This weather will be the death of us all. Last week, it was either too cold to venture outdoors or wet, as shown above. I dearly wished to stay home today, but it was sunny and mild — just for the moment, with more wet on the way — so I had to take advantage of favorable winds and run a round of errands. Before lunch with Ray Soleil, I got a haircut, and stopped by Crawford Doyle. Also William Greenberg for cookies and Venture Stationery for Post-Its. After lunch, I bought a Le Creuset Dutch oven at Williams-Sonoma, to replace one that had cracked after decades of use, and made a quick stop at the bank. Back at home, Ray and I had a cup of tea — with some cookies. Then I went out again, to pick up prescriptions for Kathleen and to buy a couple of bratwurst at Schaller & Weber. Fairway turned out to be not too much of a zoo.

Now I don’t have to go out for a couple of days. (Gristede’s runs don’t count.) Tomorrow, I can continue some domestic maneuvers.

***

On Sunday, I read an item in the Times about the dueling matriarchs of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia. The first lady was recently re-elected as prime minister; the second instructed her followers to boycott the election, which it seems they did. This superficially amusing but basically depressing story would not have meant much to me if I had not finished reading, the day before, a book about the troubled country at the mouth of the great rivers, Srinath Raghavan’s 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. I can’t remember why I bought it, but I’m pretty sure that somebody in one of the reviews gave it a strong notice. The book was hard going at first. Well, not at first; the first two chapters read briskly enough, as Raghavan relates the events leading up to the show-down between Agha Yahya Khan, the military president (dictator) of Pakistan from 1969, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the East Pakistani Awami League and winner of the 1970 parliamentary elections. Spurred on by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who would replace him after the debacle), Yahya failed to yield power to Mujib. East Pakistan rose in revolt in early 1971. West Pakistani forces suppressed the disorder, but at the cost of inducing nearly a tenth of the local population to seek refuge in India.

Just when you are ready to read about chaos in what would become Bangladesh by the end of 1971, Raghavan turns his back on the scene, the better to survey the response of the rest of the world to the situation; that’s what his subtitle means. This is where the difficulty began. It was hard to adjust to the fact that I would be reading a diplomatic history, in which communiqués and ambassadorial conversations would take the place of events. The structure of the book was initally off-putting as well. In each of the six central chapters, the crisis is reviewed from the perspective of one of the following points of view: the Indian government of Indira Gandhi, the White House of Nixon and Kissinger (a point of view in sharp conflict with that of the US State Department), the Kremlin, the United Nations and the growing humanitarian movements, the other international players, and, finally the China of Mao and Zhou En-lai. Each of these chapters begins at some point in the Sixties and advances tortuously through 1971, usually ending just a bit further into the year than did the preceding chapter. At first, this recurrence was annoying, but by the time I got to China, I was mesmerized. It was clear that Raghavan was telling his story in the most suitable way, and the cumulative pile-up of detail demonstrated the ingenuity of his sequence.

In the last two chapters, Raghavan picks up the crisis itself where he set it down at the end of the first two chapters, and, if you’ve been paying attention, the narrative is as rewarding as a great stew is tasty. After months of restraint, war finally broke out between India and Pakistan in December 1971. It lasted for twelve days, after which Pakistan surrendered and withdrew its claims upon the eastern wing of the country. No other country interfered — except, of course, the United States. The United States sent a fleet from Vietnam, which, happily, did not arrive in the Bay of Bengal in time to do anything stupid.

It would be a mistake to accuse Raghavan of an anti-American slant, but he does make almost gleeful use of White House tapes to illustrate the dickheadedness of the two guys in the Oval Office. The president and his national security adviser had only one big thing in mind, but it was a very big thing: the world itself, as rearranged by a rapprochement between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China. In order to keep this matter of global strategic significance top secret, Nixon and Kissinger needed a supremo as their emissary, and the supremo they picked was — Yahya Khan. He did the job so well that the American plotters completely lost the ability to see the subcontinental crisis at all objectively. Yahya was great, therefore Pakistan was great. India was — ruled by a woman of whom the two men had nothing nice to say. (“That bitch played us,” Nixon would bay.) To be sure, Nixon and Kissinger are at a great disadvantage here. It is perfectly possible that that the chanceries of the world echoed with the same kind of pompous nonsense as passed for realpolitik in the Oval Office. But, if so, those inanities were not recorded. Americans aside, Raghavan is largely confined to the measured statements of governments. Everybody seems cautious — except the reckless, raucous Americans. “Pissing contest” is too polite a term for the kind of challenge Nixon and Kissinger imagined themselves to be faced with.

The United States was the odd man out in this game for another reason as well, the very simple one of geography. India and Pakistan are very far away from the US. They are very close to Russia and China, however, and the Russian and Chinese leaders acted as though this fact bore heavily on their thinking, as indeed it ought. Nixon and Kissinger were incapable of thinking on a sub-global level. Their grandiosity was ridiculous.

As government after government came to the same conclusion — the West Pakistani oppression of East Pakistan was regrettable and almost certainly bound to recoil upon the oppressors, but Pakistan’s sovereignty must be respected by other nations — I found myself more and more disgusted with the notion of “sovereignty,” at least outside of Western Europe and the English-speaking powers. As applied to the Pakistan of 1970, it made no sense at all. The borders were not yet twenty-five years old, and they had been drawn by outsiders. All that bound the people of East and West Pakistan was Islam and a history with the Raj. They shared neither culture nor economic outlook. Smaller by far in land area, East Pakistan was considerably larger than West Pakistan in population. That was the problem: after Pakistan’s first free and fair election, the parliamentary majority would have been held by a party that represented only East Pakistan.

Long before I reached the final paragraph of 1971, I was of the same mind.

The 1971 crisis also has a contemporary resonance well beyond the the confines of South Asia. For it proved to be a precursor of more recent conflicts in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East. The Bangladesh crisis prefigured many of the characteristic features of contemporary conflicts: the tension between the principles of sovereignty and human rights and the competing considerations of interests and norms; the virtues of unilateralism versus multilateralism; national lineups that blur the international divides of West and East, North and South; and the importance of international media and NGOs, diasporas and transnational public opinion. The Bangladesh crisis may have occurred during a watereshed moment in the Cold War, but it was a harbinger of the post-Cold War world. Inasmuch as it turns the spotlight on these dilemmas and debates, the history of the 1971 crisis is not merely a narrative of the past but a tract for our times.

Sheikh Hasina is Mujibur Rahman’s daughter. She survived the massacre of her entire family, in 1975, only by virtue of studying abroad. Begum Khaleda Zia is the widow of a president assassinated in 1981. Independence has not been kind to these ladies, nor to their country. We have a lot to learn.

There came my way, last night, a link to a site called Raw Story, where someone had gathered up some humorous tweets that were posted during the prolonged press conference that took place in Trenton, New Jersey, yesterday. Surely the best of these was the one posted by Michael E Cohen. “What do you call someone who dies because of a politically-inspired traffic jam? A ‘corpus Christie’!”

My favorite line in today’s Times coverage of the event appeared in Michael Barbaro’s commentary on the political performance.

But this version of Chris Christie — the chastened, penitent public official — was hard to keep up, and he occasionally lapsed into a familiar pique.

This reminded me of Alan Bennett’s judgment of Margaret Thatcher. Chris Christie, too, seems to be a “mirthless bully.”

***

I finished Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants the other day, but I have yet to type up all the flagged passages and (thereby) to compose my thoughts. What lingers is the phrase “gracious living,” a term that comes up several times in the book but that is never really defined. Its advocates,  one of them a certain Angus Maude, assume that gracious living is a good thing. They also assume that it requires domestic service — servants. They regret that people who might sacrifice themselves to the greater good by becoming servants prefer to do other things with their lives. This regret is odious, and I’m not terribly interested in hearing a defense of a way of life that rests upon the belittlement of anybody. But the term, gracious living, remains. What might it mean now? Seriously.

I’m not interested in the shelter magazine interpretation of “gracious living,” in which an attractive exterior is actuated by disingenuous pretension, usually for purposes of display. I’m interested in the kind of gracious living that might be enjoyed by people living together in a household, welcoming guests from time to time but making no extraordinary efforts when they do. It is a way of life that is clean, orderly, and comfortable — three virtues in balance. The pursuit of each of them, singly, can be carried to obsessive extremes; pursued together, they check excesses.

What does gracious living look like? This is a matter of taste. Gracious living looks good to the people in the household. You may not care much for someone else’s gracious home, but your own ought to please you. This is not quite the same thing as comfort. Our homes embody our identities, and if you don’t think that your home embodies your identity, you’re simply mistaken, because you’re an inattentive person and that’s what your home says about you.

The default pattern in domestic style is the preservation of the familiar: you make your home look like the one you grew up in. Except for those who suffered miserable childhoods, familiarity is probably the healthiest root of comfort, as well as the reference point for ideas about cleanliness and order. Begin with the familiar, but pay attention to it and improve upon it. There is always more to learn.

Some stylish and affluent people like to treat their homes as if they were wardrobes, in need of regular updating, but this is hardly a characteristic of gracious living generally and can easily interfere with it. The same is true of luxuries. There is nothing wrong with opulence that is sincere and manageable, but it must be affordable in both senses: you must be able to pay for it without sacrificing necessities, and you must have the time and space in which to maintain it. Silver tureens and marble bathrooms don’t take care of themselves. Nor, in the current dispensation, do servants take care of them. You take care of them. That understood, knock yourself out.

It is, unfortunately, common to talk about the look of a home as if it had nothing to do with the daily routines of the people who live in it. This is totally wrong. The interplay between function and decor is constant and complex — or, at least, it ought to be. The handsome dining room that nobody uses is mere meaningless ostentation, but it might become something else the moment one of the members of the household claims it as a writing room. (I have always believed that dining rooms ought to do double duty as libraries.)

How does the notion of gracious living accommodate a big-screen television? Ideally, it places it in a home theatre, where all seats face it and the lights can be uniformly dimmed. An unfinished basement might have to serve. The one place where it doesn’t belong is in a room where people gather to talk or even to read.

How is gracious living managed? I shall take this up in a later post. For now, two words will do, regularity and anticipation. Gracious living is the easygoing anticipation of irregularity.

What bothers me most about Chris Christie is the general failure, among a majority of New Jersey voters, to recognize the man’s unfitness for public office. This has nothing to do with his stated political views or the kinds of programs that he would like to see enacted. He is not unfit, that is, simply by virtue of being a conservative Republican. It is something else altogether. It has something to do with bullying, with throwing his weight behind actions that only those in political power can take.

What’s interesting about many of these actions is that they’re not necessary or useful to the bully; they don’t further the cause or advance the program. All too often, they betray a lack of judgment that exudes the locker-room stink of aggressive insecurity. The Watergate break-in is a classic example. Nixon was leading in the polls and had nothing much to learn from “intel” about what the other side was planning for the election campaign. More recently — right now — in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, still a very popular leader, makes self-defeating moves against his political opponents, apparently for no better reason than to demonstrate that he can. Such men are surrounded by loyal retainers who, in Ian Kershaw’s phrase, “work toward the Führer.” They ask themselves, what would the boss like me to do here? This is how the trouble starts. It metastasizes when the boss decides to protect the retainer who has laid an egg. Faced with an embarrassing situation, the boss flails in confusion, his brain flooded by conflicting, but not contradictory, moods: You are supreme! You are vulnerable!

Whether Nixon or Mr ErdoÄŸan was prone by nature to succumb to this confusion, it is pretty clear from the discourse of Governor Christie that aggressive insecurity is a defining characteristic. The governor’s response to the Fort Lee fiasco seems to parallel the decision-making that led a Port Authority executive to block local access to the George Washington Bridge. Because the governor was supreme in the land, one of his lieutenants reasoned, a dissident such as the Mayor of Fort Lee must be punished. Except, of course, that it was the residents of Fort Lee, not the mayor, who suffered, and the vindictive act turned out to be a clumsy mistake. The governor’s first response was one of supremacy: he dismissed complaints with any argument he could think of, including the ridiculous proposition that the blockage was a traffic-planning test. Now that the mechanics of working-toward-the-Führer have come to light, the governor bewails his vulnerability: he was duped! What the blockage and the governor’s response to the ensuing scandal share is a lack of commitment to clear thinking.

