The first thing to say about Mark Edmundson’s new book, Why Teach? is Hear, hear! Well done! Couldn’t agree more. With just about everything, but especially the important things.

Because the second thing to say is that the book makes me glad that I didn’t have Edmundson for a teacher, because my resistance to his style, in those tender undergraduate years, would have induced me to disagree with his principles, into agreement with which I’ve grown steadily over the years. Also, I’m yet again confirmed in my view that I should have been wretched in academia. I expect that, even if I had been capable of mustering the discipline to attain a position on any respectable faculty, I’d have set out to be the sort of teacher whom Edmundson halfway wishes he were — and not the successful star prof that he has become. I’d have been intimidating — well, I’m that before I even open my mouth; but, when I do open my mouth, I do little (apparently) to counter the first impression. I should have been impatient. I’d have been enthusiastic — I’d have incited arguments among the students. All no-nos, according to the sage advice set forth in Edmundson’s brilliant satire, “A Word to the New Humanities Professor.”

Like irony, metaphor can make matters confusing and cause people to feel uncomfortable. Metaphor and irony can make students feel stupid and, at a good college, where students have high SAT scores, no one can accurately be described as stupid. Metaphor, like irony, can contribute to self-esteem problems. But once one has realized that the purpose of writing is to convey information and not to unfold or to discover the life of the inner self, or to create original visions of the world (we now know that there is no such thing as originality), then problems associated with metaphor and other mannered forms of writing tend to disappear.

This is my favorite piece in the assortment of essays that fill out Why Teach?, possibly because Edmundson is writing in an assumed voice, for satirical purposes, and not being his gregarious, manly self. How much that self is just another persona, I have no idea, but it clicks with the autobiographical material strewn throughout. Edmundson grew up in a near-nightmare world, working-class Medford, Massachusetts, where high school was a training ground for life on a factory floor. Edmundson himself was an unexceptional member of his class, not interested in academics and a middling football player, bound for a soul-sucking job just like the ones his father and his uncles had. Then his life was touched by a rather elfin-sounding Harvard grad who came to teach at the school — for one year, before heading off to law school, marriage, and the Maine woods. Doug Meyers, the hero (and eponym) of “My First Intellectual,” opened a view of the world to his students, and Ednundson, at least, climbed through it.

My second-favorite piece in Why Teach? is “Do Sports Build Character?” It was something of a thrill to read. The question is a vexed one for me, or at any rate it was until Edmundson deconstructed it. The first half of his essay concludes that, yes, they do. “Who could doubt it?” My breathing was shallow and my head hung low. Edmundson’s paean to perseverance made me ashamed of my lifelong disinclination to pursue the awkward and the tedious. But the second half of the piece describes the cost of this character building, and, when it was over, I was feeling more robust. Edmundson talks about the wrath of Achilles, how the hero’s pursuit of thymos makes a madman of him, capable of anything — anything but reflection. And he goes further.

When the season ended, I found myself recreating the feeling of football in a string of fistfights and mass brawls. I didn’t become a thug — far from it. But I did let the part of me that sought power and standing — over others — go way too far. Having been down that road, the chances of myt taking it again are greater, I suspect, than they are for other men. Once that path has been cut, it stays open. I once shocked a colleague, and myself, by admitting that if someone ran a light and smashed up my car (which I loved more than I should), the chances of my popping him in the jaw were probably much greater than the chances of the average professional guy doing so. Once the punch in the mouth is part of your repertoire — once you’ve done it a few times as an adult — it never goes away. (90-91)

I shivered when I read this. It was so much more candid than anything I had expected to read, something that I had never heard but always suspected to be the case. Edmundson is a very sensitive man and a passionate reader. But he has popped a few guys in the mouth. I say “but,” because that sets him apart from me. He has been bloodied by thymos. I could just as well say “and,” meaning that Edmundson is just the fellow to show the roughnecks of the world, who are, after all, far more common than people like me, the beauty of humane letters. Not to mention that he’s clearly the kind of guy who can inspire pretty girls to believe that a man who memorizes Emily Dickinson is not necessarily a dork.

***

I believe I mentioned The Poseidon Adventure yesterday, so I apologize for invoking the image of a sinking ship two days in a row, but that is precisely the specter that hangs over Why Teach? The possibility of liberal education is sinking, its hull breached by the cool culture of television, a torpedo fired by the corporate-consumerist pseudoculture that shows little sign of being on its last legs but at the same time an ever-dwindling means of support. (That would be jobs.) I don’t want to paraphrase what Edmundson has to say about all of this; I want you to read his book. If you’re too cheap to buy it, you can just scroll back through the years on this site, keyword “television.” We don’t say precisely the same things — our styles are very different — and I’m grateful that Edmundson repeatedly faults television for conveying a spurious “knowingness” to viewers, especially young ones who are defenseless against television’s pretense of presenting complete accounts of things. Knowingness — that’s an important critical tool. But behind what I say and what Edmundson says there’s what Neil Postman said, in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), in the course of analyzing a “discussion” program that featured such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and Elie Wiesel.

When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impossible to say, “Let me think about that” or “I don’t know” or “What do you mean when you say…?” or “From what sources does your information come?” This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of sophisticated verbal skills and political understanding being brought to heel by a medium that requires them to fashion performances rather than ideas. … At the end, one could only applaud those performances, which is what a good television program always aims to achieve; that is to say, applause, not reflection.

Ever since I read this passage, I have assumed that the genuinely intellectual potential of television is zero. By all means, entertain me, if you can, but don’t try to teach me anything! And this is precisely the attitude that Edmundson finds prevalent among his highly gifted students.

In fact, thoughtful discussion requires participation; for mere audiences, it is no better than a spectator sport. If your mind is not on the line for intelligent observation and provident caution, then it is not really processing the conversation. It’s really that simple. Just as you are not in danger of being popped in the mouth if you are sitting outside the ring, so you are not in danger of having an idea of your own if you are watching a panel discussion. This isn’t to say that you can’t learn a lot of useful information that way, particularly if you’re good at taking notes. But the information won’t really be yours until you act on it, later on and somewhere else. We have a term for actual thoughts that occur to people who are watching other people talk without being able to talk themselves: mind wandering.

The distance between Mark Edmundson’s satirical note to the incoming professor and Neil Postman’s post mortem is, linguistically and stylistically, very small. Postman was clearly outraged; Edmundson has packaged his outrage. I should be ashamed of myself for preferring the piece to all the others, because it’s the one in which Edmundson most straightforwardly performs.

It’s that dreadful anniversary again. I am always reminded of the scene in The Poseidon Adventure where the ship’s bursar argues with the show’s hero about which way to lead their respective flocks. The bursar insists on heading for the bow of the capsized vessel, basically for no better reason than that he is the bursar. It is obvious to the hero, and almost as clear to the audience, that by doing so, the bursar guarantees that his party will soon be dead. Bad advice, together with the failure to take good advice, was an integral feature of the 9/11 catastrophe, but I’m reminded of the movie because of what came after.

A catastrophe ought to be a learning experience, but unfortunately it tends to reinforce pre-existing ideas. Once the emotion has subsided, lessons ought to be learned, but instead of that, the determination is made to restore the status quo ante. As if putting everything back as it was might constitute a victory. As if it were courageous to refuse to learn from mistakes. Or to deny that mistakes had ever been made. Or to make changes where few or none were needed.

There is a heedlessness in Anglophone culture. Perhaps there is a heedlessness in every culture. But we have become powerful enough to array everything that interests us before us, and to sweep everything else out of sight. We are no longer obliged to confront what doesn’t suit us. We can wait for it to confront us. We have genuinely tragic possibilities.

The fact that ten percent of Americans earned more than fifty percent of the nation’s income must mean that we’re on the right track, right?

***

The sad anniversary that I would commemorate is that of the publication of Susan Sontag’s stirring remarks in The New Yorker (September 24, 2011), from which I excerpt the final paragraph.

Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management.  Politics, the politics of a democracy–which entails disagreement, which promotes candor–has been replaced by psychotherapy.  Let’s by all means grieve together.  But let’s not be stupid together.  A few shreds of historical awareness might help us to understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.  “Our country is strong”, we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling.  Who doubts that America is strong?  But that’s not all America has to be.

Somewhere in his book Shifting Involvements, I think it is, Albert Hirschman mentions the deterioration in service that may follow the political expansion of a beneficial program — and the ensuing general disappointment. If you take a system designed for small elites and stretch it to universal scale, as was done in many fields after World War II — medicine in Britain, education in the United States — you will quickly develop a deficit of professionals capable of delivering the service at anything like the original level of quality. (This is just one thing that can go wrong with a massive program.) Looking back, I don’t think that I ever experienced either the deficit or the disappointment, and that may well be because I grew up in what would have to be called privileged circumstances. Another explanation comes to mind, however, now that I’ve been prodded by a passage in David Priestland’s Merchant, Warrior, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes.

It’s not a key passage; it’s certainly not a sharp one. It’s actually a rather damp gob of abstract generalizations. But here it is:

The 1960’s and ’70s activists targeted all hierarchies — whether technocratic, corporate, ethnic, sexual, military, or aristocratic — but the university became a particularly fraught battleground. The vast expansions in higher education after the war brought an explosive clash between student expectations and the reality of university life: self-confident students demanding individual attention and intellectual fulfillment were herded into overcrowded classes taught by aloof academics. One American student remembered: “We really did speak of Berkeley as a factory. Classes were immense, and you didn’t feel that you could get near professors, because they were this presence way up in the front of the lectern.”

Berkeley, I thought. That was supposed to be a good school. You’d think that a good school, any good school, would aim for a small teacher-student ratio, simply because nothing else has been shown to be nearly as effective a way of ensuring that students learn. But, no. The big universities were larded with lecture courses, often conducted by star lecturers who shared the knack of a good entertainer for holding the audience’s attention. I took one such course, the art history survey that all freshmen in the humanities were obliged to take at Notre Dame, and I remember the lecturer, Robert Leader, very well. The course did me no harm, beyond reinforcing the already widespread misconception that images constitute reality. (That, in other words, looking at a slide of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral is tantamount to looking at the original painting.) It may well be that certain kinds of knowledge are best imparted in such general, roughly comprehensive survey courses. Beyond making very broad introductions, however, lectures are probably useless.

I did take another lecture course, later, as an elective. Seventeenth-Century Europe. The professor lectured. The students wrote papers. The professor liked my papers, but I stopped writing them when we got to the English Civil War, which I already knew a lot about and in which his lectures did nothing to rekindle an interest. I stopped going to class, and failed the course for the usual reason: I didn’t take the final exam. That was my brand of student activism.

My core courses, the classes that I had to take for my major, which was in Great Books, were quite different, and I never failed any of them, doing poorly only in History of Science, because it was so much more difficult than anything I had encountered before. Our Great Books classes were small, and they were entirely devoted to discussing what we read. There was very little room for bullshit, and our teachers were especially good at catching us out when we tried to substitute it for actual knowledge or clear thinking. I don’t recall that there was anything extraordinary about the Great Books program; on the contrary, I thought that it was normal. It was what you went to college to learn, I thought. We read all the important books and we learned how to talk about them intelligently. There was nothing flashy or brilliant about it — we were kids! But it wasn’t boring, either. I couldn’t understand why anybody would study anything else at the undergraduate level. I still can’t.

In any case, my self-confident demands for individual attention and intellectual fulfillment were more than satisfied. Indeed, I was more or less required to increase them — especially to get through History of Science. I could thank the Great Books program (developed at the University of Chicago), or I could thank Notre Dame and the very persistent faculty members who prodded me to think, or I could thank myself for following a genuinely conservative instinct that protected me from the Cultural Revolution that then raged through universities around the world and that afflicted so many of my more intelligent contemporaries with an unattractive and unhelpful cynicism. I’m just Greatful.

