The book party, hosted by a law partner of the author who also happens to be a fellow trustee of Kathleen’s at the Brearley, was a small gathering of elite New Yorkers. The author, Frederic Rich, read from his forthcoming novel, Christian Nation, a dystopian counterfactual story in which John McCain wins the 2008 presidential election but promptly dies, leaving the country to Sarah Palin and her christianists. Things go downhill from there; the novel, I believe, is written from the perspective of 2029. After the reading, questions were solicited, and one guest sensibly asked, “Why a novel?” The author thereupon named six nonfiction books about Americans who long to inflict Dominion and Reconstruction upon an evil liberal democracy. All of these books were outstanding, in his view. Had anybody read them? No one had. That’s “why a novel”: novels can get things across.

But when the author asked if anyone knew what “dominionism” and “reconstructionism” are, I did raise my hand. I raised it to the self-deprecating height of my neck, and smiled ruefully, lest anybody think me pleased about being the solitary smarty. It took Mr Rich a few minutes to look in my direction. When he saw me, he smiled and said, “Ah, the blogger!” For I had given him my card at the beginning of the party. And when he asked if anyone had read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, I raised my hand again. “The blogger, of course!” Everyone laughed this time, nicely I thought. Later, when it came my turn to ask Mr Rich to inscribe my copy of his book, I told him that I would be honored if he made it out to “The Blogger,” which (I’ve just checked) is what he did.

If you have a look at yesterday’s entry, you’ll easily see that fortuity of event was piled on fortuity of reading. I’d been reading and writing about periods marked by the withering away of liberal democracies in France and Germany, in which Nazis came to power even though educated elites dismissed them as clowns. Similarly, the Republican Party has made cynical use of christianists ever since the Nixon Administration. It can happen here. When the question period ended, Kathleen turned to me and said that she’d wanted to ask Mr Rich what we could do to stop it.

For the rest of the evening, I tried to answer her question, not in terms of taking direct action to belittle or suppress christianists, but rather in terms of encouraging the elite to open up the bubble in which several guests at the book party had claimed that we live. The first thing to do, of course, is to read books like Haidt’s. Haidt’s somewhat schematic idea is that conservatives draw on greater reserves to strengthen their beliefs than liberals do, largely because liberals eschew traditional notions of the blood tie and the sacred. This is certainly arguable, but it is better seen as a point of departure for the development of positive liberal correlatives, rooted, perhaps fantastically, in doubt.

Between them, Eugenio and Otto Albert shared a little saying: that they should “prove Hamlet wrong.” If the Shakespearean figure was the archetype of immobilizing doubt, Colorni’s ideas were intent on demonstrating that doubt could propel deeds.

That is from Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert Hirschman. (Born Otto Albert Hirschmann, he became Albert O Hirschman in America. Eugenio Colorni was his brother-in-law.)

There are many things to do. One of these days, the idea of the elite itself must be subjected to some serious reconstruction. In the pattern familiar from history, elites grow smug and inattentive, and are either eliminated or co-opted by surging non-elites, who, however radical at first, soon settle into being elite themselves. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that an elite might reform itself — instead of trying, as elites fitfully do from time to time, to reform everybody else?

American elites ought to rally behind the idea of national service, starting it off unofficially if necessary. This national service would be tasked with useful projects, more or less in the nature of internships (designed not to put working adults out of their jobs), but the most important thing about it would be compulsory residence in relatively monastic barracks during the years that Americans now spend languishing in college. No saunas, no binge drinking. Rise and shine! Not a military life, perhaps — although it is in the elite’s own interest to extend its presence in the armed forces — but not a pool party, either. Lest you cock a skeptical brow, let me remind you that our now venerable prep schools were all founded in austere reaction to the pamperments of the Gilded Age. For several generations, at least, these schools produced a renewed elite burnished with strong commitments to self-restraint and public service. It can happen again.

***

The final stage of national service might be spent in community colleges studying such subjects as personal finance (with an accent on statistics) and serious home economics. Also on the curriculum: the Bibles, Homer, Horace, Shakespeare and Montaigne. (Learning from great doubters how to prove Hamlet wrong, in short.) Only after this common education (which would take a great deal less than four years) would some students move on to graduate schools — ideally, transplanted versions of France’s hautes écoles. Most would go into the world of work.

That’s a much thornier problem than reforming the elite. Where are the jobs going to come from? It occurred to me last night that the ecology of American business is in much worse shape than the ecology of the biosphere. (By “business,” I mean to exclude all activities in which money begets only money.) And the “population problem” has developed a different complexion: while we may still have to worry, a bit, about feeding everybody, the sharper challenge is providing people with meaningful occupation.

It has been thirteen years since I set up my first Web site. That feels like a long time, and certainly much has happened. Thirteen years is plenty of time for things to happen. And yet, it really isn’t so long. I’m not actually thinking about my life on the Internet here. What I’m thinking about is that I’ve been in power, first at Portico and then at The Daily Blague, longer than Hitler was in power in Germany. He came and went that quickly.

As I say, twelve years is plenty of time for myriad catastrophes to befall millions of people. As governments go, though, the Third Reich was short-lived, more comparable to Savonarola’s religious despotism in Florence in the 1490s, or to the much more mild-mannered Interregnum in England in the 1650s, than to the dynastic monarchies that ruled Europe for centuries. It wasn’t — the Reich — much of a government. Of course it wasn’t: it was a regime supported by a hatred of government. It was a madness, an epidemic of recklessness that ran its disastrous course in little more than a decade.

Thoughts of the Third Reich are prompted by a fortuity of readings. Yesterday, I finished Frederick Brown’s For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, and then, in the evening, I picked up Jeremy Adelman’s biography of economic thinker Albert Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher, precisely at the point where the collapse of the Weimar Republic inspired Hirschman to leave his family in Berlin and to settle in France — at the ripe old age of seventeen. It was very much like reading two versions of a well-known fairy tale. Or perhaps it was exactly the opposite of that, for, when you read two versions of a fairy tale, you note the discrepancies, the differences in tone and detail. In yesterday’s readings, the differences in tone and detail between fin-de-siècle France and Germany thirty years later didn’t amount to much. Even before I re-opened Adelman, I was haunted by the conviction that disgust with the Third Republic made many, many French people itch for something like Hitler’s fascist regime. Well, they got their wish.

***

For the Soul of France is THE book to read about the Dreyfus Affair, for the simple reason that it recreates, over the course of two hundred fluently concise pages, the context in which the scandal was brewed. Having steeped the reader in the big stories that preceded the Affair — the two financial imbroglios (l’Union Générale, de Lesseps’s Panama Canal company); the rise and fall of General Boulanger, and also in the vile, intemperate language of Catholic apologists, often priests, in the partisan press, Brown is free to run through the stages of Dreyfus Affair, and its important sideshow, the Zola trials, with brisk dispatch. At the center of everything is the insistent anti-Semitism that, in those days, knew no shame. Here is Henri-Martin Didon, a Dominican attached to the Collège d’Arcueil, in a commencement speech delivered in the summer of 1898:

We must equip ourselves with coercive powers, we must not hold back, we must brandish the sword, smite, terrorize, cut off heads, impose justice. … Armed force thus employed is no longer brute strength but sainted energy put to beneficent use.

By this point in the book, the reader does not need Brown to spell out the targeting of the Jews implicit in this attack. Vincent de Paul Bailly, the Assumptionist editor of the Catholic chain of newspapers, La Croix, wrote,

Free thought, standing in the dock with Zola, acts as an attorney for Jews, for Protestants, for all enemies of the Church, and the army must, despite itself, fire away. … On all sides, people clamor for a strongman who would rrisk his life to tear Franch from the clutches of traitors, from the sectarians and imbeciles who are handing them over to the foreigner … Ah! Who will deliver us from this pack of brigands?

Father Bailly might well have been editorializing in early-Thirties Berlin. He strikes the same note of derring-do that decorated Nazi puffery.

The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) rampaged against signs of “un-German spirit” and welcomed Nazi speakers to their rallies. It was these students who stormed the University of Berlin’s magnificent library in May 1933 and proceeded to ignite tens of thousands of volumes at the Opernplatz, in front of the law faculty and around the corner from Hegel’s old office.

By then, Hirschman had left the University (and Berlin) for Paris.

***

One can only hope that the bee in my bonnet will make some honey. It is at any rate clear to me that the disarray in anti-Dreyfus France and Nazi Germany owed a great deal to the lack of a loyal opposition. The opposition to the Third Republic, as the remarks of Fathers Didon and Bailly make clear, was not loyal. Catholic nationalists did not respect the political constitution of the Third Republic, but openly undermined it, as the strange career of Georges Boulanger makes clear. (Boulanger is another figure of Third Republic history whose antics are impossible to understand without a grasp of the tenor of the times.) This was an opposition that sought to restore to crown and church the control of France. It was reactionary, but only in the sense that the victim of a terrible illness is reactionary in seeking to restore his health. They believed, just as the Nazis believed and the Tea Party Republicans believe, that the government is diseased, possibly too diseased to prop up. They believed (and believe) that the government itself can be a vector of infection. They constituted (and constitute) the opposite of a loyal opposition.

Inclined to be sanguine about the near-term future of the United States, despite everything, I must confess to a persistent chill of misgivings, occasioned, it seems, by reading and then thinking about George Packer’s The Unwinding. There is no loyal opposition in this country, either, at the moment, and that frightens me, because it is the role of the loyal opposition to rein in the recklessness of the party in power. Democracy does not work if it is merely majoritarian; minorities quite naturally come to believe that the government is one of foreign occupation, and that’s enough to shred the civil fabric, violently or otherwise. The party that gets to run things because it wins a majority of votes must nevertheless learn to listen to the party that doesn’t, and that party, in turn, must learn how to talk to the party in power. This conversation is the true seat of democratic government, and it is clearly not taking place in today’s Washington.

Janet Malcolm’s essay about the art world of the early Eighties, focused on Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy and called “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” appeared in 1986 in The New Yorker,  where I must have come across it and decided not to read it. Why? Many partial explanations present themselves, many of which can be grouped under the following statement: it was at about that time that I learned that our original idea, what living in New York would be like for Kathleen and me, had to be replaced. Our original idea had predicated a measure of engagement with the social scene — the old-guard, uptown social scene, I hasten to add, that David Patrick Columbia so lovingly follows at New York Social Diary. Without having undergone any crises of painful disillusionment, I came to see that this world was not for us, if only because inhabiting it is a full-time job (or a paid publicist’s full-time job, and we cold not afford that), and we were interested in other things. For a few years, this re-think of how we might live in Manhattan was masked by a retreat from the city, in which I spent more and more time at our newly-acquired lake house in Connecticut. I also retired, precociously but permanently. In 1986, I might have flipped through Malcolm’s essay, seen how long and formidable it was, and decided that the days of my interest in such things were over — for in those days, without being aware of it, I took “the art world” and “the social scene” as two sides of the same frame.

But who knows. In any case, I did not read “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” until yesterday, and even now I haven’t finished it. Almost everything compelling about it is tinctured by a wincing awareness that the issues and personalities under discussion are of a vintage that’s closer to twenty-five than to thirty years old, but that feels, suddenly, more like thirty. Some of the personalities have disappeared (as the French say; I think of Kirk Varnedoe, cut short by early cancer), and those still with us are now a lot older, and no longer determining the scene. But what about the ideas? I ask about the ideas because the discussions about art that Malcolm captures coincide with the thoughts that I’ve been having —thirty years later.

I wrote yesterday that Andy Warhol put an end to a way of looking at art that made it possible to talk about art seriously. I see now that Barbara Rose, an art historian and critic who had left the board of Artforum before Malcolm began her investigations, said pretty much the same thing to Malcolm way back then.

There’s a generation now that feels you don’t have to make that distinction. Mickey Mouse, Henry James, Marcel Duchamp, Talking Heads, Mozart, Amadeus — it’s all going on at the same time, and it all kind of means the same thing. For that, you have Andy Warhol to thank.

(Rose blames Susan Sontag, too, but I don’t follow her there; Sontag tore down the old temple so that she could be the priestess of a new one.) I myself feel that distinctions are so obvious that they don’t need to be made. Amadeus, for example, is a tone-deaf misrepresentation of everything valuable about Mozart. I don’t mean that it is disrespectful; that would not be the problem. It is simply and altogether misleading. It posits notions of “genius” and “creativity” that, had he subscribed to them, might have disinclined Mozart to bother setting aside his skittles game to write a few bars of music. In his short but magisterial study of late Mozart, Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune, the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff documents the composer’s extraordinarily adult program for the revitalization of a specifically German art music. (And how odd it is to imagine Mozart and Wagner writing the same sort of manifesto.) Mozart was the very opposite of the idiot savant; in his final years, he quite consciously and ambitiously set himself ever more formidable challenges. Peter Schaffer’s play is, from every standpoint — that of listening to music, that of understanding history — nothing but junk (as are its predecessors by Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov). It may be entertaining, but it cannot be entertained in the same hour as a the Dissonant Quartet.