In 1908, a new phrase came into usage: “body English.” It denotes “a bodily action after throwing, hitting, or kicking a ball, intended as an attempt to influence the ball’s trajectory,” according to the Internet. You don’t hear it much anymore, although as I recall it came up often during my very brief law-school fling with pinball machines. Body English is usually unconscious, but it is always pointless. I propose adapting this phrase for political use. Let’s call it “body Jersey.” And let’s agree that men and women who lack the self-awareness and self-control to resist the body Jersey impulse don’t belong in politics.

***

In this week’s New Yorker, Evan Osnos writes about the renewed prestige enjoyed by Confucius in today’s China. He is quick to point out the highly mediated quality of this prestige, which renders Confucius a kind of Colonel Sanders of wisdom, complete with smiley-face popularizations by the likes of Yu Dan. “Unlimited possibility leads to chaos,” Yu tells Osnos, because you don’t know where to go or what to do.”

We must rely on a strict system to resolve problems. As citizens, our duty is not necessarily to be perfect moral persons. Our duty is to be law-abiding citizens.

On balance, I take this to be a distinctly un-Confucian remark, but it ought to surprise no one that a compilation of sage statements put together over two millennia ago is open to interpretation. A great deal of what Confucius has to say strikes me as completely passé, especially his understanding of relationships, predicated as it is upon thoroughgoing inequality. I respond keenly to his injunction to “rectify the names,” to call things by their proper names — in short, to be clear about what is going on. But Confucius is not best approached as an authority figure. Osnos writes that Confucius “never imagined that he would become an icon.” He was clearly an inspiring speaker; that is why his remarks were collected by his disciples. But he would be better honored by a new book of wisdom, a collection of contemporary observations. It would be a handbook of everyday counsel for intelligent people, designed not to illuminate anyone’s inner life but to help differing people share the same world. It would have the force not of law — Confucius was suspicious of laws, and in any case we’ve already got more than we need — but, more powerfully, of convention.

I don’t know how Analects came to be the title by which Westerners know the most personal of Confucian texts. The word comes from the Greek for “to pick up,” and, if the connection seems obscure, I encountered a stray ray of enlightenment a few weeks ago while reading somewhere about a Roman servant called the “analecta,” whose job it was to sweep crumbs off the dining table. (The Chinese, Lun Yu, means, roughly, “selected sayings,” and is as plain as “analects” is arcane.) I suppose there would be no harm in calling my proposed update The New Analects, especially if “crumbs” figured in the subtitle. But would you file “body Jersey” under “B” or “J”?

After dinner last night, while Kathleen pored over documents in the living room, I retired to my easy chair in the blue room. There I watched one of three new DVDs in my collection, none of which could be described as funny.

Somewhere along the line, when the movie came out and was showing in the theatres, I missed the part about how foreign Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives is. Foreign to everything except, arguably, the aesthetic of David Lynch. I thought of Eraserhead a lot. I thought of Mulholland Drive. I even thought of Dune. Among other tics, Refn indulges the Lynchian penchant for hypnotic still shots: if the camera stares long enough, something will be revealed. I’m still waiting.

I could also see — and this was somewhat more helpful in trying to come to terms with the new movie — how Only God Forgives proceeds from Drive, both as a narrative and as a vehicle for Ryan Gosling. In both, Mr Gosling plays characters who are forced into uncongenial contexts by personal attachments. The attachment to the young mother next door, in Drive, was beautifully expressed; Carey Mulligan was the perfect match for a love affair that was somehow made lighter than air by its very hopelessness.

The attachment in Only God Forgives is wildly different, and I’m not sure that it is even competently expressed, much less well done. That’s because Only God Forgives is made for a mongrel audience. The English-speaking characters are there to attract Americans interested in indie film. They may be there to attract other audiences  as well, but the long and the short of it is that the film would never find American distributorship without stars of the magnitude of Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas. Ms Scott Thomas plays the attachment here. She is Mr Gosling’s character’s mother. That’s what we’re asked to believe, anyway.

Bear in mind that both actors, while very successful and justly celebrated, like to play unusual parts from time to time. Mr Gosling’s Julian is an extension of Lars Lindstrom, of Lars and the Real Girl. He’s a quietly damaged man who doesn’t say much. It is hard to see Ms Scott Thomas’s Crystal as an extension of anything that she has done before. Perhaps, way back in the beginning, when she had supporting roles in long-forgotten French movies, she did something like Crystal. Maybe. But the odds are that you’ve never seen her like this.

“Like this”: conjure up Donatella Versace — the long, straight, ingenuine-looking hair; the pouty eye makeup; the attitude of profound discontent. While you’re doing that, completely forget Kristin Scott Thomas’s richly modulated speaking voice, and replace it with something shrill, monotone, and perhaps even untalented. The voice of someone like Jane Forth, perhaps, or someone else from Andy Warhol’s production company. One of the less reflective characters in John Waters’s oeuvre, perhaps. Like someone really unpleasant from Long Island.

Because, if Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas appear in this movie to appeal (in part) to American audiences, they do not perform for it. They act as if for viewers who don’t speak English, viewers who regard English-speaking Americans as exotic monstrosities with too much money and no common sense. Viewers in East Asia, let’s just say.

The titles are in Thai, by the way. The hero of the story — he’s more like a god than a hero, really — is a somewhat dough-faced police agent played by Vithaya Pansringarm, an actor who burst upon the scene, as it were, two or three years ago, starring in his own screenplay, Mindfulness and Murder, directed by Tom Waller but otherwise a Thai film. Mr Pansringarm’s day job — featured in a sweet little scene (all the more a standout), in which his character dances alone with a long knife — is ballet.

Ballet is as good a way to approach Only God Forgives as any. The most appealing element, overall, is its score, by Cliff Martinez. This is not one of those scores that you’re not supposed to notice while you’re watching the film. Both minimalist and assertive, it took me back all the way to American Gigolo.

Am I sorry to have bought the DVD? Not at all — I’m a KST completist. (Although I have yet to buy Bel Ami; I’m still smarting from that experience.) The next item on my goddess queue is Man to Man, which is not about pretty men on a beach but rather about field anthropologists and pygmies a century ago. Seen it?

***

It was supposedly very cold out today, but it did feel anywhere near as — depraved; that’s what the temperature was, yesterday: depraved. I had to go out for yet more doctoring, and I ran a few errands after lunch, arriving back home with just about as much as I could carry, and not another step.

Gristede’s, across the street, has dismantled the freezer shelf in which Jones’s sausages were stocked. Whether the shelf is going to be reactivated, no one could tell me. I’m making a note of it just in case this is the Beginning of the End for Gristede’s, which, I predicted, John Catsimatidis would lose little time closing down — the chain, I mean, not just the Gristede’s across the street — if he did not win the mayoral election. This was not a genuinely conditional prediction, as the “if” clause could be taken for granted.

They say that the old Food Emporium space downstairs is going to become a CVS. I’ve been in only one CVS, and that was long ago, up in New Milford. Here in town I patronize Duane Reade exclusively, not that there’s anything exclusive about them; there’s one on every corner. It’s all so boring. Speaking of which! Ray Soleil and I noticed the other day that a new restaurant, called The Writing Room of all things, is setting up in the space formerly occupied by Elaine’s. I never went to Elaine’s, not once, in thirty years of living around the corner, but I’ll probably give The Writing Room a try, before it does whatever it’s going to do. I wonder if they’ll deliver?

Back in 2000, I created a convention. The trick of naming document files with dates, in YYMMDD format, which had worked so well in the previous century, suddenly yawned with a sea of zeroes. So I replaced the YY part with L, where L is a letter of the alphabet, beginning with “A.” (B0911 was that day; on E0425 I had my first Remicade infusion.) Slowly or quickly as might seem to be the case, the years passed by. My grandson had his first birthday when L=”L,” but “L” is still in the first half of the alphabet, if only just. The letter “O” is not. The letter “O” — which is how 2014 is represented in my convention — is right next to PQRST, which is nothing but a greased banister to the end of things. I seem to have tumbled into the wrong end of the alphabet overnight. So stunned am I by this development that I can think of nothing else to say. The end.

***

What happened was, I had to go to the dentist. I should have rescheduled for a presumably warmer day, but I had already rescheduled a December appointment, on account of snow. So I bundled up and went out. By the middle of the block between Second Avenue and Third, I was in a state of physical alarm. It was 10:30, sunny and dry, but it was also very windy, and the wind seemed about to knock me down, not by blowing me over but by rushing down my trachea and freezing my lungs. I covered my mouth with a gloved hand. When I reached the subway station, I had to tear off the gloves, because they were thoroughly penetrated by the cold. All of this after just two blocks!

Later, after the dentist’s, it wasn’t so bad. I went out to lunch and then to Fairway. Both the restaurant and the market were pretty empty. (Come to think of it, so were the sidewalks and the subways.) While I was at Fairway, the idea of brewing a pot of coffee in my stovetop percolator came to me, and that’s the first thing that I did when I got home. By the time the perking started, I had changed into my house clothes and put the fresh flowers in vases. By the time the coffee was ready to drink, I’d emptied all the bags and was dealing with the contents. There was a chicken to cut in two, one half to cook tonight, the other to freeze. (I chopped fresh tarragon, beat it with butter and sea salt, and spread it under the breast skin.) There were greens to replace (iceberg lettuce, parsley). Beans to cut for dinner. Everything to be put away. All of this took rather more than an hour.

Then it was time to pay the bills. I pay bills the old-fashioned way, although I do make use of Quicken to keep track of things. If I were a young man, I’d be paying my bills online, but I’ve followed a routine for about twenty years that it would be foolish to change now. Paying bills by mail — tearing the stubs from the statements, printing checks, signing checks (with a stamp, of course), putting everything in the right envelope and then affixing postage — has become a pleasant routine, and it takes a lot less time than messing in the kitchen with chickens and beans. So I did that.

I thought I might watch a movie, but I couldn’t decide on one, and in any case I was distracted (from deciding on a movie to watch) by Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain, which I dipped into while running an errand down to the lobby, where I was able to finish this year’s round of holiday tips to building staff. Back in the apartment, I sank into my reading chair and read about “lady-helps” and servantless houses. Servants is engaging and readable, and from time to time it’s also very funny, but I’m reading it for a reason. I’m stocking my mind with food for thought on the subject of living a comfortable life while seeing to all those comforts myself. I’ll have more to say about this when I finish reading the book.

I was about to begin writing here when an old friend called. Calls from old friends are not common events in this household, and I had no desire not to take this one. But as Kathleen, equally an old friend, wasn’t at home, I was able to schedule a call for the weekend. Even so, by the time I hung up I hadn’t got an interesting thought in my head. Besides, it was time to start dinner.

I will say that we watched Gosford Park last night, partly because it seemed like a nice birthday treat but also because Lethbridge had me thinking about it. I certainly saw it in a new way. The system of servants, it was clear, screenwriter Julian Fellowes had thoroughly anatomized, to the point that the movie might serve as an animated model of the parts of Lethbridge’s book that deal with great houses. But there was something else that I’d never quite noticed, not quite, and it had nothing to do with servants. The key to this view is Lady Trentham’s withering dismissal of Morris Weissman’s fastidiousness about keeping the plot of his new Charlie Chan movie a secret. “None of us will see it,” she assures him. And that mirrors the movie’s approach to all the genres that it traduces, most particularly the upstairs/downstairs movie and the country-house murder movie. It’s as though the movie were made by people who never saw another movie — but only, very much only, “as though.”

At every turn, Gosford Park goes the other way. None of the characters is very disturbed by the murder of Sir William, not even the few who liked him. No one is the least bit worked up about staying under the same roof with the murderer. Life goes on — as the dead man’s widow puts it, it must. The entire film is soaked in Lady Trentham’s aristocratic disdain for irregularities. As a result, the actual drama of the show, the mother’s self-sacrifice for the sake of the son who does not know her, leaps up at the end with a spectral flame that is far more haunting than any whodunit could ever be. The scene that Helen Mirren and Kelly Macdonald have in the housekeeper’s office is not long, but it packs a wallop. And the speech that Ms Mirren delivers, as fine a moment as any in her career, begins with the key to running a well-kept house.

