In this morning’s Times, I read the obituary of Carl Degler, a Stanford historian who died at a great age. I was assigned his book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, at prep school, fifty years ago. I did not read it then or afterward, but I carted it around with me for decades. I doubt that I still have it, but I can’t be sure without checking the shelves here and in storage. I was faintly surprised to read that Degler was an early advocate of affirmative action and feminism, because, it’s clear, I thought that he was much older than he was, or at least a lot more than thirty-odd years older than I was.

Out of Our Past was a large, thick paperback, unusual in those days, and I was put off by the jacket art, which featured a gigantic eagle frowning with righteous indignation. The image had clearly been lifted from a publication of the Civil War era, and I don’t think that anything could have been a bigger turn-off. I found the mere thought of the Nineteenth Century oppressive — all those black, hot, wrinkled clothes! All that untidy hair! (I was responding to old photographs; it would be a long time before I understood that earlier periods of history appealed to me because they had not been subjected to the scrutiny of photography.) And there was always something bogus about the Civil War. If it had indeed been the triumph of justice and freedom that teachers said it was, you certainly couldn’t tell that from looking at social arrangements on the ground. Black people tended to be poor. (Unless they were entertainers — a euphemism that one ran into. “There must be a lot of entertainers in your building,” said my mother-in-law to Kathleen in 1980.) They lived in unlovely places. They were conspicuously absent from my suburban hometown (which was popular with Southern expats). Triumph of hypocrisy would be more like it.

I should have liked my country better had the Cold War not, throughout my childhood, provided Blimpish fools with so many speaking opportunities.

If I find that I still have Degler’s book, I will give it some respectful attention, notwithstanding its lethal subtitle.

***

I’ve been trying to sort out two very tangled but clearly distinct strands of anti-bourgeois passion. The simpler one is the political-philosophical tradition presided over by Karl Marx. (Is it important to know what makes Marxists different from Marxians?) It is easy to see why this adherents of this tradition don’t like the middle classes, and it’s just as easy to see how wrong-headed (because of idealism) their understanding of human nature is. The more complex and far more insidious hatred of the intellectuals is more difficult to grasp. Intellectuals were frequently, perhaps even usually, socialists or communists, but, as John Carey explains in his wonderful study, The Intellectuals and the Masses, they feared and loathed the proletariat. They did not seriously believe that, shackles thrown off, means of production seized, workers would ever understand the superiority of — intellectuals. The intellectuals’ fear and loathing of the bourgeoisie was quite different. Almost all intellectuals, as their mere possession of educations betrayed, sprang from bourgeois origins. This they hastened to conceal with robust denunciations of their roots.

I could have been a classic intellectual. My parents were steady, sensible people (although my mother did have a greater than normal allotment of something that she was always attributing to me, “flair”), while I was a lazy daydreamer who wanted nothing so much as to talk about books. I ought to have grown up full of contempt for my parents’ materialism. Instead, I developed a contempt for the quality of their materialism, which wasn’t very high. They had no interest in fine art — and by fine art, here, I mean the courtly arts of ancien régime Europe. They had no time for history, which, even then, I understood to be the explanation of things, real things in the real world. (Why did practical steam engines first appear in the Eighteenth Century, and not at some other time? For the matter of that, what does “practical” really mean?) I was, in short, a great deal more materialistic than my parents. My critique of their views came, ultimately, from the right, not from the left.

Which made me interested in aristocrats, a category of persons sincerely detested (and, even more, mistrusted) by my Midwestern parents, both of whom had been relocated to the New York area in the Thirties. Aristocrats were, obviously, very interesting. But it was also clear that, as a class, they had failed. It was probably unwise, I concluded, to put so much emphasis on the chances of birth and parentage. So it would be better to say that some aristocrats were interesting — probably not very many. And, then, only at a distance: what made many aristocrats interesting was their terrible behavior. And that shatterproof self-satisfaction! I’ve got a grand example right here. I’m reading Moon Tiger, the Penelope Lively novel that won the Booker Prize in 1987. The title, I fear, is hardly better than The Forces That Shaped Modern America, but the novel is a great read. Here is the protagonist’s mother’s complacent complaint about what her daughter is going to do next:

“Claudia is going to Oxford,” says Mother. “Of course quite a lot of girls do now and she has always been one for getting her own way.” (139)

I barked with laughter when I read it; typing it out just now, I barked again. Mother will be saying next that Claudia is condescending to do Oxford a favor.

A lot of young people, I read, worry during adolescence that they will never grow up and become physically adult — that they will be stuck in an outgrown tail of childhood. What I wondered about was whether I would become an intellectual. First of all, I wasn’t sure that I was smart enough. Oh, I was very smart and all that, but so was everybody else who counted. It was like that line in the episode of Lewis (Season 7, I believe) where the beautiful scientist says, “This is Oxford. We’re all clever.” Beyond that, I felt that I was missing a key component required for the intellectual makeup. It was like worrying about being gay — I was almost certain that I missed this piece of equipment. Or perhaps I had another piece of equipment that would interfere with my becoming an intellectual.

I didn’t know what it was until quite recently — what it was that prevented me from becoming an intellectual. I’ll try to say it as neutrally as possible: I am unable to believe that any idea is more real, more true, or more vigorous than the meanest human being. The attraction of endowing ideals with an overriding significance that is lacking in shambling men and women is clear enough, but so is the horror, especially after the first half of the last century. Equally fraught is the positing of groups and the assignment of membership in those groups to people you don’t really know. The only groups that any of us halfway understand are the groups to which we think we belong, and to the extent that we’re comfortable with those identifications, we ought to regard them as deformations.

So much for the high-minded angle. I am also too attached to living in clean and comfortable places, surrounded by agreeable objects and regular meals. Too bourgeois.

A word about the Charlie Hebdo killings. I’ve been very confused about them — until today.

Today I came to understand that “free speech” has nothing, aside from the matter of provocation, to do with the slayings. Free speech, as a right guaranteed by modern democratic states, can be infringed only by the state. A disagreement between private persons, as the terrorists and their victims were here, does not become more than that simply because one party said things that the other didn’t like. The killers had no right to kill the journalists or the hostages — let me be perfectly clear: these horrific crimes were absolutely unjustifiable — but they would have had no more or less a right to kill anyone at all, had the cause of the dispute been one of the myriad things that breed feuding neighbors, or an affair of the heart, or professional jealousy, or — anything at all. The journalists do not move to a special class of victims because they were “speaking out,” any more than a trapeze artist who falls to her death suffers a thereby more momentous fate.

But when it is the state that violates its citizens’ rights, which are supposed to be guaranteed by that very state, a killing — or any other oppressive action — is darkened by an order of magnitude.

It is true that states vary the interest that they take in preventing likely crimes. Where victims are poor or members of a minority group, states can be very remiss indeed. Such was not the case here, however. One of the victims was a police officer detailed to watch over the journalists.

What if the terrorists had opened fire on some shoppers at the Galeries Lafayette, and taken others hostage? What sort of discussion would we be having then? Almost certainly there would be more critical interest in the environment from which the killers sprang. No one would be satisfied by the pat explanation that Muslims hate consumer capitalism (although the followers of Sayyid Qutb do hate it). Instead, there would be a repeated outbreak of hand-wringing over the economic plight of Mégrebins stuck in the banlieues, such as erupted several years ago when youths took to burning cars. There might even be a clearer recognition that it is fatuous, in today’s media climate, to expect people of any age to be content with dead-end lives. Bleak economic prospects, so at odds with reality-TV lifestyles, are fueling a massive social resentment along lines last seen in Paris in 1871 — but by no means just in France.

That is the kind of discussion that we ought to be having. It would put a very different construction on the solidarity of European leaders linking arms in the Champs Élysées.

***

On page 36 of Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist writes of Denis Diderot’s art criticism, “These writings marked the beginning of the understanding of exhibitions as publicly received events whose contents could be assessed in terms of newness, originality, and vitality.” The sentence implies, what nobody is likely to contest, that newness, originality, and vitality are virtues integral to art.

But in fact they are merely virtues integral to news. News was what Diderot was providing — news about the art world, but news.

Borrowing a page from DIY enthusiast Obrist, I shall here instruct the reader to supply a paragraph about the warping effect of journalism upon public affairs. Hint: this warping effect is almost entirely the result of paying journalists to make boring and/or complicated matters readily apprehensible to the casual reader. Challenge: write a must-read, 100-word paragraph about Géricault’s Scene of Shipwreck — better known as The Raft of the Medusa.

My own very rough estimate is that a well-grounded mind can devote no more than 20% of its attention to news. Too much news, and the mind becomes topheavy, and capsizes in a sea of incoherence. Happily, there is not enough real news to take up 20% of anybody’s time. Sadly, this fact is concealed behind a blaring pageant of bogus news. Today, bogus news is often concerned with the doings of celebrities. In the Nineteenth Century, there was a lot of bogus news about Progress. Progress was understood to be a semi-divine afflatus that, like a beneficent wind, propelled the nations of the modern West toward ever-greater peace and prosperity. (There were still wars, but domestic peace increased very greatly.) The cascade of new inventions and conveniences was far more exciting than our recent discovery of the Internet. As regrettably extreme as today’s income inequality is, it has not yet repeated the excesses of the Gilded Age. The first time around, spectators were dazzled and shocked by the leaping power of millionaires and superpowers — you might well say that they were electrified.

Progress, which began to be noticed toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, reached its torrential climax two hundred years later. After World War I, only Americans could be heard talking about it. Americans alone seemed to think that anything good had come from the carnage and its termination.

One of the flowers of progress was photography, and its relation to art on the one hand and to journalism on the other makes for fascinating juxtaposition. In one blow, photography obviated the “progress” that painting had been making since the dawn of the Renaissance. The object of this progress was the realization of pictorial illusion, but the reduction of art to a problem of progress — the growing misunderstanding of painting as an activity preoccupied by illusions, ever more expertly captured by painters but never quite so completely as it was captured by photographers — was the doing of journalism. Journalism, always interested in the new, is a natural promoter of progress. Modern journalism, ever since the Thirties, has understood that progress can lead in the “wrong” direction, as it did with the rise of Hitler (widely seen as a progressive figure, at least until the fighting began). But it is fixated on discovering that things are steadily progressing in one direction or the other. And it compounds the problem by struggling to envision this progress in terms that any semi-literate person can easily grasp. Journalism as practiced by the minions of Rupert Murdoch is journalism at its most natural.

Photography, tagged by journalists with the totally incorrect assertion that the camera never lies, quickly became as important to journalism as words, and, in the age of television, much more important. Meanwhile, painting was no longer associated with progress. This had a liberating effect on painters. So did the enormous changes in the nature of patronage that followed the collapse of the ancien régime in which the idea of art had been given its distinctively Western stamp. Painting and art — two different things, as we shall see.

Am I in a dream? No — I’m too aware of being confused. In a dream, confusion is normal and unremarkable. In waking life, confusion is a pain, and something of a madness.

I’m confused because I can’t find a spot of terra firma from which to survey what I see. Is Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of Ways of Curating, crazy? Or is it “just me”? I can’t be sure, because I might be blind.

Blind or blinded or at least blinkered by the environment in which I was brought up, a bourgeois environment in which manners and discretion were tremendously important, if too often distorted by hypocrisy and pointlessness. I have thought through and reformed my manners and my discretion in an attempt to make them sincere and purposeful. But I remain troubled by the belief, which I do not share, that they are somehow unnecessary or damagingly artificial.

Something even more important in the bourgeois environment is making sense. Making sense is not as simple as it sounds, because the rules for making sense are fed to bourgeois children along with their cereal, and only rarely examined consciously. Basically, it is a matter of observing the law — the laws of men and the laws of physics. Pennies must add up to dollars, and behavior must comport with standards of the permissible. If I say, “This is my house,” I must be able to support the statement with deeds and mortgage instruments. If I cannot do that, I am not making sense, no matter how justified I feel.

The bourgeois mind is uncomfortable with the claims of philosophy, because quite often they do not make sense. They describe things that ought to be the case, perhaps, but that aren’t in fact the case. They are not backed up by documents and accounts. They are just words in the air. The bourgeois mind is wary of speculation — curiosity without rigor, or whose rigor is limited to the organization of words.

***

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a fortysomething Swiss fellow. He seems to be a well-intentioned person, highly intelligent if a bit wide-eyed and somewhat humorless. By humorless, I mean that he appears to be capable of keeping a straight face while writing the following description of an exhibition (so to speak) at Zurich’s sewage museum, the Stadtentwasserung.

Cloaca Maxima, as the resulting exhibition was called, addressed themes that affect everyone directly. There were many connections to the permanent collection of the Stadtentwasserung itself, though the point of departure was the video by Fischli and Weiss, which consisted of real-time photographs from observation cameras in the sewers. According to Dominique Laporte’s A History of Shit (1978), waste in Western societies has been gradually domesticated and, hence, banned from public view, the high point being the nineteenth-century hygienist movement. Laporte theorizes that the absolute division between the economy (as the site of filth) and the state (as the site of purity, with an all-filtering sewer) separated the private still further from the public, thereby reinforcing their borders.

Art, by contrast, situates itself within transitions and passages; it opens up opportunities for the public incursions into the private and vice versa. Excrement is freed of its negative connotations by being employed discursively. Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (small sealed cans, each said to contain 30 grams of the artist’s shit) plays with exactly this kind of alchemical transformation — reinforced by the fact that the price per can was comparable to the price for 30 grams of gold.

Whoa! You lost me at Laporte’s theorizing!

Ways of Curating abounds in statements of this kind. They are held, maddeningly, to be self-evident, in no need of argument. (This hermetic quality is reinforced by the reiteration of the names of certain artists and thinkers, some but not all of whom will be familiar to the general reader. They rather powerfully convey the sense that Obrist lives in a bubble.) The most shocking thing about Ways of Curating, however, is Obrist’s bland assumption that he is talking about Art.

***

Regular readers will be familiar with my contention that “conceptual art” is a contradiction in terms, and also with my frustration at failing to suggest a plausible replacement. Good news. Not only has reading Ways of Curating sharpened my grasp of the issue, but Obrist may even have helped me to find a better term. The term that I propose to take the place of “conceptual art” is “cultural fiction.” This new term underlines the one thing that I did know about “conceptual art,” which is that it is a branch of literature. Sooner or later, what’s called conceptual art comes down to a statement, in words, of the concept(s) involved in the work. Sometimes, the statement appears in the work itself; more often, it appears on an explanatory title card, or in a philosophical essay in the accompanying catalogue. In Obrist’s world, the statements come not only sooner than later but often in lieu of actual work. Among the handful of words that stud nearly every page of Ways of Curating — toolbox (a deplorable vogue word that insults real craftsmen, plumbers included), laboratory, and interstices are three — the standout is conversation.