As the Great Books seminars progressed, I realized that we were not, in fact, reading all the important books — there were lots of others, off our list. Which was fine, not a problem, no reason for activist protest. Because, somewhere along the line, I learned what I have come to regard as the most important thing that any undergraduate can learn: college is itself an introduction, a beginning. I have been reading and writing ever since.

***

The notion that there were other important books, books not on our reading list, was not stressed by exponents of the Great Books program. It was tacitly understood that Great Books was a haven from the stormy arguments about relevance that meaninglessly sprouted like weeds in the other branches of the humanities. It was even more tacitly understood that the Great Books program, as tailored by the Notre Dame faculty, was an immersion — more than an introduction but less than an indoctrination — in the wellsprings of the philosophy and theology of the Roman Catholic Church. (Gee! What a surprise.) I was already a firm agnostic, so I had no trouble with this at all. The question of the existence vel non of God took a completely different shape in my mind; it was immediately translated into another language — another way of thinking, really. When faced with the question, Is there a God?, I replied with different question, Why do some people believe that there is a God? I still do. This is the only question that I am able to entertain. When I was a student, it made Plato, Aristotle, Dante and the others relevant in a way that was probably not intended by my teachers.

As a child, I worried about being sent to Hell for my failure to believe in God, and worried even more about being unable to resolve this paradox. For who was going to send me to Hell if not God? My parents? (Could they? I really did wonder.) I wished that I could believe, because I wanted to be a good boy, and I wanted to do the right things. But I was much, much too stubborn, much too much myself. Lack of faith was as manifest and undeniable as height. But unlike height, it was Wrong, and, also unlike height, it was something that I could keep to myself. At every stage of my slide toward adulthood, I learned how much observance I could slip out of without getting into trouble.

I continued going to Mass, however, and would probably still be going to Mass if it were not for the terrible swerve taken by John Paul II. This arguably great man but certainly lamentable pope would have made a protestant out of me if I had believed in God in the first place. “Reactionary” is not strong enough a word to describe the offensiveness of current “Church teaching” on issues of sexuality and ordination — issues laughably irrelevant to the message of Christ (about whose existence there is no question). I was thinking of all this baggage yesterday, reading an essay-review by John Connelly on the Polish intellectual Leszek KoÅ‚akowski, in The Nation. KoÅ‚akowski was one of those Marxists who “saw the light” and switched teams. He became a stout defender of his countryman’s religious conservatism. “For all his youthful anti-clericalism,” Connelly writes, “it seems that KoÅ‚akowski could never escape the gravitational hold of traditional Polish culture.”

What he abhorred about secularism was not so much its negation as its universalization of the sacred, a development that affected even the church. Liberal Catholics blessed all forms of worldly life, creating a mode of Christian belief lacking a concept of evil—that is, the understanding that evil is not the absence or subversion of virtue but an irredeemable fact—and leaving the church no reason or means to stand against the secular. The dissolution of the sacred from within and without had observable effects on the culture as a whole, contributing to a growing amorphousness and laxity in making distinctions. This was dangerous, Kołakowski argued, because the sacred gave to social structure its “forms and systems of divisions,” whether between death and life, man and woman, work and art, youth and age. He advocated no mythology in particular, and would admit only that a tension between development and structure was inherent in all human societies. Yet it was clear that certain developments troubled him deeply, and if the liberation movements unleashed in the 1960s continued, he feared the outcome would be “mass suicide.”

Connelly’s piece made me wonder if the question of good and evil isn’t simply another question about the existence of God. The questions appear to be equally propped up by an emotional dread of “nihilism” — the belief that there is nothing to believe in, that nothing matters. Is belief the issue, perhaps? What is belief? Could it be a kind of oxygen that some, but not all, minds require in order to function? Can I say that I believe in anything? I think that I believe a lot of things — but not in anything. I take a lot of things to be the case. But I don’t need them to be the case — I don’t get that far. Murder is wrong. Is there anything more to be said? Why do I believe that murder is wrong? Because I believe that we are all human beings and that none of us is sufficiently superior to the rest of us to have the right to take a life, except in self-defense. If there is more to that train of thought, I can’t imagine it. I don’t believe that Americans are better than Chinese. I can imagine believing such a thing, but there mere imagining it makes me feel foul.

If only I could believe in evil! Then I could really do something, really have some fun with my distaste for television, spectator sports, and automobiles.

After Kathleen left for the airport and her conference outside Miami, I continued reading about Claire Danes in last week’s New Yorker, but found it intolerably miscellaneous, even though I did finish the piece. (I haven’t seen any of Homeland yet). So I picked up Volume II of The Transylvanian Trilogy, They Were Found Wanting, and read a few chapters. Although I enjoyed the story, I felt that something had been violated — to wit, the form of the novel. Although Míklos Bánffy leaves plenty of loose ends at the close of the first volume, They Were Counted, a mood of finality hangs over the final chapters, and even if the characters go on living, the book comes to The End. Indeed, when the leading lady, Adrienne Miloth, makes a beguilingly indirect reappearance in Chapter Two, she has undergone such a transformation that she almost seems to be a new character. The change is plausible, fascinating even, because it reflects Adrienne’s awakening to love at the end of the previous book. But in the back of my mind I heard a deck being shuffled and dealt, placing the characters in new alignments. This is the technique that enabled soap operas to go on for decades. It is not, at first whisper, a characteristic of great world literature.

To dampen my disappointment, which was really very slight — so slight that a good night’s rest might muffle it entirely — I decided to watch a movie, simultaneously deciding that this movie would be The Third Man. Years ago, we had a VHS tape of the film that was so grainy and dark that the famous sewer scenes at the end were unintelligibly murky. It was so frustrating that I came to think of The Third  Man as The Unwatchable Movie, which I’ve by no means forgotten, so that the Criterion Collection’s sparkling remaster always comes as real treat. Another real treat is Alida Valli, one of the great mid-century beauties of the screen, and a powerful actress as well. (Don’t even think about contesting this claim until you’ve seen Visconti’s Senso.) She brings to the role of Anna something of the grandeur of a Strauss heroine — she’s a Marschallin in extremely reduced circumstances. (As was Vienna.) Then there are Carol Reed’s disturbing Dutch shots, especially at the beginning of the film, presenting everything slightly askew. These shots are more effective than the mounds of rubble, over which the characters occasionally scramble, at suggesting how unstable Vienna was after the War. Finally, there is the frighteningly good-looking Orson Welles.

I believe that Graham Greene wrote the novella after the screenplay, which makes it just possible that it was Welles’s idea to echo The Great Gatsby — at the time (1949) just beginning its steady rise from the obscurity into which it almost immediately fell after publication to the classic status that it holds today — by having Harry Lime recurringly address his friend Holly Martins as “old man.” It’s as disturbingly bogus as Gatsby’s “old sport,” and whether or not Greene or Welles or anyone intended to make a connection, the phrase sets The Third Man in the same mode of American disenchantment as The Great Gatsby.

Trevor Howard: I’d forgotten about him. He’s perfect in The Third Man, because his sharp, compact features make a perfect foil to Joseph Cotten’s wooliness. It is always difficult for me to trust any character played by Joseph Cotten; his Uncle Charlie, in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, is one of the great cinema sociopaths, playing to the audience as well as for the film. You want to give him a break even after you know better. But that’s precisely why, like Teresa Wright’s Niece Charlie, you can’t forgive him; his appeal is a form of abuse. At least for me, this quality sticks to the actor himself, and gets carried from movie to movie. There is also Cotten’s strange accent, which wants to be Groton but isn’t.

***

Over the weekend, I swallowed whole a new book by David Priestland, an up-to-date Oxford don, called Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes. It did not go down smooth. I enjoyed the book very much, but I also mistrusted it, not only because I’ve become wary of schemes and systems. I couldn’t possibly write anything like a review of it, because I argued with it the whole time, even when I agreed with it. The book is clever and fast, and it left me impressed but dazed. At gunpoint, I might venture that the book is a rather disorderly piece of jewelry, composed of stones both priceless and otherwise. Make no mistake: there are priceless insights in Merchant, and the book really must be read (or at least improved).

The idea that there are ways in which to be exceptional (and so to rise above the status of the ordinary laborer), as either a warrior or a priest, has a provenance dating to Antiquity. Indeed, the division is salient in the earliest recorded states. But like so many ideas of ancient vintage, it applies only tenuously — little more than metaphorically — to our times. Human nature may not have changed beyond recognition, but its complications have expanded exponentially. Consider the warrior. Think of him as a knight on a horse, dealing death with a sword or some other weapon. Think of him as a bold hero of blind courage. Now put him back in the glass case. The only warriors who fight like knights are the ones who can’t afford better equipment. Or who are unlucky enough to be pitched into the brutalizing guerilla war that seems to be the only game being played these days — the knight of old at least knew who his enemies were. Modern warfare is waged by technical experts, not swashbucklers. Modern armies may be warlike on the surface, but they operate as implacable bureaucracies. And bureaucrats, in David Priestland’s typology, are sages, the descendants of priests. Do we regard today’s military man as “soldier” or as “sage”?

Priestland is, like any sensible person, alarmed by the messy, volatile state of current affairs. He attributes it to the hegemony of short-sighted merchants. I could not agree more heartily! But his analysis is almost as messy and volatile as the world it attempts to describe. You simply cannot dispose of today’s power networks in “three castes,” and Priestland doesn’t really try. Starting on page 63, for example, he breaks the merchant caste into two phases, soft and hard. These are really not very different from Wall Street’s bulls and bears. The bulls (the soft merchants) believe in good times and easy credit. The bears show up after the inevitable collapse, and insist upon bills’ being paid (austerity). I think we knew all about this already. Priestland’s valuable point is that giving merchants the hegemony over political affairs that they have enjoyed in modern times greatly exacerbates the excesses of both phases of commerce, and conduces to the hegemony of warriors — the last thing any sane merchant wants to see.

The sage caste proves to even more fissiparous. Sages enjoyed their moment of hegemony in a period now best known as Les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty years of stunning climbs in the Western standard of living that followed World War II. Priestland, emphasizing the caste’s failures, considers the period in terms of the inevitable breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement. There are at least two problems with this view. The men who assembled at the Mount Washington Hotel were more merchant than sage. And the agreement, reached while the (Hot) War was in its final phase, was tweaked to suit the imagined imperatives of the Cold War that followed. Tony Judt’s assessment what-went-wrong (with the welfare state) is far more clearly made in Postwar, and it is as assessment with which Priestland would, by his own account, concur. In his concluding passage, “An End to Caste?”, Priestland writes,

The real flaw [in the Hegelians’ argument about history] came from their failure to understand that individuals have limited memories. People do learn from history, but they are most affected by what is happening around them when they are young adults; earlier history seems rather too remote, abstract, and irrelevant. Thus, policy makers in 2008 learned some limited lessons from 1929: that they should not impose austerity at a time of financial crisis. But the experiences most imprinted on their minds were those of the 1970s and ’80s, and they are convinced that the power of the state must be constrained at all costs. They find it very difficult to combine these experiences with the lessons that are really relevant — those from the 1920s.

Lessons from the 1920s, for example, that produced the Glass-Steagall Bill, which remains to be replaced after having been foolishly scrapped in 1998. Perhaps because we are both lawyers, and Kathleen a securities lawyer at that, my wife and I were appalled when the protections of Glass-Steagall were removed, and we believe that subsequent events have validated our horror. We were still in our forties when Sanford Weill mounted his arrogant undermining of the walls between retail and investment banking; we not nearly old enough to remember the 1920s. But we had learned about them, really; we had been educated well. History is not necessarily “remote, abstract, and irrelevant”; it can be brought to life by good teachers (and the writers of good histories). The problem as we see it is that educations such as ours appear to be uncommon, and have no necessary relation to brand-name institutions of learning. Something must be done to make history intimate, concrete, and relevant, if not to every man and woman in the street, then to the exceptional men and women who run things — men like Robert Rubin and women like Hillary Clinton.