If anyone had developed what is now called “reception theory” when I was a student, I was unaware of it; to the best of my knowledge, a readable history of the reception of art remains to be written. We know a lot about artists, and a fair amount about the patrons who commissioned their works, but shifts in public taste — bearing in mind the shifts in the meaning of “public,” from small courts in the Renaissance to the bourgeois audiences of the Nineteenth Century who in turn were so ill-received by many artists around the turn of the Twentieth Century that rebartative modernism was invented as a rebuff — have not been rigorously traced. Such shifts go against our ideas, such as we retain, of the transcendence of art: transcendence always suggests the eternal. It is still shocking to learn that concerts in Mozart’s day could go on for five hours or that people were allowed to talk through them, and to come and go as they pleased — shocking, that is, to audiences schooled in concert-hall behavior and unfamiliar with stadium rock. To a degree, charges of ignorance and inattentiveness can be lodged against those ancient audiences: they truly did not imagine the power of music, except on ceremonial occasions in which music played a supporting role. Today, we’re in rather the opposite boat, overscrutinizing the flotsam of “mass culture,” pretending to mind meaning in the ephemeral.

Until modernism — or, perhaps, until merely affluent, not particularly well-educated people began showing up at concerts and exhibitions — the arts were vehicles of pleasure. They were appreciated by audiences that studied pleasure, that grasped the complications of its evanescence. A scale was developed, somewhat loosely, between the inborn digestive pleasures and the acquired cerebral ones. The former risked grossness, the latter preciosity. But it was clearly the artist’s job was to provide some degree of pleasure. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain put a stop to that, or, rather, it announced to the public that artists were getting out of the pleasure business. This was so shocking that it attracted a phalanx of critics willing to defend the move. It became the artist’s job to be difficult and obscure. Andy Warhol’s boxes put an stop to that, as Barbara Rose observed, and that’s pretty much where we still are, I think.

The important thing about art, in other words, is no longer what artists are producing. It is how audiences are responding — with an accent on the plurality of audiences. The audience for Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc — the federal workers at the Javits Building in Lower Manhattan — hated what the sculpture did to their plaza, and eventually the piece was removed. I remember working through a strong resistance to the power of “popularity” in determining public art (just as Ingrid Sischy herself did, according to Malcolm’s essay), and arriving at what I would call the Jane Jacobs view, which holds that public art must be appropriate to its setting. There can be little doubt that Serra’s sculpture was designed to be completely inappropriate: that was its primary aesthetic point. It was meant to insult the admittedly ghastly Javits Building. But it was wrong to ask the people who had no choice but to work in that building to live with so severe and incommoding a work of art. When I say that Tilted Arc was a bad idea, the wrong work for the space in which it was installed, I am claiming that the artist’s inspiration and achievement is not the criterion. The work’s reception is.

As is perfectly obvious already in the world of literature, where all texts come in more or less identical packages (books), and the history of the art encompasses vast lumber rooms of forgotten authors. The fact that very few people today are willing or able to read Sir Walter Scott with pleasure consigns him to the attic, and we might very well have lost sight of him altogether had his novels not inspired so many operas. No one gives the neglect of Scott a second thought; we are not in any way obliged to appreciate him. Which is to say that nobody is making a persuasive case on his behalf. Let someone come along and show us things in Scott that we had missed, let someone open him and us up to pleasure once again, and the Penguin Classics will reappear on readers’ bookshelves.

When critics complain today that today’s art market is all about the art market itself, they are not missing the point.

As you can see, it was a perfect day for visiting the Museum’s Roof Garden. I hadn’t yet been, nor had the announcement of this year’s installation, by Imran Qureshi, caught my eye. I was very surprised to see that it amounted to — nothing. For the first time since the roof opened, the space stretches empty from building to parapet. Only having taken this in does one look down at the paving stones, which are splashed with dull red paint and inscribed with fragmentary lotus blossoms. It is a witness to violence, specifically to the violence in Pakistan, and, although two dimensional, it is not understated. For the simple reason that it is easy to overlook, it is disturbing to notice. It is also exotic, more exotic than it would have been within the Museum. Nothing could be less like the ghostly blooms of lotus than the lushly textured carpet of treetops, the most hope-inspiring form of life more than six months old.

I had errands that took me toward the Museum. After lunch at the Shake Shack, I stocked up on cash at the bank. At Flowers by Philip, I bought plants for the balcony; and, at Crawford Doyle, Janet Malcolm’s collection of pieces, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers. I had made a point of waiting to buy the Malcolm at the bookshop; it’s the kind of book that I want to pay for there. I managed to get in and out without buying anything else, which was so much the better when I came across two quasi must-haves on the sale table at the Museum. The first was a biography of Nicolas Fouquet, by Charles Drazin, that I probably should not have paid full price for, but the other, Frederick Brown’s For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, I was sorry to have missed until now. The last third of the Nineteenth Century was long my idea of a Dark Age, and I never obliged myself to learn its fundamentals. That ignorance has developed into an embarrassing pothole, and now I’m simply pleased to be able to repair it.

Visiting the Roof Garden was an errand, as well: seeing art for the first time always is; it’s only when you’ve thought about something that you begin to see it. I had no intention of exploring the interior of the Museum, and, once I’d taken in the Roof Garden, I took the elevator downstairs and headed out. On my way, though, my eye was caught by an unfolded altarpiece that seemed new to me (although it can’t have been, as it was featured in the big Netherlandish-art show in 1998), The Life and Miracles of Saint Godelieve. It has been in the Museum’s collections since 1912, but I really don’t recall attending to it before. St Godelieve, the patron saint of Flanders, was a good girl who wanted to share everything with the poor and to become a nun, two ambitions that were thwarted by her forced marriage to one Bertolf of Gistel. Bertolf soon regretted his exercise of force majeure, however, and concocted wicked stories about his wife that prepared the ground for her apparent suicide. In fact (according to legend, that is), he had her strangled. In the altarpiece, painted by an eponymous Master of of St Godelieve Legend, Godelieve is painted with long red tresses that are put up only once, into her wedding headdress: iconic proof of her refusal to be the great lady that she was born to be. My favorite thing about the piece (at not-quite-first glance) was the expression on the face of Bertolf’s mother, as she confides her “misgivings” about Godelieve to her son. She reminds me of another no-good-nik from a neighboring county, Ortrud of Frisia, the villainess of Wagner’s Lohengrin, an opera set only about a century before the life of Godelieve. The St Godelieve altarpiece subordinates sophisticated composition to effective narration, and is one of those works of art that used to inspire aficianados of cinquecento art to dismiss Netherlandish painting as “primitive.” But I hope that the curators leave it where it is for a while, so that I’ll pass by it most times I visit the Museum.

***

When I got home, I sat out on the balcony and dove into Janet Malcolm. I read the very brief pieces at the end first; then I turned to the title essay, which is, literally, a collection of attempts to write something reasonably substantial about David Salle, the hot Eighties artist who, by the time Malcolm got around to him in the early Nineties, was already something of a has-been. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what his stuff looked like, but that seemed beside the point, because although Malcolm described a few paintings, what seemed to concern Salle more in their conversations was the uncertainty of his fame. Junk-bond millionaires had made him rich by paying top dollar for his work, but it seemed unclear whether this work was actually art or, instead, just another hula hoop. Without the enthusiastic praise of Peter Schjeldahl, quoted by Malcolm, I’d have opted for the latter, as I do now, having done a bit of googling. But then I believe that Andy Warhol put an end, not to art, but to the idea that art is potentially transcendent in a way that can be vouched by philosophical consensus. In light of Schjeldahl’s interest, I’m thrown back into the wetlands in which the tides of what I think of as art intermingle with the more brackish waters of commercial illustration.

In the evening, I watched The Leopard, or most of it; when Kathleen came home from a late night, there were still twenty minutes to run. I hadn’t seen the sparkling Criterion Collection edition of Visconti’s movie, which has the strange effect of highlighting Visconti’s regard for music as a kind of subsidiary decoration rather than as a compositional element. When it isn’t in competition with the narrative, Nino Rota’s soore is pretty tacky, and Visconti thinks nothing of cutting it off along with a scene change — a sloppy effect that Hollywood outgrew very early. The interiors are all garishly over-lit; it might be argued that interiors in the 1860s were over-lit, given the excitement provided by gaslights, but they can’t have been always over-lit. And the compositions are antic rather than stately; there is no effort to see the aristocratic family as it saw itself — aside from Visconti’s trademark determination to get the costumes right. Only the Prince is a figure of real dignity, and one wonders how much of this is the filmmaker’s doing, and how much might owe to Lampedusa’s telepathic foreknowledge that Burt Lancaster would be playing the part. Why a burly American actor should be the ideal Prince of Salina is a deep mystery, but he is. Another mystery: why does The Leopard look so much more primitive than Senso, set at about the same time and made almost ten years earlier?

There is something about Michael Pollan’s writing that puts me off — his regular-guy pose, which may, for all I know, be perfectly sincere. It’s canny, and it sells books, I’m sure, but I’m the one reader in a thousand who has no use for regular guys, not in books anyway. I don’t think that masculinity (or femininity) is anything to be proud of; on the contrary, it’s a predicament that active, educated imaginations struggle to overcome. Writing about food and cooking, Pollan seems anxious at times to establish his he-man credentials. I know that I’m overly sensitive to this vernacular pheromone, and perhaps somewhat unnaturally repelled by it. But it made reading Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation occasionally uncongenial. I very nearly didn’t make it past the book’s opening section on barbecue.

Which would have been a terrible shame, because Cooked is full of wisdom about food, and it bristles with a fine critique of the business that has spoiled our supply. Was it happy coincidence that put Cooked and The Unwinding in front of me at the same time? I felt that George Packer’s book opened things in Michael Pollan’s that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I should have missed, for example, the importance of being on good terms with organized money that is the moral of barbecue master Ed Mitchell’s story. When Mitchell spoke out against industrial hog farming, his affairs were subjected to what he calls “organized turbulence,” and he lost his business. Organized money’s conservative shills would say that he ought to have paid his taxes. But his ordeal sounds a lot like that of Dean Price, another visionary with a less-than-stellar aptitude for bean counting, in The Unwinding. And I wouldn’t have been equipped to grasp organized money’s responsibility for the degradation of our foodstuffs, a matter about which Pollan is never quite explicit. Having explained the importance of live-culture foods to intestinal ecology, Pollan complains,

And yet these latter-day methods of food preservation and processing have pushed most live-culture foods out of our diet. Yogurt is the exception that proves the rule, which is that very few of our foods any longer contain living bacteria or fungi. Vegetables are far more likely to be canned or frozen (or eaten fresh) than pickled. Meats are cured with chemicals rather than microbes and salt. Bread is still leavened with yeast, but seldom with a wild culture. Even the sauerkraut and kimchi are now pasteurized and vacuum packed — their cultures killed off long before the jar hits the supermarket shelf. These days most pickles are no longer truly pickled: They’re soured with pasteurized vinegar, no lactobacilli involved. Open virtually any modern recipe book for putting up or pickling food and you will be hard pressed to find a recipe for lactofermentation. What once was pickling has been reduced to marinating in vinegar. And though it’s true that vinegar is itself the product of fermentation, it is frequently pasteurized, a finished, lifeless product, and far too acidic to support most live cultures.

The modern food industry has a problem with bacteria, which it works assiduously to expunge from everything it sells, except for the yogurt. Wild fermentation is probably a little too wild for the supermarket, which has become yet another sterile battlefield in the war on bacteria. Worries about food safety are very real, of course, which is why it’s probably easier for industry to stand staunchly behind Pasteur than to try to tell a more nuanced story about good and bad bugs in your food. With the result that live-culture foods, which used to make up a large part of the human diet, have been relegated to the handful of artisanal producers and do-it-yourselfers…

What makes it easy for industry to stand behind Pasteur is the persistence of government regulations that were formulated in a climate of horrified hostility to all microbes, long before it was known how vital many bacteria are to healthy digestion. It is not in the interest of organized money (big businesses lobbying in Congress and rewarding compliant legislators) to repeal these antiquated constrictions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss divided foodstuffs into the raw, the cooked, and the rotten, but “rotten,” as Pollan shows, is a term used only to dismiss the fermentations of others. Our own fermentations — our cheeses, our wines, our pickles — were mysteries until Pasteur’s discoveries, and few associated them with death and decay. But now we know better — Pollan shows how the making of a St-Nectaire cheese depends on waves of microbial advance and collapse — and we also know that kimchi and natto, however off-putting to the provincial Westerner, are but slight variations on foods that we prize. We also know that ninety percent of the cells in our bodies belong to non-human microbes, many of which defend us from pathogens such as E coli. The idea that all germs are bad germs is not only nonsense but wildly unhealthy. It seems almost certain that the autoimmune diseases that plague me took root in an environment, internal as well as external, that was simply too clean — too lifeless.