At a café in Paris one late morning in the spring of 1993, I was talking to the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. I was twenty-four. We were discussing a particular kind of art, one that had grown remarkably over the last century: art that included not only objects to be displayed, but instructions to be executed. This, we agreed, had challenged traditional understandings of creativity, authorship, and interpretation. Boltanski and Lavier had been interested in such practices since the early 1970s; both had made many works that presented directions for action to the viewer, who became the work’s performer as well as its observer. This kind of art, Lavier pointed out, gave the viewer a measure of power in the making of it. He added that the instructions also gave life to his works, in a very real sense: they provoked not silent contemplation, but movement and action, amongst the visitors to museums or galleries in which they were displayed. Boltanski saw the instructions for installations as analogous to musical scores, which go through countless repetitions as they are interpreted and executed by others.

Starting with Marcel Duchamp, we began to list instruction-based artworks that came up as we talked…

I don’t want you to think that I find the idea of “instruction-based artwork” silly — I don’t, even if it has nothing to do with art. But isn’t it clear here that the truly exciting thing is the conversation, the rush of ideas, the list of names? Can’t you feel the heady enthusiasm of what in my college days was called a bull session? The show that Obrist went on to design, do it, was structured so that such conversations would have to take place before its installation in another city: the design was deliberately incomplete. Everything that could be done to reduce an “art exhibition” to the ephemerality of a conversation was done. Permanence in time and space was scrupulously resisted. Obrist happens to be a conscientious archivist of his conversations, but the difference between having a conversation and reading a transcript of that conversation is almost precisely the difference between writing a novel and reading it. The writing of a novel is quite literally exhausted, emptied, evaporated when the manuscript is bundled off to the publisher. It can be remembered (by the author only) but never re-experienced. That is what Obrist prizes about his toil in the fields of art.

Another recurring motif in Ways of Curating is the chronicle of first meetings that Obrist has had with artists and other art-world figures. In many cases, these meetings took place when Obrist was still in his teens. He has been not only drinking but bottling this Kool-Aid for a very long time.

As the great actress says near the end of Being Julia, “Not remotely.”

I went to the Museum yesterday. I had to: I needed a desk calendar for 2015. Ordinarily, I order calendars for the coming year in the early summer, but I missed out on this year’s membership offer, if there was one, and in the crush of events from Labor Day on failed to stop in at the gift shop. I visited the Museum once during that time, in October, but I remember staying away from the gift shop, lest I be enticed to buy books.

I could have done an in-and-out at the gift shop without admission to the Museum proper, but the thought of my poor little passport — a small Field Notes notebook in which I paste admission stickers, as if saving up enough stickers would entitle me to the meiping vase that I’ve got my eye on — obliged me to start off the new year with a new sticker, and simple decency required me to put the sticker to use before pasting it in the passport. What to see, though? I was in the middle of running errands, not idling away the afterenoon. I scanned the posters for current shows, and decided on Thomas Struth.

Thomas Struth is a photographer who plays at being a conceptual artist. He takes stunning photographs, many in large format, and there is really no need to know anything about his subjects beyond gratifying the mortal itch to learn dates, locations, and perhaps the names of people. But the title cards on the wall are stuffed full of what lawyers call “surplusage” — no matter how interesting it might be, this information is irrelevant — irrelevant to the consideration of photographs, that is.

Take, for example, Struth’s photograph of a group of men and women standing in front of ranks of old-master paintings. The composition is still and grave but not without a certain winking wryness; the photograph could pass for a minor masterpiece by Irving Penn. We’re told that the people are art restorers, and that they’re shown in the old refectory of a monastery attached to the Italian cathedral in which the paintings normally hang. The restorers are not named, but we are also told — and this is where the surplusage begins — that Struth photographed only those restorers whom he had gotten to know, whatever that means. As I recall, the card blathered on to tell us that this personal familiarity with the people he shoots adds world-historical significance to his work.

You will have seen his large-format portrait of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. I daresay Struth believes that he got to know them, too. To the extent that such a belief wasn’t fatuous — all good portraitists “get to know” their sitters, not in the way that you and I might know one another, but as visual expressions of character — it would be impertinent, as Her Majesty, qua queen, is not there to be known. Some viewers, her subjects among them, might regard her as the heir of minor German aristocrats who have been imposing themselves on the people of Britain for centuries — an old lady with astonishing pretensions. It is arguable that Thomas Struth might actually get to know this woman. But most of us see a long-reigning monarch, the visual expression of a very grand sense of duty. We will allow this exponent of regality to have a measure of private life, but we will define that private life as something that we can never see. As Helen Mirren said of The Queen, we’ll never know how Elizabeth and her family felt about the film — even if they all write about it in their private diaries. Elizabeth Windsor might keep a diary, but Elizabeth Regina does not and can not.

In the middle of the Struth exhibit, there is the arresting photograph of a body cinched to a gurney and tethered by a multitude of cables and tubes to a menacing block of equipment. The situation is presumably medical. The card tells us about the cancer that was oppressing the patient’s optic nerve, about the successful outcome of the surgery that took place after this photograph was taken, and it even assures us that Struth had the patient’s permission to take and to exhibit the photograph. The card adds that Struth was interested in showing the vulnerability of the body in modern medical environments, as though the danger were coming not from a tumor but from the equipment. It is true that equipment can malfunction and cause death, and that many medical procedures are plainly dangerous. But equipment is never attached, nor procedures undertaken, gratuitously. Medicine is our defense against illnesses that are no less dangerous.

Struth’s photograph necessarily misses this point. We don’t see the cancer. If the patient were bleeding, we might well conclude that the equipment had induced it, not some trauma experienced elsewhere. We can see that the patient is helpless, but we can’t tell why, not from the photograph. And that is what is wrong with this picture. Charité, Berlin (2013) is a fantasy image that exploits and renders sensational a moment that is not meant to be seen, just as the Queen is not meant to be known. What I mean by this is that the only people who are allowed to see patients in this patient’s circumstances are family members and medical personnel. The family members will not be seeing a helpless mass of flesh on a gurney, but a known and perhaps deeply loved human being about to undergo a perilous trial. The medical personnel, knowing what every wire and tube is there for, will see just the opposite: someone who, for the moment, is not in distress. The surgeons will probably not see the patient at all, but only a challenge. All of these people — wives, children, nurses, technicians, and surgeons — will be too heavily invested in the patient’s welfare to see what we, the museum-goers, see. The power of what we see, moreover, stems directly from our ignorance of all the things known to doctors and family members. All we see is a body.

Having been such a body myself, having passed through similar circumstances prior to neck surgery, I feel the utter meaninglessness of Struth’s photograph, and its borderline obscenity, very keenly.

At one end of the Struth show, there is a superlative photograph that, in its extraordinary clarity, precludes any need to peek at title cards. The photograph is large, but not as large as other by this artist. It shows a group of tourists standing in the Pantheon. More eloquently than any schematic diagram or architectural rendering, it illustrates the near-perfection of classical proportions. The height of the drum supporting the temple’s dome — a height that is given quasi-human expression by the pillars at the niches — is such that it exalts those who stand inside it, and does not overpower them. The Pantheon materializes the potential for greatness that we all feel inside ourselves; it does not, despite the building’s notional purpose, crush us with the power of extraterrestrial gods.

I have never set foot in the Pantheon, and although I should very much like to do so, it wouldn’t matter if I had a very different sort of experience in the event. I have seen Struth’s Pantheon, and it tells me something as wonderful as it is beautiful.

Bon weekend à tous!

There is, in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Cambridge novel, The Gate of Angels, an amusingly irritating character called Mr Wrayburn. Mr Wrayburn is a don, and so would his wife be, too, if the graduates of the women’s colleges were awarded degrees, which, in 1912, the year in which the novel is set, they were not. Mrs Wrayburn is not much of a housekeeper, but she keeps up appearances, and perhaps the most important appearance is indicated when Mr Wrayburn first comes on the scene.

It was clear that he had never been allowed to worry. That was not his work, worrying was done for him.

The context of this “worrying” is of course the world of household matters. Mr Wrayburn is surprised, and somewhat put out, to find that his wife has given shelter to two victims of a vehicular accident that occurred outside their suburban home. In fact, Mr Wrayburn does a lot of worrying; he is a worrywort. But what “worrying” means here is that he never has to make the beds or wash the dishes, or even to think about how beds might be made and dishes washed.

This was the secret of Victorian productivity. Men — dons and divines especially — were not to be disturbed from their high-minded work by so much as the idea of domestic travail. They wrote and researched, discussed and dissected, while such creature comforts as they desired were rolled before them, quite as if they were infants being looked after by a magic carpet. It is to be imagined that there must have been one or two things that they were forced to see to on their own. On the whole, though, their homes were little palaces, with at least one housemaid scurrying about with trays. Once a year, they would give their wives a certain sum of money, or inform them that such a sum was available at such and such a banker’s; and that would be that for their “worrying” about bills. No wonder the triple-decker novel and the multi-volume history flourished!

One thing I have never read about, however. I have never come across a scene or a passage in which one of these pampered gentlemen has to rearrange his library to accommodate new books. Perhaps new books were also part of the occluded worrying. Having been appointed to your more or less august post, you stopped the inflow of new books altogether, and simply enhanced your familiarity with the ones already on your shelves, the books that such a person as yourself ought already to own. New books might be disturbing. Mr Wrayburn certainly seems to be the kind of man who would not care to make surprising discoveries in later life. In any case, library management, like all matters of plumbing, goes unmentioned in the literature of the period.

As I say, Mrs Wrayburn is not very good at worrying, which means that she worries all the time instead of getting things done. “She looked at the sink, loaded down with  all that was necessary when a husband had his daily meals in the house.” The contemplation of such drudgery is precisely what Mrs Wrayburn studied her way through Newnham to avoid. There follows a little catalogue aria of knickknacks (“knife-rests for knives, fork-rests for forks”) that I have seen quoted in toto at least twice. Although I had already decided against joining the party, I thought I’d have another look at the passage, which is full of stuff that I’d like to see (“cut glass blancmange dishes”), so I stood up to fetch the book. As I was getting up anyway, I took the bowl containing the dregs of this morning’s Purely O’s to the kitchen, where I soon found myself emptying the dishwasher. Almost everything belonged in the kitchen, but there were two pasta plates and, a leaf-shaped plate on which I’d served garlic toasts, that belonged in the dining ell, and I decided to put them away first. The moment I left the kitchen for the dining ell, I remembered that I was supposed to be writing, but when I came back to the desk I realized that I had forgotten to fetch The Gate of Angels, which, in the event, was on the writing table right behind me.

The writing table, as I mentioned yesterday, is in furious disarray. In the Victorian household, whose job would it be to tidy it up? Whose worry? I expect that there was always a handful of worthies gifted with intelligent spinster sisters-in-law who might be put to secretarial work. A sister-in-law would be better than a sister, I fancy, coming as she would under the yoke of matrimonial obedience; a sister might take an independent line. I wonder if there are any good, readable studies out there, applying sociology to literature, that canvas the domestic lives of prosperous scholarly men in the good old days.

The reason for the disarray on my desk — aside from the pile-up of minor negligences that precede and follow travel — is my decision to stop using Quicken to keep track of credit-card purchases. This sudden abandonment of software that I’ve been using for as long as I can remember was triggered by a nasty glitch, as the result of which I lost nearly a month’s inputs. The backup files were corrupted as well. Once again — as with saying sayonara to ReaderWare — I found that an application designed to “automate” everyday life was more trouble than it was worth. I shall continue to pay bills with checks printed by Quicken, but I’m going to keep track of the receipts in Evernote, just as soon as I decide how I want to do that. Meanwhile, the slips of paper pile up.

I accomplished yesterday’s job, to Kathleen’s satisfaction. I may now wrap up the Christmas tree in a plastic dropcloth and carry it down to the service elevator. Then I shall take a good broom to the carpet — no need to choke the vacuum cleaner with the bulk of the needles. By dinnertime, and without much fuss, the foyer will be back to normal. I’ll be having dinner by myself, actually, as Kathleen has one of her institutionary dinners.

No worries.

Normal life resumes today, but somewhat shakily. In order to celebrate my birthday at dinner last night, Kathleen had to work on a document until well past two in the morning; it was nearly three when we turned out the lights. Kathleen had had the good idea of ordering a car to take her into work, and she was out of bed at a quarter past eight. She threw herself together somehow and got out the door, leaving me to sink back into another three hours’ sleep. Not that anybody made me stay up late.

My job for the day is to remove the ornaments from the tree. Kathleen has already taken down the old and delicate ones, and she will check tonight to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. Tomorrow, I shall wrap the tree in a dropcloth and carry it down to the service elevator. The foyer will soon be set to rights — but that is tomorrow’s job. There is also a great deal of ironing to do. I sense that I have run out of resistance to this chore — as well as pressed napkins and handkerchiefs. My writing table is in great disorder, and I’ll have plenty of paperwork to attend to between now and Friday.

In the Times, I read that Mark Zuckerberg has launched a sort of book club, with his first title being The End of Power, by Moisés Naím. I haven’t determined whether this book addresses power from a perspective that will illuminate those mysteries of power that interest me most. These unexplained aspects cluster round two very different phenomena. The first is the problem of the powerful leader who, over time, shakes free of advisers who counsel moderation, who warn him (or her — Mrs Thatcher crossed this event horizon) against making shows of strength out of weaknesses of character, such as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is doing with his patriarchal comments on the place of women in society. Erdoğan fascinates me even more than he horrifies and disappoints me: he has been positively poisoned by power. He seems to have abandoned his checkered attempts at playing world statesman and taken up the more familiar but also more tiresome role of Tyrant of Turkey. Power has made him cease to care whether he is interesting.