So it was with the welfare state: young people forgot why the safety-nets had been put in place, and they resented the fact that the beneficiaries had changed. Immigrants in Europe, blacks and immigrants in the United States, were by the late 1970s taking the place of “natives” as the objects of social welfare. It was forgetful on the part of the sages to understand that the welfare state had to be reconfigured — reinvented, really. That is a recurrent failure of sages: having solved a problem, they think they’ve done so for all time.

In the end, sages remain somewhat mysterious in Priestland’s treatment. Are we all to be sages? And what kind of sage? There are several types on offer: sage-technocrats, sage-creatives, and so on. But it is telling that Priestland has nothing to say about “wisdom.” It is clear that the technocrats whom he discusses, most notably Robert McNamara, lacked it, to the point of not seeming to know that there was something called “wisdom” to seek. It is also clear that smart people usually lack the wisdom to carry their expertise graciously, seeming rather determined to make others feel stupid and then resentful. In this, sages are rather like warriors — show-offs.

It is very much a muddle. Not Priestland’s book, but life. Things fall apart. Things are always falling apart. Wisdom, insofar as it is not simply a wry form of resignation, enables us to envision a world that falls apart better. Merchant, Soldier, Sage is stuffed with elements of wisdom, and if the author’s playful schemata make the economic history of the modern world more vivid to general readers, I shall be the last to register any serious complaint.

Everything changes; as Lampedusa puts it, in The Leopard, everything has to change, so that everything can remain the same. This paradox is much on my mind these days, as pundits and politicians blather on about Syria. What. To. Do. About Syria.

How about this: why don’t we — and by “we” here, I mean the parties that prevailed at the “peace” conference that followed World War I — why don’t we apologize to Turkey for having insulted its sovereignty, and hand everything back. Syria. Lebanon. Iraq. Jordan. Israel, even. Just to show how sorry we really are, we’ll throw in Egypt and North Sudan. We’ll even give the restored Caliph a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

We’ll admit that colonialism is wrong, that mandates are wrong, that nation-building is wrong. None of our business!

Which is, sadly, why we can do none of the above.

How about this: why don’t we — and by “we” here, I mean us and our old friends the Russians — heat up the Cold War. Nothing has really worked since the Cold War came to an end. American foreign policy has behaved like a dog with a dead master. Not only would a renewal of the Cold War restore Syria’s status as “Russia’s problem,” but it would jam the Euro crisis, too. Hellzapoppin!

These reactionary suggestions, of course, reflect the mad mortal longing for nothing to change, never ever. Let’s just go back to the way things were — when we couldn’t wait to make changes. Because, in those days, we got to decide when to make changes and what changes to make. We had a big say in it, anyway. Nowadays, not so much. The nations of the Middle East — well, let’s start right there. The “nations” of the Middle East are all confections, fantasies of Western diplomats. Mere lines in the sand.

Once upon a time, there were two powers in the Middle East, Turkey and Persia, the latter now known as Iran. These non-Arab powers ruled the Arab population. Between them ran an expanse of desert that served as a viable frontier. Most Arabs lived on the Turkish side of this desert, but some — the Iraqis — lived on the other. The Sunni sect prevailed in the west, the Shi’ite in the East. If it hadn’t been for Western rapaciousness, for resources and for colonial security, this old Middle East might have gone on indefinitely, as a sort of Muddle East, occasionally stormy but largely stable; eventually — everything must change! — it would have evolved into something else. The point to bear in mind is that this was a world without nations.

We in the West regarded this lack of nationhood as “backward.” Are we sorry yet?

As we have had ample opportunity to learn, nations have a structural flaw. It’s something to do with their self-consciousness. Being a nation is like being a dreamer who fancies himself naked on a stage. Except that nations are awake, and armed. Shoot the audience, and quick!

Destroy the dissidents, with poison gas if necessary.

***

That is my second sermon for today: poison gas. The use of poison gas may be obscene, but surely it is less obscene than the fine discrimination that makes its use an unacceptable, “inhuman” way of disposing of civilians, while other methods remain merely regrettable. All civilian deaths are equally horrible; you don’t get a status upgrade as a martyr or downgrade as a monster simply by the introduction of poison gas into the scenario.

But surely you do? It is only human nature to feel that some ways of dying are more horrible than others. It is difficult not to feel a frisson of relief upon learning that Anne Frank died of typhus, not in a gas chamber — even if the disease ravaged her for days and days of misery. But these feelings have no place in the counsels of war. It is wrong that Anne Frank died, along with millions of others, and their are no degrees of death. How they died it is impertinent to judge. How to have prevented their death remains a conundrum. One thing seems clear: as part of our ideas about nations, we have exported genocide to the rest of the world.

I don’t make these remarks in a mood of anti-Western crankiness. You don’t have to scratch me very deep to read “West is the Best.” But I am grievously annoyed by strutting Western leaders who scold confused people to whom they stand in relation as abusive parents to abused children, and whom they then threaten with yet another beating!

When I wasn’t reading They Were Counted yesterday, I was wandering through images of and Web site pages about Bánffy Castle, in BonÅ£ida, Rumania. It used to be rather grand, in a country-house way, for Transylvania, but the Germans all but demolished it in revenge for Míklos Bánffy’s opposition to collaboration with the Nazis. An outfit called the Transylvania Trust, in which the arts ministries of Hungary and Rumania appear to be cooperating (!), is spearheading a restoration project. No sooner had I learned about all of this (and don’t take my word for any of it; I’m in a daze) than I launched into Part Five of They Were Counted, which begins with a description of summer morning at the castle (called “Denestornya” in the novel) that is so quietly ecstatic that it would serve as just about anybody’s idea of Eden: time itself stands still as you read. Just a snippet or two:

So with time, the great house grew and was transformed and spread itself with new shapes and new outlines that were swiftly clothed with the patina of years, so that when one looked at it from afar, from the valley of the Aranyos or from the hills even further away, the old castle with its long façades, cupola-capped towers and spreading wings and outbuildings seemed to have sprung naturally from the promontory on which it stood, to have grown of itself from the clay below, unhelped by the touch of human hand. All around it, on the rising hills behind and in the spreading parkland in front, vast groves of trees, some standing on their own while other spread like great forests, seemed like soft green cushions on which the castle of Denestornya reclined at its ease, as if it had sat there for all eternity and could never have been otherwise.

*

And everywhere the nightingales were singing, only falling silent for a moment as Balint passed the bushes in which they were concealed and then starting up again as if unable to contain their joy.

*

The young man reached the bank of the millstream near where the outer wooden palisades had once stood. He crossed over what was still called the Painted Bridge, even though every vestige of colour had long since disappeared, to the place where the wide path divided and led either to the left or the right, while ahead the view stretched across the park interrupted only by the clumps of poplars, limes or horse-chestnuts. In this part of the park the grass was quite tall, thick and heavy with dew. It was filled with the feathery white heads of seeding dandelions, with golden cowslips, bluebells, waving stalks of wild oats and the trembling sprays of meadow-grass, each bearing at its extremity a dew drop that sparkled in the sun. So heavy was the dew that the grasslands, as far as the eye could see, were covered with a delicate shining liquid haze.

Something tells me that Bánffy Castle has a vastly improved chance of being restored to “its ease,” now that thousands of people with money in their pockets are going to want to visit it. Here is the fictional great house that actually exists. And in that rarest of places, an exotic corner of Europe featuring great natural beauty! You can get there by taxi from the nearest town, which you can get to by train.

***

I have not had this experience before. Even when I was young, I heard all about the great books long before I read them. Every now and then, something very good would sneak up on me — I discovered Trollope all by myself (he was very unfashionable at the time), and laughed my way through Barchester Towers — but, as a rule, books like War and Peace did not arrive unheralded. Everyone else had read these books, and now you would — I would — too. Shakespeare and Jane Austen had not been recently discovered.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how The Transylvanian Trilogy got buried. The territory of Transylvania itself was contested, and so were the regimes of the two countries with claims to it, when the novel appeared in 1934. It had no natural fan base, and only a necessarily small (Hungarian) readership. A big book, it would not be translated on a lark. Its enemies would only increase after World War II, when Communist regimes in both Hungary and Rumania would have every reason to disparage Bánffy’s serenely ironic narrative of the bygone ways of “decadent aristocrats.” The novel soon fell out of print and remained in that limbo until 1982. Its only favorable wind came in the form of the novelist’s daughter, Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, who together with the late Patrick Thursfield (who seems to have done most of the writing) worked on a translation into English. This appeared, with unsurprising lack of éclat, in 1999. Word of mouth slowly built up the momentum that inspired the editors at Everyman Library to relaunch it.

All this makes sense, but still. Known unknowns are familiar presences in world literature, especially where Antiquity is concerned: we know the names of plays by Sophocles and Euripides whose texts have disappeared. Most of Tacitus appears not to have survived. Sometimes the known unknowns turn up, as in the Nag Hammadi library, where, again, we knew the titles of the books from a letter of denunciation, instructing recipients to destroy them. (Most complied.) But unknown unknowns… One must pause to wonder how many other masterpieces were interred by the catastrophes of the last century, particularly in Central Europe.

Bánffy’s Transylvania (as well as his Budapest) may be remote, but it is a distinctly European setting. It is a little behind the curve on industrialization, and still primarily agricultural, but its elite is sophisticated and well-educated. (Quite a number of Bánffy’s ladies decorate their speech with English, and of course everyone knows German and French.) The landowners are “liberal” only with respect to the Crown, which was worn by the Austrian Emperor; otherwise, they are as conservative as any landowning class. (They do not seem to be particularly reactionary, however.) Unlike the Russian grandees of nineteenth-century literature, they don’t have one foot in a world of violent barbarism. If they have a besetting sin, it is inattentiveness. They share the common assumption that things are just going to go on as they are indefinitely. It is only at the beginning of Part Four, Chapter Four (an astonishingly lengthy piece, which could, with only a very little tweaking, stand on its own as a novella), that Bánffy strikes a note of scolding mockery.

As far as most of the upper classes were concerned, politics were of little importance, for there were plenty of other things that interested them more.

There were, for instance, the spring racing season, partridge shooting in late summer, deer-culling in September and pheasant shoots as winter approached. It was, of course, necessary to know when Parliament was to assemble, when important party meetings were to take place or which day had been been set aside for the annual general meeting of the Casino, for these days would not be available for such essential events as race-meetings or grand social receptions. And, after the Budapest races, the Derby season in Vienna would follow, and so many people would be away at that time that it would be useless to make plans for a time when “nobody” would be in the Budapest.

This is very gentle, and the same could be said of upper classes elsewhere at different times. Something like the same thing could be said of America today, with so many people cocooned in Matrix-like unconsciousness of the world beyond the world around them. (The Internet appears, perversely, to intensify this massing of affinity in ignorance.) We all want to enjoy life, and a lucky few, such as the aristocrats in Bánffy’s novel, are wealthy enough to enjoy life very thoroughly. Life can be very beautiful when you don’t have to think about folding the laundry and cleaning the bathroom, much less going to work. Thousands of people today — but only thousands, not hundreds of thousands — enjoy the same gracious leisure that we read about in the big old novels. They largely have the sense to stay invisible to the billions. The rest of us learn what we can manage to do without servants.

Yesterday, I went to the dentist. I like my new dentist, but he doesn’t like me. What I mean is that his technician, who cleans the teeth, tells me that I have very poor teeth-brushing habits. The dentist himself added, “You probably breathe through your mouth when you sleep?” This was all very unpleasant. It is true that, as my back ossified over the years, it became more and more awkward to manipulate a toothbrush, even an electric one. Also, I don’t like to brush my teeth after eating: it spoils the aftertaste of the meal. As for mouthbreathing (heavens!), my nostrils have never worked properly. Actually, only one works at a time. Is that normal? It’s late in the day for such questions. I’m becoming an old man of dubious personal hygiene! The upshot, so far as dentistry is concerned, is more frequent visits, id est monthly, instead of semi-annually.

And today, it’s the “full body scan.” The dermatologist looks me over — all over. I’ve gotten used to it, sort of. But I have become a very modest old man.