Everything that we thought we knew about food, in short, is wrong — fatally incomplete. Literally fatal: the link between the “Western diet,” high in sugar and low in bacteria, and the chronic diseases that afflict us, from cancer to hypertension, has been established. What we knew about food was incomplete in other ways, too, and perhaps the most interesting thing about Cooked is how it transforms the idea of cooking itself. More than any other writer, Pollan suggests the possibility a truly nourishing cuisine, one in which the drudgery of a designated expert is replaced by a sociable praxis in which the entire family participates. In the course of the book — Cooked is basically an extended version of a certain kind of blog entry, in which experiences are pursued so that they can be written about — Pollan teaches himself how to roast meat over wood coals, how to stew cheap cuts of meat (he is a little bit too in love with the term “braise” to excuse his failure to point out that it is the French for “ember” — another form of coal), how to create bread from flour, water, salt and the yeast that’s wild in his own home, and how to ferment vegetables (sauerkraut) and malt (beer). Aside from cheese, Pollan learns how to do all of these things in his own kitchen. Some of them become part of his everyday life, while others are reserved for special occasions. But Pollan never becomes a “food person” — he never ceases to be a professional writer.

Pollan works with many artisans who devote their lives to the craft of producing food of the highest (healthiest) quality, but aside from the journalistic business of describing personalities and processes, his interest in his subject is that of a householder, someone with a day job that is not centered in the kitchen. In the old days, householders had servants to provide them with delicious meals, but servants are extinct. When they began to disappear, commercial manufacturers sold “convenience” to homemakers, almost all of them women without other jobs, who had been taught to regard cooking as a matter of following miscellaneous recipes, and not as the command of a handful of techniques that would make it possible to construct wholesome meals from meats and vegetables on hand. No wonder the second-wave feminists repudiated this deracinated chore! In the course of my lifetime, certainly, I’ve watched a swelling movement pursue the holistic understanding of cooking that was easily acquired in the harsh conditions of long-ago life, while incorporating everything that is good about modern technology. (This would include the “science” of cooking: everyone now knows who Harold McGee is.)

Today’s householder has to be a cook on the side, which is to say a habitual cook. We must eat every day, and it is better to eat well and economically as long as we’re at it. Michael Pollan makes it clear that the only viable way for all but the wealthiest to do so is to cook at home. Instead of teaching our children how to make cookies, we need to teach them how to cook, and if Pollan’s experience with his teenaged son is any indication, this teaching can be compelling. Its subject, after all, is life itself.

The weather was dismal, the traffic was terrible, but I was still reasonably patient as we crawled toward the last segment of congested traffic, at the foot of the great ramp that leads from the waterline to the altitude of the George Washington Bridge. We were on the Harlem River Drive; we would cross Manhattan on the GWB approach, but then turn off for a brief stretch of smooth sailing along the Henry Hudson Parkway. We would take the first exit we came to, and climb once again to the height of Fort Tryon Park, where the car would drop us off for the Cloisters Garden Party.

I was patient, as I say, but the driver was not, and the driver didn’t know that he didn’t know what he was doing when he decided, at the last minute, to swerve into the right lane of the Harlem River Drive, which was empty, because all traffic on the Drive at that hour is aimed at the GWB: it’s one of the three routes to suburban New Jersey. The stretch of Drive beyond the access ramp is never very heavily traveled, and it’s not unusual for it to be absolutely empty, but for one’s vehicle. I knew what the driver, thinking himself very clever, was planning to do, and I knew that he wouldn’t be able to do it, and I was beside myself with frustration. In a small, calm compartment of my mind, I worked on how to save the situation.

For there is no entrance to Fort Tryon Park from the southbound lane of the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Nor would Kathleen’s suggestion work: proceeding to the next exit, getting off the Parkway, and then getting right back on again at the opposite entrance. This is a maneuver that I call the Sherman McCoy, after the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities: it’s his deluded reliance on such a plan, which New York City was built to defeat, that precipitates his downfall. The next-exit turnaround works on most Interstate Highway access points in the United States, but as Susan Sontag said about Manhattan — well, some other time. The “next exit” of the Henry Hudson Parkway is a manic doodle of whichways that even makes use of a city street (Riverside Drive). Re-entry onto the northbound lane of the Parkway is not an option that I’m aware of. But we got off at this next exit anyway, because I was pretty sure that I could get us out of the sprawling interchange and onto a side street that would take us to Fort Washington Avenue, from which the Park and the Cloisters can also be reached. When I saw “W 178 St” on an overhead sign, I directed the driver to head for it, and, soon enough, we were really on our way.

I had not actually insulted the driver, but I had loudly berated him for not listening to me. My indignation subsided the moment the driver realized his error (counting on a southbound-lane exit that didn’t exist). By the time we reached Margaret Corbin Circle, at the entrance to Fort Tryon Park, the driver was not exactly apologizing but excusing himself — in seventeen years of driving around New York, he’d never been here — and I was apologizing, if also along pro forma lines. I was magnanimous — that state of soul that is ignited by the triumphant satisfaction of knowing that (a) I was right and (b) I knew how to fix it because (c) I’ve been visiting the Cloisters for nearly fifty years. Call me a hedgehog: I know one big thing about the Cloisters. How to get there.

Kathleen, who had not enjoyed the interplay between the driver and me, muttered as we crossed the cobbled road to the Cloisters that she hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. But we were soon enveloped in the peace of the place, and when we boarded a bus (provided by the Museum) for the homeward journey, she said that she was very glad to have come.

***

I know a few other things about the Cloisters, but others know them better. The important thing about what I do know is that it’s indispensable: if you can’t get to the Cloisters, the rest doesn’t really matter.

Which is why, I suspect, the Museum puts on this annual Cloisters party for its more generous members. Such members are extremely unlikely to take the MTA bus that threads its way up Broadway, and even less likely to take the IRT subway to 191st Street and then walk half a mile through the hills and dales of Fort Tryon Park, which itself is not easy to do, because if you elect to follow the road, there is no sidewalk, whereas the pathways in the Park are anything but straightforward, and often involve flights of stone steps that aren’t in the very best shape. As for driving, there’s something curiously wrong about a forty-minute road trip (in no traffic) that begins and ends in Manhattan. It’s a way of going nowhere in a car that reminds me of what Mark Twain said about Bermuda (before airplanes were an option): it was a Paradise that you had to go through Hell to get to.

Some party notes: The arcades of the Cuxa Cloister, the largest of the four (they say that there are five, but St-Guilhem, Trie, and Bonnefont are the only others that I’ve found), are not very spacious when furnished with a bar and serving tables and a small crowd of members — not on a rainy night when you can’t stroll in the garden, and neither can you leave the cloister with food and drink. Doubtless because of the weather, but also perhaps because absolutely nothing else was on offer, not even water, the wine-tasting setup in the chapter house didn’t seem to be very busy. There was another bar in the hall that contains the Fuentidueña Apse (“on permanent loan” from the Spanish government) — crickets. Heading downstairs, we found another bar/munchables setup in the arcade of the Bonnefont Cloister, which was almost jammed, given the bad weather. The Trie Cloister, which ordinarily sports a breezy café cart, was deserted, probably because the garden there has been completely reconstructed, with new drainage and a few seedlings sprouting from the new topsoil; the charming fountain is also out for repairs.

Access from the bar areas to the other rooms is limited to two doors leading off the Cuxa Cloister, the one from the vestibule and the one that leads to the room that I never linger in, despite its very pretty windows, the Early Gothic Hall. Through this chamber, you can descend to the lower level, with the Treasury (closed for the occasion, wisely I should think), the adjacent Trie and Bonnefont Cloisters, and the “tomb room” that is probably the most powerful reminder of the vicissitudes of fortune to be found in this city: how surprised those knights and ladies would be — how much more than surprised— to learn that their effigies would cross the ocean and come to rest in a heathen cosmopolis for all to gawk on (all who can find the way to Fort Tryon Park, anyway).

By another door, you can leave the Early Gothic Hall for the two rooms of tapestries (Nine Heroes and Unicorns) and the collections of late-Gothic artifacts (the jewel of which is the Campin Altarpiece). Through the vestibule, you can pass to the hall with the great apse that I’ve already mentioned, and proceed further to the always-tranquil St-Guilhem Cloister, with its pebbled court and translucent sunroof. The Langon Chapel was blocked off, for use by servers, but we espied the capital that is said to portray Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. (How surprised they would be, too — but not more than surprised, not that pair.)

I’m not sure that the doors to the battlements were unlocked, but only fools would have made use of them — fools and persons not appropriately dressed. The wet weather was a great shame. The gardens were lush and green and very melancholy. So beautiful and yet so inaccessible.

Dreary as it is today, it is slightly difficult to remember by what a stroke of readerly providence it was that I came to the end (for the second time) of Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) shortly after noon on a brilliant summery Sunday in June. While Kathleen was at Mass, no less, at the church where we were married nearly thirty-two years ago, no less. It was all extremely concordant, and I felt that a Sicilian tenacity was holding my world in place, much as it did the Prince’s. In Lampedusa’s magisterially conservative Weltanschauung, nothing changes and nothing remains the same: passing away and becoming are the same thing. His writing ascends to such a pitch that one can fairly hear the music, not of the spheres, but of Kepler’s polyhedra, grating smoothly against each other at the occasional point of contact. Cosmic, in a word.

The Leopard is a book for older readers. It won’t do young readers any harm, although I expect it might bore them; I myself didn’t read the novel until I was in my early fifties, but even then I found it somewhat extended. This time round, it had the concision of a prose poem. There is also something faintly liturgical about it, as if Lampedusa were observing what we might call the Rite of the Novel. The book consists entirely of set pieces that are studded with memories. The family saying the rosary; the discussions with Fr Pirrone and Tancredi; the voyage to Donnefugata; the bourgeois comedy of marital misalliance, seen from the opposite perspective; a fantasia on fairy tale themes that follows the young lovers on their escapades through the vast, unmapped palace; the Ponteleone ball, summa and summary of Le temps retrouvé; the death of the just man, satisfactorily according with the Prince’s reaction to the copy of the Greuze painting in the preceding chapter; and closing with the family — now reduced to three of the Prince’s daughters (with his daughter-in-law looking on) — not saying the rosary but trying to hold on to the right to hear Mass in its chapel, a chapel (and a privilege) unknown in the Prince’s day.

Each of these scenes — I neglected the intermezzo in which Fr Pirrone visits his ancestral village and patches up a family quarrel — is as suave and shapely as the very best of European literature, and far more stylish than anything written in English (except by Henry James). The art lies not only in the beauty of the prose but in the concentration of significance, which is often effected by inverted sequences. Take, for example, the trip to Donnefugata, which takes up twelve pages in the Pantheon edition. We begin near the end, on the third day of the journey, with an extended rest stop — a scene by Corot. Then we flash back to an evening at the villa outside Palermo: a “Piedmontese” general arrives, together with his entourage (including Tancredi, the beloved, mercurial nephew) and asks to see the frescoes (!); this general is said to have been useful in arrangement the safe-conducts for the family’s crossing of the island from Palermo. Now Lampedusa returns to the journey, this time cataloguing its horrors and hardships (“…the Prince had found thirteen flies in his glass of fruit juice, while a strong smell of excrement…”). At the outskirts of the town, the cortege is welcomed by the “authorities.” And then, instead of retiring to the palace, the family proceeds to the cathedral for a Te Deum. Everything in this extended passage is massive, arduous, slow, and lighted by menace. The Salina family is impervious, but it treads on nothing more substantial than nuance. If you are severely pressed, these twelve pages will do a passable job of standing in for the novel as a whole.

The Leopard makes me envy Umberto Eco, because I believe that you would really have to be he in order to get everything that this novel has to offer. I don’t mean to suggest that The Leopard is at all obscure. But it, too, treads on nuance, on quiet references to Italian culture and history (and beyond) that I register without fully comprehending. The book’s political talk (not that there is so very much of it) must be so much more tensely allusive to well-educated Italians. And how the aristocratic writer would be cackling (silently, I imagine) at the current state of Italian politics. Talk about foretold!

***

I was still basking in the afterglow of Lampedusa’s masterpiece when Will and his mother arrived, a visit that, while it prolonged the concordance, prorogued my daydreams about the House of Salina. For the first time, we were able to enjoy the balcony as a family, and the balcony was fine place for would-be messes, such as playing with Kathleen’s collection of stamps and inkpads. Always fascinated by the three-gallon watering can that he has never been able to lift, Will found a new use for it when he discovered that his feet were “thirsty” and in need of immersion (up to the knee). Only one leg at a time, though! Happily, there isn’t room for both; if there were, Will and the watering can would have tipped over for sure, spilling a small lake of water that would immediately subside beneath our faux-brick flooring only to flood the neighboring balcony.