Over the weekend, I received a very nice note from a reader — which I accepted from the fates as the best kind of birthday present — who was struck by a paragraph in a recent entry, “The 150.” Here is the paragraph that the reader quoted:

And I can see that we’re living in a crisis now, one that began with the first reliable steam engines nearly two centuries ago. This crisis has a dizzying variety of ramifications. One, obviously, is the lasting damage that we might have caused to the world we live in. Another is the increasing amount of labor that is performed by mechanical devices. A third is the state-change in human society that has been unfolding throughout the crisis, which has been marked by savage revolutions and unprecedented wars. Two hundred years ago, most people were illiterate farm workers. Now, most people have television sets. How does a society bear such transformation? It is so obviously much nicer to watch television than to plow a field that no one can be seriously expected to give the question the critical attention that it requires. That’s a fourth ramification. There’s no immediate payoff in understanding the crisis. There’s every human-nature reason to ignore it altogether. That’s why the crisis is met with general disregard, punctuated by dustballs of media-induced panic.

This was one of those passages that surprise me even as they seem to write themselves. I don’t want to suggest that I was unconscious while my fingers tapped out these sentences. But as I was concentrating on matters of diction and syntax, the actual ideas in the paragraph seemed to fall into place. There is nothing remarkable about any of them (however important they might be); it’s the putting them all together, as a collection of “ramifications,” that’s forceful — if I do say so myself. The reader commented,

It’s a heady distillation of so many profound discernments that I collected it for my quotes file… I don’t know what to do about it, but the integration of insights was powerful.

I don’t know what to do about it, either — about the crisis of the Industrial Revolution — but I believe that the way to begin is to organize its effects as comprehensively as possible, so that we can keep as much of the problem, what is to be done?, in our minds at one time as possible. This will prevent “solutions” that, addressing one aspect of the matter, make another worse. For example, we do not want to put an end to the degradation of the environment in a way that forces people back into lives of pre-industrial drudgery.

We also must begin with the understanding that nothing truly transformative is going to happen overnight, or possibly even within the lifetime of anyone currently breathing. We need what used to be called a plan of campaign. This military metaphor is not inapt; it recurs to a time when the most important thing for any warrior to know was the lay of the land. We have to plan for a somewhat distant future, and arguably the most important part of that plan must be to educate our children to educate themselves the better to advance the campaign. Instead of pouring the learning of the past into students’ heads, we ought to present it to students as raw material that might be re-engineered into steps and solutions. Certainly a great deal about what not to do can be learned from history, sociology, and psychology — three faces of humanism that regard our ambitions with a firm awareness of our limitations.

How did we get into this mess? How can it be that, a mere sixty-odd years ago, Americans were triumphant about mushrooming consumption? How did what looks like depredation now look like prosperity then? Where, for another example, did Pat Weaver (whose biography I should very much like to read) get the idea that television could be a medium of cultural fertility — and why was he wrong? (Was he? Or were his ideas never given the right chance?) How can we be sure that we understand things any better than our forebears did? Merely knowing where they were wrong does not put us right.

We begin with a lot of questions. But there’s also something that we know for certain: at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, no one suspected for an instant that human effort could conceivably alter the constitution of the planet. Aside from a small crew of atheists, everyone believed that the Earth was in God’s hands. Today, that view is confined to a small crew of believers. Everybody else knows that God is not going to keep us from wrecking everything.

***

Plans have a terrible reputation these days. Planning is associated with socialism, and few -isms are as discredited as socialism. Yet we require plans that work, and we need to work together to implement them: somehow, we need to think around the problems of planning and socialism to arrive at their objectives by different paths. We need plans that are less efficient and more open to feedback, something that, more than incidentally, calls for an entirely new job description and aptitude assessment for the people who administer them. We need a new way of looking at property, one that begins with accepting the fact that people like to “own” things, and to be materially rewarded for their efforts, but that doesn’t stop there. A great deal of property is owned by business corporations. What does this really mean? We need to drop the idea that shareholders own this property. Shareholders own shares, period. (We need to be Confucians: we need to rectify the names.) What is capitalism, exactly? I wonder sometimes if it actually exists.

Tell me what capitalism is. That’s what I’d like for my birthday.

The haunting began before Christmas. Brahms songs. Lottle Lehmann singing “Lerchengesang.” Marjana Lipovsek singing “Von ewiger Liebe.” Thomas Allen singing “Botschaft.” It had been years since I’d heard any of these songs, as a look at my iTunes cupboard, bare of Brahms lieder, instantly proved. An ordinary person would have rustled up the CDs and listened to them. I managed to rustle them up, all right — amazing, really — but instead of listening to them, I went straight to Arkivmusic and ordered recitals by other singers. Then I listened. My reward was an ache for Brahms that persisted through the Christmas season. Only now that we are safely into the new year can I soothe it.

I’ve quickly fallen in love with Bernarda Fink’s all-Brahms disc, but here’s something odd that happened when I opened up a “Liederabend” recording made by Irmgard Seefried back in the mid-Fifties. Seefried was “my first soprano,” because she appeared on my first classical record, Bruno Walter’s recording of Mozart’s Requiem. I never collected her very much, so to speak, because little of what she recorded was in stereo, but now I’m old enough to overlook that in certain contexts, lieder recitals being one. Seefried sings only a handful of Brahms songs, along with Schumann, Schubert, Mussorgsky, Wolf, and, at the end, one little song by Strauss. “Ständchen,” it’s called — like so many German songs; the word means “serenade.” That being the case, it’s customary to give the first line after the title, just to clear things up. This is the amazing thing. As I was reading this line, the song came to my lips. I have not heard it in thirty years; I forgot that it existed a long time ago. But the words, “Mach auf! mach auf! doch leise, mein Kind,” prompted the tune. How I used to love it! How did I know it? I suspect that it appeared — sung by whom, man or woman, I still can’t recall — on a collection of then-old recordings called “The Seraphim Guide to the Lied,” or something like that. There were three LPs in the box, and songs by Schubert, Schumann, Loewe, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss. I think. But nothing is very clear.

This Strauss “Ständchen” is a young man’s ecstatically hushed call to his beloved, imploring her to join him in the moonlit garden — without waking anybody up. The accompaniment is a transfiguration of what you hear in Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” — recursive drudgery made spinning flame. At the end, the lover forgets himself, and fairly bellows the first words of the last line — “hoch glühn” — twice, and louder the second time, in what I believe in pop music is called a “big finish.” It must be acknowledged that Richard Strauss had a unique gift for making adolescence attractive. How did I let this song slip away?

It ought not to be inferred from my longing for Brahms that I got nothing out of the annual diet of Christmas carols. Possibly because I’ve been reading Frances Haskell on baroque painters and their patrons, and Paul Hazard on the Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715, I heard something new in something very familiar. Ever since Kathleen and I set up house together, we’ve had a copy of The Many Moods of Christmas, a Robert Shaw LP that Kathleen knew from childhood. (It made a very early reappearance on CD.) Shaw did a lot of very fine Christmas music over the years, but Many Moods is over-the-top baroque. I don’t mean that it sounds like Bach or Handel so much as that, like those celestial vistas in baroque churches, the arrangements transform what was originally rather humble and simple material into grandiose spectacle. The album opens with three mighty blasts of orchestral firepower, then some vaulting curlicues, then the thundering threesome repeated, followed by more curlicues, and finally five close chords, each of them as massive as the pillars in St Peter’s, which fade away as the choir comes in with “Good Christian Men Rejoice.” This doesn’t sound very clever, but it is, even if it did take me years to recognize “Jingle Bells.” (Kathleen never did hear it until I pointed it out to her the other day.) Somehow the phrase “hiding in plain sight” seems inapt. I’ve always thought that The Many Moods of Christmas was great seasonal fun, but lately I’ve been given to imagine the horror that it very likely aroused in serious music listeners back when it was new. This is seasonal fun, too.

I also learned that we can no longer be content with randomly shuffling through a playlist into which all the better Christmas CDs have been dumped. I’m going to have to “put something together.”

***

The snow and the cold contrived to keep us in bed until it was nearly afternoon. We never thought of going out, although I’d hoped to get to the Museum. Instead, we watched movies. Ages ago, Kathleen went through couple of the bins in which DVDs are filed, and wrote down the names of movies that we own/she likes. For some reason, her list begins with “H” and doesn’t quite reach the end of the alphabet. We watched Hanna, the very first title on the list, after we watched Mortal Thoughts, an unjustly neglected movie from 1991 with Demi Moore, the great Glenne Headley, and Bruce Willis. (Also a fine John Pankow.) As if inspired by playing a supporting role instead of the lead, Bruce Willis gives an astounding performance as a hateful, self-involved prick who, happily, dies early. Just desserts with a cherry on top! The ladies are shrouded in big hair, as befits the Bayonne setting. Mortal Thoughts is the pepper to Working Girl‘s salt.

Happy New Year, now from 2014!

It’s really ghastly out there on 86th Street, killingly cold and wet with coming snow. Kathleen and I ran a round of errands this morning that entailed circling the block. We sat for passport photos at what used to be the place where you took film to be developed. We mailed some calendars from the post office. We opened a joint account at a retail bank that has a coin-counting machine — you just dump them in. Then we went to lunch. At Café d’Alsace, the split-pea soup is so delicious that I’m thinking of making it again, after a hiatus of well over twenty years. If I can find a good recipe.

***

Now for today’s lesson. I am going to share with you something that I learned, quite gradually, in 2013. I wish that I had been taught it in my youth, but of course that wouldn’t have been possible. In addition to an interesting book, you will need a supply of Post-It flags, or tabs, or whatever they call them, and an Evernote account. I strongly urge you to set up an Evernote account right now, even if you think that this is the only thing you’ll use it for.

As you read, use a Post-It flag to mark (temporarily) any interesting passages. You will probably overdo this at first. I have come to regard 25 flags as maximal. You’re not composing an outline of the book. Your objective is to create a record of your reading, an ephemeral thing. The passage that you mark will say more about your state of mind at the time of reading than they will about the book itself.

When you have finished reading the book, create a note at Evernote. At the top, type the author’s name and the book’s title. In the note proper, indicate the date on which you finished reading the book. Then begin copying the flagged passages into the note. (Remember to provide the page reference.) Remove the flags as you do this.

If you’ve just read a Kindle edition, you can open it on your computer and find all your highlighted passages. Type them into the note as you would extracts from a physical book. As of this writing, the “cloud” version of Kindle editions provides a page reference as well as a “location.”

If you come across a flagged or highlighted passage that no longer speaks to you (why did I flag this?), summarize it briefly and move on. If you come across several such passages, you need to have a talk with yourself.

Consider your extracts. Do they seem to capture what was interesting about the book? Now is the time to hunt for the odd remark that you didn’t flag when you read it but that came back to haunt you later.

When you shelve the book, record its location in the note. If you discard the book in any way, be sure to mention that, too.

No more marking up books, no more illegible and/or mislaid notebooks, no more lost insights. I haven’t yet learned how many times the Post-It flags can be recycled. There’s probably a lot more that I haven’t learned, but this will do for the moment.

New Year’s Eve — really?

Tuesdays have evolved into a secondary housekeeping day. I do most of the tidying on Saturday, but I change the bedsheets on Tuesday, and I take the laundry downstairs, &c &c. (I also do a load myself. Some day, I’ll explain why I wash about half of our laundry myself, and send the rest out.) Since I’m already drudging, I might as well polish what silver needs it. Then there are closets to tackle — a shelf or two at a time. In any case, I began the day with a run to Fairway. Not the greatest thinking-ahead, that.