On the bright side, it’s nine in the morning but I don’t hear a thing. In addition to the subway-station project directly out the front door, Con Edison is doing something in front of Fairway, something involving jackhammers. And First Avenue is being repaved. This time with asphalt, it appears. Over thirty years ago, they poured a concrete roadway with steel reinforcements. It ought to have lasted longer, but First Avenue is the northbound lane of I 999, an unofficial Interstate Highway that would dry up in an instant if they would only toll the East and Harlem River Bridges. Second Avenue is the southbound lane. The particulate-matter emissions of heavy trucks is not regulated. I can tell, every time I wipe down the tables on the balcony.

But, for the moment, however inexplicably, no noise.

***

Instead of yammering on about They Were Counted — but I must say that Book Three of the novel is the most densely-packed piece of literary fabulousness ever, with a declaration-of-love-scene that flies off the page and into a waltz — I’ve found a couple of blog posts about the book, one from the Neglected Books Page, written a few years ago, before Everyman got into the act, and one from the Chicago Reader.

At the end of his Introduction to the Everyman edition, Hugh Thomas thanks Antonia Fraser for recommending the book to him. At the Neglected Books Page, it’s reported that Jan Morris named They Were Counted the book of the year for 2000. (The English translation first appeared in 1999.) That’s the sort of swell that’s going to carry Míklos Bánffy’s masterpiece into the library of every well-read person. Caroline Moor (also reported at Neglected Books) writes,

Banffy vies with Tolstoy for sweep, Pasternak for romance and Turgenev for evocation of nature; his fiction is packed with irresistible social detail and crammed with superb characters: it is gloriously, addictively, compulsively readable.

I hasten to add that, at least in the English translation, it is extremely well-written. And also very funny at times, with a finer-grained sense of the ridiculous than one finds among the Russians, and more generous good humor than one encounters among the French. It is, in short, miraculously humane.

The spell of sticky weather came to an end late yesterday, and I slept well for the first time in over a week. I woke up every ninety minutes or so, took a big sip of icewater (mouthbreathing!), toddled off to the bathroom, and then slid back into odd but entertaining dreams. Some of the details were unmistakably lifted from Bánffy.

There was no good reason for me to visit the bookshop last Friday, but I couldn’t very well walk by Crawford Doyle without looking in the window — and what did I see there but the wonderfully titled, completely unknown-to-me Transylvanian Trilogy. A thickish Everyman edition, and Volume I to boot! A long and lovely read was promised. I stepped inside and, sampling a few pages, found that I liked them very much. I left the shop without the second book, which contains Volumes II and III, because I didn’t want to be dragging it around at the Museum, my next stop. But I’ll be ready for it by next week, no matter how indulgently I luxuriate in the book that I did buy.

Opening in the autumn of 1904, They Were Counted (Volume I) centers on the Hungarian aristocracy, much of it Protestant, that held the fields and forests that stretch within the horseshoe of the Carpathian Mountains. Today, this territory lies within Romania, thanks to the Treaty of Trianon, one of the many bad arrangements made after World War I. But being in Hungary meant that it was, ultimately, under Austrian control, “dual monarchy” notwithstanding. Míklos Bánffy, scion of an ancient landed family quite as grand as the ones that people his fiction, wrote the book after the war, when the patriotism of his class no longer made any sense; and by the time he died, impoverished, in 1950, its wealth had been stripped away entirely. Midway through They Were Counted, however, I have yet to sniff a sense of loss. It would appear that the downfall of his way of life simply made Bánffy a very clear writer.

The novel was published, in Hungarian, in 1934. It did not appear in English until 1999. I am not sure that I’d have been drawn to it but for two recent influences: a re-reading of The Leopard that has not yet lost its spell, and Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors. The newer novel filled me with a passion to be lost in Central Europe, where the sea is very far away and the territorial frontiers have shifted significantly in recent centuries. Crain’s Prague and Bánffy’s Kolozsvar (now Cluj) have little in common, but they stand at roughly equal distance from the world outside my window, and for similar reasons their histories are wrapped in a tissue of secrecy. And both books are studded with the disheartening discoveries that smart young people can’t help making.

They Were Counted is one of the most opulent books that I have ever opened. The writing is measured and tonic, and not at all showy, but almost everything that it holds up to the light is rich, in the way that everything in the Tale of Genji is rich. A good deal of the opulence is social, of course; there are grand houses and elaborate hunts. At a Carnival ball, “it was only young girls who did not wear imposing tiaras.” But much of the beauty is natural, as in this highly scenic description of a waterfall that Balint Abady, the central figure, visits as part of a tour of his forest properties.

Though the waterfall still could not be seen, they were so close that at every step they were drenched by the spray, while the roar of the falling water echoed round them like thunder. Then, clinging to their long fir-bows and sliding, slipping through the snowdrfifts, they rounded one more giant boulder and there it was, right in front of them, a huge arc of water springing clear from the rocks a hundred feet above.

Nothing interrupted the fall off the water: it was like a pillar of liquid bluish-green metal in front of the glistening black of the wet rock cliffsides, and from this dark mass rose white foam-crests or spray, which in turn were transformed into large droplets white as pearls that fell into the boiling swirling mass of water in the basin at the foot of the great fall. Sometimes a thread of water would break away from the central mass and seemed to hang quivering in the air until it too dissolved and merged with the rest. Immediately others would take its place springing out freely over the chasm below, endlessly repeated, endlessly varied, a constant picture of which the details were never the same from one moment to another. Underground springs fed the basin at the foot of the fall and even when in the air it was degrees below zero steam would mingle with the spray to form icicles which hung from every bow and every overhanging rock, so that the fall itself was framed by pillars of ice.

The waterfall’s “surging energy and apparent will to live” reminds Balint of a married woman who has come to fascinate him. He has known her all his life, and he believes that he doesn’t love her, but she haunts his thoughts. Hypnotized by an open fire at one of his forest-camps, Balint comes to a conclusion about her that invites comparisons with famous novels about star-crossed love.

Thinking now once more of Adrienne, he felt that at last he knew what she was really like, and that she, like the fire, was driven by some fatal force of which she herself could barely be aware but which, powerful and uncontrollable, must, in the end, prove fatal.

Why it should be a pleasure to read such lines is one of the great perversities of fiction.

Clues? It’s the Connecticut River. And the image shows but a small patch of a large painting.

I’ve only recently begun pulling out my camera at the Museum. I recall being shocked, ten years ago, when young Asian tourists seemed to be taking snaps of everything at the Louvre. Was this allowed? The consensus seems to be that, as long as there’s no flash, there’s no harm done.

Only the other day, though, did I see the fun that could be had.

In other images, we had a Face Time call from San Francisco last night — a lovely surprise. Ryan was still at work, but Megan and Will had just gotten back to their temporary housing from school pickup and househunting. Perfectly aware that his mother needed a steady arm to hold the iPhone, Will scrambled all over her like a monkey — a very big monkey. He told us that he is in California, and he asked us where we were. (He also asked why my eyes were closed. Gawd, I thought, I haven’t hit the vodka yet!) Kathleen had the bright idea, after the call was over, of holding the phone sideways, so that we could both be in the picture, instead of just the space between us.

Megan and Will looked great, and it was great to see them.

***

I spent hours yesterday sniffing around Friedrich Hayek, trying to find out what the big deal is. One of the books that I’m reading is The Great Persuasion, by Angus Burgin. It’s a somewhat academic account of — but that’s what I’m not sure of. Something to do with the Mont Pélerin Society and the recrudescence of free-market, laissez-faire thinking. I’m in the middle of the chapter about Milton Friedman, who if nothing else inspires Burgin to write with verve. If Friedman was robust, Hayek was fastidious; he seems to have been almost too neurasthenic to develop clear and distinct ideas. I don’t understand the whole “Austrian School” thing. What, exactly, is aggregate demand all about? It goes in one ear and out the other. And Keynes: why is it that, even though I don’t understand what he’s talking about, either, he nonetheless always seems to be right? Does it all come down to rhetorical effectiveness?

I will hand it to Burgin for expressing my problem with economics in terms that do not highlight my stupidity.

Given Friedman’s indisputable influence on the political thought of both his time and the present day, he has received remarkably little scholarly attention outside the economics profession. He has been the subject of one short popular biography, several books of ideological analysis and synthetic condensation published well over a decade ago, a scattered collection of isolated articles, occasional polemics from his political foes, and countless cursory mentions in popular newspapers and journals. Milton Friedman’s rise to public prominence, despite its world-historical force, has yet to be historicized. This failure is in part a reflecion of the academic abandonment of the history of economic thought, which has been marginalized by economics departments focused wholly on the development of contemporary analytics, ignored by historians of science who maintain a restrictive understanding of the parameters of their field, and bypassed by historians wary of the relationship between abstract academic debate and processes of social and political change. The hybrid nature of Friedman’s career poses a further discouragement to research, because he blurred the lines between popular politics, forays into political philosophy, and work in technical economics that can prove difficult for nonspecialists to comprehend. The irony is that scholars have abandoned inquiry into these modes of analysis even as their importance to our public life has grown. For better or worse, we now live in an era in which economists have become our most influential philosophers, and when decisions made or advised by economistic technocrats have broad and palpable influence on the practice of our everyday lives. No figure is more representative of this development than Milton Friedman.

I’m not sure that I’d use the word “historicized,” but I love “economistic technocrats.” The point is, economists in the wake of Friedman have defected from humanism, and the humanists have sighed “good riddance.” As Burgin is too academically polite to say, that’s crazy! Just re-read the penultimate sentence until you get it.

I was not at all surprised to learn, earlier in Burgin’s book, that Hayek’s Road to Serfdom achieved its postwar fame largely thanks to a bowdlerized Reader’s Digest condensation. Hayek himself never got over the shame of it.

Talleyrand was in his mid-fifties when François Gérard made this undoubtedly flattering portrait, in 1809. The former bishop and imperial diplomat, and future ringmaster of the Congress of Vienna, had momentarily retired from public life, and this picture illustrates what public life was the worse for losing. There he sits, surrounded by fine-looking things from the ancien régime, defying history itself: the old order would not be entirely swept away if he could help it. (He could and he did.) Disabled by an untreated clubfoot, Talleyrand was spared the military exercises that would have been a waste of his genius. It may also have freed him from the more unthinking habits of honor. Throughout his long life, Talleyrand exhibited the nimble opportunism of someone both rooted and wounded.

It is time to read up on Talleyrand again. I see that JF Bernard’s 1973 life, which I bought when it came out, has not been superseded. Opening the book at random, I came across this suave passage:

The American attitude toward wealth was as puzzling to Talleyrand as it would be to later generations of Europeans. His own interest in money was purely utilitarian: it served only to buy the things that pleased him: luxurious surroundings, books, paintings, fine clothing, presents for his friends. The idea that it might serve to purchase social standing was foreign to a man accustomed to a society in which position was inherited rather than bought and in which rank was an inalienable quality which had always, and would always, exist independently of the inventory of one’s material possessions.

Talleyrand’s American sojourn taught him that “the country has become acquainted with luxuries too soon. Luxuries are ridiculous when a man can hardly provide himself with the necessities.” This aperçu is illustrated by the contrast of a Sèvres table, purchased by an American “at the Trianon,” upon which someone had laid a hat so coarse that a “European peasant would not have been caught dead” wearing anything like it.

***

Rebecca Solnit’s meditation on intrusive media technologies and the corporations that foster them, in the current LRB, has been much on my mind, largely because it makes statements to which I already subscribe, but also because it suggests the nefarious possibility of an egalitarian tyranny in which each of us is reduced to the status of one customer. Solnit pulls an unlikely short story by Kurt Vonnegut out of her memory, and makes it pay.

A short story that comes back to me over and over again is Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’, or one small bit of it. Since all men and women aren’t exactly created equal, in this dystopian bit of science fiction a future America makes them equal by force: ballerinas wear weights so they won’t be more graceful than anyone else, and really smart people wear earpieces that produce bursts of noise every few minutes to interrupt their thought processes. They are ‘required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.’ For the smartest person in Vonnegut’s story, the radio transmitter isn’t enough: ‘Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.’