Like everybody, Will likes to have a choice. For quite a long time, he has been subsisting on milk, fruit, French fries, and the odd bit of vegetable. That is all we get to see, anyway. Signs that his original omnivorousness may be returning have begun to glimmer, however. For his dinner last night, we ordered a grilled cheese sandwich deluxe from the “dinner store” across the street (read “coffee shop”), so that Will could feast on the deluxe — the fries. The grownups were going to eat Chinese, which was a different order, so while Kathleen and Megan chatted indoors, waiting for that to arrive, I sat with Will at the table on the balcony while he tucked into his food. The stamps and the inkpads were nearby, and he seemed interested in playing with them while he ate, but I gently forbade that and he did not persist. I asked him to try a bit of his sandwich and he declined. Then I had a very low idea. I offered to let him play with the stamps while he ate if he took two bites of the sandwich. He at once put down the French fry in his hand, picked up half of the sandwich, and took the tiniest of bites. When it was objected that this did not count, he took a slightly larger one. Presently, he had taken two real bites and I reached for a third. To my surprise, he didn’t balk. The third bite was followed by a purely voluntary fourth, a fifth, and so on. Will seemed unable to put down the sandwich. This was gratifying in itself, but I was also piqued to observe that he showed no interest in playing with the stamps. It was the option that he wanted. And, only then, as he discovered, a grilled cheese sandwich

A pretty picture, ain’t it? Entrances to the new subway station are under excavation to either side of our driveway, which is already cluttered with the scaffolding required for the replacement of the building’s balcony railings. I suppose we’re lucky to be able to get in and out. A visitor queried elevator passengers the other day: was it always this noisy? (The sawing and the drilling of the balcony workers reverberates far and wide.) “It’s a war zone,” I said, as I tend rather fatuously to do, never having been in one. What I really mean is that the station’s work sites have made the intersection of 86th and Second something of a checkpoint, reminding me of Cold War Berlin (not that I’ve been there, either). The lady standing next to me said, “People in the front of the building have no life.”

Kathleen and I lived in an apartment on the front of the building for two years, and the street noise was plenty obnoxious then. I recall with special shudders the commercial refuse haulers who would grind their way down the street before sunrise, stopping every ten yards or so and lulling us back into dreams of quiet, only start up again momentarily. Now, what with the jackhammers and the blasting, it must be hell to spend the day at home for those overhead.

***

In the eighteen months since my aunt’s very unexpected death from complications of appendicitis, my thoughts about my adoptive father’s brother and his wife have shifted significantly. My feelings remain what they were, but I see them from a different perspective. The querulous egotism that marks every positive relationship (basically the late Mayor Koch’s question: “How’m I doing?”) gives way to something more Proustian. Instead of fretting over planning the next visit, or just picking up the phone (which I did quite often in the years after my uncle died) — instead of wondering what I ought to be doing, and looking forward to seeing and talking to them — I consider our connection with detachment, and I see, as I never did when they were alive, that I adopted them, I made more of them than anyone intended. When they were alive, I told everybody that I “adored” them, as indeed I did, but now I see something beneath that admiration, what might be called a neediness. I needed them because I admired them.

I won’t say that I ever wished that they were my parents instead. Some sort of taboo blocked longings of that sort. They had four children of their own whom they must necessarily prefer to me; recognition of this formal proposition is probably what licensed my interest and esteem, which certainly had no correlatives as regarded my actual parents. I admired my aunt and uncle because they were breezy and clever and well-read and unafraid of ideas. My uncle, unlike my father, was not embarrassed by his own intelligence. My aunt, who had written sonnets at Manhattanville and worked at Vogue, was unafflicted by the low-grade paranoia that paraded as my mother’s shrewdness. And she was my kind of woman. I see that now, too.

Yes. Although sophisticated and unsentimental (about people), and not, as I gathered from my cousins’ murmurs much later, the most maternal person in the world — she confessed to me herself that, although she dearly loved each of her children, she had not been able to care for them as babies — my aunt was more of a woman to me than my mother was. Isn’t that odd? Isn’t one’s mother ordinarily the template of womanliness? But mine was never mine, even before I found out that she was not my mother.

I suppose the current wisdom would hold that our bonding failed during my infancy. Whatever the cause, I thought that my mother was a strange sort of person, and frightening, too, because she did not handle finding me to be a strange sort of person at all well. And I still suspect that my sister and I were adopted to give my parents the appearance deemed suitable for membership in the senior-management class.

***

What is love? How do you know when you love someone? That you love someone? How can you be certain? What if it’s just the case that you want to love someone, because you’re supposed to, or you used to?

Such questions were a constant vexation to me, until I met Kathleen thirty-four years ago. I was very confused about love, but then she came along, and I learned that love is how I feel about her, and what motivates me to behave as I do. But because I was so old when I found out what love is — I had been on the point of learning, a few years earlier, when Megan was born, but the lesson was canceled and my feelings remained confused — I’m still astonished that she loves me. In black spells, I doubt that she does. (She is never nearby at such times — that’s the small part of the problem that ignites it.) Doubt is my default. As a boy, I knew that I was supposed to love my mother, and, wanting to be good, I wanted to love her. But I doubted that I did. I was often told that my behavior strongly indicated that I didn’t. Such comments clouded my grasp of love with frankly contractual concerns. On the subject of contracts, I am lucidity itself, a fount of judgments for all occasions. As to love, though, I know only that I found out what it was with Kathleen, and that she taught me, in her instinctive way, how to love the rest of my family. Instead of ignoring what I didn’t adore.

Who knew? Who knew that there was a movie, made in 1948 (the year of my birth), about Sophia Dorothea, Electress of Hannover and mother of George II — but never Queen of England, owing to her mad idea that she could be as unfaithful as her husband. That would be George I, surely the most unpopular of English monarchs, even including bad King John, who was at least bad. George I was, in the vernacular view, pompous and German and even more hypocritical than the English themselves. But this is not the time to indulge in corrective history. No, this is the time to say that the original Sophia Dorothea probably lacked the modest county dignity of her impersonator, Joan Greenwood. In the Ealing Comedies, Greenwood was always arch and ironic, but in Saraband she is noble, or as noble as a lady who falls for love can be. She is also somewhat generic, in Ealing’s first motion picture in colour, looking like any number of beautiful Hollywood starlets whose first chance at leading roles was never followed up. She doesn’t sound like them, of course. She sounds like Joan Greenwood, with the sexiest voice ever to speak English on film. Her prettiness in Saraband is a kind of kink.

Françoise Rosay is very good as the other Sophia Dorothea, the mother-in-law, the granddaughter of James I who was on terms of conversational equality with Leibniz and other worthies and who, had she lived another couple of months, would have been Queen of England in her own right. Instead of that, of course, we have a dutiful old lady who brings Martita Hunt to mind. From a movie buff/historian’s vantage, Flora Robson is the draw, because instead of playing Elizabeth I or somebody’s prim aunt, she’s a sultry schemer with a small waist and a light voice — she looks pretty Hanoverian herself, and sometimes just plain pretty. But despite the valiant and engaging performances of the three leading ladies, Saraband can’t survive the mauling of its men (Stewart Granger, utterly inexplicable; Peter Bull, impossibly overwigged; Anthony Quayle, words fail) and preposterous screenplay, which, gunning for historical accuracy, presumes that audiences will care about electoral politics for its own sake. The result is an Errol Flynn swashbuckler, made ten years later but with no less lurid Technicolor, with Joan Greenwood in the Olivia de Havilland part. That was good enough for me, but I’m in love with Joan Greenwood at the moment. She is the frog princess.

It’s hard to resist the idea that Saraband could have been made only under the Labour Government that followed World War II. The Tories would have considered it a libel on the royal family, of whom the adulteress was an ancestress. Tories are of course the people who believe that it’s a crime to speak unpleasant truths. If it weren’t for that signal defect, I’d probably be one of them.

***

Michael Pollan’s Cooking, beginning as it did with its celebration of fire and barbecue and Homer and men standing around “passing the jar,” did not immediately appeal to me. I have found the second part much more attaching. I’m delighted that Pollan is making a reasonably big deal about the gender bias that built up around kinds of cooking in almost all traditional societies, with men killing and roasting the meat and women pulverizing and boiling the grains. Like me, Pollan believes that this has to stop: men must learn how to chop onions without complaint. In passing, Pollan says something (to be quoted at another time) that makes me very sad about my own kitchen. People are always amazed that I produce “gourmet” dinners in such a small space, but the real problem with my kitchen is that it is that it is too small for two people — too small for the conversation that makes chopping onions a breeze. I know, because I built a wonderful kitchen in our country house, years ago, and everything good that I remember about that room involves talk.

It was on the first leg of my round of errands that I realized that I should have to go home before setting out on the second. I had forgotten the key, the key to the storage unit, located a few blocks east of the well-known lamp emporium on Lexington Avenue in the 60s. I was, therefore, lugging my laptop for nothing. My laptop is perfect for someone who travels from one room to another; carried beyond the apartment’s threshold, it puts on a lot of weight. I sighed but managed to curb genuine irritation. At least I wouldn’t be carrying the bulky lampshade frame that I had brought in for recovering, but which was going, it turned out, to be thrown away — it was somewhat crude, said the salesman, and in need of repairs that would cost almost as much as a new frame. I was very happy about the apple-green silk-wool twill that we had found for the new lampshade, which will be the first thing that anybody coming into the apartment sees. Lampshades usually are the first things that you see: they surround sources of light. But they go unnoticed, designed to complement a room without attracting attention to themselves. I don’t expect the new lampshade to attract a lot of conscious attention, but I know that it will put people on notice that they’re entering the kind of place that greets you with a shot of apple green.

When my transactions were complete, I walked over to Third Avenue and caught a taxi. Although it was a beautiful day, traffic was terrible. I couldn’t decide what to do next, but when I got to the apartment, I stayed there just long enough to wash my hands and do one or two things. I stuffed some shirts into my consolidated tote bag and headed down and out. In the taxi, I realized that I’d forgotten to stop in at the dry cleaner’s on my way out and was still carrying the shirts. It was that kind of day. But I did have the key.

By now, it was nearly two, and lunch was way overdue. I thought twice about having my usual burger, with accompanying black-and-tans, at the Baker Street Pub, before trying to get something done at the storage unit, but I decided to risk it. In the event, it didn’t hurt, because I never could bring up the library database on the laptop. I thought that I had fixed whatever it was that doomed my first attempt, a few weeks before, but I was wrong. It would take an hour of help from Jason, back at the apartment, for me to figure out how to make Readerware work “offsite” — Jason’s word for anywhere not connected to the wireless network at home, through which a number of data banks are based (not just backed up) on a NAS server. Jason, paying a visit via TeamViewer, reminded me, ahem, that Readerware is designed for use on one, presumably stationary, computer. Jason is forever reminding me, graciously as you please, that I am living in the Flinstone era. That’s okay, because he usually has a workaround.

Before the session with Jason, as I was coming home from the storage unit, I walked right past the dry cleaner’s again. It really must have been a beautiful day, because I was still able to curb irritation. I cleaned up, changed into house clothes, and took the shirts down to the dry cleaner’s. Not having learned to do one thing at a time, I also took the cards that we use in the laundry room; there’s a device in the lobby that enables you to put more money on them. But I forgot that they were in my pocket when the dry cleaner produced a cumbersome bedspread for me to carry home. It was the kind of day when some little thing goes wrong at every turn, but to no effect. When irritation is curbed. A very rare kind of day. Perhaps not a kind of day at all, but unique.

After the session with Jason, I sat outside in the lovely evening light and read Albert Hirschman on interests and linkages. Then Kathleen came home from Washington, and we had a pizza.

***

Have you read Walter Kirn’s piece about his friendship with Clark Rockefeller, in the current (Fiction) issue of The New Yorker? As is well-known now, Clark Rockefeller was a Bavarian,  and not a Rockefeller at all. Was he a con man? Hard to say; he was so much more, and so peculiar as well. He was certainly a murderer — or at any rate a jury had no reasonable doubt that he was. Kirn admits to being dazzled by the friendliness of a man who appeared to belong to the ultimate inside establishment. His memoir of an uneasy undergraduate career at Princeton, alluded to here, prepared me for the story that he had to tell about “Rockefeller,” whose real name was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter. Kirn is careful to demonstrate that the point of such stories is that they are never about the showman; they’re about you, about what makes you fall for such a guy.

As an English major at Princeton, I’d learned the phrase “suspension of disbelief,” but with Clark you contributed belief, wiring it from your personal account into the joint account that you held with him. He showed you a hollow tree, you added the bees. He gave you the phone number of the President; you added the voice that would greet you if you dialled it, and the faces of the Secret Service agents who would show up at your home a few days later. He gave you an envelope with a check inside; you filled in the amount.