The aisles weren’t crowded, but the checkout lines were something else, and I shopped in a panic. Back at home, I got right to work on the bed. Then Kathleen and I had lunch at the coffee shop. She went on to shop for clothes, and I headed to Gristede’s for paper products, which I buy en masse there and have delivered. (Happily, we were short of everything. I’d have had to go just for Kleenex, what will all our sniffles.) The bags are always delivered by the same fellow, I think he’s Haitian but he might be Senegalese; I wonder what he’s qualified to do, wherever he came from. Ten years or so ago, there was a lot of talk about deliverymen who were doctors and accountants back home, and I perhaps ought to be ashamed to say that learning this made me careful to treat them with sincere respect and big tips. At Gristede’s, I forgot to buy Cokes in the very small bottles that Kathleen likes. The two that we have on hand will have to get us into the New Year.

And then, after Gristede’s, I did this, and I did that — the kitchen counter looks terrific! — and I forgot completely about writing here. There was a little problem there. We saw American Hustle yesterday, and, ordinarily, I’d write about that. But a masterpiece about con artists simply cannot be discussed until it comes out on DVD. Then, and only then, can I go into such gems as “science oven” and “If somebody needs to be intimidated, we’ll intimidate them.” (The latter line is delivered by one of my favorite character actors, Paul Herman.) The result of not being able to make use of such material and having devoted the day to the ultramundane (not to be confused with the ultramontane — no, the ultramundane is distinctly cismontane) can only be flushed away.

Kathleen is knitting a baby blanket. The newborn, a little girl, is two weeks old. Here’s hoping that she’s still a baby when Kathleen finishes the blanket. It’s not that Kathleen is slow — not at all. But she must always be doing something that she has never done before. This blanket has an intricate border and a sprinkling of “medieval hearts,” with the child’s initial at the center. A document only slightly thinner than an S-1 has been prepared, with measurements in inches.

We are finally listening to Christmas carols. Just made it! And while we’re savoring the mysteries of time, permit me to ask when, in your opinion, a certain little fellow turns four? EST or PST? Either way, some time between 1:30 and 2 AM. Party time, definitely. For people, that is, who are younger than we are, and older than Will.

Happy New Year! And thanks for reading!

At Timon’s Villa let us pass the day,
Where all cry out, “What sums are thrown away!”

Thus begins the excerpt from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Taste that appears in The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1926, reprinted 1963). Although I never quite memorized it, I read it many, many times, often aloud. I was enchanted by Pope in those days. His easy elegance and clear cleverness made writing look not only easy, but a fun thing to do. His moralizing was not disagreeable; I never felt that he was pointing at me. I could have my cake and eat it, too: while agreeing that Timon’s villa was emptily, unpleasantly ostentatious, I could also, perched over the page, savor every extravagant detail.

And now the Chappel’s silver bell you hear,
That summons you to all the Pride of Pray’r;
Light quirks of Musick, broken and uneven,
Make the soul dance upon a jig to heav’n.
On painting Cielings you devoutly stare,
Where sprawl the Saints of Verrio, or Laguerre,
On gilded clouds in fair expansion lie,
And bring all Paradise before your eye.
To rest, the Cushion and the Dean invite,
Who never mentions Hell to ears polite.

I had no idea who Verrio or Laguerre were. At some point, I learned that they were imported artists. I may not have known that Verrio painted the grand staircase at Hampton Court Palace until I visited the place in 1984. Later, on that same trip to London — Kathleen and I were visiting her parents, who were living there are the time — we went to Petworth House, where I got to see a staircase by Laguerre as well. Verrio and Laguerre, specialists in illusionistic, quasi trompe-l’oeil murals, are pretty much as mediocre as Pope suggests. The very nicest thing that you could say about them (or about the staircases that I have seen) is that they are resolutely second-rate. Their work is too self-important to be pleasing. Fussing with the mechanics of spectacle, it is not spectacular.

Over the weekend, one of these painters came up, in Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters, a book that I truly wish I might have read, or been able to read, in 1963. Antonio Verrio appears in the chapter about the attempts of North European patrons to attract Italian artists to their countries. Born in 1636, Verrio was representative of the caliber of those artists who, prior to 1700, accepted the invitation. Haskell is especially stinging.

Verrio, like Gentileschi before him, came to England from Paris, though he had been born in Lecce and liked to call himself a Neapolitan. In common with the other artists employed by Le Brun at Versailles, he had there been required to lose rather than develop a personality, but in his case the process cannot have been a difficult one.

Such fun! Turn the page, however, and the deprecation becomes bizarre. Haskell is discussing the unhappy fates of several artists who felt obliged to flee England after the fall of James II.

Verrio was more cunning. With his coach and horses, parmesan cheese, bologna sausages, olives and caviar, he left the court and worked for a time in a number of country houses. Before the end of the century, however, he had been taken up by the new régime and was being employed at Hampton Court…

Parmesan cheese and bologna sausages? The shock of this passage points up how little Haskell has to say about food, if indeed he does mention it anywhere else in the book — I’ll be on the lookout now! — but even more how seldom (again, if ever) Haskell is at all obscure. This must be a moment of unsuppressed donnishness. Haskell is alluding, I suppose, to an anecdote of greed or gluttony or, it may be, finickiness: Verrio, who was very well paid, must have insisted upon the comforts of home (although — caviar?). Haskell airs a few other remarks that are, arguably, unnecessarily withering. It must be, too, that there was no need to go to Italy to experience the mediocrity of Verrio; one needed, rather, to escape England to avoid it.

At the other end of the scale, reading about Poussin and his great Italian patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo, made me want to look at some Poussins, so I pulled down the catalogue to the Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions exhibition that visited the Museum in 2008. This show was chiefly curated by the Louvre’s Pierre Rosenberg, and in the introductory essay, “Encountering Poussin,” Rosenberg makes the most extraordinary claim. He calls Poussin “one of the finest artists of the seventeenth century” — certainly! — “and, together with Cézanne, the greatest of all French painters.” I had to read this several times, sure that I had missed some qualifying clause; but, no, there isn’t one. Poussin and Cézanne, the greatest of all French painters!

It’s a moralizing judgment rather than an aesthetic one, as I sense the minute I disagree. But what about Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, and Fragonard? The believer in the paramountcy of Poussin and Cézanne purses his lips in disdain; I have named four painters from a decadent period, three of them devoted to amorousness and two occasionally pornographic. My reply is to insist that each one of them puts vibrant human beings on paper and canvas with an accomplished brio that is altogether lacking in Poussin and Cézanne, neither of whom is especially gifted at drawing figures.* And let’s not forget the two de La Tours, Georges and Maurice-Quentin. I don’t argue that any one of these painters is superior to Poussin. But I deny that he is superior to them.

I did read a bit more of the catalogue, and a good deal of it covered the same territory as Haskell’s chapter about “The Private Patrons.” There was Cassiano dal Pozzo; there was Camillo Massimi, another Roman patron. It’s like meeting someone at a second party, and feeling that one has gotten to know more than just a face and a name.

Massimi’s face quickly becomes familiar, because its was painted by Velásquez. Massimi’s great collection of fine-art objects is memorable, too, not for what it contained but for where it went when he died, in 1677.

Among the purchasers of some of the finest pictures, drawings and antiquities were the King of France, the Spanish Viceroy of Naples and an English gentleman, Dr Richard Mead. The transaction is almost symbolic. There were, of course, other important collectors in Rome at the time, but they were becoming increasingly rare. The combination of wealth, enthusiasm, catholicity of taste and discrimination that had marked the the leading Italian patrons of the seventeenth century did not really survive Massimi, and a largely new tradition had to be forged again in the neo-classical period.

I’ve been learning a good deal of just plain history from Haskell. I have never had a very clear idea of Italy in the age of the baroque, and one of Haskell’s bass-note motifs is the decline of papal prestige. This had something to do with the aftershocks of the Reformation, but more to do with the emergence of modern nation-states in the period, and it was most glaringly manifest in the Peace of Westphalia, which resolved the crises of the Thirty Years’ War without taking papal concerns into account. Indeed, disregard for Rome seems to have been a sine qua non for peace. Urban VIII, the Barberini pope and something of the genius loci of Roman baroque, died four years before the Peace, but he was already protesting the conduct of negotiations. His successors were forced to wear smaller shoes.

Meanwhile, the English were gearing up production of milordi — rich, young men who toured “the Continent” with their tutors. The tutors espoused high-minded objectives while their charges had as much fun as possible. Haskell writes of one of these, Sir Thomas Isham. Isham

left England in October 1676 and spent nearly eighteen months in Italy, where he visited most of the important towns with his tutor. Though he enjoyed a series of extravagant love affairs and got heavily into debt, he also managed to acquire a certain number of contemporary paintings, advised mainly by a dissolute priest called Buno Talbot.

Curious to know more, I learned at Wikipedia that Sir Thomas kept a diary in Latin for a few years before his Italian junket, at his father’s instance — he wasn’t Sir Thomas yet — and that he died of smallpox not long after his return to England. I should like to know what inspired Francis Haskell to describe his Italian dalliances as “extravagant,” instead of, simply, “expensive.”

It was only after I’d read almost everything else in the latest New York Review that I condescended to look at Thomas Nagel’s review of a book whose title, which I completely misunderstood, put me off: Death and the Afterlife. It didn’t take long to clear up my mistake. Here is Nagel’s second paragraph:

The afterlife referred to in the title is not the personal afterlife, the continued existence of the individual in some form after death. [Samuel] Scheffler does not believe in a personal afterlife, and some of the book is taken up with the question of how we should feel about our own mortality if death is the end of our existence. But his main topic is what he calls the collective afterlife, the survival and continued renewal of humanity after our personal death — not only the survival of people who already exist, but the future lives of people born long after our deaths. Scheffler argues that the collective afterlife is enormously important to us—in some respects more important than our individual survival—though its importance escapes our attention because we take it so much for granted.

This, I could see, was thrilling stuff. Somebody writing about a matter that is much on my mind.

Schefflin’s book collects two Tanner lectures with a third paper, and wraps them up with commentary by other philosophers (among them Harry Frankfurt) and a response by Scheffler. I don’t intend to say more about Death and the Afterlife, which I’m not sure I’ll read, because the philosophical tone of the writing, at least as quoted here, sounds tedious, and also because I don’t require Scheffler’s thought experiments to reach his conclusions. But I do want to copy a few more extracts from Nagel’s review, because they pull the discussion of leisure and cultivation that I began yesterday onto an interesting tangent.

Some examples of the dependence of present value on the existence of future persons are obvious: it would make no sense to pursue a long-term project like the search for a cure for cancer, or the reversal of global warming, or the development of an effective system of international law, if humanity were going to be extinguished shortly. But Scheffler believes that the prospect of extinction would probably undermine the motivation for many other types of activity as well: procreation, of course (in the doomsday scenario); but also artistic, musical, and literary creation, humanistic scholarship, historical and scientific research—even though these seem to be temporally self-contained. Their place in traditions that extend greatly beyond our own lives and contributions, Scheffler believes, is a condition of the value we assign to them, and of our motivation for pursuing them.

As I read this, I paused critically to note that very few people — sadly — are engaged in artistic creation and scientific research. And even fewer, I daresay, in humanistic scholarship. Later in the review, Nagel considers this explicitly.

On the other hand, Scheffler seems right that motivation for the kind of work that contributes to our culture, our knowledge, our economy and society would be hard to sustain under these scenarios, and that this would drain a good deal of meaning from our lives, and might well result in a general social breakdown. Yet this is most plausible with regard to creative activities of a kind that most people don’t engage in. Would it be natural for an electrician, a waitress, or a bus driver to think of what they are doing as essentially part of the collective history of humanity, stretching far into the future—so that it would lose meaning if there were no future?

Except for the link to their direct descendants, I suspect that for most people, horizontal connections with their contemporaries are far more significant in underwriting the value of their lives and activities than vertical links to the distant future. But while the exact scope of the effect may be hard to determine, it is clear that Scheffler has succeeded in posing a genuinely new philosophical question of great interest and importance. Value evidently has a long-term historical dimension.

So while Scheffler’s argument certainly holds for these special people — and holds, as I say, for reasons that don’t depend on his argument — it is more tenuous where ordinary people are concerned. But that is what has to change if human beings are to become democratic stewards of Planet Earth.