What too few people — especially the necessarily inexperienced young — grasp is that the plethora of media choices is actually a constraint, because it presupposes the abandonment of personal initiative. By personal initiative I mean something as simple as the reading of a long novel. To read a long novel, you have to abandon the plethora of media choices, at least for several hours a week. Also, the young are especially afflicted with something not unlike a skin irritation that has recently found a perfect name: FOMO. Fear of missed opportunity. This fear is closely related, probabilistically, with the hope of winning the lottery. If you are always doing things that are either necessary or meaningful, then you will not be worrying about the things that you are not doing. It is doing nothing in particular, hanging out, being on the lookout for something to happen, that is like buying a lottery ticket and then spending the day watching television.

The gravamen of Solnit’s lament, I think, is that it is always going to be hard to make technology serve personal initiative instead of supplanting it. Making technology suit you, instead of letting yourself suit technology, requires a great deal of knowledge, and no small amount of wisdom. It will be of only limited use to know what your friends are doing, and how they are doing it. You need to know about how you do things, and about how your mind works. How anyone is to know such things, really for sure, before the age of forty is beyond me. And the corporations make what was is already hard even more difficult, by offering us so much stuff for “free” — subsidizing our consumption with advertisements, and deforming our networks with the need to sell things.

But: early days.

Well, I’ve got an iPhone. An iPhone 5. I had gone “off contract” with my first smartphone, an HTC, at the beginning of the month, and so was eligible for a special price on what was still a very expensive piece of equipment. I was advised, by an adviser very close to the family, a member of the family actually, to wit: Megan, that Android phones are unreliable. Mine certainly was. It had taken, most recently, to rebooting in the middle of phone calls. (More bothersome to me, I had also been unable to install a Chinese-character flash-card app.) There was an edge to Megan’s recommendation, an unspoken don’t-come-crying-to-me-if-you-miss-our-calls-from-San-Francisco, that completely overcame my instinctual resistance to All Things Apple. Kathleen, by the way, thinks that I already own All Things Apple, what with my clutch of Nanos, two classic iPods, and the old iPad. But I have never owned or operated an Apple computer.

That was yesterday. I had been putting off my visit to the phone store, which is only up the street, but the transaction was painless and would have gone quite quickly if relaying my contact information from the old phone to the new one had been straightforward, which it couldn’t be, because the old phone was misbehaving. In the evening, I found myself unable to buy the flash-card app on the new iPhone, but I worked round it by purchasing it on the iPad, whereupon it became available for installation on the phone. I spent an hour with the flash-cards and was spooked by my progress. Characters that I really didn’t know at all became familiar in a short time, owing to the stickiness of the drill. First, you have to choose the pinyin rendering of the character from one of four possibilities, and this gets tricky over time as tones come into play. (Shí is “o’clock,” shì is “to be.”) Having passed that hurdle, you hear the character pronounced, and now you have to choose the character’s meaning in English, again from four possibilities. This is tricky, too. Two early characters, néng and huì, for example, both mean (but in different ways) “to be able.” (It has always fascinated me that you cannot say, in English, “to can,” unless you’re talking about vegetables.)

I’m sure that I’ve forgotten most of the stuff that was new to me yesterday, but today’s drill will change that. You know, I’ve had cardboard Chinese-character flash-cards for years. Decades. But — largely because I was never sure about my pronunciation (rightly!) — they weren’t nearly as effective as the app is. (I sound out the character with the app, but I’m not tested on that performance.) The app highlights my mistakes, and confronts me with those characters more frequently.

Today, I am going to the Museum. I’m taking Ms NOLA’s mother, who is in town, to lunch first; then we’ll be joined by Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil. Two things that I want to see are the Gérard portrait of Talleyrand, which I’ve already ogled twice but about which I know a bit more now that the Museum has devoted an issue of its Bulletin to Gérard, and the Julia Margaret Cameron photographs. The Cameron show is the latest entry in a growing list of shows that, under Thomas Campbell’s frugal eye, the Museum has assembled out of its own vast holdings.

***

Ray Soleil, recovering from a broken arm, didn’t sleep well last night and, given the weather, decided to stay home, as did Fossil Darling, who is on that mandatory vacation that bankers have to take (now with email access, but no ability to delete messages and clear out the inbox). So, after lunch, Mme NOLA and I stepped through the shank of a thunderstorm to the Museum, where we saw a great many things by ourselves, including Julia Margaret Cameron’s wonderful still-photograph staging of Lear with his daughters. Cameron’s jolly husband played Lear (managing to look not jolly), while Lear’s daughters were impersonated by the three (three of the?) Liddell sisters, with Alice as Cordelia. Alice was, for the duration of this exposure, Cordelia. She wasn’t the vaguely pre-sexual beggar girl (Dodgson/Carroll) or the rebarbative Pomona (another Cameron), but Shakespeare’s heartsunk Cordelia. It was maddening to discover that neither of the books of Cameron’s photography on offer at a nearby kiosk included this amazing image. Speaking of amazing images, I took a picture of Mme NOLA from behind, as she was gazing at a Monet. And then I took a picture of the title card on the wall. Or I thought I did. Neither of these pictures showed up on my camera just now. (Drat.)

As you’ve no doubt read by now, James Wood gives Necessary Errors, the novel that Caleb Crain waited to be fully grown to write, an extraordinarily favorable review in this week’s New Yorker, confessing at the top that he read the book with competitive envy and had to admit that it was indeed “enviable.” (What that must have cost!) It’s the sort of review that, if you’ve read the book and liked it, encourages you to savor it again, from a more or less slightly different perspective. When I got home from the Museum, I communed with Necessary Errors by listening to the New World Symphony, possibly my least favorite thing by DvoÅ™ak, and to two movements from Smetana’s Ma Vlast, “The Moldau” and “From Bohemia’s Fields and Forests.” It was these latter two pieces that really reminded me of Crain’s novel. I don’t recall his ever referring to the river that flows through Prague by name — an elegant evasion of the difficulty of choosing between the easy-to-say but utterly German “Moldau” and the native “Vltava,” which (kiss of death for novels with foreign settings) looks harder to say than it is. If the river had an English name, such as “Danube,” there would have been no problem.

Anyway, as the river swirled in Smetana’s tone poem — swirling a lot like the Rhine in Das Rheingold, I couldn’t help noticing, wondering why I’d never noticed before (or had I, and just forgot?) — I thought of Jacob Putnam, Crain’s hero, growing, from from someone whose “one reliable pleasure” is reading, into someone with at least two reliable pleasures, and how sweet and innocent that is, the discovery that sex is good. Not everybody makes it. It’s easy to learn that sex is fun, but fun is not necessarily good; the distance between the two grows into an abyss over time, if there is a difference, and (suddenly) fun is the opposite of good — but it’s too late to go back. It’s my own opinion, so to speak, that sex is only all about sex, and nothing else, and I wouldn’t put this thought in anyone else’s head, but I suspect that Jacob reaches the same conclusion. Sex is not about anything else. It only seems to be, before you experience it, and can only think about it terms of other things. If you’re lucky, those other things burn away in the experience of sex, and, if the sex is good (it can be fun, but it has to be good, too), a certain harmony ensues.

I can’t wait to re-read Necessary Errors, but I’ll have to — six months at least, I’d say.

When Kathleen shuffles through the bedroom, her feet make the carpet whistle. It’s like something a kid might do, but she’s not a kid, and she’s not having fun. Every now and then, Kathleen throws a muscle in her lower back, and it takes a few days to relax. In some unknown way, she did this over the weekend. On Sunday, she asked for a cane — that was the worst. Heat packs, hot pads, Advil and tea are bringing her round slowly. In the afternoon, she will move into the living room to work on a document.

As if I were visiting in the hospital, I’ve been taking shameless advantage of Kathleen’s cripplement to spend hours reading magazines. It’s true that these are not found magazines, reluctantly settled for over a waiting room side table, but magazines to which I subscribe and don’t quite manage to keep up with. I seem to have spent most of Sunday with the July issue of Harper’s (there have been two since), which contains, among other things, a beguiling memoir by Julie Hecht and an exciting takedown of contemporary American poetry — Graham! Bam! Heaney! Ashbery! Bam! Bam! — by Mark Edmundson, the UVa professor whose new book, Why Teach?, is on its way to me. I didn’t just enjoy the piece, I reveled in it. Not only does Edmundson berate today’s poet’s for their pusillanimous solipsism, but he blames their cowardice on my favorite villains, the men and women of academe whom I would seriously consider vaporizing if given the chance: theorists.

Poets now would quail before the injunction to justify God’s way to man, or even man’s to God. No one would attempt an Essay on Humanity. No one would publicly say what Shelley did: that the reason he wrote his books was to change the world. But poets should wise up. They should see the limits emanating from the theoretical critics down the hall in the English department as what they are. Those strictures are not high-minded moral edicts but something a little closer to home. They are installments in the war of philosophy against poetry, the one Hass so delicately invokes [in a poem that I don’t know called “Meditation at Lagunitas”]. The theorists — the philosophers — want the high ground. They want their rational discourses to hold the cliffs, and they want to quiet the poets’ more emotional, more inspired interjections. They love to talk about race and class and gender with ultimate authority, and of course they do not wish to share their right with others.

Hear, hear! The practice of philosophy ought to be as obsolete as the practice that it inspired, back in the days when nobody knew anything, blood-letting.

Yesterday, I read that piece about drones in the Atlantic that everybody’s talking about — will there ever be a grand unification of the rules of engagement of military and police forces? — and then new LRB arrived in the mail, catnip as usual. After dinner, I read Susan Watkins’s somewhat exhausting review of recent books about the Eurozone and its crises; as the editor of the New Left Review, Watkins predictably takes a very dim view of the anti-democratic price-tag of fiscal rescue, and she is not hesitant to see “Washington and Wall Street” behind it.

I could not help agreeing that the ordinary people of Europe are suffering because elite governments permitted reckless behavior in the banking sector, and, ordinarily, it would have stopped there, but because of what I’d written earlier in the day for this space, I had a bit of a brainwave. In calling for “an articulate and functional doctrine of loyal opposition,” I had been thinking of structure, not content, but now I saw that the natural occupants of the loyal opposition in any democratic government ought to be the “moneyed interests.” It is clear, after a century of catastrophic tampering, that it is the moneyed interests that make society dynamic, but also that they do so only when they do not actually run the government. The golden age of upward mobility and broadening affluence that everyone likes to see in the Fifties and Sixties was definitely a time when “business” was in loyal opposition to an expanding welfare state. This halcyon came to an end for extrinsic reasons, but we would be much better off today if the relationship between business and government had not shifted so drastically. (For which I blame sourpusses such as Lewis Powell. Isn’t the money enough?)

A friend called to say that he had been shocked by the discussion that Bill Moyers had with This Town author Mark Leibovich. I almost didn’t read This Town, because someone said that it doesn’t really deal with the politics or with the issues or with the money. On the other hand, it was said to be a fun read (and it is), so I eventually found out that the failure to explore politics, issues, and money is no drawback in a book that captures Washington’s culture. This is a culture, most notably, to which there is no significant opposition of any kind, loyal or otherwise. People who boast that they’re going to go to Washington to change things by doing right are like thirteen year-olds who vow never to smoke, drink, drive or have sex. Leibovich doesn’t say this, but Washington is a court society with very strict etiquette. This etiquette has nothing to do with the politesse of Talleyrand; rather, it is a distillate of three distinguishing obsessions of everyday American life: sports, cars, and television. In other words: high school. And somebody few outsiders have heard of is both the principal and the cheerleader: Tammy Haddad.

This Town has no index — for a good reason, it turns out — but I would be vastly entertained by a compilation along the lines of Julian Barnes’s hysterically funny index to his collection of Letters from London (to The New Yorker). I can imagine something like this: “Haddad, Tammy: … as human ladle, 32.”