George Packer is such an accomplished writer that everyone he talks to becomes an interesting person, at least on the pages of his book, The Unwinding. But only one of them puzzled me. That puzzlement will probably prove to be very constructive, indicating as it does a new window on human possibility that I’ve got to figure out how to open, but at the moment, I just don’t get Peter Thiel. I don’t understand how anyone so manifestly intelligent can be stuck on sweet dreams of the Tolkien fantasies and the, to me, equally childish worldview of libertarianism. Is it possible that his education passed by without a single teacher’s getting through to him about the meaning of the humanities? Or that the sprouts of any seeds of understanding that might have been planted have been rigorously weeded out?

According to Packer, Thiel believes that a constructive era in American life came to its end in 1973, and that sounds right to me. The oil shocks of that year are often cited as watersheds of trauma, but my recollection of a time in which I had little or no interest in the economic health of the United States, it seems to me that it was thereabouts that the last of the fizz of the Sixties finally went flat. It has long been my impression that, somewhere in the early Seventies, feminism went from being a challenge proposed to being a challenge undertaken. That most preposterous of terms, “human resources,” came into use about then, signalling a disingenuousness in American business that cleared the moral ground for the financialization of everything. Rather than share their merit badges with the girls, the boys converted the troupe into a casino. Men got sly. This did not mean that they became more intelligent, however, and that’s why we’ve had such a bumpy ride.

I agree with Thiel that we haven’t any real technological progress since 1973, but I’m not sure that this is the bad thing that he thinks it is. No technological progress since 1973? you gasp, glaring meaningfully at the screen upon which you’re reading this; but I agree with Thiel: the proliferation of circuits and binary strings that has certainly altered the texture of intelligent life in the past thirty-odd years has been a matter of implementation, not one of invention. The introduction of the personal computer (itself the miniaturization of existing machinery) launched a multiple-warhead novelty bomb that continues to cloud our understanding with information of dubious value. It has also facilitated transactions that tend to benefit few at the expense of many — the globalization of manufacturing, the merchandising pressures of a behemoth such as Wal-Mart, the growth of unwittingly risky financial trades requiring bail-outs.

In short, a mess. But Thiel doesn’t want to hang around cleaning up messes. He wants to visit other galaxies and live forever. He wants more new experiences. The novelty bomb is still going off in his head.

***

As I finished The Unwinding over the weekend, one figure stood out as a potential member of what I’m calling the loyal opposition to organized money, and that was Elizabeth Warren.

The bankers could never forgive her. They saw her as “the Devil incarnate, and they threw money all over Congress to keep her out of the consumer agency job. They called her naive, but what they could forget was how well she knew their game.

The Republicans could never forgive her. She didn’t back down or extend the usual courtesies, and so they hectored her, called her a liar to her face, and devoted themselves to killing the consumer agency almost as if they were pointing the knife at the woman who dared.

Some of the Democrats would never forgive her. The White House considered her “a pain in the ass.” Dodd suggested that her ego was the problem. Timothy Geithner, aggravated almost to shouting in an oversight hearing, couldn’t stand her.

And the president didn’t know what to do with a woman like this. They had Harvard Law School in common, and Warren talked about the same things Obama did — the hard-pressed middle class, the need for a fair playing field, the excesses of finance. But she did not talk about things things as one of the elites. She did not say, in the same breath, “It’s not personal, guys — let’s be reasonable and get a deal.” For that reason, some of Obama’s most prominent supporteers were moving away from him, and toward her.

We shall see. Now that she is in the Senate, Warren has an opportunity to show what loyal opposition might look like, by taking stands that preclude her selling out to the party in power, which is organized money. Organized money corrupts elected officials by purchasing their inaction with the promise of lucrative lobbying and consulting jobs upon return to the private sector. Packer illustrates the process in a brilliant single paragraph, which also encompasses the final awakening of one of his feature players, Jeff Connaughton. Connaughton, working for Senator Ted Kaufman to enact a strict Volcker Rule, might have hoped that Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd would support their efforts once he announced that he would not be running for re-election.

That should have liberated him to go after Wall Street with Kaufman, but Connaughton saw it the other way around. If Dodd had to face the voters again, he would have felt pressured to shepherd through a tough bill. Instead, he was free to prepare for life after the Senate, where the power of money would still hang over his career. You had to think really hard before you took on the establishment, because there were a lot of ways to build a very comfortable way of life if you went with the flow (like become the top lobbyist for the movie industry, which was what Dodd would go on to do), but standing against the establishment closed off a big part of America that otherwise would have made room for you. You were in or you were out.

To be perfectly clear here, “organized money” is the amorphous special-purpose entity that provides compliant politicians and other public figures with comfortable livings when they retire from public life. No loyal opposition currently exists as an organized body. That is what Packer means by “out.” Out in the howling darkness, with nothing but your own talents to chase down the rare high-compensation job that is not a comfortable living in the gift of organized money.

Organized money can never be eliminated altogether, but it can be cut back, and cut back extensively, if:

• We deny corporations the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment — free speech especially. Defenders of this protection must be obliged to spell out the harm that would be done to actual human beings by its withdrawal, and to be very clear how many human beings (if any) would be harmed.
• We professionalize civil servants, real-estate developers, and retailers, as we do lawyers, doctors, and military officers. Imposing standardized skill-sets and codes of ethics creates powerful bodies of men and women, while by the same token fracturing the elite into union-like organizations.
• We improve living standards for elected officials by raising salaries and pensions and preserving the dignities of office after retirement, as we currently do for the President. Campaign financing must be equalized if not neutralized. (A good deal of this would be accomplished by denying the right of corporations or industry associations from contributing to campaign chests, as would follow from their loss of the right to free speech.)

There are undoubtedly many other things that could be done, but I’ve tried to focus on measures that don’t directly diminish anyone’s personal property or other expectations.

In the household I grew up in, meat was judged by the amount of time that it took to cook it. Quickly-cooked meats were prized; slow-cooking meats were shunned. It’s for this reason that I have never tasted pot roast. Nor, until quite recently, did I understand where the beef in a roast beef sandwich comes from. I still have no idea what “bottom round” signifies. Mark Bittman’s recipe for Off-Oven Roast Beef, published in the Times Magazine on 20 January, calls for “1 beef roast, top, eye or bottom round, approximately 3 pounds,” so I went to Fairway and found one. (Fairway seems always to have eyes and bottoms, but no tops.) Picking it up and putting it into my shopping cart, I felt that I was taking a big step in my mastery of cuisine, about forty years late.

On Sunday, I roasted a piece of bottom round for the third time this year, slathering it in a sloppy goo of garlic that I had run through a small food processor with sea salt and peppercorns. The roast weighed 2.71 pounds, so I multiplied that by five and got thirteen and a half minutes. Bittman’s rule is that you put the meat in a 500º oven for five minutes for every pound, and then you turn the oven off and leave the roast undisturbed for two hours — by which time my oven, at any rate, cools down almost completely. The fragrance of garlicky meat blasted the apartment for about an hour, and it would have been insanely appetizing if we had not had a big breakfast.

Rather late in the evening — Kathleen had been pottering in her closets, and I’d been lost in the last pages of The Unwinding — I decided to make dinner after all. I’d been toying with going across the street for Mexican, as we often do on Sunday evening. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to cook. I just wasn’t sure that I was up to inventing something worth eating. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of meat salads for decades, but recipes are hard to find, and they generally rely too heavily on tomatoes. Dressings never seem quite right. I have also learned, by error and trial, that greens — cooked beans especially — introduce an unpleasant note of chlorophyll. I had it in mind to make a dinner salad with wild rice, stewed tomatoes, and thinly-sliced beef, but the details were unclear. I had another glass of wine and listened to Kathleen’s music. Then I got off my duff and went into the kitchen.

Aside from an ear of corn, which I stripped into a small frying pan and sizzled for a few minutes, everything that went into the salad was already cooked. The rice had been sitting in a bag in the refrigerator for some time, but it was still good — very good. I shook out an amount that seemed right. I quartered four stewed grape tomatoes. I minced three green onions. I chopped the contents of a rather small bottle (Fairway brand) of artichoke hearts. I stirred in the warm corn. Then I turned to the dressing. I combined a little less than a tablespoon of sour cream, a little more than a tablespoon of mayonnaise, and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard with a splash of lime vinegar, and stopped right there, mindful that  the salad ingredients were already variously seasoned. Finally, I sliced the beef, which fell from the spinning blade in shreds. I tossed the salad well, and let it sit for about half an hour, or slightly longer than it took to compose the salad.

This is the second time that I’ve written down my recipe for Rosbif Salad; I was careful to do so last night, after dinner, in my kitchen notebook.

***

On Saturday night, we went to see the new apartment of an old friend who recently inherited some very fine furniture, paintings, and other lovely things. I have been in a few “fabulous” New York apartments over the years, but never in one filled with objects of museum grade. The rooms were spacious and uncrowded. There was plenty to look at, but no need to see much of it at any given time. The understated opulence was curative, deeply refreshing. My admiration was untainted by envy, because the meanest thing at our friend’s was finer than the best thing that home had to offer: there was simply no overlap. The question, wouldn’t I like to live in such splendor, had a way of not quite coming up. I might visit with pleasure, but I would never belong in such surroundings. Thirty years ago, when our friend was already collecting nice things, I was rattled by competitive urges, and it took rather longer than it ought to have done for me to realize that I was once again making like a Roman instead of learning how to live my own life. I did develop a taste for prints, shared with Kathleen. But eventually I woke up to the fact that I am uncomfortable living with antiques.

I was recalling an old argument with my mother the other day, talking to someone in the editorial department at Antiques Magazine. My mother insisted that anything called an “antique” had to have been made prior to 1833. I argued that it had to be a hundred years old, that the applicable Federal law, passed in 1933, fixed a term, not a date. How I knew about this law, or what business the federal government had ruling on antiques in the first place, I have no idea whatsoever, but the woman from Antiques nodded her head vigorously: I was right about the century, twice the period that has elapsed since my arguing the matter with my mother.

We have a small chair that I have always assumed to an antique; with every passing year, I can be more assured of it. I call it the “French chair,” as it was probably called that when it was new. Carved fruits, refined nor crude, arch over an open, unupholstered back (against which, Trollope reminds us, no true lady’s back would ever lean), and the legs are just finished just enough not to be dismissed as rustic. The chair belonged to my maternal grandmother and might well have been the finest piece of furniture in someone’s house at one time, out in the Midwest somewhere. I wouldn’t dream of sitting on it, but Kathleen takes it at dinner parties. It would be curious, if not frankly out of place, at our friend’s new apartment.

There’s more to my shaking than the iced coffee that I drank at lunch: what I read while I ate. Part II of George Packer’s The Unwinding comes to a close with a rousing account of semi-organized resistance, in Tampa, Florida, to foreclosing banks. Part III opens with a Senate staffer’s dismay at newly-elected President Obama’s choice of financial ministers. Very little of Packer’s material is new to me, and most of it is quite familiar. But it is as shocking and infuriating as if it were the plot of a novel about rank injustice that I had never read before. That’s because Packer’s perspective is very different from mine. I am a disaffected offspring of the elite, my background is still elite, and that makes it hard for me to see, what Packer makes plain, the egregiousness of the elite’s betrayal of America.

Economists will say that manufacturing jobs drained from the United States to China because of free-market mechanics, and they may be right, but surely someone ought to have stepped in to plug the leak. Far from doing so, men in positions of power built a conduit, a veritable aqueduct to speed up the catastrophe, reaping huge profits and increasing their power. I have a hard time blaming ordinary Americans for having been distracted by the spectacle of television from seeing what was happening, because ordinary Americans have been not only un- but miseducated for generations, their heads stuffed with nonsense that nobody needs to know, their minds left unsharpened by critical training. Children of the elite are taught differently, and divergence between the two systems is now so extreme that what children of the elite learn most of all is that ordinary Americans are, as such, pathetic. The old paternalism was killed off long ago, but nothing has taken its place. Children of the elite can either perpetuate the new order, by working in one way or another for the benefit of what Packer calls “organized money,” or they can lead purely private lives. There is no loyal opposition to the power of organized money in running the country.

There is no loyal opposition. I don’t think that I grasped that until Packer’s book showed it to me. And yet I ought to have known. You can bet that, had I been blogging in 1998, I’d have wailed loud and strong about the repeal of Glass-Steagall; Kathleen and I talked of nothing else. But we could talk only to ourselves. There were a few warning voices, as I recall, but there was no platform from which the repeal’s dereliction of public duty could be effectively denounced. Such a platform was so absent that it couldn’t even be imagined. We were living in the era of organized money already, but we didn’t know it, because we hadn’t seen the power of organized money to disorganize everything else. It took the wreckage of millions of lives to reveal its contours.