***

Over the years, I’ve abstracted a general observation from casual experience. Most mature people, even most educated people, live at the center of a sphere of consciousness whose diameter is about 150 years. Although there are plenty of facts in the litter of the past 75, and nothing but hopes and probabilities in the future, the two halves are homogenous, because, at least in peace time, healthy people operate on the assumption that the future is going to resemble the past. At a distance of 20 years, I’d say, the past begins to blur, but there are clear landmarks — parents, grandparents, houses lived in, schools attended, perhaps even the schools attended by parents and grandparents. For most people, these living links to the past 75 years persist after the death of parents. Living links to the future are only speculative, but we extend what we know from the past into our imagination of what’s to come. Beyond this range, from the youth of grandparents to the old age of grandchildren, our sense of the living planet falls off the continental shelf of everyday awareness into an abyss that, if not impenetrable, remains unpenetrated. Beyond the lives of grandparents, there stretches an undifferentiated past that, again, for most people, is not altered by contact with history textbooks. Beyond the lives of grandchildren, it may almost be said that the world ceases to exist, imaginatively, except as the matrix for escapist science fiction.

Regular readers will know that I take a great interest in histories of all kinds, and I’ll aver that the objective of my mental cultivation, the fruit of my intellectual husbandry as it were, is an enhanced historical sensibility. I confess to being interested in history in much the same way that you might be interested in racecars — I like the details. But I get more than pleasure from history; I get insight into the future. No, I have no more idea of what’s going to happen next than anyone else does. But I have a lively sense of what might happen if what’s happening now continues. Thanks to my knowledge of history, I know that terrible catastrophes can erupt from nowhere. I also know that, so far, there has never been a catastrophe of complete devastation. These are everyday realities to me; I don’t go for more than six months without reading something new that bears on the Black Death that swept through Eurasia in the Fourteenth Century.

And I can see that we’re living in a crisis now, one that began with the first reliable steam engines nearly two centuries ago. This crisis has a dizzying variety of ramifications. One, obviously, is the lasting damage that we might have caused to the world we live in. Another is the increasing amount of labor that is performed by mechanical devices. A third is the state-change in human society that has been unfolding throughout the crisis, which has been marked by savage revolutions and unprecedented wars. Two hundred years ago, most people were illiterate farm workers. Now, most people have television sets. How does a society bear such transformation? It is so obviously much nicer to watch television than to plow a field that no one can be seriously expected to give the question the critical attention that it requires. That’s a fourth ramification. There’s no immediate payoff in understanding the crisis. There’s every human-nature reason to ignore it altogether. That’s why the crisis is met with general disregard, punctuated by dustballs of media-induced panic.

This crisis is not going to resolve itself pleasantly. Nor is it going to come to a stop within the lifetime of anyone currently breathing — barring a possibly human-induced natural catastrophe that we lack the perspective and the political will to foresee. Faute de mieux, I assume that it will continue for half of its duration so far, roughly another century. By then, either we will have begun to bring it under control or it will metastasize into something truly unmanageable. If we do begin to control it, that will be as the result of a plan, a plan developed sooner rather than later. We shall plan for a world in which we use less and cleaner energy, for both our devices and our own bodies. We shall also have to plan for a world of massively reconfigured resources. A world in which most people enjoy leisure.

Yes, that’s right: a world in which most people don’t have jobs, but don’t experience material want. That’s what we ought to plan for, anyway. We could always give the default model another spin, returning most people to peasantry. But if what we want to plan for is not always clear, planning against a collapse into agrarian autocracy is surely a no-brainer.

This planning can’t be done by some smarty-pants elite of thinkers and scientists. It must be embraced by everyone — so it must be understood by everyone. That’s why we have to break the 150.

The other day, I began thinking about leisure. Not for the first time: back in college, I spent a lot of time with Josef Pieper’s then-important book, Leisure: the Basis of Culture. I’ve got a copy somewhere, but I haven’t dealt with that part of the library yet, and even if I could find it I should have to re-read it to say anything more than what I can say off the top of my head, which is that Pieper rooted everything that’s valuable about culture in leisure, specifically and originally the leisure of monks. His book — an impassioned pamphlet, really — was motivated by the horror of what he could already see, a “popular culture” that was not rooted in leisure.

What is leisure? Short answer: time to think. That may sound too “leisurely.” Thinking — the act of arranging thoughts — requires leisure.

More important: leisure is not the opposite of “work.”

Leisure is a concept that comes down to us from classical antiquity, during which slave labor enabled property owners to cultivate their minds instead of their fields. The OED reminds us that the origin of the word is akin to that of “license” — the man of leisure has permission to use his time as he sees fit, without regard to material necessity. The dictionary also suggests that to do something at one’s leisure is to do it with deliberation. A happy quotation from Dr Johnson (1780) makes a very important distinction:

I am not grown, I am afraid, less idle; and of idleness I am now paying the fine by having no leisure.

Some people — writers and professors as well as artists come to mind — are able to devote their professional lives to the pursuit of leisure because their cultivation produces marketable goods. This is not to suggest that there is anything leisurely about what professionals do. But the skill with which they do it is the fruit of leisure. To grasp the implications of anything as fully as possible, it is necessary, if only for a time, to cut free of particular objectives and agendas.

I am going to assume that some people are wired to resist the idea of leisure, to regard it as little more than an occasion of goofing off. I am not going to attempt to persuade them otherwise. Instead, I address this to people who understand the importance of vacations, breaks, intermissions, even distractions. For many such people, the refreshment of leisure occurs unconsciously. I vividly remember coming back to class at the beginning of a fall semester and immediately grasping the function of the subjunctive in French, a language to which I hadn’t given a thought all summer. Similarly, as an old man, I’ve had to learn that to recapture an elusive memory (usually the name of something), it’s essential to think about something else; for a reason that we don’t yet understand, memory is often frustrated by consciousness. I don’t intend to explain these foibles of the mind (I’ve just said that they can’t be explained — not yet), but if they are familiar to you, if you have accepted the current situation, one in which our minds, if only because we really don’t know how they work, or why they work in different ways for different people, are notably inefficient, then what I have to say about leisure might be of interest.

***

The other day, I mentioned an essay by Boris Groys about Clement Greenberg. (It appears in The Books That Shaped Art History.) I want to begin this discussion of leisure by quoting a chunky passage from it. The bit of Greenberg at the end comes from “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg’s seminal essay of 1939.

Greenberg does not expect from the start that the half-educated masses could be consumers of avant-garde artistic revolutions. Rather, he finds it reasonable to expect that the cultivated bourgeoisie will support the new art. However, the historical reality of the 1930s brings Greenberg to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie is no longer able to fulfil the role of the economic and political supporter of high art. Time and again he states that the secured domination of high art can only be guaranteed by the secured domination of the ruling class. At the moment at which a ruling class begins to feel itself insecure, weakened and endangered by the rising power of the masses, the first thing that it sacrifices to these masses is art. To keep its real political and economic power the ruling class tries to erase any distinction of taste and to create an illusion of aesthetic solidarity with the masses — a solidarity that conceals real power structures and economic inequalities: ‘the encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which the totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects (p 19).

As a Trotskyite (as he then was), Greenberg understandably talks as though immutable social laws were at work here, but we can overlook these mechanical pretensions and agree that Greenberg (through Groys) is describing what really did happen between the wars. The ruling classes of the West, anxious to avoid further revolutions from below, cast off a great deal of pomp and circumstance. Fine art, with its Western origins in royal and aristocratic courts, was disparaged for the ostentation that had been an important component of its original appeal. Modern art — that of the avant-garde — was taken up by some members of the elite because it didn’t look anything like the art that adorned the old palaces (and new museums). But it was ignored, along with the rest of art, together with the cultivation required to appreciate it, by most elites. The culmination of today’s illusion of aesthetic solidarity has nothing to do with art at all; it is the skybox.

Greenberg believes, namely, that the connoisseurship that makes the spectator attentive to the purely formal, technical, material aspects of the work of art is accessibly only to those who ‘could command leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort’ (p 9). For Greenberg this means that avant-garde art can hope to get its financial and social support only from the same ‘rich and cultivated’ people who historically supported traditional art. Thus the avant-garde remains attached to the bourgeois ruling class ‘by an umbilical cord of gold’ (p 8).

But, as Greenberg goes on to argue, that “umbilical cord” has been cut by anxious elites. Greenberg and Groys believe that the health of the art world depends on the support of a ruling class, and perhaps it used to do so. Looking forward, however, I believe that the health of tomorrow’s ruling class — ideally comprising everyone — will depend on fine art, and on many other things in life that require thought. Ultimately, it will depend on the “cultivation of some sort” that can be produced only by leisure — leisure seen not as “free time” but as a skilled activity that requires training and exercise.

What distinguishes leisure from work isn’t effort. The man of leisure may be just as industrious as the man who works the fields, but his industry, unlike the farmer’s, is personally refreshing. It wouldn’t be cultivation if it weren’t.

Encouraged by the dry sunlight, I went out this morning to get a trim. The barber is off to Tampa for a week, and if I waited for his return my beard would become an ill-tended hedge. It was good walking weather. The temperature had dropped back somewhere closer to normal, but it wasn’t too cold. I’m almost looking forward to going out again! We’re due at Ray Soleil’s at six, after which we’ll head over to the Knickerbocker dinner. The original plan called for a traditional Christmas Eve here, but that was scratched over the weekend, and I’m sure that I’m feeling better because I haven’t been messing about in the kitchen. I’m still sniffling, but I’m clearly on the mend, and all I have to do is to take it easy.

It is the invisible Christmas. Christmas is going on elsewhere. Every now and then, Kathleen and I walk into it, smile, shake hands, and chat. But we haven’t caught the spirit of the season at all, which is what happens when one of us is ill or both of us are tired. Kathleen has certainly been tired, and with good reason. I’ve had this cold, but I’ve been tired, too, and I ought to wonder what I’ve got to be tired about, but I don’t, because I’m managing everyday life well enough. In other words, being tired might have nothing to do with it; I may simply have lost interest in things that matter to me a lot less than others. And one thing that matters to me more than almost anything else is leisure.

The foregoing paragraphs were followed by several more, but when it was time to get dressed for dinner I realized that I wasn’t even halfway through what I’d need to say about the topic raised by that last word, leisure. It’s a much bigger topic than I thought it was; all I can think right now is how queer it was of me not to see how big it was. In any case, I’ve just had a nice, big dinner at the Knickerbocker — the place was packed, and the oysters were tremendous! — and my capacity for ratiocination has dipped below the horizon. I’ve saved those extra paragraphs for later. And that is how I rather thought this entry would end: it’s Christmas Eve; you understand; sorry not to be able to say more.

***

But I’m that rarest of birds, capable of speaking long past the exhaustion of the ability to think. As I was getting into my nightclothes, I dwelt upon a conversational matter that recurred throughout the evening. A family friend, X, has a child, Y, who is not doing well in college. Y does not see the point of it, and in fact has spent two semesters, paid for by a generous but understandably knit-browed uncle, not going to classes at all (unbeknownst to X), and eventually failing in everything. The worst of it is that Y appears to be unrepentant — another way of saying that nothing whatsoever has been learned. A terrible situation, one that we should all hate to have any closer in our lives than this one already is. Needless to say, I exploded with comments and suggestions, but at every turn I felt obliged to add, as indeed I quite sincerely did, that I did not hold X at fault for any of it. X had been, it was clear, an exemplary parent. But the discussion teetered back and forth, in implication, between blaming Y and not-blaming X. As if it were somehow a problem that the two of them could be expected to solve. I did say that I thought that the whole system of higher education — Z — was screwed up. I say it all the time. But I didn’t feel it until I got home and was getting ready for bed, and thought about X and Y and the sorrow that made so little sense. What had been an objective observation at dinner became an outrage.

The problem is Z. The American model of higher education is a CROCK. Indulge me by regarding the word in caps as an emoticon spewing Krakatoan havoc.