The other locus of power that intrigues me is the much subtler exercise that this virtue gets in the realm of bureaucracy. It’s difficult to imagine this now, but bureaucracy was once upon a time a great improvement over previous arrangements, which tended toward the ad hoc and draconian. There have always been clerks, of course, at least wherever there has been money, but bureaucracy as we understand it is a modern invention with the most high-minded aims. Designed to minimize the impact of human caprice and to assure the realization of stated objectives, it has refashioned executive operations in every field. Unfortunately, it has failed to refashion its primary working material, which is human nature. Humans remain capricious, beset by common vices, and the history of bureaucracy is one of double subversion, first of those stated objectives (not the bridges and canals but the “abstractions,” justice and prosperity), and then of the bureaucracy itself. Like so many modern social reforms, bureaucracy harbors the hope that human beings might be induced to behave more like machines.

Would computers do a better job of running things? I’m not particularly worked up by anxieties over The Singularity, but I’m not keen on handing power over to machines, either, partly because they can be hacked but mostly because they are, after all, designed by human beings. What I think would be helpful is a new kind of Operating System, one that was not designed with somebody’s corporate profits in mind. Instead of offering blandly helpful friendliness, my proposed system would work like the Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, except that it would not wait to be asked how things were going. Programmed to recognize instances of misjudgment, it would intone, perhaps in the voice of the late Alec Guinness, sympathetic but stern admonitions. You must promote the gifted staffer, not the one you’re cheating with. There would be no way to disable these lectures, which might go on for some time, as past, not necessarily related errors were itemized in scrupulous detail. My OS wouldn’t make us better people, but it would provide a corrective to our haphazard, often quite demented memories.

In addition, memoranda of these wisdom sessions would be delivered to all immediate subordinates.

***

For the time being, we must make do with novels. There are precious few good novels about bureaucracy, whether the vast and impersonal ones of Kafka’s nightmares or the intimate, chatty hardball court of Joshua Ferriss’ brilliant first novel, And Now We Come to the End. I just discovered another one the other day, and the most surprising thing about it was that I had never heard of it, even though I’ve read all of its author’s other fiction. I speak of Shirley Hazzard’s 1967 People in Glass Houses, a satire on the United Nations. (I would have been a little too young to read it with pleasure when it appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.) Most satires exaggerate things that happen, but Hazzard does something else: she exaggerates the precision of normal attentiveness. Rarely have I been so viscerally reminded of a surgical theatre, but instead of blood everywhere, there are human failings of every shape and size and hue, most of them fairly venial.

People in Glass Houses is a sequence of eight self-contained stories, linked by recurring characters and the constant background of the Organization. The UN is never named, nor New York City or the East River, although both are described, at least as seen from the Organization campus. (The Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City becomes a plug for “Frosti-Cola.”) Hazzard isn’t being coy, or attempting the stunt of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (set in an unnamed but unmistakable Venice); rather, she’s locating her novel in a land of wishful thinking. The heart of the matter is laid out early in the first story, which, like the last, concerns the “separation” of a staff member.

The Organization had bred, out of a staff recruited from its hundred member nations, a peculiarly anonymous variety of public official, of recognizable aspect and manner. It is a type to be seen to this very day, anxiously carrying a full briefcase or fumbling for a laissez-passer in airports throughout the world. In tribute to the levelling powers of Organization life, it may be said that a staff member wearing a sari or kente was as recognizable as one in a dark suit, and that the face below the fez was as nervously, as conscientiously Organizational as that beneath the Borsalino. The nature … of the Organization was such as to attract people of character; having attracted them, it found it could not afford them, that there was no room for personalities, and that its hope for survival lay, like that of all organizations, in the subordination of individual gifts to general procedures. No new country, no new language or way or life, no marriage or involvement in war could have so effectively altered and unified the way in which these people presented themselves in the world. It was this process of subordination that was to be seen going on beneth the homburg or turban. And it was Algie’s inability to submit to this process that had delivered his dossier into the hands of Mr Bekkus at the Terminations Board.

The Organization, in short, has become preoccupied, like all large organizations, with the problem of operating itself. Its stated goals, the objectives that it was established to implement, necessarily fall to secondary status.

One of my favorite moments in the novel occurs in the sixth story, “Official Life.” Olaf Jaspersen, a moderately senior pooh-bah, encounters a Mr Nagashima, one of his subordinates, in the elevator.

Striking a personal note, Jaspersen inquired, “Your daughter at college now?”
“He’s at the university, yes.”
“I thought —”
“Yes, yes. Just the one son.”
“What’s he studying?”
“Humanities,” Nagashima nodded, smiling.
“Only the one play?” asked Jaspersen, who thought he had said “Eumenides.”
Nagashima beamed. “Yes. Yes.” The elevator stopped…

Moments later, Jaspersen is telling his Chief that Nagashima “was telling me about his daughter — turning into quite a classical scholar it seems.” My Operating System would be waiting for Olaf Jaspersen when he got back to his office.

Happy Birthday, old bean. I know for a fact that you never thought you’d make it this far. (While at the same time blithely sharing youth’s belief in immortality.)

This has long been my favorite picture of me. It captures how I feel when something interesting and exciting comes up — nowadays, generally, in a book. I want to read it aloud, share it with somebody. The image has been lost in layers of files transferred from one computer to another — and as to where the original snapshot is, who knows? I consider it an auspicious sign for the New Year that I made the effort to track this down and found it.

Run your cursor over the image to discover its title — which ought to embarrass me, but doesn’t; rather the reverse. By the time I was old enough to speak English, I was told that I had been an adorable baby. That my adorableness had regrettably evaporated since then seemed to be the implicit point of this praise.

And now, to find myself in the orbit of seventy! Dissonance in the music of the spheres: while the Times is full of obituaries marking lifetimes not so very much longer than mine to date, my conviction, as uncritical as this child’s eagerness, is that life is just beginning.

Or is it, perhaps, relief that the beginning is finally over? Now I really begin.

***

As we walked into the apartment last night, after my first time away from it, I was “shocked by its beauty.” (Hat tip to Lillian Roberts.) Hitherto, my idea of roughing it had been living at home. Now I thought: wow, all the comforts of hotel suite, plus being at home. Or vice versa.

Sadly, however, room service has not been introduced with the New Year. One remains reduced to restaurants. I’ve just taken our former/upstairs neighbor out to lunch at the Café d’Al, and then made a reservation for dinner at Demarchelier with Kathleen. I must nevertheless run across to Fairway for groceries. How I wish I could think of Fairway as a colorful local market that I visit every day in search of the best ingredients. Talk about pretty to think so! All that distinguishes Fairway from Times Square Station is grime and uneven lighting. On the plus side (for Times Square), subway riders usually know where they’re going and how to get there. This is probably the most sexist thing that I am ever going to say — indeed, I hope that it is — but the world would be a better place if women relied on the Internet and Fresh Direct, and left in-store shopping to men. Children requiring carriage ought to be banned. They were, informally, when I was a child, and Eisenhower was winning the Cold War. Exceptions will be made for infants who can demonstrate a desire to go shopping.

San Francisco was different this year — rather, it was back to being the same old strange place. Last year, Thanksgiving 2013, was so oddly disappointing; everything that made San Francisco unlike other American cities appeared to have evaporated, leaving only the terrain. It was probably a mistake to stay at the Fairmont, which had indeed become very ordinary in the fifty years since my previous visit. This time, we stayed at the St Francis, which my mother always looked down on. It had its motellian edges — the elevators, which required room-key cards, were kludgy, and there were no real doormen — but we were very comfortable, especially in bed, and the Oak Room, the hotel’s default restaurant, served rather good food in a richly-paneled dining room. Say what you like, but the hotels of the modern West have been our palaces of democracy, where anybody with sufficient simoleons could be king for a day. An astonishing number of modcons have made their first appearances at hotels, although don’t ask me, after my nice lunch, to list any. (Take, rather, the doubting-Thomas position of M le Neveu: “Egyptian beer? Pshaw!” Then see what happens.) The best hotels are still engines of advance, but not, I fear, on the old humane front of grandeur and comfort. Even if the grandeur is all but in ruins, the St Francis remains a monument to the advances of the past that gave us the “grand hotel.” There is even, for example, an occasionally-manned shoe-shine stand.

Right outside the door is Union Square, which is what such a square would be like if it were in front of the Museum, or, even better, the museum on the other side of the park, plus a lot of stores. As a central plaza it is hopeless, most of it hidden away on shrub-screened terraces, and the palm trees send the wrong message. (The underground parking lot, once so progressive, has become a monument to the folly of the last century.) Union Square seems imported from somewhere else, but then, so does ours here in New York. (A sardonic comment on what “union” really stood for? Secular, materialist commercialism?) It did when I first laid eyes on it fifty years ago. But it’s a convenient location.

We went shopping, twice. The first and far more serious round took us to Gump’s and to Rochester. Rochester, which sells quality clothes for men of my build (and bigger, much bigger), has a branch in Midtown Manhattan, and I’ve been meaning to get to it, what with the state of my belts and my sock drawer, but the branch in San Francisco is the first one that I patronized — I don’t think that they’d opened in New York back then — and it was somehow easier to get to (at Mission and Third) than 52nd Street (or is it 51st?). As it happened, the branch is about to close, not because the rent has gone up but because the building is coming down. Everything was 20% off. I bought a Calvin Klein topcoat and a Jack Victor sportsjacket. The salesman, appreciating my feeling for color, dug the jacket out of the back. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say that it suggests a somewhat distant wooded hillside seen through a light fog at the peak of autumn, only with the sky blue mixed in with the colors of the leaves. I’ve never seen anything like it. Kathleen fell in love with it even quicker than I did. I also bought a Robert Talbot tie that will attract a lot of attention when I wear it to a cocktail party. How to say “flame stitch electric purple” without evoking the Seventies? Which I assure you it doesn’t.

At Gump’s, we went straight to the display of table lamps and found a salesman to sell us the small trophy lamp that we wanted to buy last time we were in town but didn’t. What we had done was to copy down all the numbers on the ticket, and a lot of good that did. While the lamp was being written up and the shipping address noted down, Kathleen found place mats. They were somewhat nicer versions of the place mats at the Oak Room that I had shortly before commented on at lunch. “Now, this is the sort of thing we need,” I’d said. Now we have eight of them. We took them with us.

The other shopping expedition was a quick tour up and down Grant Street. I shall have to describe the romance of Chinatown some other time; it is the romance of a memory. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a marvelous little metal box featuring a woman in Chinese opera getup next to the words “Random CRAP from Here and There.” The box wouldn’t begin to hold all the random crap from here and there that’s in this house even after the move, but it’s coy enough to place in the living room, and a suitable container for the best of my random crap. It’s a start.

Here we are in the year P. Although I never believed that there would be a Y2K disaster, I wasn’t happy about all the zeroes that the new century was going to impose on filenames in YYMMDD format — as most of mine are. (Letters, photographs, and most other documents are filed by date, in appropriate subdirectories.) Bearing in mind my age, should I live to need the letter Z, I decided to turn to the alphabet instead.

Perhaps it is time to revert to conventional figuration: instead of being P0102, today might be 150102. Especially since I already tripped over the alphabet and named the photograph above “N0102,” as if the year N had never been. It is time, I conclude, to be conventional whenever being conventional is simpler. This conclusion prompted our decision not to paint the walls of the new apartment. They had just been painted, in what we both found to be a depressingly drab mushroom color when the apartment was empty, but that quickly revealed itself as a decorator’s miracle hue, subtly changing in different lights and borrowing (or complementing) the colors of nearby objects. The lease obliges the management to repaint the apartment every so often, but only in its chosen shades — which is how we went eighteen years without fresh paint in most of the apartment upstairs. No more of that, say we!

Sticking to conventions is also helpful when you’re tired, and we’re still very tired. Not as tired as we were yesterday, or on Wednesday night as we were packing. We’ve had a good night’s sleep in our comfortable hotel bed, and a lazy morning over room-service breakfast. But we’re tired, and it shows. I have not been quite lazy, actually; I have finally set up an account with Uber. This is something that I have meant to do since Thanksgiving 2013, because it is the only way to get a ride from Outer Sunset back to downtown San Francisco. Setting up the account and installing the app on the iPhone are more or less straightforward processes, but I encountered difficulties installing the app, because I could not remember my iTunes password. Only after a great deal of moaning and groaning did I remember where I might find it. Then I forgot the password that I had just used to set up the Uber account! With a little guesswork, I recaptured it, but this time I made a note of it where I found the iTunes password.

We shall give Uber a try when it’s time to go out to Sunset for dinner. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll take a taxi and I’ll get Megan or Ryan to show me what I’m doing wrong. Either way, the ride home will be on us. It felt pretty dreadful to have to ask Megan to arrange the ride last night.

We found everyone well, and a great deal more relaxed than we were. (You can’t relax if you’re really too tired, even though that’s exactly what you need to be doing.) Will blew out all the candles on his birthday cake in one go. (Because Megan was short of matches, we used a piece of uncoooked spaghetti to light them all.) Tomorrow, we’re going to go shopping to buy him the serious presents that he really wants. Superheroes are involved. Remind me to write about Megan’s fascinating thoughts about the importance of superheroes for the moral guidance of children Will’s age — I need a few days to let them sink in.

***

It’s a good thing to be in San Francisco, good both to be here and not to be there, at home in New York, if only for a weekend. We had reached a natural break time in settling in to the new apartment, and the coincidence of the year’s beginning contributes a symbolic oomph. Life in the hotel room, while comfortable enough, has a certain desert-island quality. Or perhaps the quality is monastic: few of the special comforts of home are on offer. I can’t make a fresh pot of tea at will — I could have one sent up, but it would be strange and expensive — and I haven’t got any music on hand, having decided not to lug iPods and their accoutrements for just a few days. There is also the simplicity of a retreat in the withdrawal of everyday routines. Laundry, grocery-shopping — they’re not there to forestall the encroachment of boredom, which in this case would be the inability to think about what I’ve got think about.

And what have I got to think about? Right now, it seems time to organize all the things that I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of years, not only because all of them seem to be profoundly interrelated — the worrisome tell-tale sign, I’m aware, of the paranoid mind — but because the interrelationships occlude conventional standards of importance. In my new view, it is not always more important to think about art than it is to think about closets; moreover, there may well be a connection between the two. Books pose the most formidable example of widely distributed significance. The problem of finding shelf space for books seems mundane enough, but at a certain point in life it becomes anything but, by involving the very question of book ownership itself. Why have a personal library? And why have a personal library in what appears to be a new era of virtual books, which occupy so very little physical space that they seem to be positively immaterial? The worth of a personal library is very much an unexamined idea.