Here’s something that seems obvious to me: the opposition of capitalists and socialists in the direction of public policy is a sideshow, obscuring more fruitful and constructive dialogues about persons, goods, and property. Here’s something else (I’ve mentioned it before): the doctrine that corporations are natural persons entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, never actually decided by the Supreme Court but attributed to it, needs to be reversed. The natural persons who control corporations ought not to be permitted to hide behind this noxious proposition.

***

Also a little shake-making was Frances Ha, which I saw this morning. Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have created an unforgettable movie about a young woman’s very precarious life in New York City. That’s not what the movie is supposed to be about. Frances Ha is supposed to be about a woman’s coming to terms with having outgrown a college friendship, and, to be sure, that story is told quite well, if rather elliptically. (But then, isn’t it in the nature of friendship to fade when no one is paying attention?) But in the meantime, that young woman is living “on plates of fresh air,” as the old song goes. She ekes out a living that is not quite a living while living, literally, a dream. Frances is not completely in touch with the world around her. There’s an appalling scene at a dinner party at which everything Frances says is inept at best and often inappropriate. (Grace Gummer, playing a person sitting opposite, deserves an Oscar for Best Effortless Radiation of Contempt.) In Frances’s world, however, such behavior does not lead to ejection. On the contrary, Frances comes away from the evening with access to another guest’s great little flat “in the Sixth” (Paris). Not knowing the outcome, I cringed all through the scene. When Frances went home to visit her parents at Christmas (played by Gerwig’s actual parents — very interesting to try to figure out where she gets her looks), I thought that she ought to stay there, even if it was only Sacramento. I was astonished to discover that the “college” where she met her defecting best friend was Vassar. If Greta Gerwig has a shtick, it’s the appearance of being winningly dumber than she really is.

There were four labeled boxes of stuff at the uptown storage unit. I took the box whose label began with “Becky’s Hen” and set it in the stacked garden chairs that we rolled down to the van the other day. I didn’t care about the other stuff in the box, which, mildly annoyed, I had to find places for. But I wanted Becky’s hen (shown); I wanted it right at the center of our new, long, zinc-topped “salvaged beer garden table.” And there it is.

Becky’s hen is a wedding present, given to us by a friend named Becky. Somehow, it has survived more than thirty years in our break-prone household. Much of that time, it’s true, it spent out of harm’s way, atop a cabinet out on the balcony. The cabinet was discarded when the balcony was cleared last fall, so that the building could install new railings. Most of what we had out there, some of it also going back thirty years, was also discarded. Last month, we began with a relatively clean slate — and long experience with what is essentially a narrow ledge. We resolved to avoid furniture designed for suburban patios. We also wanted to avoid the clutter of accumulated stuff that I’ve almost completely banished from the interior of the apartment. But a clean slate needn’t be absolutely empty. Becky’s hen was going to be the centerpiece.

We have never been quite sure what Becky’s hen is meant to be. A planter, I suppose — but it’s so deep! An artisinal planter — there you go. We might, of course, ask Becky. Now that all this time has gone by, the question wouldn’t be rude. The very fact that we’ve held on to the hen is proof that not knowing what it’s meant to be has not been a problem for us. But, precisely because all this time has gone by, Becky would probably not remember. It’s very likely that she bought it on a whim, and the whim went with the wind. It’s not important. It’s quite enough that Becky’s hen is Becky’s hen. Being Becky’s hen is what it does.

***

It was irritating, last night, not to have received the lamp that we’ve bought to make night-reading possible outside. I was plowing through George Packer’s The Unwinding as eight o’clock came and went; I had to move to the bench, with my back to the light, to continue reading. This was unsatisfactory because, perhaps because I’d just seen The Great Gatsby, I was distracted by the fear that I might be shot in the back by a deranged pedestrian or a professional sniper. By the time Kathleen got home, it was dark, and we ate pork lo mein by candlelight.  (I’d ordered Chinese because Kathleen wasn’t certain when she’d be home. I’ve learned not to make dinner myself when this is the case.) Then we went in for the night, Kathleen to continue working and I to continue plowing.

After a while, I turned to The Leopard. I am reading a good deal of the novel in Italian as well, and last night, I came across a passage that I had to read not only in the original but aloud. I read it aloud several times. (Lost in her work, Kathleen never noticed, but she was also in another room.) The sentence begins:

Donnafugata con il suo palazzo e i suoi nuovi ricchi…

But this is the bit that I repeated:

…perché, rispetto alla immutabilità di questa contrada fuor di mano, sembravano far parte del futuro, esser ricavati non dalla pietra e dalla carne ma dalla stoffa di un sognato avvenire, estratti da una utopia vagheggiata da un Platone rustico e che per un qualsiasi minimo accidente avrebbe anche potuto conformarsi in fogge del tutto diverse o addirittura non essere…

“the longed-for utopia of a rustic Plato…” Here is the passage as Archibald Colquhoun translates it:

Donnafugata with its palace and its newly rich was only a mile or two away, but it seemed a dim memory like those landscapes sometimes glimpsed at the distant end of a railway tunnel; its troubles and splendors appeared even more insignificant than if they belonged to the past, for compared to this remote unchangeable landscape they seemed part of the future, made not of stone and flesh but of the substance of some dream of things to come, extracts from a utopia thought up by a rustic Plato and apt to change at a whim into quite different forms or even found not to exist at all; deprived thus of that charge of energy which everything in the past continues to possess, they were a bother no longer.

I had a hard time saying “alla immutabilità,” so I’m saying it over and over again. The Leopard is a wonderful novel on its surface, but for anyone who has been reading European fiction for a few decades it is also an impossibly delicious sundae; barely longer than The Great Gatsby, it concerns itself with the thoughts of an aristocrat who would not be out of place in something endless by Goncharov or Tolstoy, but who thinks with the delicacy of “the Marcel of the novel.” And why shouldn’t it? It was written by a learned old man in 1955!

***

I find that I must say another word about Emma Brockes’s She Left Me the Gun; I neglected to point out what a lovable character her mother is — the mother who didn’t leave her the gun after all. Pauline de Kiewit Brockes (“Paula,” once she got to England) might not have been so lovable in person — you wouldn’t know until it was too late — but on the page she’s a sweetheart.

She was in many ways a typical resident [of the village]. She went to yoga in the village hall. She stood in line at the post office. She made friends with the lady on the deli counter in Budgen’s and had a nice relationship with the lovely family that lived next door to us. Their young boys would come around to look at the fish in our pond. Every year I made her a homemade birthday card that depicted scenes from family life. She tacked them up on the kitchen wall, where they faded with each passing summer. I found them recently, seven in all, a memoir of my mother’s existence in the village. There she is, wonkily drawn in her yoga gear, surrounded by me, my dad, two cats, and the fish.

At the same time, it pleased her, I think, to be at a slight angle to the culture, someone who had adopted the role of a Buckinghamshire mum but who had at her disposal various superpowers — powers she had decided, on balance, to keep under her hat. (I used to think this an attitude unique to my motherr, until I moved to America and relaized that it is the standard expat consolation: in my case — a British person in New York — looking around and thinking, “You people have no idea about the true nature of reality when you don’t know what an Eccles cake is or how to get to Watford.”)

In my mother’s case, it was a question of style. She was very much against the English way of disguising one’s intentions. One never knew what they were thinking, she said — or rather, one always knew what they were were thinking but they never came out and said it. She loved to tell the story of how, soon after moving in, she was sanding the banisters one day when a man came to the door, canvassing for the Conservatives. “He just ASSUMED,” she raged then and for years afterwards. “He just ASSUMED I WAS TORY.” She wasn’t Tory, but she wasn’t consistently liberal, either. She disapproved of people having children out of wedlock. When a child molester story line surfaced on TV, she would argue for castration, execution, and various other medieval solutions to the problem, while my dad and I sat in uncomfortable silence. She was not, by and large, in favor of silence.

Even her gardening was loud. When my parents bought the house, the garden had been a denuded quarter acre that my mother set about Africanizing. She planted pampas grass and mint. She let the grass grow wild around the swing by the shed. Along the back fence, she put in fast-growing dogwoods.

“It’s to hide your ugly house,” she said sweetly when our other neighbor complained. After that, whenever my mother was out weeding and found a snail, she would lob it, grenadelike, over the fence into the old lady’s salad patch.

There are plenty of family photographs in Brockes’s book, almost all of them showing her mother at some stage in life (but not late), and, together with the sparkling dialogue, she comes across as someone who would have to be played by Glenda Jackson or Janet Suzman. Do such cheeky dragonesses still patrol the British stage?

What a lot of fuss there has been about Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby. It surprises me that intelligent people are still so worked up about the possibility of fidelity, which is an infantile anxiety for at least three reasons. The first was well-put by LA Times critic Sam Adams: “I don’t want a movie to be great literature any more than I want a novel to be a great salad” (a tweet repeated at The Rumpus). It’s that simple. There is no real possibility of fidelity, even where the illusion of it is intense, as in the great tornado/we’re going to Europe scene in Mr & Mrs Bridge, which treats the text as an absolute scenario. The second problem is that fidelity is in the eye of the beholder, and not remotely objective. My third argument is that an adaptation is intended to refashion something for another purpose. When we go to see a film setting of The Great Gatsby, we do not expect the complete text to be flashed upon the screen. We expect to see things that Fitzgerald did not create. When I went to see The Great Gatsby this afternoon, I expected a Baz Luhrman extravaganza, and I was not disappointed. I found it to be a smashing success.

Now that I am an old man, I have no hesitation about pronouncing The Great Gatsby to be the Great American Novel, nor about refusing to argue the point (for the moment). It seems inherent in the idea of great fiction that several satisfying and plausible but mutually uncongenial, even inharmonious screen adaptations might be generated by it — and that is just as infantile to insist on the best adaptation as it is to worry about fidelity. I regard it as a sign of immaturity to carry about lists of best derivatives, such as performances of operas and, indeed, screen adaptations. I want to allow plenty of room for interpretation, and I will forgive a great deal of manifest infidelity if I am satisfied by the result. The new Gatsby affords an excellent case study in how and how not to judge. In the novel, the second chapter is the dark heart of the novel, because the party at Myrtle’s love nest is unrelievedly sordid; the rot that Fitzgerald wanted to capture is therein presented without any bedizening glamour. It is a nightmare of tedium. As such, it is not promising material for transfer to the screen. There is a Mrs McKee, “shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible.” She interrupts Catherine’s story about a trip to Monte Carlo by exclaiming, “I almost married a little kike who’d been after me for years.” About Mr Wilson, Catherine says,

“You were crazy about him for a while.”

“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.”

She pointed a finger at me, and every one looked at me accusingly.

These details and others are omitted from the 1974 Jack Clayton adaptation (screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola), as well as from the new movie. But Clayton’s version of the party is straightforwardly naturalistic. This means that we are taken to a party set in 1922 but obviously filmed in the early Seventies. Luhrman’s version could only be Luhrman, and it is a highly stylized (if merely suggestive) orgy. Luhrman omits even more details, but the point is that neither adaptation is interested in the point of the party, which is not Tom’s punching Myrtle in the nose but rather the disordered mood that makes such violence not only possible but likely.

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

I don’t rule out the possibility of following the Fitzgerald’s text as closely as James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala do Evan Connell’s, but I don’t fault Clayton or Luhrman for their less literal accounts. Both movies are hugely entertaining, and both capture the poignance of Gatsby’s misbegotten hope. They deliver the weight and mass of the novel, even if these are distributed over fewer moving parts. Both films do their duty to the text, and then go on to be great movies.

I would give Luhrman the edge for casting. Everyone is superb for Jack Clayton, but Luhrman’s crew is transcendental, as fully prepared to soar beyond naturalism as is Catherine Martin’s production design. And Luhrman manages to glamorize Daisy Buchanan without worshiping her,  as Clayton seems to have done with Mia Farrow. (Something tremendously funny/disturbing happened when I watched the Clayton just now, to refresh my recollection of Myrtle’s party. Why did Karen Black’s reading of Myrtle’s little speech about falling in love with Tom on the train remind me so much of Mia Farrow? It came to me, as I left the room, that it was a case of Farrow imitating Black, about fifteen years later, as the title character’s occasionally entranced voluptuary in Woody Allen’s Alice.) Joel Edgerton is as thrilling as I expected him to be: who knew, back when Kinky Boots came out, a mere eight years ago, that its winsome ingénu would develop, in maturity, a trans-Gable degree of assured masculinity? (And yet Edgerton’s weak-kneed wince, when Tom uncovers Myrtle’s corpse, almost makes you forgive the lout everything.) Tobey Maguire is rather more damaged than Sam Waterston, and he succumbs to the madness around him, whereas Waterston (delightfully but typically) distances himself as a genial critic. Leonardo DiCaprio, for all his still smoothness, abounds in active rough edges, as Gatsby must. And Cary Mulligan is wholly substantial as Daisy; she is mortal, not an apparition. (She is also incredibly lovely — I’ve been a fan for ages, but I was almost shocked by how beautiful she is here.)