Can we just admit that? Can we admit that American higher education works well only for those probably natural scholarly students who understand what “learning” is all about long before they get to college — long before they actually understand why it’s important? (And also for the ghastly race of parasites who “test well,” or are gifted at “psyching out” their professors.)  Can we? Because these kids are not models for all the others, all the ordinarily-endowed students who have been told that they need a degree to get a job. When, in fact, all they need is not not to have a degree. The degree itself is meaningless, the learning behind it meaningless — and the smarter (though still not scholarly) students among them understand this. It’s like a test for waiters: can you get this martini to the patron’s table without spilling a drop? (You’re not going to be the one drinking it!) Something altogether different is required — required!

X and Y are not the people responsible for curing the systemic mendacity of Z — which seems to exist today, like so many of our enterprises, only to rake in revenues. The rest of us can help them out by demanding something honest.

Make my Christmas bright. Think about it, please.

For several days, I’ve been afflicted by a cold. It’s not a very bad cold, just enough to keep me indoors and away from most holiday festivities, something that, this year, suits both of us down to the box spring. (Kathleen, who has been conducting a small fleet of new deals since the spring, has survived a stretch of extreme exhaustion and is now convalescing.) I manage to do the regular light housework, and we order in a great deal.

In a little while, we’re going to watch Transsiberian, which I’ll tell anyone is the only film not by Alfred Hitchcock that can claim a close kinship with his aesthetic. Because Kathleen and I were sure that we’d seen it twice already, I was surprised not to find the DVD in our library, but now I know what must have happened: we saw the movie in the theatre and then rented it when it came out; despite my very high regard for it, I must have been on an austerity kick, and put off buying it until I actually forgot to do so. I was looking for it after we saw Side Effects, which stars the other Mara sister, Rooney. Kate Mara, who had played nice little girls (Tadpole, Brokeback Mountain), appeared in Transsiberian as a damaged drifter, in over her head on a rotten deal. I thought we’d have a little Mara festival. I did buy the DVD, by the way. New ones are out of stock at Amazon, but I was able to order a “Used — Like New” copy for 78¢. But I didn’t want to wait for it to arrive, so I had Video Room send over a(nother) rental.

However — reading. A cold that doesn’t reduce one to wretchedness is a great excuse to spend the day reading. Yesterday, I swallowed up Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape, a book about the greats of Latin antiquity from 1957 that Donna Tartt said somewhere that she was reading. I don’t think that I’d ever heard of Tibullus, and Propertius was just a name. Highet presents the poets in his own translations only, so I had to search Google a bit to find the originals. I’m crazy about the distracted elegance in this line of Propertius:

cantabant surdo, nudabant pectora caeco

Two Loebs are on the way.

Robert Stone’s new book, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, is a very quick read, as I found out this morning. Having gotten through a few chapters last night, I finished the whole thing off before lunch. I bought the Kindle edition — a somewhat questionable choice. Robert Stone is a master of slow-motion, intense excitement, and he combines the thrilling with the literary like no one else. Ordinarily, I should have bought the physical book. But I was down with my cold and in need to things to read on the Paperwhite at bedtime — now. Quite often now I wake up at four with my reading glasses resting on my chest, Kathleen’s beaded chain still around my neck. But the lamp on the bedside table isn’t on, and it’s nice to be spared that middle-of-the-night confusion. The Paperwhite falls asleep soon after I do, and gets lost in the blankets. I usually read mysteries, and am content to make them last — it took ages to get through Ruth Rendell’s No Man’s Nightingale. But the new Stone had a very different impact. I woke early this morning, my sinuses dried-up and blocked, and I picked up where I’d left off as soon as I’d refilled my water bottle. I didn’t even look at the Times until I was done. It wasn’t a good Paperwhite read at all: now I have to buy something else.

I’m puzzled. Did Death of the Black-Haired Girl feel slight because I read it on the Kindle? Or was it slight? Certainly it was sparing. Thirty years ago, Stone would have served the philandering professor (whose first philander this was) a heap of misery, with more suspense for the reader into the bargain; and that satanic priest, “the Mourner,” would have appeared for real. (Maybe he had a twin.) The black-haired girl would have left a bigger hole in my heart when she died; as it was, I was glad to see the end of a self-absorbed pain in the ass. The novel would have been longer, with more about the former nun’s years in Latin America and the professor’s wife’s youth in a Canadian Mennonite community. There would have been more about the dean’s interesting wife, making her role in the resolution of a grievous conflict more satisfying. More — there would have been More. I don’t know what kind of complaint it is to wish that an author had written More — a fairly complimentary one, on the face of it. But in the end, the end came too soon; I didn’t spend enough time with the characters, and I don’t know how they’ll stay with me.

***

Another book that I finished today was The Books That Shaped Art History: from Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, a collection of sixteen essays edited by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard. The actual range of the book is Mâle to Belting — neither of whom I’d heard of before. Emile Mâle published a study of French iconography in the Thirteenth Century in 1898. Hans Belting came out with Bild und Kult ninety-two years later. The other writers covered are Bernard Berenson, Heinrich Wölfflin, Roger Fry, Nikolaus Pevsner, Alfred Barr, Erwin Panofsky, Kenneth Clark, E H Gombrich, Clement Greenberg, Francis Haskell, Michael Baxendall, T J Clark, Svetlana Alpers, and Rosalind Krauss. I saw the book at the Frick bookshop right after I’d finished reading Haskell’s The Ephemeral Museum, and it made me realize that I’ve read very little serious art history. I’ve got a couple of books by Gombrich (although which I can’t say for certain), and a collection of essays by Panofsky. I used to have something by Wölfflin. I always thought that I ought to read Kenneth Clark, but didn’t — not The Nude, anyway. (The essays focus, as the collection’s title indicates, on particular books, not on their authors’ complete output.) I read a bit about Rosalind Krauss recently, in Janet Malcolm’s 41 False Starts. I knew who Berenson, Fry, Pevsner, and Barr were, but I was ignorant of the last five writers. I dreaded reading about Clement Greenberg, because he was so notorious for pugnacity, but I found that Boris Groys’s essay, which focuses on “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “The Plight of Culture,” to be the most lucid piece in the book. Not only that, but I readily understood what (according to Groys) Greenberg was trying to say. I didn’t agree with it, but I did engage with it. Engagement did not occur in most other instances, and several essays were either too jargon-ridden or too philosophically preoccupied for me to grasp them. For the later writers, art history seems to have dwindled into a cudgel with which to bruise the bourgeoisie and other vectors of power, and has little to do with pleasure. The essayists would seem to be even worse.

(I did come away curious about Alois Riegl, who was mentioned in quite a few of the essays; his Stilfragen might well have been included among the Shapers.)

The idea that giving pleasure is not enough to merit serious attention is vital, but in the history of Western letters it has too often degenerated into the very bad idea that giving pleasure itself is not worth talking about. If we are going to take art (or anything) seriously, this noxious notion holds, then we must find something other than pleasure to talk about. Another bad reason for avoiding pleasure — it’s too personal; “there’s no accounting for taste” — draws support from the puerile obsession with system-building and generalization-generation that characterizes the modern intellectual. But pleasure is the beginning of art; to begin with anything else is to avoid seeing it. And, as Books that Shaped Art History will make instantly clear to any layman, the philosophical systems that art historians construct and contest are anything but enlightening, in the sense that none of them encourages contact with art. This contact is assumed, and assumed, one fears, to have been outgrown. It’s as though art were wine, to be savored only after a long rot. Rot.

(The singular exception is Francis Haskell, much too interested in vagarious history to succumb to theory — and a joy to read.)

If it were not for the code in my ‘ose, I’d expatiate upon these philistine themes, but there’s plenty of time for that.

Schopenhauer on the novel:

The art [of the novel] lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life.

Actually, this may be Tim Parks’s reworking of Schopenhauer.* No matter. It seems the most perfect description of Henry James’s art.

Ten years or more ago, I decided that I needed to read up on Schopenhauer. I even bought a volume in German. I could swallow none of it, because I couldn’t figure out how to open it up. Schopenhauer seemed lost in a fog of abstractions. These might have meant something to someone conversant with Kant — which I most resolutely was and am not. Kant is rather like television — inconceivable if you’re not habituated. And, as far as I can see, just as pointless.

Schopenhauer, however, inspired Wagner, among others, and imported a lot of thinking about the religions of India. I did read a biography. It was not alluring. Schopenhauer’s life or the biography.

Speaking of which, did you know that Borges considered himself to be a “hedonic reader“?

Borges calls himself a “hedonic” reader—he seeks pleasure in books, and beyond that, a “form of happiness.” He advises his students to leave a book if it bores them: “that book was not written for you,” no matter its reputation or fame. As a reader, he hunts for specific passages, or even just phrases, that move him. “One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author,” he says. “Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.”

I don’t think that I’ve ever come across anything in Borges that made so much sense. Anyway, no Kant for me.

***

I recall saying the other day that Capital Culture, Neil Harris’s new book, is too dutiful to be brilliant. I’d like to add substance to this rather offhand remark. Now that I’ve finished the book, and slept on it, I can see that Capital Culture is a very good book of its kind — excellent, really — but that this kind of book can never be brilliant. The essence of Harris’s duty, as manifest in the book, is to document aspects of an institutional career. The institution in question is the Smithsonian, and the aspects largely relate to its semiautonomous “bureau,” the National Gallery of Art, as directed by S Dillon Ripley at the Smithsonian and J Carter Brown at the National Gallery. More specifically, these aspects relate to the mounting of “blockbuster” art exhibitions, three of which are described in detailed chapters of their own. Harris has sifted through voluminous archives and found a story that he can build upon them. That is what modern historians do.

So we are told a lot about Brown’s negotiations with owners, officials at other museums, diplomats, and legislators. We are told about his relations with his trustees and with his staff. An early chapter is devoted to the exciting acquisition of Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci. If someone said something interesting about a work of art, and it’s relevant to Harris’s institutional history, then he quotes it, but there isn’t very much of this sort of thing. The art itself remains largely offstage. Which is not a fault; I’m not looking to Harris for art history. The fault, rather, is in Harris helpless reduction of the point of all this effort to attendance records. Brown and his colleagues (and competitors) move mountains, or at any rate spend fortunes, to bring rare and precious works of art to the public. And what does the public do? The public shows up.

What more is there to say? What can be done with visitors beyond counting them? On the reception side, Harris makes reference to responses to the exhibitions as such and to the “politics” behind them — but only fleetingly to the constituent works in themselves. Missing from his documentary materials are testimonies to the effects that seeing these works might have had on individual visitors. This is hardly neglect on Harris’s part. The archive of such testimonies, exclusive of the trite, is undoubtedly very slim. We don’t expect museum visitors to file reports. We take it for granted that exposure to artworks is an inherently good thing.

I take it for granted that exposure to artworks is a great opportunity, but for the “inherently good thing” to happen, the visitor must do something more than pass by with an approving nod. What this something more might be, it is not easy to say, but Harris’s book makes it clear that museum officials do not seek to ascertain it. They’re content with raw exposure, which, in the case of most museums today, registers as box-office revenue. The same goes for outreach and educational programs. To the extent that they are offered and attended, they’re successful. My buying a ticket contributes to the reputation of The Girl with the Pearl Earring; I need do no more.

I’m afraid I see a hole here, a void where there ought to be something. It is not to be filled by the commentary of professional critics, who are as deformed by the configuration of art institutions (galleries and auction houses as well as museums) as the people who run them are. How rare it is for a journalist to discuss a work of art that hasn’t been moved from one place to another! I  remember a lovely piece from 2004 about Bronzino’s Ludovico Capponi (at the Frick) by David Masello, then the editor of Art & Antiques. Such essays are altogether too rare. John Updike’s writing about art is strong — but Updike was a professional writer, too. Where are the amateurs?

Late in Capital Culture, Harris describes the negative critical response that met a show called The Greek Miracle.

The first problem was the show’s rationale, or lack of one, beyond simply making available masterpieces normally accessible only to world travelers.

Many would argue that bringing masterpieces to people of less than ample means is a virtue in itself, all the justification that any transport requires, but I can’t agree, not until I know why the masterpiece itself, and not an excellent copy, such as can be quite conveniently produced today, thanks to digital technology, has to be viewed. Professional critics and other literary writers are equipped to assess that part of the experience of looking at art that depends upon seeing originals, but world travel is part of the practice of art criticism. There’s no need to shunt priceless canvases about for their discernment. Why put our patrimony of unique artworks at risk of travel when we have no meaningful evidence of the impact of their presence upon ordinary visitors?