As I organize these newly-examined ideas, I have to decide on a rubric, and here, too, I range between the unglamorous particularity of “householding” and the intoxicating ether of “humanism.” From an academic standpoint — and it is still the academic standpoint that determines the worth of any serious discussion — householding utterly lacks the importance of humanism; but I have determined that this valuation is an uninformed prejudice, and there’s no doubt that my “subject” is the continuity that I find between everyday questions of household management and no less everyday questions about decency, self-respect, and generosity that, for me, comprise the interactions of human beings in a healthy world. As I sort my observations, which labels will be most helpful?

Bon weekend à tous!

Gaspingly late, early Christmas morning

Our lovely tree doesn’t look like this anymore. It has been covered with ornaments, beautifully decorated by Kathleen and Ray Soleil. The tree looks so good, in fact, that I can only think that we must have a party, so that everyone we know can come to see it. But I know that that’s not what’s important for Kathleen.  She doesn’t need an audience.

We had a lovely Christmas Eve dinner. I was very ambitious. We began with a ravioli dish that would have been super had the ravioli been cooked enough; they were slightly underdone. The salmon mousse course was a complete success, perhaps because no cooking was involved. Then there was a break. I sent all the diners back out into the living room — Kathleen and Ray to decorate the tree, Fossil to do something undetermined with his smartphone — while I prepared the main course, Beef Stroganoff. A moderate success, I must say; no more. Then the bûche, about which the less said &c. A great Christmas dinner, however. Kathleen and Ray decorated the tree as though they’d grown up together.

***

Boxing Day

And that was all that I could manage to write, late Wednesday night. I composed it, as if out of stone blocks, while the dishwasher took care of the pots and pans. By the I gave up and left the book room, the dishwasher was ready for the china and glassware. I managed not to break anything.

Yesterday, I was not particularly capable. Without complaint, however, I got dressed and paid visits. On the way our friend who lives near Hunter College, I left my very nicest wool cab in the taxi. I’ve been trying out various means of tracking it down, but right off the bat I can tell you that the nice people at 311 don’t have the correct phone number for the company that owns the medallion attached to the cab in which I lost my personal property. Nor, armed with the company’s name, could I find a phone number on the Internet. I still haven’t decided whether to pay $50 to post an ad with a Web site that promises to help out with these problems. The hat is certainly worth more than — it comes from Paul Stuart. It’s worth more than twice that, which would cover a nice reward. But is the ad site legitimate?

I remembered to water the tree just now. Another thing that I had to remember was to take a Christmas envelope down to the doorman on duty. But he was off having lunch. I’ll try again in half an hour.

Shortly after darkness falls, Kathleen and I will make our way to a Boxing Day party in the Seventies.

This is not one of those holiday seasons when I feel so out of sorts that I wish I could simply sleep through it all. Nor is it quite one of those warm and lovely times that I’ll remember forever — although, come to think of it, I don’t remember the good times distinctly; they mash up together into a pleasant omnibus. This holiday, in fact, I may remember just for itself, because it has been neither awful nor transcendent. Our first Christmas in the new apartment, it has had a provisional feeling, but only around the edges. We had a real Christmas Eve dinner, just as at the best of times, and we have a lovely tree. We’ve listened to Messiah a dozen times at least (we’ve got several recordings), and we’re not yet sick of Christmas songs. We have yet to send out a single calendar (our version of a Christmas card — Kathleen chooses twelve of her best photographs and sends them off to Vista Print), but that will get taken care of on Monday. And of course there are still the fifteen boxes of books that settled into furniture-like configurations two weeks ago. I do wish we had curtains in the living room. Such are this year’s imperfections. Most people wouldn’t notice them.

On Wednesday, New Year’s Eve, we’ll have friends from Geneva to lunch, and then we’ll pack for our flight to San Francisco in the morning. The day before my birthday, we’ll be back at home. It turns out that my birthday, 6 January, is no longer the Feast of the Epiphany. Except occasionally. On the liturgical calendar, it has been shifted from the fixed date to the first Sunday after what used to be the Feast of the Circumcision, now the Feast of the Holy Family. At least, so I am told by our friend the deacon. I expect that this is an American, or Anglophone usage. The feast has long been a Holy Day of Obligation in Canada (where the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is not), and I’m told that Mexico also clings to the traditional date of Twelfth Night. Like so many practical American arrangements, the reassignment of the Epiphany has a strong odor of gimcrackery.

***

Time Passes

Suddenly, it is days later. Sunday evening, to be exact. What I’ve been up to is easily reported: a party on Friday, followed by dinner at Orsay, always very nice. We keep it special by pretending that it is more expensive than the restaurants closer to home. Perhaps it is, by a very small percentage. Kathleen did have Dover sole.

Yesterday, I did nothing. I cleaned up at some point, but I never got properly dressed, and I never made the bed. The day was entirely devoted to purging the holiday excesses.

Today was what yesterday ought to have been: a quiet afternoon of tidying up.

Throughout these days, I have been reading either Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, which I finished last night, or one of my books about Oxford. I had always known that Oscar Wilde said something about wishing that he could live up to his collection of “blue china” — blue and white, presumably — but I didn’t know, or shouldn’t have had a place to store the detail, that he said it whilst a student at Magdalen, and that the quip “went viral,” adding to the evidence that probably determined the masters of Oxford to refrain from offering Wilde anything like a permanent post at the University. “Later,” writes David Horan in Oxford: A Cultural and Literary History, “[Wilde] would boast that the Vicar of St Mary’s opened a sermon with:

When a young man says, not in polished banter but in solemn earnestness, that he finds it difficult to live up to the level of his blue china, there has crept into the cloistered shades a form of heathenism which it is our bounden duty to fight against and to crush out if possible.

Heathenism! What a delicious euphemism!

Wilde was, as usual, making an important, if, indeed, heathenish, point. For nearly two thousand years, the futility of Christ’s example as a practical matter had been demonstrated by nearly every life. Might it not be better — more practicable, more purposeful, more attainable — to emulate the standards set by rigorous craftsmen? Craftsmen aren’t so much as they do. Rather than trying to be perfect, as Jesus was, we ought to pursue perfection, as the artisans of the Kangxi period so evidently did. From the New Testament, we learn a lot about how hard it is to be good. But we’re not taught, in any meaningful sense of learning, how to be good. We’re told that following a set of rules isn’t enough — Jesus is very clear about that. There is no recipe or formula for goodness. Paul, who is much more forgiving, urges everyone to love everyone else, but this is not only difficult but unnatural: given some of the everyones out there, it seems hardly desirable to spread one’s love evenly. Nothing is said about the duty to make ourselves lovable. To be told that God loves us just the way we are is not helpful. God is not the problem.

The other day, Roger Cohen published an Op-Ed piece in the Times, complaining that everything is now the same everywhere.

I traveled several thousand miles recently from London to Singapore. There I found myself on Orchard Road, that vast temple dedicated to the worship of the global brand, a tropical and air-conditioned Oxford Street. I wondered why I had bothered. Nothing to be bought there in the Asian city-state was any different from what could be bought in the glittering streets of the British capital, where billionaires like to bivouac.

We travel within closed loops, taking our worlds with us on devices. If the deep absorption of place requires the setting aside of the place one has come from, it has grown infinitely rarer. That in turn means the diminishment of discovery, which demands the vigilance of the senses. Without discovery the spirit withers.

Cohen begins by trying to be shocking: he praises the smoky atmosphere of a hotel in Berlin where smoking is still permitted. What Cohen doesn’t see is the irony of his craving. Without discovery the spirit withers. That’s as may be, but the notion that travel ought to involve discovery is more arguable. It used to be unavoidable, and the discoveries were often unpleasant — sometimes even fatal! It’s hard to believe that a gentleman of 1850 would not have regarded the likeness of Orchard Road to Oxford Street as a triumph of civilization. As, in its awful way, it really is, for the idea once rather visionarily shared only by affluent Anglophones is now a universal: without outlets of Gucci and Prada, there can be no civilization!

The argument that the triumph here is one of imperialism is an empty one. Now that the expanses of the globe are no longer governed from a handful of European and American capitals, the intrinsic value of consumer society is starkly shown to be very high: everybody wants to be able to afford it. The intellectual heirs of those inspired Victorians have perhaps outgrown the initial objective, as I think Wilde foresaw. What we have to discover in this life is something to live up to.

***

Monday, Return to

I should have liked nothing better than to stay in today, partly for comfort and partly from fear. The comfort part, on a cold day, even a sunny one, at the cold nadir of the year, ought to be perfectly understandable (message to young’uns: it will be!), but the fear is something that even I have yet to work out. All I know is that it’s a combination of age, or the consciousness of ageing, and the persistent surprise, lined with disbelief, that I have landed in this apartment.

The consciousness of ageing is not personal. Last night, I put two things side-to-side for Kathleen. The first was a Pitkin Guide, Morse in Oxford. The second was the jewel box containing Season 8 of Lewis. Both show Kevin Whately making pretty much the same sort of face — a strange blend of unbending moral rigor and profound human sympathy — but this simply emphasizes the work of time. On the Pitkin cover, he is as smooth as a cupcake. On Season 8, it’s Laurence Fox who is smooth (though not as a cupcake); Whately can only be likened, in comparison to his younger self, to a toad. That sounds nasty, but I don’t mean it to be. Rather gloriously, in fact, the pair of photographs manifests an assured humility: Whately’s face is still the one that he was born with. He remains very much the man within, where comparisons to his younger self declare growth, not age.

When I was young, Katharine Hepburn looked middle-aged. In her movies from the late Thirties and the Forties, she seemed magically youthful — magically, because I hadn’t been there to see it. I’ve been watching Kevin Whately since A Murder Is Announced, in which he looked decidedly boyish. There is no magic in seeing that singular episode of Miss Marple now: I was there. And yet, even more time has elapsed.

***

The problem that I’m having with Penelope Fitzgerald’s late novels is that their excellence, their extraordinary agility, is almost ephemeral, because the books are so short. It took no time at all to read The Gate of Angels, which I loved while I was reading it but now have trouble remembering, only a few hours later. I have trouble remembering why I liked it. I still remember why I liked — loved — Innocence: I was captured by its insouciant but quite genuine Italian quality; the novel deserves an entry in that catalogue, Sprezzatura. The Beginning of Spring did not appeal to anything like the same extent. I felt, not without chuckling amusement, as though Ivy Compton-Burnett were taking over the translation of a Russian classic from Constance Garnett. If Innocence struck me as echt, The Beginning of Spring felt pastiche. This distinction is simply a reflection of my very different regard for things Italian and Russian. To me, Russia is a version of the Wild-West United States that hasn’t got the sense to use the Latin alphabet. My dislike of the prelates of Orthodoxy is unsurpassed, at least by other dislikes.

What did interest me about The Beginning of Spring was its strange echo of imperialism. The hero, Frank Reid, is British by background but Russian by birth. Frank was educated in Russia and speaks perfect Russian. Had the setting been India, this fluency would have been unlikely, as would have been the local education. The management of a printing works is an almost stereotypically imperial sort of business, but whatever its commercial activities might have been, Britain never subjected Russia to its yoke; on the contrary, Russia ran its own empire, and vied with Britain for mastery in Central Asia. All the clichés of empire — the alluring, the dangerous, the unintelligible, the backward — are present in The Beginning of Spring, but they are set in what in music would be called a remote key.

With its English setting — London and Cambridge, also in 1912 — The Gate of Angels is extremely familiar, more familiar than it might be if I hadn’t read all the mystery novels of Charles Todd last year. The fictional enterprise of creating a fictional Oxbridge college for the purposes of satire is as comfortable as my favorite napping blanket — and that’s a problem. This is where I think the novel undercuts itself: there is no need in this love story for the extremity of St Angelicus College, and the gratuitousness of the creation is highlighted at the finale, when Daisy Saunders, ever the capable conscientious nurse, violates the college’s male-only hygeine, explicitly likened to that of Mount Athos, in order to relieve the “syncope” of the blind master, whom she finds prostrate at the foot of the tiny quad’s solitary tree. The dons who cluck at her presence are ineffectual hens, and it turns out that Fred Fairly, the junior fellow whose passionate devotion to Daisy powers the plot, is not even on the premises. St Angelicus gives Fitzgerald the pretext for a delightful retelling of the synopsis of La Favorita, the opera about antipope Benedict XIII, only (tellingly) without the Favorite. But that’s about all it’s good for. The solidly stimulating writing about the (quite real) Cavendish Laboratory makes the imaginary college even flufflier.

Now that I’ve dissed The Gate of Angels, I remember, and like, it better.

Friday had its sunny moments. None since.

It’s rare that I read something and then wish I hadn’t. But that’s getting it wrong. I don’t actually wish that I hadn’t read Sam Frank’s piece in the current Harper’s. On the cover, it’s billed as “Power and Paranoia in Silicon Valley.” The proper title appears to be “Come With Us If You Want To Live.” Frank’s subject is a menagerie of dislocated visionaries. Perhaps it would be better to say they’re visionaries of dislocation. Some are preoccupied with “the Singularity,” which will occur when human and machine minds meld, and with preventing “bad AI” from running loose and destroying humanity. Some, like eschatologist Michael Vassar (what we used to call a kook), are watching multiple countdowns — to environmental catastrophe, to the encroachment of various “memeplexes.” They all not only hate politics but contrive to write it out of their visions. They appear to believe that politics can be made to Go Away. Where do they get that idea?

Michael Vassar puts his finger on something: “It is unfortunate that we are in a situation where our cultural heritage is possessed only by people who are extremely unappealing to most of the population.” Although “cultural heritage” seems to be the last thing that Frank’s interlocutors possess.

Geoff Anders, the founder of Leverage Research, a “meta-level nonprofit” funded by [Peter] Thiel, taught a class on goal factoring, a process of introspection that, after many tens of hours, maps out every one of your goals down to root-level motivations — the unchangeable “intrinsic goods,” around which you can rebuild your life. Goal factoring is an application of Connection Theory, Anders’s model of human psychology, which he developed as a Rutgers philosophy student disserting on Descartes, and Connection Theory is just the start of a universal renovation. Leverage Research has a master plan that, in the most recent public version, consists of nearly 300 steps. It begins from first principles and scales up from there. “Initiate a philosophical investigation of philosophical method”; “Discover a sufficiently good philosophical method”; have 2,000-plus “actively and stably benevolent people successfully seek enough power to be able to stably guide the world”; “People achieve their dultimate goals as far as possible without harming others”; “We have an optimal world”; “Done.”