What about all the racket in the background? I liked it because, for the most part, I hated it — and isn’t it the very point of Fitzgerald’s book that Gatsby’s parties are nightmares? The whole story is a nightmare. If a gangster like Gatsby is worth more than the “rotten crowd” from across the bay, something must be terribly wrong with the world. Nightmares also accommodate extraordinary spectacles; when fireworks and music are used to such dysphoric effect, it’s hard for them to be “excessive.” Gatsby’s chateau couldn’t be more bogus, but you won’t hear any objections from me. (The Buchanan’s place across the water is more subtly off-putting, its excesses disciplined but oppressive.) Nor am I bothered by the extensive CGI footage. Like a great ballet, Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby is completely and brilliantly artificial, except when it needs not to be.

I opted against seeing the movie in 3D, at least for the first time. I didn’t feel that I was missing anything.

So, nu? My neurotransmitters are flickering. A big holiday weekend, a scarily effective bout of house-ordering, and now, today, the restoration of the last bits of furniture to the balcony. Also, a cushion and a table were delivered, permitting Kathleen to stretch out for a nap (were she at home, and the temperature considerably higher) and me to throw away the Big John’s cardboard box that I’d been parking my drinks on (done). A visit to Gracious Home yielded a round metal outdoor table so cunning and sunshiny-yellow that Gracious Home put it in the Third Avenue window. If only it weren’t so miserable and wet outside!

***

On Saturday, when the weather was also miserable and nearly as wet, I read most of Emma Brockes’s She Left Me the Gun, one of the best-written books that I’ve ever come across. There is really no way to summarize this dual memoir without spoiling it, because it is both brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed. The raw material — the awful stuff that happened to Brockes’s mother in and around Johannesburg and the warm and loving life that she later made for herself in and around London — would be depressing and jejune by turns if Brockes didn’t know how to shape it as well as she does, or how to infuse her sentences with a crackling dry wit that keeps the sordid and the sentimental equally at bay.

After her mother’s death (from lung cancer), Brockes decides to try to fill in the blanks in her mother’s stories — and what she has is mostly blanks. What she knows of her mother’s childhood and youth is unsettling, to say the least. There was abuse, there was a prosecution, there was gunfire. Brockes seeks out her mother’s half-siblings in South Africa, which her mother left at the age of 24. One of the brothers has died. Another has emigrated to Florida, and does not want to discuss his painful family history. (One of the three sisters is barely named in the text, suggesting a disinclination even to register her distress.) This leaves two brothers and two sisters to testify to the horrors of life with an abusive father. And that becomes the story. Not the abuse, which was absolutely unremarkable — men who prey on their daughters appear to come in one, horrible size. But the testimony and the aftermath, the children’s different ways of coping with the damage. There are good stories there, and Brockes unfolds them into the texture of her search.

One of the brothers, Tony, seems never to have amounted to anything. When Brockes meets up with him, he is minding an auto-repair shop while its owner is on holiday. Tony suggests repairing to a nearby casino for a coffee. Brockes’s transcript of the conversation is the self-portrait of a failure so compleat that Tony’s shreds of decent dignity are precious salvage, even as he remarks that “I’m basically quite a rotten person. … I’m violent and a drunkard.” In Brockes’s hands, however, the humanity of his situation is not banal but overwhelming.

I have been in the casino forever forever. I am never getting out.  I have been here forever, I am never getting out, Celine Dion is never, ever going to stop singing. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. It is dim in there, the ceiling the same midnight blue with the sparkly motif. I put the lid down and sit. How strange to be in a casino toilet, absorbing this information. The weight of detail in my uncle’s recollections is so crushing I can hardly breathe, but in the midst of my exhaustion I feel some measure of relief. Tony has corroborated  that aspect of my mother’s story I always found it hardest to believe: not that there was abuse, but that there was in, spite of it, such tenderness. I flex my cramped writing hand and go back to my uncle.

Brockes’s mother managed to have her father prosecuted, after he assaulted a younger daughter, but the case collapsed when her stepmother retracted earlier statements. This defeat seems to have determined her mother to decamp to a new life in London — a violent and desperate uprooting for a young woman who had friends and a good job. Eventually, she married and had a daughter, the author, and was the only one of the children to die married to her first husband (or married at all, for that matter). She did not, in fact, leave “the gun” to her daughter.

Of everything she brought over with her it was the item she most wanted me to have. “This will be yours one day,” she said, long before those kinds of conversations were necessary. In the end, however, the price of a gesture can be too high to bear. In 1990, a gun amnesty was declared in Britain, and my mother decided that, after all, it might get me into trouble. Reluctantly, she laid it in a box like a dead pet and drove it to the police station. By the time she got back she’d cheered up. The female desk sergeant had squealed when she opened the box and called out to her fellow officers from the back room. It was the only contribution to the amnesty they’d had.

“They were completely intrigued,” said my mother, beaming. “I suppose I don’t look the type.”

That would be the type to drive your drunken father out of the house with five wildly mis-aimed shots from a pistol.

This is the year of Obnoxious Weather, 2013. I shall pass over the protracted winter, and the sketchy, belated spring. It’s bad enough to be hot to the bone, as I still am after three days of clammy, warm humidity, during a retour à l’hiver, on which temperatures plunged to a positive chill. And, I’d planned a picnic. Our first dinner party on the balcony. Phut to that! Rain and atmospheric miserableness pushed us indoors.

The picnic was a second choice. I’d wanted, originally, do an Italian menu, some pasta followed by a roast. But Kathleen said, “tomorrow will be hot: don’t do pasta.” So: picnic. The day turned out to be so not hot that I considered changing the menu altogether, even after getting the picnic underway. The marinating grilled chicken and the potato salad — well, the wonderful thing about a picnic menu is that nothing is very expensive. But I couldn’t decide on the pasta course that a revised approach would require. I considered a risotto, even. (The roast was always going to be an already not very ambitious tenderloin.) But I stuck with what I’d started, and, in the event, we had a very pleasant dinner. I preserved the most important element of a picnic: we ate on the love seats, not at the table.

My arc of errands, as announced — was it yesterday — I reversed, heading east to west, from the barber to Crawford Doyle to the Museum and then home, via a second visit to Fairway. I’d known that the European Painting (I call them “Old Master” and don’t know why the Museum doesn’t) galleries had been under some sort of reconsideration, because on my last visit, just a few weeks ago, I had to walk a narrow path through them to get to the American Wing. I’d had no idea of a total overhaul until this morning’s Times. That’s not quite correct, though: last night, at the one spring cocktail party to which I’ve been invited this year, I’d been chatting to a very nice lady who “teaches art history to inner-city kids.” When I told her about picking my way through cordoned-off galleries, she as good as told me what I read in this morning’s paper.

I had planned, as announced, to take a farewell view of three or four paintings in the Impressionist show — two Tissots, one Degas, and the Caillebotte a print of which I’d had in my dorm room sophomore year. After I’d done that (and written down the names of the gents in Tissot’s group portrait of the Cercle de la Rue Royale, shamefully absent from the show’s catalogue), I walked through the new German/Netherlandish galleries, which occupied what I used to call “the Old Master Exhibition space.” So many wonderful shows there — Van Gogh’s drawings, “Americans in Paris.” But the age of big shows from abroad is setting, if not over. I will say without reservation that the new arrangement is an improvement. But it is a great change, and it will take a few visits to grasp. Happy challenge! I certainly didn’t envy the crowds of visitors — the place was beyond packed — who didn’t know how things used to be.

***

Central Park on Memorial Day weekend! And yet we had a very good time. The Park was certainly very beautiful; this is the time of year when it looks its welcoming best. Aside from a few contests of will about the forbidden climbing of rocks, it was a very smooth visit, especially considering that we didn’t really know where the Carousel is. Kathleen thought that it was close to Fifth Avenue, but although I knew that this was not the case I had no clear idea of the actual path. In the end, I consulted my phone, something I never do. Moments later, we looked down the Mall and espied the fellow who was generating gigantic bubbles with a witches’ brew of soapsuds, two poles, and two bits of string. Will was as enchanted as can be imagined. Shortly after that, we found the Carousel, where Will was treated to two rides, the first on a horse, the second in a (non-moving) sleigh — his idea. I climbed aboard for the latter junket, which Will spent staring at the designs on the pillar at the hub.

We had been to the zoo just before. For the first time — Kathleen and I. I don’t think that we had been to the Central Park Zoo since its complete overhaul a decade or so ago. We remembered when there was an elephant, and the monkey house stank to high heaven. It is all very different now, just like the Cloisters — although perhaps it is easier for most people to see the change at the zoo. We are looking forward to the Cloisters party early next month; we’ve reserved seats on the bus. This month’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin is devoted to “the making of the Cloisters,” and I pore over the photographs with inexplicable fascination. At that cocktail party last week, I killed people with my crack about being depressed to learn that the Cloisters is not ten years older than I am, not quite. “It’s May, and I’m January.” Even though the Cloisters was built to look old, very old, it is disconcerting to be so not-much-younger than a monument that everyone takes for granted. It will get worse if I go on continuing to age: pretty soon, I’ll be moaning that the Empire State Building is a lot less than twenty years older than I am. Egregious showing-off, of course, is what it really is.

As we were taxiing home from the Park, Kathleen was inspired to tell Will about Ye Olde Days on 86th Street, when barrels of beer were rolled down the hill from the Ruppert Brewery (on Third Avenue, a few blocks north) to the East River, where they were loaded onto barges. “Why?” Will asked. The question was pro forma, so we were surprised that he took the answer so seriously. “Because there were no cars or trucks in those days,” said Kathleen. Will was genuinely shocked. He has evidently crossed the imaginative threshold beyond which it is really possible to believe that things were not always as they are. He is familiar with pictures of himself as a baby, and of Kathleen and me as obviously much younger people. But — no cars!

All I could think of was: And there were no iPads until you were three months old, either. Just wait! But I said nothing.

Later, there was a Simplicitas moment. That’s a reference to Unfaithfully Yours, perhaps my favorite Preston Sturges comedy. I’m not going to explain what “Simplicitas” means; if you see the movie, as you ought to do, you’ll know the folly of my believing, before the Simplicitas moment, that I could go to an electronics store and buy a flat-screen LED monitor and a VCR/DVD recorder and hook everything up, no problem. The Simplicitas moment was not fun.

But I got the thing to work. Don’t ask me how — that’s the frightening part.

It all began yesterday afternoon whilst watching Kipper. One disc of programs had come to an end and it was time to insert another. I pressed the wrong button. It was not really the wrong button, but just the wrong button at the time, because, at the time, the component whose button I pressed by mistake, through which signals passed from the DVD player that I actually use to the NEC vacuum-tube television that we bought sometime prior to 1990 and have been enjoying until recently — this intermediate machine, it went toast. It’s I/O button made noises like that of a cockroach in rigor mortis. A pale light caused the meaningless word “Auto” to flash in the display. As to the NEC, its picture had begun to deteriorate. There were all sorts of rolling effects that I don’t know how to describe any better. Although they did not make watching movies unpleasant — and that is all that this piece of consumer electronics was ever called upon to do; never was it attached to cable — they suggested that perhaps, just perhaps, we had got our money’s worth out of the thing. And then some.

There’s a wonderful line in the Fawlty Towers episode, “The Builders,” where Sybil says that “it will probably all come crashing down by lunchtime,” or somesuch. That’s how I feel about the new equipment. I shall probably have to figure, all over again, how I managed to get the flat screen to “read” the input from the DVD/VCR combo. I haven’t had the nerve to find out how the setup deals with videotapes, but I did discover that the new arrangement imitates the old in defaulting to the separate all-region DVD player whenever there is no disc in the combo tray.

On an ordinary day from the past six months, setting up a new screen/player outfit would have been a good day’s work, but today it was but an interlude in a scarily productive program. In the morning, I went through the kitchen like an Old Testament angel, casting bagsful of old food into the Hades of the garbage chute. When I had done, there was a lot of empty space in the refrigerator, more than ever before ever. I would open the door from time to time just to check: still empty. Empty-ish, anyway. Then, after a nice lunch at Demarchelier (the key to the day, I suppose) and our shopping expedition at PC Richard, and the hooking up of our catch, I tidied the bedroom and the living room. I forgot to mention!: I saw to the blue room right after breakfast; that was how I got started. At a few minutes past eight in the evening, I put the cleaning gear away, changed into fresh clothes, and sat on the balcony for a while, luxuriating in the lights coming on. Somebody in a garden-level apartment was giving a party, and although I could hardly make out the revelers, and they didn’t seem to be very numerous, the delicious racket that they put out made me intensely nostalgic. I suppose that all parties sound the same, but there is something about the sudden, surprised sound of a woman’s beautiful laugh that strikes me as stamped in Manhattan. Even when you can see that everyone is in T shirts and camisoles, everyone also sounds very grown up, and pretty much like the far more buttoned-down adults of my childhood. Fun, in this part of the world, is probably a constant.