As I walk out, I get a big hug from Tammy Haddad, a veteran cable producer who repurposed herself in recent years as a professional party host, event organizer, and full-service convener of the Washington A-list. Haddad, a towering in-your-face presence with black hair bisected by a white streak, is a human ladle in in the local self-celebration buffet. She tells you how great you are, how you really need to meet the author, or cohost, or honoree, of whoever, and that by the way, she just talked to Justice Breyer! “Over the Rainbow” plays as Tammy and I and the rest of the Club schmooze our way up to the Kennedy Center roof for an actual cocktail party.

Or this: “Club, The: … metamorphic immortality of, 7.”

And the gathering itself [a memorial service for Tim Russert, to be followed by that “actual cocktail party” on the roof] is itself testament to The Club, that spinning cabal of “people in politics and media” and the supporting sectors that never get voted out or term-limited or, God forbid, decide on their own that it is time to return home to the farm. The Club can be as potent in DC as Congress, its members harder to shed than ten-term incumbents. They are, in effect, the city fathers of This Town. They are not one-dimensional and are certainly not bad people. They come with varied backgrounds, intentions, and, in many cases — maybe most cases — the right reasons. As they become entrenched, maybe their hearts get a bit muddled and their motives too. Not always: people are complicated, here as everywhere, and sometimes even conflicted (enough sometimes to see therapists, though we don’t discuss that here, don’t want to scare the vetters). But their membership in The Club becomes paramount and defining. They become part of a system that rewards, more than anything, self-perpetuation.

Is This Town cynical and depressing? No. It really is funny. Beyond that, it’s a vivid sketch of a social world that is very appealing to people who are powerful or who want to be powerful. (High school.) Entrée to this world is confined to several portals, most of them exacting stiff fees. The money side of Washington is not Leibovich’s brief; he just wants to show you what goes on and how all that goes on is part of one big pizza. He disposes of The Club’s financial machinery in a brief but superpotent quotation from Jack Abramoff, the formerly-incarcerated former lobbyist. (And, what do you know? The book opened to the very page — 163!)

In addition, tens of thousands of Hill and administration staff people move seamlessly into lobbying jobs. In a memoir by disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the felon wrote that the best way for lobbyists to influence people on the Hill is to casually suggest they join their firm after they complete their public service. “Now, the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to them, that was it, we owned them,” said Abramoff, who spent forty-three months in the federal slammer after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges. “And what does that mean?” Abramoff continued. “Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they’re gonna do. And not only that, they’re gonna think of things we can’t think of to do.”

It occurred to me, in the cryptic terms that haunt my meditations on “organized money” — a phrase that George Packer uses in The Unwinding, but without analyzing it — that putting “the moneyed interests” into some sort of structural loyal opposition to the administration of government just might organize the people who have money, instead of letting the money organize them.

On this morning’s New York Times Op-Ed page, editor and columnist Bill Keller calls (“Adrift on the Nile“) for a withdrawal of United States aid to the “generals” currently in control of Egypt. I can’t make up my mind about the money, but I am quite sure that Keller is dangerously deluded about the nature of democracy, whether in Egypt or in the United States, at least insofar as he believes democracy to be something that is established in the latter country,  and exportable to the former.

In fact, the late Morsi government revealed with sun-saturated clarity that the democracy toolkit is missing a very important piece. We all understand that democracy requires free and fair elections, and the Islamic Brotherhood, after decades of repression, won more votes than any other party. Fair enough. But nobody really knows, not in Egypt, not in the United States — maybe in the United Kingdom, where these things were first worked out but, famously, never written down — what to do next.

Mohamed Morsi and his colleagues exercised power along majoritarian lines. Having won those votes, his government believed itself to be entitled to disregard its political opponents, particularly the cosmopolitan secularists who live mostly in Egypt’s cities, and to lead Egypt toward theocracy. This is pretty much what Hitler did after winning his election, with the difference that he himself was the god, unhampered by ancient scriptures. I would support any number of generals in the undertaking to dislodge such a regime.

Even our cherished mantra, “checks and balances,” does not provide useful insight into the majoritarian problem of democracy. Checks and balances are supposed to prevent the concentration of power in too few hands. But power is not the only problem in a democracy, and “the majority rules” fails as a maxim in the long run because majority rule invariably decays into what minorities rightly come to regard as oppressive occupation. We sense that minorities ought to be respected in a democracy, but we have no clear way of distinguishing benign dissidents — the loyal opposition — from malignant ones. The Constitution is silent on the mechanics of identifying the loyal opposition and giving it voice. This is not surprising, for the Constitution was drafted in a climate of very uneasy antagonism, which it awkwardly and hideously attempted to resolve by counting “unfree persons” (slaves) on a discounted basis for the purpose of establishing state populations and hence congressional representation. The Southern states, in other words, entered the Union as a semi-loyal opposition. Not only were they determined to preserve slavery in the teeth of Yankee hostility, but they insisted on inflating their size on the backs of their slaves.

Over the course of the next seventy years, the people of the majority became convinced that the minority, pro-slavery view was malignant. A terrible, very bloody war was fought, and the majority (eventually) won. Slavery was extinguished. But among the flurry of Constitutional amendments that crowned the majority victory, no provision was made for avoiding a repetition of the conflict, and the theory and practice of loyal opposition was ignored. It still is. We still rely on ad hoc, pragmatic solutions to governmental impasses. We wait for them to happen, as if counting on miracles. Sooner or later, impatience does the trick. But impatience can never be a part of orderly procedure.

The very idea of loyal opposition is unnatural. We are naturally hostile to our opponents — that’s just human nature. But it is to curb and correct the impulses of human nature that we subject ourselves to the confusion and inefficiency of democratic governments. We understand the role of elections in democracy, but that’s where our wisdom stops. We don’t know how to recognize or accommodate loyal opposition. We tend to mistake for it the minuet of political parties, a profoundly cooperative enterprise even in times of legislative gridlock. There is no loyal opposition currently at work in Washington. It wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. (Take your pick: George Packer’s earnest The Unwinding or Mark Leibovich’s rollicking This Town.)

Majoritarian oppression is unlikely in the United States because the nation is so plural. We’re said to be polarized, these days, but we’re polarized along a multiplicity of poles. Guns, health care, free markets, unions, education — there aren’t enough people aligned identically on these and other issues to seize control of the government. In Egypt, as in other Islamic countries, it is different, because there is one overarching issue: religion. The majority position in the West is that religion has no place in the operation of a democracy. The people of what used to be called “Christendom” learned this lesson in a succession of bloody conflicts that preceded American independence. A few leaders of Islamic countries, most notably Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, have sought to keep religion out of government, but the restraint tends to be elitist and unpopular. Ordinary Egyptians and Syrians have yet to internalize the rule that religious democracy is impossible. Ordinary Americans can’t show them the way, because, while we learned the lesson, we didn’t finish the course. Until we do — until we develop an articulate and functional doctrine of loyal opposition — we ought to refrain from oppressing the world with our own half-baked conception of democracy.

Megan, Ryan, and Will have been enjoying the scenery at Glacier National Park. They’ve gone hiking to the Hidden Lake Overlook. It sounds idyllic — like the beginning of a horror thriller. Nor does it set my mind to rest to contemplate their drive across Interstate Highway 80 in Nevada — especially after reading the review in today’s paper of an apparently lousy movie in which two jerks get stuck/lost in Death Valley. Suddenly I understand why I feel so safe at home: no one has ever set a scary movie in Yorkville.

While Kathleen worked another late evening, I watched yet another movie: State of Play. I was reading This Town, Mark Leibovich’s laugh/cry book about Washington, and mention of the Washington Post Company’s sale of Newsweek reminded me of a more recent sale to Jeff Bezos.  I thought it would be interesting to see State of Play in a new perspective. Which was curious, in its way, because State of Play came out only four years ago. It looks a lot older.

Four years ago, Ben Affleck was just beginning his post-Gigli turnaround. He had made the sterling Hollywoodland in 2006, but it went largely unappreciated at the time, despite his very fine performance and an even more amazing one by Diane Lane. Company Men and The Town, in 2010, would reestablish his career, but things were still uncertain enough the year before for him to caricature his washed-up reputation in Mike Judge’s extraordinary Extract. In State of Play, he plays a flawed nice guy who turns out, at the last minute, not to be a nice guy. Russell Crowe is a shoeleathery reporter of prodigious resourcefulness who works for the Washington Globe. Rachel McAdams is the peppery tyro who represents the threat of new media to old-school newspapers before, of course, signing on as the reporter’s Girl Friday. Helen Mirren plays the embattled editor in search of sales, and Robin Wright Penn (as she then was) is the nice guy’s beautiful, humiliated wife. Director Kevin Macdonald knows exactly how to deal with his somewhat cobbled screenplay, and he never allows his film to take its issues (the demise of print journalism and the rise of the surveillance state) too seriously. State of Play is a perfectly satisfying popcorn movie, worth seeing just for its winsome coda, a sequence, showing the step-by-step manufacture of a daily newspaper, that always makes me cry.

I love the old movies, but I’m surprised that State of Play is already one of them.

***

It was only after I’d written the foregoing that I remembered being asked out to lunch by Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil. Ray had the stitches taken out of his arm, which of course meant getting rid of the plaster cast first; the great news was that there was no need to replace the cast. That deserved celebrating, I thought, so, against my shut-in inclinations, I got dressed and took the subway for the first time in so long that I almost went uptown. Then it turned out that my Metro Card had expired. Not to worry. Lunch at the Knickerbocker was classic: a witty trainee waiter was on hand to keep us on our toes. Oysters, fish and chips, chocolate sundaes, not to mention beverages — how is it that Fossil and I are still walking the streets? Afterward, we peered into a few University Place shopwindows before patronizing the downtown branch of Agata & Valentina, which I hadn’t been to before. I bought dinner — very handy! Dinner for two nights, really. It was lovely: the absence of Upper East Siders made me feel that I was on the Riviera. I came home in a taxi, up Park Avenue almost all the way. There is something about the Park Avenue route, from Union Square through Grand Central and on up into my own part of town that makes me take stock of my life. I usually conclude that I am older.

Meanwhile, Megan, Ryan, and Will are in Idaho. Fifty years ago, on a camping trip, I crossed from Idaho into Canada near Bonner’s Ferry. But I still can’t quite believe that there is such a place as Idaho. What I mean, of course, is that I can’t believe that there are people who want to be there, so far from everything that is important to me about human life. Taking stock of my life on Park Avenue (which I appreciate for its arboreal medians but do not find particularly grand), I understood that I have lost the ability to imagine living more than five blocks from it, in either direction. It’s a lucky side-effect of my Gotham provinciality that I have always made an exception for San Francisco.

In the end, I watched three movies yesterday, Kicking and Screaming (as noted) and then two French specials, De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone), which I hadn’t seen before, and Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One), which I had never found quite so thrilling before. More about the movies in a minute. In between movies, I finished off this week’s New Yorker, where Alec Wilkinson’s profile of the nonpareil art forger who generally goes by the name of Mark Landis got the electrons in my brain jumping again.

“The Giveaway” is full of laugh-out-loud passages, but an abiding sadness prevents its being just plain fun.

In 1988, when Landis was thirty-three, he lost his savings in a real-estate investment and “returned to Mississippi in disgrace,” he said. He moved into his grandmother’s house in Laurel, with his mother and his stepfather, who had moved there to take care of her. He stayed in his room, hardly eating, and before long he grew catatonic and was admitted to a hospital.

Between 1988 and 1992, Landis gave away no art. For a year, he lived on disability payments in the company of nine other men in a halfway house, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He finally left and enrolled at the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, where he took economics and math classes. He lived in a housing project, where the majority of the tenants were elderely black women. In church, he was the only white man among the congregants. When he started donating [his forgeries] again, recipients would sometimes collect pieces from his apartment. “They must have thought it was strange that you’d live in a housing project, if you had enough money to give away art to museums,” he told me. “I guess they thought I was eccentric.”