How much of this “master plan” has actually yielded practicable measures is so unclear that it seems to be unimportant: what’s important is to have a vision. A good vision is a successful grant proposal.

Bear in mind that Peter Thiel is outspoken in his belief that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

Another story that I read over the weekend had a very different effect. Ginia Bellafante wrote a profile of Eduardo Vianna, a professor at LaGuardia Community College whose “constructivist” methods engage students who enter the classroom without the intellectual equipment that Ivy League colleges can take completely for granted. A heartwarming story — I can’t seem to find it online. But there was one line that would come back to me later, when I read Sam Frank’s piece.

But another [student], who had been fidgety and distracted much of the time, completed the course announcing that she saw no need for an understanding of history.

In the context, one might attribute this blinkered view to an underprivileged background, but it is implicit in almost every remark that Sam Frank quotes.

***

History: one damned thing after another. That’s what history seems like when you’re studying for a test.

History: the never-ending story. That’s what history seems like when the variety of human experience comes alive. In one sense, history ends now, at the moment of telling. But that moment never actually stops; it continues with every breath we draw. History is never-ending in a different sense as well. It is a story made up of countless stories, and few of these stories make a smooth fit in the overall picture. There is much that we don’t know and probably never will know. But we are always learning how to fit the stories better, and how to bring what appear to be very different stories closer together. In my lifetime, the scope of history has broadened immeasurably. It was still pretty much a tale of war and politics when I was a boy. I was reminded of that the other day, when I was shelving not one but two books that recount the history of restaurants. Restaurants! Nothing is too trivial for history nowadays.

History is nothing less than the story of human life on this planet, as accurately as we can tell it. Like Sam Frank’s report, it is full of visions. But it also tells us where, if anywhere, those visions actually led people. When we read history, we’re thinking,  What were they thinking? We might, too, be thinking We have an optimal world. Done. We might be thinking that Done is a possibility. That would be a mistake. History tells us, at great length, that so long as humanity is muddling along at all, Done is not on the menu.

Why would anyone want to be Done? For the same reason that philosophers hate history; for the same reason that many men prefer to break work down into tasks that can be completed. There is a longing — I doubt that it is inborn, but it is certainly culturally conditioned — to live now, and for now to be the best possible now. Not tomorrow, not next week, and absolutely not last year. Everything that does not exist now is irrelevant, and everything that exists now is to be understood as if it existed now only. Begin from first principles and scale up from there. History has a nasty way of obliterating first principles, because, in history, everything has antecedents. Similarly, there is no now in history. There is only the latest. And the latest cannot be understood in isolation — in isolation, that is, from all previous nows.

There is a longing for timelessness that makes history laugh. This longing has given us the body of speculations that, in the West, we call Philosophy, with a capital P, to distinguish it from less logically rigorous schools of wisdom that flourish wherever understanding human beings is more highly esteemed than creating the best model of how things work. After a great deal of contention, volcanic outpourings of hot air, and intellectual purging, Philosophy gave us Science, which does infer timeless principles from phenomena. From most phenomena, but not, as of yet, from the phenomena of human interaction. Philosophy and Science have nothing to tell us about human interaction beyond wishful thinking.

Politics — political activity — is merely a concentrated occurrence of significant things. There are no rules; it is not a game. Anything can happen. In moments of political crisis, there are so many nows that they cancel each other out. There is only watching, with bated breath, for what’s next.

This holiday season — I’ll be contributing to one baggy entry for the next two weeks — I intend to meditate on the unpopularity, if that’s what it is, of history. Pascal’s pensée comes to mind, the one that attributes all the miseries of human life to man’s inability to sit still in a room. I’d like to amend it: all the miseries in human affairs owe to man’s disinclination to sit still and learn history. Which surprises me, because I find history to be never-endingly interesting. And one of the most interesting things that history has to tell us is that nothing is quite so ruinous as the belief that history has come to an end, that men are capable of making a new beginning. There can be no new beginnings with the same old human beings. Which may be why history associates “new beginnings” with bloodshed.

The end of philosophy is the beginning of history.

Christmas has come early. Anyone interested in watching the world turn can look for new spins, now that one of the last fronts of the Cold War has dissolved in diplomatic exchanges between Washington and Havana, and the Ponzi-esque futility of Vladimir Putin’s management schemes for Russia is expressing itself in the plunge of the ruble toward worthlessness. Neither of these developments marks the beginning or the end of anything, but rather a sharp plot twist in the middle. It’s more than a little depressing to hear that American businessmen are salivating at the prospect of developing markets in Cuba and to see that the Times regards this as newsworthy; it would have been nice to spend at least a week contemplating the non-commercial aspects of renewed relations between the tired old enemies. As for Russia, it’s very difficult not to wonder what the impact will be on Manhattan real-estate prices. Will the kleptocrats vamoose, and settle down in their pieds-à-terre, gradually becoming Americans? If so, we ought to call them Green Russians, for the color of their dollars. But what if there is a sell-off, as the Russians try to liquidate their assets? Could spell bust-o-rama for that tippy-tall tower next door to Kathleen’s office. I have no idea what to expect, which is of course what makes idle speculation so much fun.

Then, in The New York Review, I read with delight that Rupert Murdoch is finally Getting Old, as in maybe leaving us soon. In a postscript to the acquittal of Rebekah Brooks, Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes,

There are signs that Murdoch’s attention is flagging, and what might be politely called his increasing eccentricity is magnified by his addiction to Twitter — that device helpfully enabling people to write faster than they can think — with such effusions as “Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti Israel in ever crisis?” or “Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptians not white? All I know are.”

I wonder if the Powell Era is drawing to a close. The period in which businessmen and their professional advisers heeded the call of the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell, made not long before he joined the Court, to repel the “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” shows signs of having played itself out. In a 1971 memorandum addressed to a friend at the US Chamber of Commerce, Powell essentially revived the axiom that what is good for American business is good for the United States — that commercial prosperity determines the welfare of American people, and that that’s all there is to it. Certainly there is no welfare without prosperity. But we have learned the hard way that business will not benefit the American people at all if it is not directed to do so. The American free enterprise system, to the extent that it is a system at all, must be subordinated to a more far-sighted system of social equity.

Does that sound like socialism to you? Socialism is in sore need of a major re-think. The theories of socialism that were developed in the Nineteenth Century are crude and useless, and it won’t do to lump every economic notion that is critical of capitalism under the “socialist” rubric. Capitalism, as none saw better than the observers of the Nineteenth Century, is vital to the launch of new businesses — new industries especially. Whether it continues to be necessary, however, for the sustaint established businesses, is much less certain. Today’s private equity racket, which generates lots of bankers’ fees and inflated asset trades but little in the way of real value and, what’s really intolerable, jobs, suggests that capitalism can be bogus, quite the opposite of creative. Indeed, much of what passes for “business” today isn’t business at all, but financial shuffling. There is good evidence that some capitalist maneuvers have become reflexive rather than purposeful.

And it is always to be borne in mind that the capitalist’s ideal number of employees is always zero. Like all ideals, zero is unattainable, but it does inspire the thought that, no matter how many employees are on the payroll, there could be fewer.

For about twenty years now, the populations of the Western World have been greatly distracted by the introduction of devices that have transfigured access to information. As these devices become more familiar, we can expect that more attention will be paid to the information, and less to the devices; and we can only hope that this will accompanied by increased concern for the quality of information. One cannot help imagining that more and more Americans are going to get a clearer picture of the country’s economy, not from television news, which is just another corporatized operation, but from ground-up reports on the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. It must always be remembered that the conflagration in Bosnia was triggered, prior to the appearance of these devices, by radio broadcasts “informing” Christian Serbians that their Muslim Bosnian neighbors were about to murder them en masse. It is terrifying to imagine the unrest that a similar campaign of disinformation could cause via Twitter.

***

In the bedroom upstairs, we had a cabinet or case, made by the now out-of-business Sorice outfit, that held I don’t know how many pop CDs. Let’s say, somewhere between 150 and 200. These were, by and large, CDs that Kathleen liked to play, but also the classic bands that still appeal to me, such as Steely Dan and Blind Faith. That’s why I didn’t break them down, and store them more compactly in the bins the house the vast bulk of our discs. There was, however, no place to put this CD case in the new apartment. In our first or second week here, I emptied the case into a couple of large canvas tote bags, and stuck them behind my reading chair in the bedroom. The other day, after I opened the last of the non-book boxes, I found that I needed that corner behind my chair for other things, so the tote bags came out into the foyer, where they are not welcome, and I had to deal with them.

Which means I’ve had to get to work breaking them down. Here’s how: I take the CD itself out of the jewel box and slip it into a windowed sleeve (sold in boxes of 800 by Uline). Then I slip the little booklet that also serves as the CD cover on top of the sleeve. Now comes the hard part: removing the CD couch from the jewel box so that I can get the back matter, from which the spins are folded. I put the back matter on top of the booklet, making sure that everything is pointing in the right direction, and then insert this loose package into the proper place in the bins: “Ronettes” comes after “Rolling Stones.” The spine along the right edge of the back matter continues to serve the same purpose. If frequent access to the CDs were required, the spines would soon fall apart, but I kept my classical CDs in this way for nearly ten years now, with no signs of wear and tear. The point of the exercise, of course, is that the contents of a CD jewel box occupy, on their own, less than a third of the volume of the jewel box.

Now I find that the CD of The Nightfly, Donald Fagen’s first solo album, is missing. I have the jewel box and the paper, but not the disc itself. I uploaded the album onto my laptop computer some time ago, so I’ve got the music. I can’t remember what prompted this, but we were playing The Nightfly (on a Nano) and I noticed a bass riff that sounded a lot like something from “Spanish Dancer,” my favorite cut on Steve Winwood’s Arc of a Diver. Who was listening to whom? I had to get both albums to compare dates. Was the CD missing then? (I wouldn’t have opened the jewel box.) Where could it be? Astonishingly, the album is out of print.

I was looking for the jewel box last night, because I’d been listening to the music while breaking down CDs, and wondering where it was. Also, I wanted to know for sure that the word shouted out at the end of the first verse of “Walk Between the Raindrops,” preceded by a rising glissando roar, is “Miami!” But that must have been an improvisation, because nothing appears in the booklet.

Bon weekend à tous!

Today, I am making a concerted effort to do nothing. Aside from writing here, of course. We’re nearing the end of our fifth week of residency, and already, but for curtains, the apartment is Done. I feel, at least half the time, as though this has been my home for a long time. The pictures and the furniture appear to have forgotten where they used to be. The pictures especially. Last night, Ray Soleil put up all the pictures that are going to hang in the bedroom — period. Eight photographs, some of Kathleen’s finest, are being reframed, as is a print that she is very fond of, and these all have designated spots on still-vacant walls. I’ve decided to mount a miscellany of the remaining pictures, crammed in tightly — a souvenir of upstairs — behind the door to the bookroom. But, as Ray likes to say, “we’re done here.” The pictures have bonded with their new rooms and new neighbors.

Now I have to make an effort to change the address on a host of subscriptions. (I just took care of The New Yorker.) But not today.

***

Later last night, I finished reading Jan Morris’s Oxford. I’m stumped as to what to say next. That Oxford is a great piece of travel writing, of cultural anthropology? That it is also a dish of treats, anecdotes wry and dry that flatter the reader’s sophistication? (Who’s going to read a book about a university town with a very long history?) That I had just about concluded, when I got to the end of the antepenultimate chapter (“Distant Trumpets” pivots on the unprecedented and decimating lurch toward military service in 1914 — and although Morris doesn’t make this point, I couldn’t help thinking that all those gallant young officers who went off to Flanders only to find mud and rot instead of glory were realizing, in a truly awful way, the ending of Max Beerbohm’s sardonic fancy, Zuleika Dobson), that Oxford is a feint, a book “about” Oxford that manages to keep all the important secrets, so that only those who study in its colleges will know what the place is all about — that, in short, I was feeling had? Or should I come right to the point: Morris saves the truth for last. For it is in the penultimate chapter, “The Heart of Things,” that we are finally told what it is that makes Oxford Oxford.

One of the perennial complaints of the English reformers is this dominance of Oxford in the affairs of the kingdom — Oxford bishops, Oxford politicians, Oxford publicists, Oxford lawyers: but it is likely to last, for there is no city in England where a young man may better get the feel of the State, tread in the footsteps of so many leaders, or more easily slip up the road to picket the party headquarters. (264)

Oxford is the home of many good schools, many of them not part of the University, and a great deal of serious scholarship in the humanities and research in the sciences hums in its libraries and laboratories. The density of clever minds, as the English would put it, is perhaps unparalleled anywhere on earth. But its institutional foundation, the bedrock of its well-preserved fabric of stone walls, garden lawns, and collected treasures is its function as the finishing school par excellence for the leaders of the British nation. It is the School of Politics, brilliantly conducting a curriculum that, from the University standpoint, is strictly extracurricular. While most undergraduates pursue a higher grade of what nonetheless remains an undergraduate education, a self-selecting few study the levers of political power. The Oxford Union is a luxury Parliament, compleat in every degree of procedural fuss, but delightfully free of hustings and constituents.

The standard explanation for the University’s refusal (under Roy Jenkins’s chancellorship) to grant Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree, in 1985, is that her policies concerning the funding of education were deplorable. A much better reason, I suspect, was that, as Margaret Roberts, Mrs Thatcher attended Oxford (Somerville) without knowing what it was for.

Reading chemistry for her degree, rather than history or PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics) like most aspiring politicians, she was not exposed to the discipline of sampling the whole spectrum of political thought; she was free to read only what she was likely to agree with. … It was only retrospectively that she would like to claim an intellectual pedigree that was no part of her essential motivation. (John Campbell, The Iron Lady, 15)

In other words, the lady emerged from Oxford unfinished. You might almost have argued that the Prime Minister didn’t deserve the degree that she already had.

The Oxford that tourists visit, that the producers of Inspector Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour transform into a member of the cast, the Oxford of “dreaming spires” — that Oxford is a front, a gaudy camouflage. It has nothing to do with education; indeed, what it teaches, this burnished, medievalized rock garden, is abominable conceit. But so long as Britain is a parliamentary democracy, the rock garden will be kept spruce, and the education overall will be superior to that available anywhere else, except, arguably, at “the other place,” Cambridge. The front will be maintained.