Educating articulate amateurs is the next task of museums, and it will be even more arduous than acquiring masterpieces or building galleries. It will be just as problematic as conservation — but no less necessary. Without such amateurs, art museums will decay into elitist echo chambers, poor revenants of the palaces whose ornaments they now display. At the same time, these museums will be vulnerable to the worst sort of populism — the illiterate kind.

The sad truth is that the wonder of art, for all that it is alleged in Capital Culture, is never more than glimpsed. You have to take it for granted.

***

To return to another matter entirely, what the “something” about Betrayal that mattered to me might be occurred to me later in the day. I neglected to mention that the scenes of this back-to-front history of a love affair are not presented in strict reverse chronological order. Three scenes (out of nine) occur “later” than the ones that they follow, just as scenes conventionally do. This makes for a certain “second act” built around Robert’s and Emma’s trip to Venice. There is the scene in Venice itself, in which Emma confesses to Robert that she’s in love with Jerry, followed by a scene at the Kilburn flat in which Emma unwraps the tablecloth that she bought for it on the trip and lies to Jerry about going to Torcello (implying that Robert didn’t go), followed by the scene in the Italian restaurant (with its mural of Naples and Vesuvius), in which Robert, furiously guzzling white wine, tells the truth about Torcello (he went alone). We might say of this “act” that it belongs to Robert, as it is characterized by Robert’s anger at the discovery of Emma’s affair. This is the time for the actor playing Robert to let loose, and Daniel Craig did not disappoint.

But there is one more “later” scene, and it is the second. Having been told by Emma that Robert knows about their affair, now long since extinguished, in the first scene, Jerry summons Robert in a panic. He can’t be still until he knows how Robert has taken the news — which wasn’t, of course, “news.” He must have it out, and take whatever medicine Robert dispenses. This scene ends with the two men practically cuddling upon the same couch, laughing at something. This is the end of the action; this is where the story stops.

Emma and her affair with Jerry have nothing to do with how Betrayal “ends.” That matters.

We saw Betrayal last night. The play itself did not engage Kathleen, but it certainly did me. We agreed that the performances were superb. Kathleen felt that the rather elaborate sets, involving rather spectacular set changes, simply underscored the play’s emptiness by attempting to provide substance where there wasn’t any. I was a kid with a model train set, hooked. In the end, I granted Kathleen this much: I appreciated Betrayal more as a show, almost as a ballet, than as a drama. But although I recognized the force of Kathleen’s argument that the play is “just a stunt” — scenes from an unremarkable and rather tacky love affair seen in reverse, beginning with an implicit post-mortem and ending with the first kiss — I was simply too moved by what I’d seen to dismiss it. And too dazzled by the wit.

Harold Pinter’s dialogue is so sketchy and hermetic — at times, he writes as if constrained by a set of not very literate refrigerator magnets — that it can be interpreted in different ways, and the way of Mike Nichols’s direction is to emphasize the wit. The characters don’t have particularly witty things to say, but they can say them with witty point, and the three stars in this revival, Rachel Weisz, Rafe Spall, and Daniel Craig are formidably equipped to make their encounters sparkle. Encounters, I say; confrontations (and their climaxes) are strenuously, successfully resisted. The married couple, Emma and Robert (played by the married couple in the cast), are like restless cats, prowling for excitement but leery of being scratched. Rafe Spall’s Jerry is a puppy dog, slow on the uptake. But Jerry is no dummy. He’s having an affair with his best friend’s wife. Emma takes it seriously enough to furnish a second home, a flat in Kilburn. She seems to have some idea that Jerry will leave his wife, the unseen Judith, but we know not only that he won’t but that it never crosses his mind to do so: Judith, clearly, is Jerry’s security blanket, his mother figure, his hearth. Or we knew it last night, thanks to Mr Spall’s affable characterization. In their refusal to answer simple questions simply, Pinter’s characters can seem dreadfully sullen; last night’s company made them look clever.

Judith is a doctor;  she is always busy at the hospital. Robert is a publisher, and Jerry is a literary agent. They’re not only best friends but professional colleagues. Jerry doesn’t want Robert to know about his affair with Emma, but this, if you ask me, this is the stunt: he’s drawn to Emma because she is his best friend’s wife. So he can pull one over on his best friend — who, it turns out, has been having affairs of his own. Jerry is so serenely untroubled by his betrayal of his friend that it amounts to not seeing the betrayal at all. Clearly, everybody’s moral compass, in this triangle, is on the blink, but Jerry’s is in worse shape than his friends’, because he is not a puppy dog. He is an adult human being, except not. More than once, it crossed my mind that the playwright may have chosen his male characters’ professions, so often felt to be parasitical by artists, with edifying malice.

Rafe Spall was new to me, although I have seen his father in many movies, so my response to his performance was one of uncomplicated pleasure. His costars were, I thought, old friends; I have seen them in many movies. But it was as if I’d never quite seen either of them before. Some screen actors fade onstage, although that’s doubtless less common in Britain, where theatre plays, proportionately, a vastly greater role in cultural life. Ms Weisz and Mr Craig, so far from fading, showed facets and faces that I had never guessed at; it was almost as though I’d only seen animated versions. She reminded me of Myrna Loy, of all people. (Kathleen thought she was Keira Knightley.) But she was much less “nice” than she tends to be in her films. He reminded me of — well, imagine that James Bond had a screw-up brother. (Mr Craig was very good at screw-ups before he became the leading man he is today.) These two actors had a grasp of what was wrong with Robert and Emma and their marriage that went deeper than rehearsal; their performances had the passion of people hoping to stave off a horror by playacting it. “Let’s try hard, darling, never to be like them.” Their one scene alone, the one set in Venice, was wretchedly pained.

What’s wrong with both Emma and Robert, or what makes them vulnerable to Jerry, is the bitterness of a restless disappointment that’s really Pinter’s hallmark. Mr Craig’s Robert fairly bursts with it in the restaurant scene, bouncing his leg like an activity-starved adolescent and trying to convince himself that he hates literature. Ms Weisz’s Emma begins each statement with a bright enthusiasm, as if hoping that her remark might summon forth a vision of satisfaction; when it doesn’t, her voice trails away. She only knows, as does her husband, that what she has got isn’t enough, not remotely. At the play’s beginning, you learn that Robert and Emma have decided to separate. At the end, you’re not unhappy about Jerry’s contribution to their breakup.

Betrayal is an essay in dramatic irony that leads to a hall of mirrors. Do they know about us? gives way to It doesn’t matter. That was Kathleen’s problem: it didn’t matter. But it somehow mattered to me. Something did.

***

In the old days, when I patterned pieces such as this one on professional reviews, I would be careful to run through the non-acting credits. Now I find that doing so is arguably misleading. But the sets — Ian MacNeil — and costumes — Ann Roth — were as witty, in their way, as the acting. Their work reminded us that, if Betrayal were to play out today, it would do so very differently. Wouldn’t it?

This morning, I want to return to Michael Anesko’s Monopolizing the Master, which I finished reading over the weekend. It is a book that everyone interested in Henry James’s fiction ought to read, not because it offers special insights into the work, but because it focuses on reactions to James’s complexity, reactions that tended to minimize this complexity, that tried to reorganize it. Monopolizing the Master is about misreading the Master.

Not just anybody’s misreading, but the gatekeepers’ themselves. These were James’s nephew and literary executor, Henry James III, known as Harry, an attorney by profession; and Leon Edel, a journalist who, in the course of writing a dissertation on Henry James’s stage plays, appears to have won the anxious Harry’s seal of approval. I do not mean to disparage lawyers or newspapermen, but it is no surprise to me that Harry and Edel liked to have things in black and white. Black was for shrouding the ambiguous, the ambivalent, the arguably inappropriate — everything that creaks underfoot as one traverses the spacious galleries of James’s novels and the winding corridors of his stories. Edel also enjoyed the clarity, for a time, of a working monopoly with regard to access to James’s papers, an arrangement with which academic libraries complied not out of obligation but from sympathy. The monopoly came to an end on 4 May 1973, when Harry’s nephew, Alexander James, rescinded it. Now, at last, the legacy of Henry James could be submitted to proper academic inquiry. It took nearly a generation for the effects of this liberation to be felt, so heavily had Edel’s hand clamped shut the possibilities of discussion. And we’re still calling James the Master.

The bootstrapping worked like this: James’s complexity was a sign of his mastery: he knew what he was talking about. If you couldn’t quite follow him, you could at least be sure that he had trailed into realms of fine exaltation. You might content yourself with this understanding, formulated by Pound, of James’s impeccable purposes.

What I have not heard is any word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny, book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression … the rights of the individual against all sorts of bondage. The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn’t ‘feel.’ I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn’t raise this cry.

(Anesko quotes this passage from Instigations on p 119)

Michael Anesko’s pen is the most sophisticated of instruments. Covering in full the protracted attempt to control the learned response to Henry James — which became, in time, the only response — Anesko never condescends to discuss the motivations behind this attempt. He does not conceal the matter altogether; on page 80 he lets drop a surmise about “the belated acceptance of heteronormative roles and conventions” by both Harry James and his sister, Peggy. He quotes from a very naughty pamphlet that circulated while Henry James was still alive, called What Percy Knew. (The fragment is titled, “The Better End, an uncompleted chapter from a novel by H nr J m s” — the Morgan Library has a copy, if you think they’ll let you see it.) The general effetness of Henry James’s circle of friends is mentioned as the reason why the James family didn’t get on with them. My point is that Anesko never dwells on the obvious wellspring of anxiety and control that produced the monopoly, that deep quaking and unspeaking dread of homosexual desire, out there in the world and, more horrible still, lying coiled within oneself. And because Anesko doesn’t dwell on it, it flies up from his pages, in all its bruised unhappiness, like a living, palpable ghost.

It would be anachronistic to charge Henry James himself with a homophobia similar to his nephew’s; Harry James’s attitudes were molded by the anti-feminine, muscularly Christian tide that swept the men of the West right into the folly of World War I. My own view is that Henry was too physically fastidious for actual sex; he was happy enough to write as if to lovers. That was the problem for Harry. It didn’t really matter what Uncle Henry did; what he wrote in his letters, and not just those to the hunky sculptor Hendrik Andersen, was blatantly faggoty. It wasn’t the sort of thing — it couldn’t be the sort of thing that the “Master” of American novelists, of novelists in English! could indulge in. So Harry saw to it that they were buried. Edel, not as squeamish on the subject but eager to secure his right to scoop everybody else, was happy to comply.

But James’s effusive letters, together with his nephew’s shame, actually make his novels much easier to understand, and at no expense to their mastery. The novelist’s private enthusiasms stand in for the thoughts and deeds of characters whose points of view are not shared with us. They give body to the menace of the unknown: they make it clear to us why the unknown must be kept unknown. This is not for a moment to suggest that most or any of James’s characters are gay. What they share with James is, simply, illicit desire. Many of James’s characters have a vaguely obscene desire for comfort — for the comforts, that is, of the well-appointed, beautifully-staffed private residence. This puts them in need of money, in pursuit of which they may do unspeakable things.

Pound is not off the mark: the most unspeakable act in James’s book of ethics is to pretend to love. What Henry knew was what follows innocence, and he writes about the mess as scrupulously as if he were shepherding atomic wastes. Within the spools of his finely-wrought paragraphs is tucked some very dirty linen. In the fiction, we can only guess that it’s there. In his letters, and in his nephew’s horror at the thought of their publication, we can get a good whiff.

***

And here I was going to quibble with something in Anesko’s book, his recurring references to James’s “cultural capital.” I have an idea what this phrase means, but I find it infelicitous in several ways. Real-world capital is always ascertainable down to the penny, and it is measured in one currency at a time. The power of novelists, especially with the passage of time, is both uncertain and profuse; I can think of at least two “currencies” in which the reputation of Jane Austen can be measured, and they are not mutually convertible. “Cultural capital” sounds Marxian to me, and therefore somewhat reductionist.

