But Jacqueline mistakes Eunice for a servant. The dissonance between the two outlooks comes into screeching view as the Coverdales, imagining that they are treating Eunice better than a servant, in fact offend her as a worker. Eunice sees herself an employee, as someone who wants to do a job and then be left alone. The old problem of live-in service rears its head: how is it possible for homeowners to grant complete privacy to strangers employed to do menial jobs and who live in their attics? Once upon a time, the Coverdales would have had no trouble staffing Lowfield Hall. Now, though — the book came out in 1977 — they’re thrown back on a woman with serious personality disorders.

For there’s more to Eunice than the inability to read or write. These incompetences mask and symbolize Eunice’s deeper disengagement from normal social life. She is not a sociopath, quite, but her vigilant self-defensiveness and her preference for unobtrusive shadows betray a very damaged character. As does the fact, revealed not far into the story, that she murdered her invalid father by suffocating him with a pillow. She is also a natural blackmailer. Other people, in Eunice’s world, are there to be used.

That is not the outlook of a good servant, or even a bad one. It is the outlook of a creepy person.