Lest anyone imagine that this finishing-school-for-politicians role marks a degradation of Oxford’s greatness, it must be noted that it was precisely to civilize and polish the scions of wealthy and/or powerful families that European universities began admitting, five hundred years ago and more, students who had no intention of taking holy orders and remaining celibate. Long before the Germans overhauled the idea of the university, giving us the research model that still governs higher institutions of learning, universities taught their students about the ways of the world. There was nothing academic about the lessons. True to their name, universities were gathering places for smart people from everywhere.

Although I despise the notion that education can or ought to be “useful,” I am no believer in unworldly education, in ivory towers of “pure” learning. No matter how lacking in practical applications a branch of knowledge might be, it is to be studied in the perspective of human society. Everything that we learn conduces to our better understanding how our public affairs ought to be arranged. This, strictly speaking, is not a political matter, but pre-political; it must be worked out before political activity can begin. Each of us is engaged in the pursuit of a probably unattainable social consensus; those of us with good educations must do more to make our understanding available to those without. The politicians’ job is to harness society’s competing interests in the attempt to implement such consensus as has been reached and as much consensus as can be afforded.

I come away from Jan Morris’s Oxford all but convinced that it would be a very good thing if an Oxbridge background were a sine qua non for all political candidates. After all, we like our doctors to have gone to med school.

Yesterday, after hours spent unpacking the last of the non-book boxes and somehow finding new places for everything that had been stashed temporarily in the linen closet, I had an hour or two for reading, and I thought for a while that I would knock off a few chapters of Penelope Fitzgerald. I had five to go. Nearing the end of the first of these, “Innocence,” however, I realized that I must put the book down, and not pick it up again until I’d read Fitzgerald’s last four novels, one of which is the subject of each but the last of those chapters. It’s all very well, when you’re young, to read about things before you read the things themselves; but, as an old man, I look forward to the surprise of an unread novel. I’ll have heard something about it, something about what happens in it — but I’m talking about a more subtle kind of surprise.

Hermione Lee’s chapters about what she considers to be Fitzgerald’s most important work are essays in literary criticism. They’re more heavily accented with biographical associations than the usual literary essay is, but they’re also far more concerned with the novels than with Fitzgerald’s life, which has been dealt with in other chapters. These appreciations of Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, and The Blue Flower are clearly intended to demonstrate that Penelope Fitzgerald was not a minor English novelist but a great one, despite the somewhat unprepossessing cast of her life story. The books are examined closely, and their artistry subjected to lively analysis. Themes are teased out, and what is implicit in the stories Lee makes quite explicit. I’d like to have a crack at this sort of thing first. I don’t want to read the novels like a well-informed tourist, checking off the things that I’ve been told to look for. I want to be surprised, not by the novels themselves, but by Hermione Lee — by her telling me all the things that I missed.

So the novels were ordered; I don’t have three of the four. I thought about buying Innocence in the Kindle edition as well, so that I could get started right away, but then I took a look at my teetering book pile. There’s a new novel, Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief, that I’ve yet to begin, as well as half a dozen books that I’m halfway through. While I attend to them, my thoughts about Fitzgerald, which are as murky as the muck into which her houseboat sank, will settle somewhat, or perhaps even sort themselves out.

What I find least congenial about Penelope Fitzgerald is the blend, in her character, of the traces of an austere evangelical family traditions with what, at second hand, I take to be an ungenerous disposition. She displays the habitual tendency to be disappointed by other people that is all too common among educated Britons. What saves this discontent from narcissism is that the self is its primary object of scorn (the evangelical influence), but it remains a habit, and, like all bad habits, it quickly becomes tiresome. Yes, we could all be better people; we could all do better. But harping on this, as Fitzgerald implicitly does when she focuses unlovingly on the foibles of people she encounters, is not encouraging. It is a cup of tea too bitter to drink, or at any rate enjoy. As I say, however, I have all this at second hand. I don’t believe that Lee has set out to stress the unattractive side of Fitzgerald’s personality; she seems if anything inclined to downplay it. But it emerges in extracts from Fitzgerald’s notes and letters.

I know nothing of Marilynne Robinson’s private life (her notes and letters), but I gather from her essays that the same sort of evangelical tradition works itself out in the context of a very different  — very generous — outlook. There would be worse ways to spend 2015 than in savoring the contrasts, the different faults and virtues, of the British novelist and the American.

***

On Monday afternoon, I baked two loaves of sourdough bread. Ever since reading Michael Pollan’s Cooked earlier this year, I’ve wanted to make sourdough baking a regular part of my life, but the undertaking has been thwarted, not least by my own lack of aptitude for regularity. Three times have I ordered sourdough starter from the King Arthur Flour website. The first time, I let the starter sit unopened for nearly two weeks. It never quite recovered from this neglect. The second time, I followed directions scrupulously and was all set to go, before I’d been home from Fire Island for a week — but I went to the hospital instead. By the time I was well enough to consider taking the crock of starter out of the refrigerator, what I found when I opened it was not pretty. The third time, I ordered the starter too soon after moving into the new apartment. Well, during the move. The starter has been in and out of the refrigerator a number of times, usually without my doing anything to it. But on Monday afternoon, it looked nicely bubbly, so I dove in.

Sourdough bread is easier to make than other breads, for the simple reason that the yeast is already active and rising. There’s no need to proof anything. And, at least in the recipe that I’m using, there’s no butter to melt and let cool. Everything gets tossed into the mixing bowl, boom boom boom, kneaded by the mixer, and then dumped into the rising bucket. I was a bit lazy, I’m afraid; I threw in the five cups of flour called for as if I were digging sand at the beach. I ought to have weighed the flour and reserved a portion of it for the last stage of kneading. Because I used too much flour, the loaves did not rise spectacularly, and the crumb was dense. But the bread still had a nice spring to it. It makes delicious toast. I’ll have finished off the loaf by next week, just in time to divide the starter again.

(I always try to give the second loaf away. If my upstairs neighbor weren’t traveling, I’d have taken it up to her. Instead, I sent it to the office with Kathleen. Things have been so hectic there that she couldn’t tell me how long it lasted, or indeed if anyone was even tempted to try it.)

Then, last night, I made a new chicken dish — new to me, anyway. Chicken Thighs Normande, I think it was called. I got the recipe out of Classic Home Cooking, one of the handful of cookbooks that I keep in the kitchen. Like sourdough bread, it’s very simple to make. You toss sliced leeks, smashed garlic, and diced Canadian bacon in a roasting pan, and put the thighs on top of them. Then you pour in a cup and a half of hard cider, season with thyme and salpep, and bake for twenty-five minutes. The cider is then reduced, and thickened with sour cream.

I didn’t have any hard cider, so I flamed half a cup of Applejack — I don’t really know why I didn’t use Calvados, although now I think of it it’s much more expensive — and poured it, still flaming, over the chicken, and then added a cup of water. When the chicken was supposedly done, it didn’t look cooked to me, so I put the thighs on a baking sheet and ran them under the broiler. From a culinary point of view, this was a very good idea. But then I botched the sauce. I neglected to reduce it before adding the sour cream. The recipe had pointedly said not to let the sauce boil after adding the sour cream. So I added some heavy cream as well, and turned up the heat. It thickened nicely. I spooned the leeks and whatnot into stew plates, topped them with chicken, and filled out the plates with miniature farfalle. The sauce I poured mostly over the chicken.

Somehow dinner got to the table in good form, despite a contretemps with the smoke alarm. I am still learning how to use the new stove, and the broiler feature is presenting me with a steepish learning curve. (It’s also the case that I removed the batteries from the smoke alarm upstairs.) Because I hadn’t really planned on broiling anything, because the decision to give the chicken some color by running it under the fire was made on the fly, I didn’t prepare for smoke. I left the kitchen doors open, and the kitchen window closed. When the alarm sounded, I rushed to fetch the ladder from the broom closet, to “reset” the alarm, and was instantly tangled in pratfalls also attributable to the unfamiliarity of our new arrangements (and to the extremely narrow broom closet in particular). The ladder caught on the legs of the ironing board, which opened, pinning the ladder in the closet as well as the ironing board itself, so that I had to grope blindly for the catch that would unlock the legs and allow them to close. There followed several moments of maximum fuss, and, long before I managed to restore order, the alarm fell silent. There was never any need for the ladder at all.

Is life too short?

The point of the photograph here is not the Headpiece of Ra effect bouncing off the building called The Georgica (indeed), but the demolition of the “hog house,” the subway workers’ administrative center. The second storey is long gone, and so is about a third of the ground floor. It is almost unspeakably gratifying to watch the disappearance of these artifacts that, while temporary, have been around for a long time. The return to normal is delicious.

What am I saying? I’m not even living in the same apartment. But it is becoming difficult to remember life in the old place. Who’d want to? It’s so much nicer downstairs! The closets may seem to be about half as spacious as the ones upstairs, and the bedroom and book room might be smaller than their upstairs counterparts (the book room smaller by half, it feels). But the pluses, the advantages, the improvements all smother my recollection of what we’ve lost. I don’t give the fabled view a thought; I may have to take up writing novels just to do something with the speculations that sprout in my head every time I look out the window. And don’t get me started on the Rear Window views from the bedroom and book room. Kathleen doesn’t care for them much, but I’m every bit the fan that I expected to be. Who wants to look at Queens?

(Another improvement: I treasure the Venetian blinds. For one thing, they conceal the hideous blackness of the window frames in the back rooms.)

Before the end of the year, we shall have at least placed an order for sheer, “glass” curtains for the front of the house, and we have chosen the fabric for the sham draperies that will hang, permanently open and purely for visual effect, at the wide window in the living room and the narrower ones in the dining ell. With these in place, we shall have absolutely moved.)

The Great Wall of Book Boxes disappeared much sooner than I expected it to. On Saturday, I opened ten boxes, bringing the remaining total down to seventeen. I don’t know what got into me. Perhaps it was a way of dealing with the suspense of waiting for Kathleen to come home from her second week Out West: I was beginning to wonder if she’d ever see what I’d done (with a lot of help from Ray Soleil) while she was away. In the event, she was somewhat underwhelmed. At least a dozen pictures had gone up on the walls, but she seemed to think that there were already plenty. And the Wall was still standing on Saturday night. It had moved somewhat, but only enough to make the dining ell look quite poorly arranged. Ray and I took care of that on Sunday morning. The wall was dispersed into three separate piles, two of six each, flanking the sideboard, which drifted 90 degrees to make a lot more room for the dining table, and a line-up of the remaining three on the dining ell side of the bench in the living room. Atop each the latter is an open box of pictures: regular, wide, and probationary. In most cases, “probationary” means that I no longer care enough for a picture to override Kathleen’s dislike of it.

There is shelf space in the book room for the contents of two, and perhaps almost three, of the remaining boxes of books. Two boxes will certainly go to the uptown storage unit. I may construct additional shelving in the dining ell. (Something like this.) I will stock it with sets of paperbacks — Penguins, Oxford World Classics, nyrbs, Eulenburg miniature scores, maybe even the Loebs. For all my adult sophistication, there is nothing that pleases me quite as much as a row of matching paperback spines.

Moving the sideboard changed everything. The entire public side of the apartment snapped into focus. I am dying to give a party. Valentine’s Day?

In further twaddle, I learned last night that I’ve lost five weeks of Quicken transactions. Why? Even JM can’t say. Somehow, the backup file was corrupted when the attempt to open the default file, itself corrupted, was terminated. New protocols will afford stiffer protection. I’ll save all the receipts until I’m sure that they have been backed up recoverably. (No more overwriting of files; I’ll have to delete backups periodically.) I’ll be able to re-enter December’s bills without too much fuss, as I print a report of them each month. But nothing like this has ever happened before in the more than fifteen years that I’ve been using Quicken. Coupled with the gremlins that made Kathleen’s edits of a hundred-page document inaccessible to her (the IT people at the firm recovered most of them), the Quicken glitch is spooky.

And, just to make things really ticklish, this week’s New Yorker arrived on Monday, as it ought to do but hardly ever does.

***

Over the weekend, Mark Bittman stepped forward from his accustomed food platform to publish an Op-Ed piece of global perspective, in which he argued that all the problems of today’s society are related, and that demonstrating against “the billionaire class” ought to be kept up until the “superrich” are appropriately taxed. The piece was flavored with more than a dollop of pungent late-Sixties extract, which is doubtless why I found myself protesting against almost every sentence, even though I am in complete accord with Bittman’s basics. I hate it when the prospect of Justice is made to smell like someone who needs a bath.

The only thing that could make American society worse than it already is would be a return to Sixties-style antagonism — which has already demonstrated its miserable track record. Bittman seems absolutely unaware that today’s dystopic tendencies have been willed into being by his rough contemporaries of the same sex, men who were boys back then, and who grew up with no intention whatsoever of raising their consciousness. These men, I expect, will die off without heirs of their own; their sons will not be so determined to avenge their fathers’ loss of hegemony. But it’s so much easier to blame things on undertaxed plutocrats, a vaguely insect, non-human class that crawls out from under the rocks when nobody is looking.

These “billionaires” are as fictional as the intellectuals’ “masses.” Sure, there are too many people out there in possession of nine-figure fortunes, but they don’t form a class except to the extent that they support legislation (or the lack of it) that will allow them to keep all their money. This money, it seems to me, has poured upon them from ever more capacious chutes, as changes in social patterns (such as the use of “devices” that didn’t exist twenty-five years ago) have caused the payment of certain kinds of rents to skyrocket. Punitive taxation isn’t the answer; income diversion, breaking up some of the grosser revenue streams, is a far more intelligent response.

I am also unhappy with the plan of encouraging young people to try to fix things, equipped with nothing but stamina and enthusiasm. I don’t understand how anyone even passingly acquainted with the Cultural Revolution in China can embrace such a program without shudders and nausea.

After all, it was the radical elements of Sixties counterculture who turned out the lights on the New Deal, dismissing it as not nearly good enough. It was the abandonment of the Postwar consensus by progressives that opened the way for right-wing predators.

***

It’s Beethoven’s birthday. (He’d be 244.) That means it’s okay to start playing Christmas carols. If you’ve waited until now, you won’t be sick of them until the last few days of the year.