Perhaps I have just said all that I needed to say on the subject.

Neil Harris’s Capital Culture is one very solid book. It also has an appropriate subtitle: J Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience. It’s that last bit that caught my attention and induced me to buy the book. The museum experience — you have to be middle-aged or older (and Harris is ten years older than I am) to think of such a thing, to imagine that such an experience really can be reinvented. I wish I’d been a better observer when I was young, but I was too self-absorbed to pay real attention to anything else. So my recollections of the museum experience in the 1960s are dim.

Museums themselves were pretty dim in those days; they didn’t attract attention to themselves. The idea was to showcase the art by providing as little showcase as possible. We recall the noisy exuberance of the Sixties easily enough. What’s harder to recapture is the austerity of everything deemed to be serious. Pleasure was intellectually suspect. I do remember that.

John Walker, director of the National Gallery prior to Carter Brown, wrote to his former teacher, Bernard Berenson, in 1948, about the crowds showing up to see an exhibition of German treasures. “I have almost come to the conclusion that interest in the arts in America is overstimulated.” It’s an astonishingly contemptuous thing to say, now. In 1948, it was conventional mandarin wisdom. “Overstimulated” was a word much used in those days in connection with children who were too wound up to take anything in, who ran around senselessly, crashing into things. It was a byword for “unthinking.” The crowds at the National Gallery were too enthusiastic, were having too good a time. That Walker disliked this did not make him mean-spirited; he simply cherished the hushed serenity of understated grandeur that is still the reverberant note on the West Building’s main floor. John Walker rarely appeared in public, one imagines, not wearing a suit and a tie.

How quickly things change: not ten years after Walker’s retirement, President Jimmy Carter showed up for a special viewing of the great Treasures of Tutankhamen show wearing a sweater and an open shirt.

Museums were not dim in the old days because they were neglected. But their austerity — their chilly, quiet, underlighted institutional ostentation — was completely out of fashion. The great museums weren’t what they had been intended to be: timeless. Perhaps their timelessness was simply incompatible with youthfulness. This did not go untouched by our cultural revolution. By the end of the Sixties, both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art were in the hands of young men, neither yet forty: Thomas Hoving and J Carter Brown. Sometimes working together, mostly in earnest competition, they gave us the blockbuster exhibition, bigger museum shops, and, above all, welcoming (if noisier) museums. Hoving and Brown put an end to austerity wherever it was not inherently stylish. Brown, at heart a very gifted broker, kept his job much longer than did the restless and mercurial Hoving, but he was no less a showman.

Even when buildings in the beaux-arts style of the West Building were erected, their degree of ornament was curtailed by puritanical modernism, which held that, whatever the work of art, it must be seen without distraction. There ought to be, ideally, nothing else to look at. Decades of this proved to be enervating. Almost all the older paintings in any museum were intended to adorn walls in relatively opulent rooms, and they were very much part of the furniture. Modernism, wrenching them out of context, almost wrenched the life out of them. Today, it is fashionable to restore some of the contextual opulence by suggestive lighting, an old trick in retailing. Sometimes the suggestiveness is a little loud, and you wonder where the pricetag is. This is an unwelcome distraction. Knowing that you cannot take this home is one of the great pleasures of visiting a museum. (Ah me, I am an old man.)

Whether or not the Frick Collection is timeless, time has come to a full stop there — except, sadly, in connection with a few lampshades that are in dire need of replacement. The idea, at the Frick, is to see things as the collector saw them, and to enjoy them in his very fine mansion. (That’s why the shabby lampshades have to go!) You need not pretend that you live there to appreciate how much richness the paintings and other artworks draw from their surroundings. Bellini’s absolutely timeless St Francis is honored, not only by the company it keeps, but by the wood-paneled wall behind it.

***

So, what have I learned from Capital Culture? (I’m not done with it yet.) That the Smithsonian is a bewildering Institution, certainly. Smithsonian Secretary (director) Dillon Ripley gets two chapters in Harris’s book. It’s an intelligent way to put Carter Brown’s career in relief, because Ripley went about things very differently. Both men were Ascendancy WASPs — “You’re just visiting” — but if Ripley affected, in the manner of FDR, to be a man for the people, if not quite of them, Brown was a chic patrician. Curiously (or maybe not), Ripley was the one who persistently invited unwanted Congressional inquiries, while the wheels of Brown’s triumphal chariot were optimally oiled. Ripley was riotous sprawl; Brown, elegant containment. Each of them headed the right museum.

Chapter Eight, “Trouble in Paradise: The Light That Failed,” is a testament to Brown’s negative capability. In 1977, Washington Post art critic Paul Richard wrote about the cleaning of an alleged Rembrandt, The Mill, in a way that upset Paul Mellon, son of the National Gallery of Art’s prime mover and himself not only a trustee but also President of the museum. Six months later, Mellon interfered in  museum operations by calling a halt to all conservation work. Over the summer of 1978, a battle raged between rival camps of conservators, with the “English” or “European” connoisseurs vilifying the American technicians installed at the National Gallery. Aside from the embarrassed staffers, who could rightly complain of kangaroo-court treatment, the museum official who stood up for them and who took the blows was Charles Parkhurst, the Assistant Director, not Carter Brown.

In effect, during the coming firestorm Brown largely absented himself and let Parkhurst take on the role of mediating between the staff and the Gallery president. By now, almost ten years into the director’s job, Brown may well have realized the potential costs to his staff of Mellon’s decision to call a moratorium on conservation. But he was always deferential toward his superiors, and the role Mellon played in the Gallery made him even more indispensable to its continued success than Brown himself.

So far, that’s the worst that I’ve read about Brown. I would want to know more before passing judgment.

Goodness, the time. I thought that I should write today about Maureen Dowd’s column in yesterday’s Times, but it turned out that I hadn’t really given the matter enough thought. Nor had I read the piece by Tom Scocca, appearing at Gawker, to which Dowd principally referred. In “Do Snark,” Scocca finds that the evils of snark are vastly outweighed by the dangers of smarm. I’m not sure that I want to write about snark or smarm. I suspect that I’m too old ever to understand either term properly. I was drawn to Dowd’s column by her vote for negative commentary. Where politics is concerned, I couldn’t agree more. But I think that critics, especially of politics, ought to take pains to clear their work of any charge of snark. No winking jokes addressed to the gallery. No sloppy sarcasm. And no focus on what’s wrong. The point of criticism is to point out that something is not right, and in order to do this it is necessary to fly a clear banner of what’s right. Always focus on what’s right.

At one point, Scocca writes, “It is also no accident that [Dave] Eggers is full of shit.” I like Tom Scocca. I enjoyed reading his book about working in China. His tough-guy tone is not my cup of tea, but he manages to make it attractive, most of the time. Not so, however, here. This is pointless rudeness.

Back to Maureen Dowd. Dowd quotes The New Republic‘s Leon Wieseltier, who in turn quotes Rebecca West, a writer of vexed temper.

“In the very first issue of my magazine, almost 100 years ago,” he told me, “Rebecca West established what she called ‘the duty of harsh criticism,’ and she was right. An intellectual has a solemn obligation to speak out negatively against ideas or books that he or she believes will have a pernicious or misleading effect upon people’s understanding of important things. To do otherwise would be cowardly and irresponsible.”

Looking around, I am trying to think of a book currently on the landscape that I fear will have a pernicious or misleading effect on anyone. I fail, doubtless because the dangers once posed by books have changed venue, and are now at work on television. For reasons outlined long ago by Neil Postman, I regard all telejournalism as insidious and misleading at best. I don’t even approve of listening to audiotapes of books that you’ve never read! We are born with five senses but are educated to command a sixth: literacy. Literacy is a complex but not incoherent bundle of skills involving memory at its most objective and judgment at its most dispassionate. Reading cannot be replaced by listening or (worse) watching, neither of which is sufficiently critical of inputs. Having said this, I have said all that I have to say about the dangers of pernicious or misleading effects, and I hope that I’ve done so as matter-of-factly, and as free from harshness, as possible.

Wieseltier often makes me wonder if I have any moral fibre at all, because, if I do, it doesn’t look like his. I am wary of solemn obligations; they seem to burden, disproportionately, self-important people.”The duty of harsh criticism” is a bleak concept, one to which I should never consider myself fit to respond — not with regard to books or ideas, anyway. Dowd writes,

Not to review books negatively is in essence to subsume book reviewing into advertising, public relations and promotion. Succumbing to uplift, edification and happy talk is basically saying that there’s something more important than telling the truth: not making enemies, not hurting people’s feelings.

I don’t agree at all. Because I should never write insincerely, I should never treat favorably a book that I didn’t care for. The alternative to favorable response is sometimes silence, but brief mention is perhaps more effective. It narrows the range of explanations for the fact that X doesn’t have much to say about Y, and it leaves the reader with the impression that part of the explanation must be that X fails to find Y congenial. There’s my moral fibre, you see. Congeniality is of the essence. It leaves me with little energy for detecting and denouncing plausible dangers. I’m too busy maintaining the good health of my appetite for the congenial.

And I frankly avow that the whole point of a favorable review is to induce sales. Frankly, I say! If I think that a book is worth reading, I want to persuade other people to give it a try. I won’t say that I’m absolute proof against the book that is written to express no higher passion than the desire to make money, but I don’t think it can be said that I’m a shill for commercial interests. If I like a book, I want the author to be rewarded for his work: buy the book! That’s how it’s done, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

Was it premature, yesterday, to speak of Michael Anesko’s Monopolizing the Master as a delicious bonbon? Further reading has begun to give me the creeps. It’s a jolly case of the creeps, to be sure, but it is edged in black doubts. The story so far — about the handling of the literary (and epistolary) remains of Henry James — is so marked by suppressions, evasions, denials and distortions, all in the name of promoting the author’s position in the pantheon to one of preeminence, that it sounds rather like one of the Master’s ghost stories. Then there is “little B” — Theodora Bosanquet, the intelligent young stenographer who took James’s dictation in his later years and who, snubbed by the James family (they liked to think of her as a sort of charwoman, all the worse for being literate and prone to what they regarded as eavesdropping), convinced herself of a parapsychological bond with Henry James’s ectoplasm, which continued to dictate. Creepiest of all, though, is wondering whether I’ve been — to use one of James’s favorite horror-words, always put in scare quotes — “sold.” Oohing and aahing my way through a re-reading of The Golden Bowl — was I nuts?

This uncertainty is an anxious response to Anesko’s persistent sounding of the dissonance between, on the one hand, the aloofness from vulgar material concerns said, quite falsely, to be a shining virtue of the late novelist’s by almost all who survived him, and, on the other, James’s actual endless whining about money matters (suppressed from the early editions of his Letters), not to mention the commodification and branding of his oeuvre that was well underway by the time of his death. Anesko’s stated subject is the struggle for control over James’s legacy, which ended only a few decades ago, but his leading subordinate theme, it seems to me, is, simply, the packaging of Henry James. No one was more interested in this aspect of things than James himself; the Prefaces that he composed for the New York Edition of his novels and stories are presentation cases designed to make the fictions that follow them look even more elaborate and remarkable than they already do. It was hoped, by his publishers, that these prefaces would be both informal and intimate, sharing “trade secrets” in plain English and thereby inviting the reader to feel a familiarity with the author that might make his highly-wrought prose somewhat easier to digest. In fact, the Prefaces achieve this end, but by precisely the opposite means: never is the question, What the hell is this man talking about?, more pressing. One comes with relief to Chapter I of whatever has just been addressed. The Prefaces are as fancy as the most ostentatious jewel box, but they are also as difficult to open as the plastic cases in which we nowadays are forced to acquire so many articles of domestic utility.

Thus lurks the horror of sunk costs. What if it is nothing more than our unwillingness to acknowledge that we’ve made an awful mistake that produces the feeling of satisfied elation that accompanies the fourth or fifth re-reading of The Ambassadors?

Am I one of the doomed sybarites in the closing frame of Edward Gorey’s masterpiece, The Curious Sofa?

And I’m not even halfway through.

Bon weekend à tous!