He stopped showing his gift deeds to his mother, though. She might have been proud of him when he lived in California, and she believed he was an art dealer and a benefactor, but the charade was not possible to sustain at close hand. “She wasn’t stupid,” he said. “One day I showed her one, and she just looked at me and said, ‘That’s nice’.”

It’s hard not to feel sorry, more condescendingly than empathetically, for Mr Landis, or for Father Arthur Scott, SJ, as Landis presented himself now and then, wearing the clerical collar but also driving his late mother’s red Cadillac. Told of this strange man’s forgeries of minor works by second-tier artists, all that I could conjure up was the forgiving smirk of Tennessee Williams. Diagnosed twice with schizophrenia, Mark Landis appears never have been involved with anyone other than his mother, who comes off in the piece as a milder Auntie Mame. As a would-be philanthropist who gives away his productions without any thought of remuneration, he wants to be famous (or at least highly regarded by grateful museum directors) for things he hasn’t done. I see nothing criminal in his gentle frauds, but there is no doubt that he is morally in the wrong, and probably sane enough to know it. Not funny. His stunts may be naughty, but the sharpness of his hunger for respect lets all the air out of them.

But what about forgeries generally? Since I’ve got no money in the game, it’s easy for me to trust my eye. Its first check is for beauty, and beauty is beauty no matter who produces it. The converse of this is that great artists can, and do, produce unbeautiful things. The important corollary is that I put myself under no pressure to attribute beautiful things to famous names. The second check is for characteristics. The painters who appeal to me most cover their canvases with characteristic ways of handling paint, and it is unlikely that any forger would capture them all. The third check is for what some might regard as arrogance. The importance of any picture is an invisible arc running from the canvas to my mind. It exists only when we are together in the gallery.

These principles, if that’s what they are, making me receptive to forgeries. They ought to be properly labeled and accredited, but don’t take them down because they’re not by Vermeer. I want to know as much as I can about art, but not in order to protect myself from being taken advantage of. As I say, this is not a problem: I’m not in the market for valuable art.

***

Rust and Bone is a decidedly unbeautiful movie. It did not appeal to me nearly as much as The Beat That My Heart Skipped did eight years ago, partly because Thomas, the hero of the earlier pictured (played so mightily by Romain Duris) was a tormented artist, and his story a surreptitiously romantic one in a way that reminded me of Flaubert. This dimension is missing from the new picture. Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) works with whales in an entertainment facility. My grandson would adore the kind of show that she and her troupers put on — until a terrible but rather vague accident. I thought that the loss of her lower legs and feet would be the worst thing that happens in Rust and Bone, but it’s not, because the guy in the picture, a mec called Alain who seems incapable of minding his five year-old son, commits a world-class error of judgment. Alain’s surface appeal never quite won me over. When he wasn’t fighting — boxing for money in illicit matches — he seemed a gentle giant, but perhaps he was only simple. Sullenness is the only aspect of adolescence that he appears to have outgrown, and on some fronts it might be argued that his adolescence has yet to be reached. I’ll be reserving judgment on Matthias Schoenaerts (who plays Alain) until Blood Ties, Guillaume Canet’s forthcoming movie about crime in Brooklyn the Seventies. Marion Cotillard is great in her part — ça va sans dire — but the part was not thrilling enough to distract me from worries about her legs in real life. How did they do that?

M Canet’s Tell No One is an adaptation of Harlan Coben’s novel. Kathleen read it years ago, and I tried to read it, too, but I couldn’t get past the first scene, which was full of furiously bad writing. The director seems committed to rendering pop American styles with a slight French accent, which makes his films challenging for American audiences, in that most Americans still won’t see them because they’re in French, while many of the rest of us will wish for something “more French.” Little White Lies, a remake of The Big Chill with an exclusively American playlist, works best as a sampler of how French people do things that American people do, too, but in a slightly different way. With Blood Ties, M Canet will be throwing off the burden of French altogether; in addition to Ms Cotillard and Mr Schoenaerts, his cast includes Clive Owen and Billy Crudup. I suppose a remake of Tell No One with George Clooney is not totally improbable.

But for all its accents aigus, Tell No One is a spirited thriller with a topnotch cast that hurtles through Paris like a runaway train.

When Megan posted from Sheridan, Wyoming late yesterday afternoon, I was concerned. They’d never make it to Glacier National Park by bedtime! It took a moment to register that their speedy, two-day trip to Rapid City was simply their escape velocity. Now that they were out West, they could slow down. They’ve just passed Belgrade, Montana. I’m not sure that they know yet that the next exit, I kid you not, will be for Manhattan. There has to be somebody in New York who can stand at a bar and say, “I’m from Manhattan, Montana.” After a few drinks, you start sounding like Lucy, after a few ladlings of Vita-Vegemin. (Thank you, Google Maps.)

“Jammie Day” sounds decadent and self-indulgent, and, besides, you can’t have one all by yourself. But I can’t think what else to call these off-days, which seem to befall me once every two weeks or so. I am always especially tired, usually from the moment of waking up. The immediately previous days have been unusually productive, as a rule. It’s nothing to worry about personally, but it feels unprofessional. I don’t want to appear to be shirking. Shirking what, exactly, though?

So, anyway, I watched Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s first movie. I watched it because Caleb Crain remarked that David Haglund’s very nice review of Necessary Errors (in the Times) begins with a quote from the opening scene.

“Oh, I’ve been to Prague,” the lead in Noah Baumbach’s 1995 film, “Kicking and Screaming,” says to his girlfriend, shortly bound for that city. “Well, I haven’t ‘been to Prague’ been to Prague,” he clarifies, “but I know that thing, that ‘stop shaving your armpits, read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” date a sculptor, now-I-know-how-bad-American-coffee-is’ thing.” His attempted put-down hints at how quickly the post-college stint in post-Communist Prague became, for a certain set of sophisticated liberal-arts types, a cliché.

What’s sad about the men in Kicking and Screaming is that they haven’t “been alive” been alive. They’ve only read about life, or seen it on game shows. I didn’t find the movie funny at all, except for the book-club scene, which made me roar with laughter. Chet (Eric Stoltz) delivers a nice summary of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. He begins by expressing relief that they both know Spanish. The other member of this “both,” the hapless Otis (Carlos Jacott), looks like a very unhappy horse at the mention of a foreign language. Then he fastens his eyes on the back of the book in desperation. It is only after his gassy regurgitation of what he reads there, spiced with bits of Chet’s précis, that Chet asks if he has read the book, but you’ve known it from that first terrified glance. “I’ve been remiss,” says Otis. That sums up his life. It sums up all their lives. On top of that, they weren’t very likable. I did find myself wishing that Grover (Josh Hamilton) had a passport, and could get himself to Prague.

In today’s Times, the book under review was Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach? A few years ago, I read Edmundson’s Why Read?, and rather liked it. (Good grief, one of the earliest Daily Blague entries!) If I knew where it was, I’d pull it down and dip into it again. Of the new book, Michael Roth writes,

Mr. Edmundson worries that too many professors have lost the courage of their own passions, depriving their students of the fire of inspiration. Why teach? Because great professors can “crack the shell of convention,” shining a light on a life’s different prospects. They never aim at conversion, only at what Emerson called “aversion” — bucking conformity so as to discover possibility.

I’m all for this, but something is missing. I’m reminded of a remark made by David Denby in Great Books, his account of going back to Columbia for a year and taking its great-books seminar. Every generation must rediscover the classics on its own, he observes. I’ve mentioned this many times before, I think, but I don’t think I’ve ever stressed something that probably ought not to be left to implication: in order to recognize classics, students have to encounter them, and this can’t happen if there is too much focus on the recent, the “contemporary.” It occurs to me that all liberal-arts professors are necessarily historians. They are intimately familiar with the development of the novel, or the changing tastes in oil painting, or the success arguments on a philosophical point. It’s not just the political historians who are historians, in other words. Everything we do — everything that we can learn — has a history, usually a lot of it. There is far too much history for anyone to learn, beyond the barest outlines, in four years of undergraduate life, but what a good teacher ought to do, along with inspiring students to think for themselves, is to persuade those students that the history of anything that interests you is also interesting.

Watching Kicking and Screaming, I wondered what the new graduates had learned in college, if anything. I suspected that one thing that they hadn’t learned was that they were the latest leaves on a very long vine. Life was as flat to them as their sense of the past.

On Sunday, we saw Blue Jasmine. It came to the theatre across the street while we were out on Fire Island, so we didn’t have to go out of our way. We just had to show up in time. We went to the first show on Sunday morning. The line for tickets, as we approached, was a bad sign, but there turned out to be no competition for good seats, because most people wanted to see The Butler. (As do I.)

I remember when Crimes and Misdemeanors came out, nearly twenty-five years ago, and how shocking it was that someone was murdered in a Woody Allen movie. By a hitman! Blue Jasmine goes one step further. Although unmistakably a Woody Allen project, it is a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett. She makes the movie. I don’t want to suggest that Mr Allen lost control of it somehow; on the contrary, I think that he finally worked up the courage to let a brilliant actor run with her part. In most Woody Allen movies — the ones that I can think of off the top of my head — the pretty girl (Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow) or beautiful woman (Charlotte Rampling, Marion Cotillard) is a muse of sorts; her role is to bewitch the male lead. There is no male lead in Blue Jasmine. The film is something of a solo turn, a one-woman show. Or, rather, maybe, a two-person show, with just you and her. You alone with her.

Blue Jasmine is said to be a mash-up of Streetcar Named Desire and “the Ruth Madoff story.” It’s clear that both of these elements provided working inspiration for the project. However, the roots of Blue Jasmine lie in Medea. In a moment of extreme humiliation, a woman commits an unspeakable act of vengeance, and, this being an update, develops a serious mental disorder as a consequence, because she cannot live with what she has done. Her attempts to deny it inevitably explode in her face. Also in keeping with the modernization of the tale, there is nothing initially attractive, except for her appearance, about this woman. Monstrous in her collapse, she was narcissistic to begin with. She belongs in a secluded convent, one where the mortification of the flesh is rigorous but the habits are elegant. Sadly for her, there haven’t been many such places since 1789.

Why care about someone so heartlessly self-involved, so useless to society? Because she is played so rivetingly by Cate Blanchett, of course — and the encounter is not prolonged beyond the two-hour mark. There is also the operation of Woody Allen’s magic. He lets you think that you’re watching a mash-up of Streetcar and “Ruth Madoff” right up until the moment when you expect the Bernie Madoff character (played by Alec Baldwin) to blurt out the bad news about his balance sheets. But that’s not what he does — he blurts out something very different. And there has never been the whisper of a suggestion that Ruth Madoff did what Jasmine does in response. It is only at this very late moment that the true nature of the story is revealed. You’re left with the grim pleasure of reconsidering everything that you’ve seen.

Everyone else in Blue Jasmine is very good, but, in his usual fashion, Mr Allen confines his actors within their commedia dell’arte roles. Sally Hawkins is the happy-go-lucky girl with a very short memory. Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale are big dogs from New Jersey. Michael Stuhlbarg’s dentist is a joke with a nightmarish punchline. Peter Sarsgaard is the one member of the cast who manages to tweak Woody Allen’s formula so as to put himself in control, by making himself as empty as the privileged trust-funder whom he plays. Like Ewan McGregor, Mr Sarsgaard brings a Zen-like perversity to acting, and even here, his character, though duped, turns out have lots of sharp, pointy teeth. (It would have better if they’d cut his tantrum, which somewhat spoils the effect.) I don’t mean to be complaining. It’s not a defect, in the end, that Ms Blanchett burns on a different plane. On the contrary, it feels like something altogether new and wonderful, and we have to go back and watch all the other Woody Allen movies for inklings and intimations.