Whenever I find myself near the living room window, I am startled by the passers-by on the other side of 87th Street, many of whom, like this young man with his device and his mug, are not quite passing by. 87th Street is a side street, not a thoroughfare like 86th, and a great deal of what can only be called loitering takes place on it. Also, the people close enough to be appreciated. From the bedroom upstairs, we could see pedestrians at the northeast corner of First and 87th, by they were distant, indistinguishable creatures, notable only for the occasional sporty umbrella. From the living room down here, it is impossible not be intrigued by the view from what momentarily feels exactly like a box in the theatre.

As for the view inside the apartment, that has undergone a startling change, too: the Great Wall of Books has disappeared. But more about that some other time.

***

I have never been so keenly aware of the biographer’s art as I am while reading Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald. That’s another way of saying that I feel, intensely, the very different stories that might have been told by other, less sympathetic historians; while, at the same time, I sense as never before, the complications of perspective that are encompassed by any life, certainly any interesting one. Lee manages to tell at least two stories herself. One of her Fitzgeralds is a novelist with a glittering academic past, about whom one might say that she did not begin to write books of any kind, much less novels, until she caught the sound that would make her voice distinct from all those that she had encountered as a literary scholar. The other Fitzgerald is a woman beset by domestic adversities that, although all too familiar to working-class women everywhere, took this scion of the materially austere but nonetheless elite Knox family by surprise. Twice in her life, she was evicted by bailiffs (or by the threat of their imminent appearance), and after losing a third home to the Thames — her houseboat in Chelsea Reach sank — she spent over a decade in a council estate. It would be easy to put the entire blame for these catastrophes on her feckless husband, but to do so is to reduce Fitzgerald to a passive, hopelessly helpless female.

Another woman might have reflected upon her life as a woman, coming to maturity when she did, but I suspect that Fitzgerald found this subject not only humiliating but, worse, uninteresting — just as I suspect that it was her lack of interest in the foundations of housekeeping that exposed her to the vagaries of uncertain fortune. I am by no means looking down; my familiarity with the embarrassing irregularities that Lee retails (as delicately as possible) is far more extensive than I care to admit. I certainly took no interest in the foundations of housekeeping when I first set out to keep house. I am still far more concerned about the appealing appearance of a room than I am with its actual cleanliness; and, instead of budgeting, I try to spend as little as possible, an effort that from time to time seems to justify outbursts of irresponsibility. I get better at it, I believe, but at my age this is no sterling accomplishment. I am, moreover, a man: I have been able to choose to take on the duties and cares of keeping house. I have not had to raise children, either; my daughter’s daily care was almost exclusively her mother’s concern shortly after she passed her first birthday. Fitzgerald, as a matter of everyday life, was a “devoted mother.” Her efforts to secure the educations of her three children, all of whom followed her to Oxford, were unceasing. By that very token, however, it is not surprising that all three left home at a tender age. And it is difficult to forgive Fitzgerald the priggish blindness that made her refuse to visit her daughter, Tina, while she was living in Muswell Hill out of wedlock, with the man whom she would marry. Photographs appear to confirm one’s judgment that Penelope Fitzgerald never tried to make a home.

In the world in which Fitzgerald grew up, there were servants and maiden aunts to see to what Hannah Arendt calls, in The Human Condition, the labor of domestic life. Like Arendt, Fitzgerald never seriously considered undertaking this labor, even when money was very tight. Both women would have considered housework a shocking waste of mind, and both contrived to avoid it as doggedly as I avoided studying Latin. I lived to regret the early drilling in Latin, but I don’t think that Arendt or Fitzgerald understood what they had missed on the home front. And I don’t fault them for it: they belonged to the first generation of which intelligent people no longer entertained the notion that the minds of women were inferior. Housework would almost certainly have been the waste of a chance to enjoy parity of intellect. I expect that neither ever doubted that housework ought to be done for servants, and that one ought to try to make enough money to pay them, rather than taking it on themselves.

We still live in a world where loving homes are thought to be maintained, or at least overseen, by selfless women, even though selfless women have all but passed from the face of the earth, along with domestic servants. Housekeeping still looks like a mousetrap to intelligent women; no bait in the world could merit the loss of personal autonomy that engagement with housekeeping seems to require. I know this, because smart women often tell me so, and in whispers, as if the very mention of the subject were dangerous. I know many devoted mothers who are raising children in what seems like an improvised camping ground, rather like living in a fun circus without the dangerous animals or the shady characters. The idea, which certainly reigned chez Fitzgerald, is to grow up and go out into the real world as soon and as successfully as possible. You’re not leaving home if you’ve never had a proper one.

The idea that attachments to people are the only important ones strikes me as naive. We are all needy creatures, and it seems healthier to work out some of this neediness on things — possessions. Home is a possession shared by two or more people and owned by none. We talk about the importance of good homes for children, but good homes are never very precisely described. Men, by and large, don’t know anything about them — but who is to enlighten them? Many of the women — most? — who would dearly love to have a home are too poor to make one, and the men in their lives aren’t ready to help them. As for the smart women, they have “better things to do.”

I hope that it won’t be long before well-educated women stop being afraid of home.

A few weeks ago, I placed a photograph of the book room taken from this angle at the bottom of an entry. I had the idea of posting an image each Friday, to show how the moving in was coming along. The following Friday, however, was the day on which Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil did something special, and I was distracted. Ray had already applied a coat of paint, mixed with glaze, to the bookcases. One coat. That was all it took. With sunlight streaming into the room, you can tell that one bookcase used to be bright green, while the other two were dark blue, but you have to be looking for this. A casual glance suggests that all the bookcases are a bronze brown. I was never so impressed in my life. One coat!

This photograph nicely fails to suggest the extent of disorder on the bookshelves, but there are plenty of hints. Perhaps in another three weeks I’ll post another photograph. Perhaps not — I’ll be in San Francisco. (Yikes.)

***

David Brooks’s column in today’s Times has fallen into my lap. “In Praise of Small Miracles” retails anecdotes about how behavioral economics is being used to make life less awful for people around the world. In Kenya, iron boxes encourage savings, and heckling bad drivers reduces automobile casualties. Sugar cane farmers in India are invited to make important decisions (about choice of fertilizer and schools) after they receive their annual payment, not before, when they tend to score ten points lower on IQ tests. Bonuses are awarded to teachers on the understanding that they must be returned if quotas are not met. The gist of all these stories is the importance of understanding that we are generally far more motivated to avoid some things than we are to achieve some others, and I don’t think I could find a more eloquent expression of the little formula that I inserted into an entry the other day (less awful ≠ more better). It’s a mistake to try to work with a scale that ranges from bad things to good things, because the two are not continuous in our minds. It’s a mistake to exhort people to do good things so that bad things won’t happen, because we think about good things and bad things with different parts of our minds. If you want to focus on making bad things less bad, it’s better not to muddle the picture with talk of improvement. It’s enough to show ways in which bad things can be made less awful. And this is something that institutions of all sizes can do.

Does this mean that human engineering works? No. Human engineering envisions improved human beings. Behavioral economics is more modest. It doesn’t seek to straighten the crooked timber of humanity, but only to accept it — to work with its grain instead of against it. Brooks’s small miracles are no more (and no less) miraculous than raising a happy child. What’s new is the understanding that informed, humanist concern for the welfare of others is the first principle of social policy, just as it is of successful parenting.

It’s because of this focus on safety and soundness — making life as little awful as possible — that parents and institutions do best to leave the positive pursuit of happiness to others, to contributions of the individual’s peers — to colleagues, neighbors, friends, and lovers.

The parent who has created a safe and loving environment has done enough. It’s a mistake to proceed to fill up a child’s life with extracurricular activities. Similarly, it is useless for universities to pay any attention whatsoever to those extracurricular activities when deciding which applicants to admit. Parents and schools are charged not with turning out well-rounded adults but with seeing to it that adults are not ill-equipped to live in the world — in the same way that they are not malnourished or unclothed. It is the responsibility of parents and schools to teach young people the conventions of social intercourse and the principles of political government. It is the generosity of teachers and lovers that inspires our lives with the visions of happiness that make the hard work and mortal failing of life more than worth the trouble. We pursue happiness in the free company of peers.

(Teachers as peers? I’m using “teacher” in a special sense, the one that marks our recollection of teachers who “made a difference” to us. The difference made in such cases is an understanding of the world, and it is not taught but delivered, by one mind to another. When this “difference” is being “made,” the teacher is, momentarily, not an authority figure, but a guide, as Virgil was to Dante.)

***

Coming home from the Remicade infusion yesterday, I finally got to sit in one of the new taxis with a sunroof. It was a great treat, even in the dark. As we drove up First Avenue, I watched as the tops of tall buildings floated by. I can never see anything much from the sedan windows of a taxi, and I can’t see much more when I’m walking; to glimpse the top of a building across the street, I might very well have to stretch out on the sidewalk. The view through the sunroof of so many lighted apartments reminded me forcibly that I live in a very big city full of a lot of people. That this immense population is neither crowded nor oppressive amazes me. (NB: If you are reading this close upon a return from the Fairway in my neighborhood, please give the sentence fifteen minutes of deep breathing to achieve plausibility.) All those rooms, stacked in columns twenty or thirty tall, each kitted out differently, each trailing a unique bundle of stories. Comparisons to anthills would be blind and stupid.

And then we pulled into the driveway of my building. I am already beginning to forget how long we couldn’t use it.

Bon weekend à tous!

Kathleen is now in San Francisco. She flew there from Phoenix yesterday morning. Last night, she took a taxi out to Sunset and saw Megan, Ryan, and Will, and also Ryan’s parents, who have been paying a visit from their new home in Riverside County. She had a very good time. I stayed up late, in order to chat with her afterward. What a difference an hour makes! The two-hour jump between the Eastern and Mountain Time Zones is psychologically manageable — it doesn’t seem to amount to very much. The third hour, between Eastern and Pacific, makes it much more difficult to reconcile schedules. I call it a phase change, although I don’t know what that means.

I slept neither well nor poorly. I got up earlier than I thought I would. Although I read several stories in the Times, I can’t remember a single one, except for Charles Isherwood’s review of the revival of Electra in London, with Kristin Scott Thomas, whose outbursts of rage struck the critic as “monotonous.”

Then I called Kathleen, who doesn’t have anything to do today but draft documents and, this evening, attend a dinner. She gladly accepted my offer to call her back in an hour.

In the middle of the afternoon, I’ve got a Remicade infusion at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I was going to try to do a few other things while I was out, such as getting a haircut, but I’ve abandoned those ambitions. Getting myself to the hospital and back will be plenty beaucoup for this cold, grey day. At some point, I have to install a new answering machine. Now that JM has normalized our land-line situation, I’ve taken calls from friends who didn’t have my cell phone number. One of them said, “Ah, your phone is working again.” What he meant by that was that I had picked up the phone before his call could be shunted to the voicemail box to which, not knowing the password and not being able to set a new one, we don’t have access.

Between washing the dishes, after dinner with Ms NOLA and Mr ED, and Kathleen’s phone call two hours later, I read Jan Morris’s Oxford. But is it? Oxford came out in 1965, when Jan was still very much James, and the book betrays, on almost every page, an insider’s familiarity with the place that, in those days, only a man would possess. (A woman, no matter how much of an insider herself, would certainly have complained about the male entitlement that was still the great sea of privilege on which the University floated.) But authorial metamorphosis is not the twistiest thing about Oxford. Fifty years on, how accurate is it? In the chapter on “College Spirit,” Morris predicts that the autonomy (and peculiarity) of the thirty-odd colleges can’t last, that, if nothing else, state funding, new at that time, will eventually transform the fabric. (In fact, however, there are three more colleges today than there were in 1965, a move, it would seem, away from homogenization.) Can the High Steward still oversee trials for treason?

It doesn’t much matter, really; I’m reading the book for its impressions, as well-written as Morris’s always are, and for a sense of the once and future university, which rises from countless statutory provisions and traditional routines to caper like a dragon in one’s moist imagination, impossible to capture.

Do I wish I’d gone to Oxford, instead of to Notre Dame? Do you have to ask? But I’m too old for regrets of such highly speculative nature. Notre Dame was good enough for me, and I have heard of only two or three other American schools where I fancy I might have done as well for myself. That’s to say: where I shouldn’t have come to grief. I needed a demanding curriculum but easygoing professors. Arguing in seminars was instructive, but writing papers was more important. I was convinced that nobody really knew anything, that the older professors who actually did know something had stopped learning, as a response to the apparently huge changes in everything. My totem, a figure too invested with dread and dismay to serve as an idol or a patron saint, was Cassiodorus, the sixth-century patrician who institutionalized the preservation of a written culture that had already sustained severe losses. I regarded my contemporaries as Ostrogothic barbarians looting the libraries. And I still do.

My intellectual community is a world of silent exchange, of writings passing back and forth and onward. The division is not between the living and the dead but between the distant and the near, and my intellectual companions are all distant; they are at any rate never in this apartment. My life is not at all monastic — I’m unabashedly hungry for dozens of small pleasures — but the pace of my thinking is set by the demands of reading and writing, not those of debate, which rather horrifies me. The meaningful discussion of almost anything is too complex for conversation; talk just complicates. Silence can indeed be golden.

This is not to say that conversation is unimportant. Far from it; without the stimulation of smarty-pants badinage, I should go on thinking the same old things indefinitely. But the thinking, when it happens, takes place in my fingers, not on my tongue.

I often think of that pensée of Pascal’s that I can never quite locate in satisfactory form, in which he attributes all the unhappiness in the world to the inability of men to sit quietly in a room. I substitute confusion for unhappiness, and I also argue that no one can be expected to sit quietly in a room without sooner or later reading or writing, both forms of engagement with the world.

I don’t know how much of this I should have learned earlier in life had I sojourned in an Oxford college. I doubt that it would have made much of a difference. Oxford is, after all, a society in which young people compete whether they’re asked to or not, and I have never understood the value of intellectual competition. I want to get closer to the truth, yes, but this doesn’t mean that I want to get closer to the truth than anyone else. What’s the good of that? I’m left alone with the truth. I’d rather work toward it in peaceful and quiet collaboration with other readers and writers. I’m not above showing off, but I’m aware that showing off is, or can easily become, ridiculous and pathetic. Not to mention distracting.

For the next couple of days, you’ll find me in Jan Morris’s Oxford.

Most people, when they get on a train for the first time, know where they’re going. The destination is not what makes the journey interesting. What’s interesting is what’s seen in passing. Hills, farms, towns, rivers — and let’s not forget the backs of factories. Trees up close whiz by; trees far away can almost be contemplated. But the train does not stop to permit further investigation of these phenomena, nor does it shift onto tracks that will take it to a different terminal. You can enjoy the ride, but you cannot direct it.

That’s perhaps why the phrase “train of thought” never meant much to me as a figure of speech. It seemed unintelligent, because I took it too literally. But reading Hannah Arendt, who was very fond of the phrase, taught me to loosen up a bit, to forget about destinations. Trains of thought make stops wherever you want them to, and they work their way to junctions of which you hadn’t an inkling at the outset.

For some time now, also as a result of reading Hannah Arendt, I’ve been deeply interested in the idea of humanism. I’ve used the word a lot, and, almost as often, its close cousin, humane. But what does it mean? Something new, I believe. I saw last night, from a train of thought that I happened to be riding, that humanism in the Twenty-First century embraces a respect for the multiplicity of human idiosyncrasies, and honors every individual idiosyncratic human being, in ways that were not characteristic of the humanist outlook of earlier times, such as classical antiquity or the Renaissance. In fact, this respect and this honor are now the heart of humanism.

The old humanism taught that every human being has a soul that is beloved by the Creator, and it insisted on the sanctity of every individual life. But it also taught that the things that distinguish any two people are accidents, the non-essential results of chance — and therefore not very important. The very thing that all human beings shared and that was held to make every life as important as every other, was also the thing that made the differences between people trivial. I might be tall, and you short; you might be rich, and I poor. But none of this sort of thing mattered in the long run, for the long run was a matter of souls.

So there was nothing in the old humanism to protect humanity from the many bright ideas that were spawned by what is usually called the Industrial Revolution but which would be more clearly grasped as a Mechanical Revolution.

There had always been machines, but they were as varied as the men who made them. Toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, craftsmen developed a knack for the production of precise instruments that repeated operations exactly. This meant that the parts of machines could be made the same, so that two machines could also be the same. One machine might be in Newcastle, the other in Bristol, but they would both spit out the same widget.

At the same time, the concept of civil engineering emerged. Hitherto, engineers had been military men, the designers and operators of weapons and fortifications. Engineering was one of the arts of war. Now it became an art of peace as well, an art of improvement. Civil engineers drained marshes, dug canals, and built bridges without any military or even political objectives. They put the steam engine to a thousand uses. They made life more productive and convenient, and, eventually, safer.

Unfortunately, there was nothing in the old humanism to refute the idea that human beings might also be improved by engineering, by a mechanical analysis of human behavior that would routinize human operations and iron out the quirks that make people different, unpredictable, and annoying. Everyone would be the same, and live together in perfect harmony. Failing that — and, even in the most intoxicated throes of this utopian daydreaming, it was fairly clear that everybody would never be the same — a ruling class of smart people would govern a mass of interchangeable human units.

It sounds ridiculous, but the history of the period 1750-1950 is stuffed with horrific attempts to realize variations on this theme. From slavery in the American South to the Final Solution and the gulags in Europe, and to the Cultural Revolution in China, we find nightmare after nightmare in the glaring light of day.

Today’s humanism begins with a cautionary axiom: Every human being alive is driven crazy by at least one other human being. This cannot be corrected without making things truly crazy for everybody. In most cases, you can teach yourself not to be driven crazy, and life can be grand.

***

I never quite saw this before, but my obstinate objection and resistance to self-help books and New-Age schemes for the realization of human potential are rooted in the belief that people cannot be engineered. (I also have a rather wonderful faith that, in the event that we ever do learn how to engineer ourselves, we’ll no longer want to.) The only way that you can make a human being conform for sure is to kill it, and this can take the violent form of inducing actual death, or it can take the nominally milder form of draining the human being’s life of meaning. Human beings cannot be engineered, but they can be degraded. (That sounds like a candidate for the second cautionary axiom of humanism.) Torture and ethnic cleansing are ancient examples of the application of military engineering to human beings. Standardized testing and television advertizing represent the newer, civil side.

Every happy human being (and here I should equate success with happiness) is the artisanal product, a complete one-off, of manifold acts of generosity. There are no shortcuts. There’s much that we can do to make life less awful for large numbers of people, but happiness is an individualized project: every human being aims for a peculiar kind of happiness that is not quite like anybody else’s. (Third caution: “less awful” ≠ “more better”.) The pursuit of happiness would be a maddeningly inefficient project, if it could not be assisted by a handful of loving and friendly helpers.

Growing up, I hated Venetian blinds. Back then, there was nothing stylish about them. They were the default setting for soulless housing. Like the blinds in the photograph, they were usually metal — in the bedroom, we have wood — but they came in unattractive shades of white, cream, and grey. The tapes were cheesy. When we moved into this building, the first thing I did was to get rid of the blinds. Three times I did this. The fourth apartment came without them, and I couldn’t wait for the blinds that I was obliged to pay for myself to arrive and to be installed. That’s what thirty years will do to you. Thirty years, and a complete reversal of taste.

It would be interesting to know how much of its prosperity the firm of Smith and Noble owes to the 1981 adaptation of Double Indemnity, Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt. As I recall, the glass walls in Hurt’s character’s law office are shaded by blinds. Not the itsy-bitsy ones that were common at the time, but wide, woody blinds that were reminiscent of an earlier decade. It was a feeble attempt, I always thought, to explain all that sweat on the bodies of modern-day Floridians. It was as if air conditioning hadn’t come in yet. Sort of a cake and eat it problem. Anyway, the blinds were super; everybody noticed them. Everyone said, blinds — hmm. (Well, not everybody.) Now you can order up the Body Heat look online. I actually did that — for the blue room upstairs. Having done it, I didn’t want to do it again. Let there be light.

Although: the blinds will make it possible for me to remain in the book room in the middle of clear days, when the sun pours down like molten ore.

In other developments: thanks to the tireless efforts of JM, Tech God, we now have regular land-line phone service in the bedroom and the book room. Hitherto, we have depended on a battery-powered phone plugged into a jack in one of Kathleen’s closets. We have also discovered that we’re signed up for a Verizon voicemail option that we never knew about. It picks up calls on the fourth ring — but slightly later than our old answering machine did. We have no idea how to access this voicemail. For three weeks, it has been taking messages, and who knows what awaits us when Kathleen finally manages to unlock the mailbox.

Also, the book-box count is down to 34. I emptied three boxes, though, not two. One box had almost become part of the furniture. It was marked to indicate books from the living room, but it was full of treatises on needlecraft, and there was no dealing with it when I discovered the error. (There was at that time no furniture in the bedroom.) The box was overlooked in later counts. Among the duly counted boxes, I came across a one that was actually marked “Trollope,” and I set it aside. I’ll open it later, take out what’s not Trollope (if anything), and top it off with other books for storage. I haven’t mentioned my Trollope problem recently, have I? Two summers ago, out at Fire Island, I re-read Orley Farm, and quite liked it, but Kathleen and I were reading Wilkie Collins’s sensation novels at the time, so the air was thick with context. And the young-persons romance in Orley Farm is about as recessed as it can be.

Next summer, perhaps I’ll read The Small House at Allington again. I loved that book the first time I read it. I wasn’t yet onto Trollope’s penchant for lockjaw female monogamy. Now, whenever I read Trollope, it’s like a bad smell, as of virgin immolations in a neighboring park.

More of a boost than that from emptying the three boxes was gained from clearing the clutter on and around Great Wall Island. When we were moving in, the Wall was a very convenient dump for things that didn’t seem to belong anywhere. For a long time, I didn’t even see the mess, because the Wall itself was so formidable. Now that it has been vastly reduced, the Wall and its purlieus must be kept neat and tidy, dusted and swept, and they are. I could simply call it all an Installation and be done with it. Untitled: The Artist’s Library #34. But we know how I’d feel about that.

***

Like everybody else (well, maybe not everybody), I’m reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. I’ve read three or four novels by Fitzgerald, and I think that I read them while she was still alive. I have not read The Blue Flower, but I have a copy. It’s an odd edition — QPBC, perhaps? — that couples The Blue Flower with The Bookshop, which I did read. I’ve also read At Freddie’s and Offshore. I can’t say that I’m a great fan of Fitzgerald, but then I’ve just confessed to not having read anything since the year 2000. (That can’t be right, surely?) It doesn’t matter. Hermione Lee writes superb biographies. I wouldn’t say that she could write a fascinating book about just anybody, but then, neither would she. In Fitzgerald, she has an intriguingly late-blooming subject who belonged to a family, the Knoxes, that was practically its own Bloomsbury group. (And both of her grandfathers were bishops!) I haven’t forgotten how Lee made Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf new and desperately interesting figures, despite all that one had read before, and I’m afraid that I’m reading Penelope Fitzgerald as if it were a novel. Pure pleasure; I’m not learning anything.

At night, when I’ve got ready for bed but am not about to get into it, I sit at the end of the living room that I call the boudoir and inhabit it. I sit in my corner chair, which pivots easily for different views. It is very quiet, but I can imagine parties so easily that they almost materialize. One of my favorite sounds is the burble of a good cocktail party, heard from an adjacent room (such as the kitchen). This tells you something about my childhood, I suppose. Although we went to Mass every Sunday, cocktail parties (much less frequent) were the big events in our household. They were, quite literally, productions, and they were always successful, in that most of the guests/audience were glad that they had bothered to show up. I like to think that I have a somewhat higher caliber of acquaintance. I put drinks on the bar and food on the table, and everything’s tasty, but largely I stand out of the way and let my friends entertain each other, which they rarely fail to do. The “production” part is all in what used to be called the Rolodex.

They’re gone. Here we see a couple of trucks engaged in remounting the bishop’s-crook lampposts. The next day, they were gone, along with all the orange cones and whatnot. The street was clear to traffic. There were even parked cars along the curb! The foundations of the station entrances are bound in hurricane fencing, but that is the only sign of work under construction. There are no workers now. Other workers, under another contract, will complete the entrances.

So much for 86th Street. Second Avenue is still a mess. Which is ironic, in that much of the inconvenience attending this project was caused by the failure to block the avenue as a throroughfare at 96th and 61st Streets. Instead, the sidewalks were narrowed, to make room for the traffic and the construction zone. This bad decision severely reduced pedestrian traffic and put a lot of shops and restaurants out of business. Traffic on Second seems worse than ever, perhaps because of developments at the other end of the 86th Street Station, at 83rd Street.

I noticed last night that the lampposts have not been hooked up. Something to look forward to.

***

It’s very cold and very grey, and Kathleen is very far away, in Phoenix. On Wednesday, she flies to San Francisco, where she hopes to see the younger branch of the family, and she comes home to New York on Saturday. Aside from a Remicade infusion on Thursday, my calendar is blank. So I’ll be able to spend plenty of quality time with the Great Wall of Book Boxes. I brought the number of boxes down from 44 to 36 yesterday. There is still plenty of shelf space, although little of it is what I’d call premium.

The Great Wall stands right next to the dining table, so the sensible thing seems to be to empty the boxes onto that. If I set up the card table in the foyer, I’ll have somewhere to put books that have for one reason or another lost their place in the book room — presumably to make room for a newly-unpacked book that has a better claim to that place. At a certain point, I shall stop breaking down empty boxes, and start filling them up with books found for the storage unit uptown. The contents of each box will be listed in an Evernote, and a copy of the list will  be packed with each box. (The label of each Evernote will be inscribed on the box.) I wonder if the Christmas tree will have come and gone, and our New Year’s visit to San Francisco will be behind us, before I have finished deciding between which books to put into storage and which to give away. But there’s no doubt in my mind that, by the end of this week, the remnants of the Great Wall will have melted into something like a console, standing alongside the Lutyens bench — I almost said “behind it,” but the bench is backless — masquerading as a clunky piece of furniture that can be lived with for the time being. Four or maybe even five boxes can be slipped beneath the bench, too.

I ought to have foreseen that the move itself would crystallize changes in my thinking about my personal library even more powerfully than the prospect of the move. I say my personal library because I’ve stopped thinking about personal libraries in general and what they might or ought to be. That’s an aspirational outlook, suitable to a young person setting out to build a library. A characteristic of library-in-general is that it ought to be well-rounded, whatever that means. Unless, of course, it is going to be specialist, full of books on two or three topics. I would say that somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of my books are aspirational in this way, acquired pursuant to some imaginary rule. That’s why I have Gibbon in a box. That’s why I used to have several histories of mathematics.

I now see the library as a network. I am at the center of the network, of course, but most books are also related to some, or even many, of their neighbors on the shelves. The importance of most (but not all) books is determined nodally, by the thickness of connections to other books. In the case of fiction, the most important books are those whose authors are represented by five or more titles (although I’m thinking of slimming down my massive Trollope collection, by sending most of it to storage). A singleton, an only-book-by-a-given-author, is probably going to be discarded. So are books about small-tail subjects. I’ll try to collect examples as I cull.

Is this process of moving in taking too long? It doesn’t seem so, but we have had access to the apartment for more than four weeks. And yet, as I wrote last week, the move is done. What remains to be done is all in the nature of improvements that we might well have made to the old apartment. And, briefly interrupting the writing of this entry, my favorite handyman (and I don’t mean Ray Soleil) has installed blinds in the bedroom and the bookroom. Privacy at last! I know that we can’t have curtains by Christmas, but it’s a pleasant dream anyway. Maybe sheers on the living room window.

***

Reading John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts?, I see that modernism is an aesthetic that we both dislike but that we sidestep differently. Carey is happy to go with what I call the weedy definition: just as a weed is any plant that’s growing where you don’t want it to be, so art is anything that anybody regards as art. This solves the philosophical problem, “What is a work of art,” by stabbing philosophy in the heart, but the solution is absolutely uninteresting. Why even bother having the word “art”?

My solution is to proceed in the opposite direction. Like Arthur Danto, I believe that a work of art must be intended as a work of art, but, unlike him, I don’t have to deal with his famous necktie conundrum — Picasso and a five year-old both paint neckties that, when they’re done, are indistinguishable; but Picasso’s is a work of art because he meant it to be one, while the child’s is not — because intention isn’t the whole story. Like John Carey, I, too, ignore philosophy’s search for the invisible qualities that distinguish art from other kinds of things. I insist on the very distinct and obvious adherence to a specifically Western tradition of art. This tradition is still very much alive and well, with many practitioners, among them my friend Devin Cecil-Wishing, and as soon as the “art world” and its attendant journalists see modernism and its sequelae as the branches of literature, not art, that they are, the tradition will return to the foreground.