***

At lunch — I went out to stop myself from checking Facebook every three minutes for pioneer news, and was rewarded upon my return with newly-published photographs of a climbing road presumably west of Rapid City, presumably posted by my still-intact daughter — I read Nicholson Baker’s dandy essay in the current edition of Harper’s, “The Case Against Algebra II.” More about that later. What sizzled in my brain as I read the piece was this question: why are Bill and Melinda Gates and Arne Duncan so keen  on teaching of a perfectly useless and even more perfectly (pardon my French) sadistic course?

My answer makes no sense, comes completely from out in left field, &c&c. But bear with. George Packer, the Unwinding is still on my mind (and so is your book).

The people who advocate Algebra II speak it, because Algebra II is the language of organized money.

From the Pearson text that Baker quotes:

If a is a real number for which the denominator of a rational function f(x) is zero, then a is not in the domain of f(x). The graph of f(x) is not continuous as x=a and the function has a point of discontinuity at x=a.

This is an unnecessary way of pointing out the obvious: no number can be divided by zero. There is no need whatever for the dehumanizing crapage of the text!

Remember: with organized money, as with organized crime, it is the money (or the crime) that does the organizing, not the human agents. The human agents are simply among its victims, helplessly driven by the money in their pockets to provide it with means of expansion, by flooding them with the existential horror of someone else’s competitive advantage. Organized money requires its victims — its avatars, you might say — to regard the world in terms such as x=a. In real life, of course, nothing equals anything else. Only money balances out.

Algebra II, as a requirement for admission to the best schools, weeds out the cranks who aren’t cut out for organized money.

To all but the last of the haircuts, I would bring Will uptown in a Vital black car, ordered by Kathleen, because you really cannot even dream of finding an empty taxi in Soho at four in the afternoon. He was never more the little gentleman than on these rides. He would sat still, even without a car seat; he would make occasional observations (which, in the early days, I couldn’t much understand) about what he saw out the window. He was always extraordinarily well-behaved, except that it wasn’t behavior, it was just who Will was and is.

He has apparently been very much this ideal traveler on his trip out West, so far at least. Yesterday, his parents crossed a good third of country, driving from the Delaware River to the capital of Wisconsin.

***

In other losses, I finished Necessary Errors over the weekend. The rich and full account of a young American man’s gap year in Prague, twenty-odd years ago, the novel comes to an end on several levels all at once. There is the book itself: you’ve read the last page, and there isn’t any more. Jacob, the young man, is on his way back to the United States, about to open a letter from a lover whom he may never see again. Prague itself has all but completely put socialism behind it, and is waking up every day a Western city, for better or worse. You are still trying to recover from the loss of Melinda, the beautiful Englishwoman who “defects” from her circle of English-teaching expats with an old friend of the hero’s. With only a few pages to go, Jacob shares a letter that he receives from her. Everything ends. For a book about twentysomethings in a time of peace, Necessary Errors is remarkably alert to mortality.

I have never met anyone like Melinda, but I’ve fallen in love with her type over and over again in film: English, university-educated, incapable of uttering a banality, and ravishing to look at. Melinda rather immediately took on the self-possessed glamor of Charlotte Rampling and Saffron Burrows. Her voice, I could tell, had a bottom. And everything that she said was pitch-perfect and true; although gay, Caleb Crain must love the Melindas of the world as much as I do. “You do turn everything to that account, don’t you,” she says when Jacob stammers his belief that the man whom Melinda has been talking about is not gay; she wasn’t talking about sex.

It’s presumably not just for the sex that Melinda leaves her boyfriend and all-but-fiancé, the equally glamorous Rafe, for Carl, a rather good-looking straight friend of Jacob’s who comes to visit and who steals, as it were, the golden apples. The problem between Rafe and Melinda is that Rafe is bored with Prague; he wants to give Kazakhstan a try, and that’s not the direction that Melinda has in mind. (With Carl, she  decamps to Rome.) Crain says something outstandingly clever about Rafe.

He had the excitement of a boy looking forward to a math test that has scared all the other boys, not because he’s better at math but because he’s better at thinking while scared.

The conversations that Jacob has with Melinda about her love-life are marvelously Jamesian, shot through with the tacit acknowledgment that to speak too clearly about love is to misunderstand it. As if they understood it! This is a book to read again, after I’ve taught myself Czech.

***

Along with its pleasures, Necessary Errors gave me the opportunity to be honest about something. For the past couple of years — ten, perhaps — I’ve been berating myself for not having had the courage to do something like what Jacob and his friends have done in the novel, to have gone to Europe after college and given living there a try. This complaint is accompanied by the automatic assumption that, had I done so, I should never have returned, because, according to my little reverie, Europe would have suited me so much better. It is all very pretty, this sentimentalized regret. So I needed the good poke in the pants that Necessary Errors gave me. My reason for not going to Europe had nothing to do with a want of courage or resolution. It was all about hating the life of a student. What I dreaded was the prospect of spending a night in a youth hostel — even if only once. Even in those days, I could have said, although it hadn’t occurred to me yet, that my idea of “roughing it” is staying at home. When I travel, I expect room service. No room service, no travel — it’s really that simple. What I want out of travel is an improved version of home; it’s not uncommon for me to have a brainwave about organizing my closets when I’m thousands of miles away from them. Over the weekend, I saw an ad for tourism in Hawaii that showed a young man peering over some boulders at molten lava. “Give your other vacations an inferiority complex,” ran the copy. This way of thinking about travel in particular and about life in general is contemptible to me — in the affectless way that dog food is contemptible.

I also didn’t want to spend any more time around students. The characters in Necessary Errors seem to be normal young people, enjoying their youth. I couldn’t envy them that. Youth was never a good fit on me.

It was an excellent distraction. I had just said goodbye to Megan — this time for real, finally; I won’t see her again until Thanksgiving — and I was having trouble speaking. Then we got to the top of Avenue C. I was in a taxi with Ray Soleil, having just overseen the removal of some items from Megan’s apartment; now we were on our way to deposit them in the downtown storage unit on Sixty-Second Street. As we pulled under the drive (it’s still Avenue C along the river), I saw this gigantic plume of very black smoke pouring quite unmistakably from one of the levels of the Queensborough Bridge. Some sort of fire was raging in the span over the East Channel of the East River, between Roosevelt Island and Queens. In the picture above, it might seem that something on Roosevelt was burning, but from the top of Avenue C, the smoke rose from a point over the river. Hours later, there still isn’t much news about it, but a truck seems to have exploded. We did see orange flames through the smoke.

Later, after lunch, we found that we had to walk home. Traffic on First and Second Avenues was at close to a standstill. There were few taxis, none of them empty. A dramatic afternoon, in its way. I was very grateful for the superficial disruption, although it must have brought massive inconvenience to many and rather worse, I imagine, to those in the vicinity of the truck.

As I carried Will to the car in which his other grandparents would drive him across New Jersey to a house in Pennsylvania where, tomorrow, Ryan’s mother’s family will celebrate its annual reunion — Megan and Ryan will join them after they’ve cleared out their flat — he told me that I had to come out to California soon, “because I don’t want to be out there all by myself.” I managed to keep on walking.

Early Sunday morning, the young O’Neills will begin their drive out West. They’re looking forward to a day at Glacier National Park, en route. Otherwise, they’ll try to make good time. We can’t wait to hear that they’ve reached San Francisco.

I’m feeling rather crumpled, as one does after tears not quite completely suppressed. I’m happy to be in the middle of Necessary Errors, which is as big a book as The Corrections, or at least as deeply plumbed a one. The novel also reminds me of What Maisie Knew — the indirection stemming, in this case, from the protagonist’s ignorance of just what is going on around him, and his finding out, slowly, where to look. It is astonishing that an attentive and highly-educated young man can be so innocent, but I remember being so myself.

On the whole, I’m finding Jacob Putnam, the protagonist of Caleb Crain’s new novel, Necessary Errors, to be appealing and sympathetic. As he is a big fan of Stendhal and Flaubert, I’m not sure that we’d get along in real life, but I’m enjoying the ways in which Necessary Errors tracks L’Éducation sentimentale and Le rouge et le noir, especially as Jacob is not nearly as shallow and callous as his romantic predecessors. There’s only one off-putting note in Jacob’s response to the world around him, and it gets louder as I turn the pages. It usually involves the word, “hunger.”

Jacob looked over the other men in the club with open hunger and curiosity. It seemed a place to be unabashed. He didn’t know if he wanted Markus or one of the others.

Jacob is a bright young Harvard grad who has only recently realized that he is gay; he is still, as a teacher of English in newly post-Communist Prague, finding himself; and, like Julien Sorel and Frédéric Moreau, he is doing so in a time of social upheaval that promises opportunities for self-transformation. Crain is very discreet about Jacob’s sex; beyond some kissing and caressing, we don’t see much. (I haven’t so far, anyway.) But this agreeable coyness seems only to make more lurid the nakedly generalized desire that overcomes Jacob in gay bars. It isn’t the sex that’s shameful; it’s the surrender.

By now, of course, I’ve realized that this is all about me, not Jacob Putnam. I’m the odd one, not Jacob. For a while, I thought that I was stubbing my eye on “hunger” because it is not the angle of desire that a straight man would emphasize. Straight men hunt. This means concealing their hunger with an appearance of some kind of assured ferocity. It is as though the ability to predate replaces the need implied by hunger. I’m assuming that the sexual impulse, among men straight and gay, is the same; but its expression seems to be colored very differently. It might be said that the gay man, acknowledging the need in his desire, is more honest than the bluffing, puffing straight man; and it might be countered that the straight man faces a stiffer challenge, because he must attract a person whose world view, most especially on the subject of sex and its consequences, is quite different from his own.

But “hunger” still bothered me, because it seemed unworthy of Jacob. That this thoughtful, well-intentioned memorizer of Emily Dickinson should yield to a much grosser appetite disappointed me. And that he would do so, of course, at a bar, because alcohol makes surrender so much easier. Jacob himself might not drink very much, but the very air in a gay bar is erogenous. Either that or absolutely terrifying — depending on how much you’ve had to drink. Because I’ve had so many more gay friends than straight, I’ve spent more time in gay bars than in their straight counterparts; in fact, I can’t remember actually being in anything like a straight meat market. I have never gotten to know a woman with whom I had a first encounter over drinks. This is very largely attributable to the time in which I grew up, now remembered as permissive but in then quite constrained, as to liquor as well as to sex. I feel the luckier for that, than otherwise.

But there is something in me that is determined not to surrender. (Why not just say, I am determined not to surrender?) Do I fear it? I suppose I must. What are we talking about here? Surrendering to another person, whatever that might mean? Or setting aside that other important aspect of autonomy, responsibility for one’s social self-control and good behavior. I would never surrender to another human being, sexually or otherwise, and I would be disgusted by anyone’s offer of surrender to me. (Mutual surrender would compound the problem, not cancel it out.) My amour propre, self-respect, call it what you will, is much too strong, too powerful a source of other pleasures, for me to consider giving it up. As for the other kind of surrender, are you mad? Experience attests that mortification is the one and only outcome of experiments in that direction; happily, I have never wound up in jail — but let that be a warning to me.

It’s academic, at my age, given my way of life. But I still wish for nice people like Jacob that they would get to know people before having sex with them. Abandon can be exciting, I’m told, but my own constitution has drawn pleasure from giving pleasure, and this is something that you can do much better if you know the person whom you want to please. There’s a lot of writing out there that suggests that the great thing about sex is that you get to check your personal baggage at the bedroom door, that sex is an escape from self. But is this true? Doesn’t this reduce sex to an adventure, a lark? In which case there are better things to do. (Become a missionary.) In Jacob’s case, it seems to be only the prospective part of sex that is mysterious.

They embraced quickly for a leave-taking, and the smell of Luboš, rising off his body as they touched, first disgusted Jacob, then melted him, the second response succeeding the first almost instantly, disorientingly. This was the body he had been lying next to, the aroma reminded him, with whom he had taken a simple pleasure. He had somehow forgotten it upon waking up.

I’d be happier if Jacob’s simple pleasures could follow simpler meetings. Then he might skip that initial, disorienting disgust. But wait! There’s lots of Necessary Errors still to read.