Hearing the people down in the garden having a good time — their voices soared up to my balcony, but you couldn’t have heard them standing on the street outside their building — I didn’t wish that I was one of them, but I was hugely happy for them, and I hoped that they all had the exact wonderful time that they’d had in mind when they set out for the evening, even though I know that this can’t have happened to more than two people at most. And then I realized that I was having that good time.

The problem with tying myself to the mast in order to get something done — in today’s case, what I can only call a major tune-up of the blue room, which is bordering on the bordel — is that I have to do the tying myself, which means that I can untie myself, something that I am very inclined to do now that I’ve read Chris Barsanti’s review of George Packer’s new book, TheUnwinding. I have a sudden craving to consume Packer’s criticism of perfectionists Alice Waters and Oprah Winfrey, which promises to be delicious.

But being instructed in Oprah’s magical thinking (vaccinations cause autism, positive thoughts lead to wealth, love, and success), and watching Oprah always doing more, owning more, not all of her viewers began to live their best life. They didn’t have nine houses, or maybe any house…they were not always attuned to their divine self; they were never all that they could be. And since there was no random suffering in life, Oprah left them with no excuse.

Wouldn’t it be nice — much nicer than reshelving books — to tootle over to Crawford Doyle to pick up a copy of the book, and then to pay a final visit to the Impressionists show at the Museum? Yes, it would. But I’ll wait until tomorrow, and I’ll begin at the Museum and work my way eastwards, from the bookstore to the barber to Agata & Valentina, where I’ll buy the fixings for dinner. (Weather permitting, there will be six of us eating al fresco tomorrow night.)

Last night, after dinner, it was much cooler on the balcony than it was indoors — the rooms still held the day’s mugginess — and I sat in my sleepies running through Wikipedia entries about the Wittelsbachs of the 17th-century Palatinate. It was delightful. I wasn’t reading, exactly, but just boning up on dates and connections. I learned (and will not forget) that the lady who has entered history simply as “Madame” (Liselotte, duchesse d’Orléans) was the great-granddaughter of James I of England and the great-grandmother of Marie-Antoinette of France. I ought to have known it long ago. Que voulez-vous? There were no tablets to enable nocturnal study in the open air.

***

George Packer’s chilly assessment of Oprah Winfrey  — I hope he doesn’t forget Martha Stewart — surprised me because I hadn’t seen Winfrey as an agent of the “personal responsibility” movement, but of course she is one. (In fact, I have never seen Oprah, or at least not her show.) The great lie about personal responsibility is that everyone has the freedom to be responsible. Most people do not. They are constrained by material shortages and indifferent educations, as well as by the lack of exceptional vigor and intelligence that enables highly unusual people like Winfrey to make the most, the very most, of any stray good luck. The lie is that everyone, working hard enough at it, could be Oprah. The personal responsibility movement is a campaign to absolve fortunate people from guilt for failing to take responsibility for the unfortunate — by denying the existence of fortune. (“Fortune” is made to mean nothing more than amassed wealth.)

The campaign is not entirely an expression of selfishness. There is a growing exasperation with government, which earlier generations had hoped to make capable of rationalizing charity by distributing goods and services evenly and equably. That hope suited simpler times, when there were far fewer goods and services, and a more austere, almost puritan notion of necessity prevailed. During the Depression, nobody was thought to need a radio, for example, in order to survive in the world. How did the bare necessities of life proliferate so quickly and so profusely after World War II? How did health care become so manifold and so complicated? We seem to have gone through a second industrial revolution, only without the industry. We might perhaps think of it as the personal revolution: within the past sixty years, expectations regarding personal consumption and well-being, as a matter of norm if not quite of right, have mushroomed, and we have yet to conceive of a program of public welfare capable of meeting them.

Hence: personal responsibility. It’s up to you, bub, to get your own flat-screen TV. Which doesn’t sound so bad, taken out of context. But the context is one of draining jobs and shuttered horizons. Hence Oprah Winfrey, who does not have the honesty to declare, as faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman so campily used to do, that she believes in miracles.

Last night, Kathleen and I had dinner on the balcony for the first time this year — for the first time since regaining possession. The day had been warm and unpleasantly muggy, but the evening breeze was a delight. We enjoyed every minute. The food didn’t matter, although I’d put a bit of effort into chopping a few mushrooms and green onions, cooking them for a minute, and then stirring them into a bowl of steamed arborio rice — that came out well. Interesting but probably not to be repeated: chicken legs marinated for several days in Jack Daniel’s steak sauce, and then baked in a hot oven. This was a frugal offering, in that it cleared the freezer of the chicken legs and the condiment tray of the steak sauce. Kathleen asked for ice cream for dessert.

Earlier in the day, Ray Soleil and I got together for lunch, after which we walked up to Feldman’s Housewares in Carnegie Hill. All I really needed was an extension cord, but of course there were a few other things that I found I had to have, and I left with two very large shopping bags. As if my weakness for housewares weren’t bad enough, there’s Feldman’s counter of death to contend with. While waiting for your purchases to be totted up and wrapped and bagged, a lovingly leisurely process, you have all the time in the world to play with the novelty toys on display by the register. Talk about guilty pleasures! This is where I discovered the Yodeling Pickle, which, as I saw immediately, would fascinate Will inordinately. (It’s not even a nuisance to listen to anymore.) On offer yesterday was something called the Spiro-Light. An unprepossessing handheld object, the Spiro-Light recreates something of the thrill of nighttime at an amusement park when you press the button. Two soft-bladed fans whir into action. One of each fan’s blades spotted with diodes that spark on and off at staggered intervals, creating bright blinking circles of primary colors. After dinner, I showed the Spiro-Light to Kathleen, and she was so thrilled that she spent a long time trying to hunt one down on the Internet — in vain!

That’s the interesting part. This morning, I tracked down the outfit that sells the toy, Play Visions. If you visit the firm’s home page, and wait for the panel in the center to cycle through a series of promotions, you’ll see one for “Light Up Tops From Play Visions.” This suggests, without actually illustrating, a toy like the Spiro-Light. To find out more, you have to be a retailer. (Or expose yourself to Feldman’s counter of death.) Many of Play Vision’s toys are featured on the Web site, but not the Spiro-Light — not yet. It makes sense that retailers would be attracted by almost anything that isn’t available online, and a novelty impulse item that nobody has ever seen before because even the picture is not online is going to promise some old-fashioned business. (Remember when things “flew off the shelves” and “out of the stores”? No?)

I could try to take a picture myself, but that would violate all the principles of novelty impulse buying.

***

In the street, Ray asked, “Do you think the city is being taken over by black SUVs?” I replied that I didn’t think that any other kind of vehicle was still being made. At that very instant, a sleek, smallish Rolls Royce glided by. You don’t see Rolls Royces in Yorkville every day, not even every year. It seems contrary to nature, somehow. Why on earth would the driver of such an automobile — and this one, we could see, wore a cap — take 86th Street to go anywhere? Especially with the subway station construction. So much bustle and commotion and ordinariness. I thought to myself, Thank God I do not own a car. I think that every day, just as Orthodox Jewish men are said to Thank God for their XY chromosome. Then, remembering something I’d read recently about the moral opprobrium visited on the scientists who developed the atomic bomb (because they put such terrible powers in the hands of benighted mankind), I thought, what about the automobile? The automobile has done untold orders of magnitude more damage to humanity than the bomb, and the damage goes on piling up, day after day.

Albert Hirschman says something on point here. As a way of apologizing for “the danger that the dynamics I celebrated could be overdone, to the point of setting up a highly inefficient industrial structure,” Hirschman writes,

Is it not unreasonable to ask the inventor of the internal combustion engine to come up immediately with a design for pollution control and air bags?

There are people who would insist that it is not unreasonable to make such demands, and there always will be, and although (happily) they are never effective, it would be better if they saved their breath. They are the same people who expect scientists warning about climate change to develop immediate solutions. Some people, I believe, are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the fact that things develop over time, that circumstances change in unforeseen ways. Their violent alarms make it harder for patient meliorists to exercise steady vigilance. They must reduce everything to simple terms and bold initiatives.

The atomic bomb was so obviously awful (in every sense of that term) that it was immediately surrounded by sanctions (many of them paranoid, but we must hope effective). The automobile was just the opposite. Early cars were toys for grownups — rich grownups. Then, along came Henry Ford. Was he the Oppenheimer of the auto? Or was it Eisenhower, who endorsed a massive national highway project to enable defensive maneuvers that have become increasingly difficult to imagine? I can never decide whether the automobile ruined American civilization or made it. But I can rephrase the puzzle: the automobile seriously damaged the possibilities of civilization in America.

Who could have foretold this?

Whilst tidying the bedroom yesterday afternoon (pursuant to the current household schedule), I watched two of the St Trinian’s movies, British Lion comedies based on cartoons by Ronald Searle that were produced between 1954 and 1960. I had never seen either. First, Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957). I chose it with a purpose; I wanted to see Sabrina (née Norma Ann Sykes), the pneumatic blonde whose 41-inch chest was insured for £125,000. How did I come to be thinking about her, you may ask. I never heard of her until last week, when I read about her in the “Good Times Girls” chapter of An English Affair.

In the film Blue Murder at St Trinian’s … she was given star billing after Alistair Sim, above Terry-Thomas, Joyce Grenfell, and Terry Scott, but played a swot who stayed in bed with a book, and never spoke.

The last part of the sentence is accurate enough. Sabrina reads a book in a manner that points up her mammary endowments. Lavish waves of blonde tumble about her face, like curtains meant to distract from an undistinguished view: Sabrina looks neither pretty nor intelligent, but sour. I question Richard Davenport-Hines’s account of the movie’s credits, because surely “Terry Scott” was meant to be “George Cole” (like Grenfell, a constant in all four St Trinian’s films), and both Sim and Sabrina are given special billing at the end of the bill, not at the top. (Sim speaks, but his scene is even shorter than Sabrina’s.) But I’m grateful for the prod. I happened to have the St Trinian’s DVDs on hand — buying all four was the only way to acquire The Belles of St Trinian’s, the riot in which Alistair Sim plays both a Queen-Maryish headmistress and her con-artist brother — but I’d never got round to viewing the others. I’m enjoying postwar British comedy these days; the other night, I saw Whiskey Galore (1949), with Basil Radford and Joan Greenwood, and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945; Wendy Hiller) and Fallen Idol (1948; Ralph Richardson) are in the queue pile.

Blue Murder at St Trinian’s involves a diamond thief and a trip to Rome on two rickety buses operated by Terry-Thomas, but the plot is just an armature for the series’s tropes. First, the notion of a girls’ school so out of hand that the army has to be called in to police it — a school, moreover, with two classes of students, the youthful fourth formers who brandish squash rackets and scream incessantly when they’re not plotting mayhem, and the curvaceous sixth formers who wear scanty gym slips and carry on like kittenish Mayfair escorts. Second, and rather funnier, the despair of authorities from the Ministry of Education whose efforts to impose order and decency at St Trinian’s are eternally unavailing, and the plight of poor Ruby Gates (Grenfell), whose nuptials with the cold-footed Superintendant Sammy (Lloyd Lamble) can’t take place until the St Trinian’s “problem” is solved. In both Blue Murder and the final film of the series, The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s, Sammy deputizes Ruby to infiltrate the goings-on at the school, abandoning her to the clutches of dodgy lovers (Terry-Thomas, Cecil Parker) with whom she flirts and faints like a spinster whose idea of what follows marriage are wilfully cloudy. Grenfell, if you’re in the mood, is the funniest thing about these movies.

***

My French prof taught me a phrase that has sunk into the Anglophone part of my brain: de fil en aiguille. Robert’s Dictionary says that the phrase means “gradually,” but my prof used it to explain the course of a conversation, which moves from one thing to another along forgettable but coherent connections. It is the opposite, in short, of “one damned thing after another.” It is my guiding principle these days, as I hope has been palpable, if not obvious, here. It has become the principle according to which I determine the relevance of things.

“Relevance” has never been a word I’ve been fond of. It was used a great deal during my undergraduate days. I was familiar, of course, with “irrelevant,” having grown up watching Perry Mason just like everybody else. But “relevance” did not figure in everyday life until, rather suddenly, it was found to be wanting in the books that we were supposed to read for our Great Books seminar. Although no one mentioned the word “theory,” it was the dawn of a wretched period in higher education, which reversed the purpose of teaching by declaring objectives at the outset and then, rather tautologically, reading through to them. A by-product of the then-fashionable cocktail of Maoism and pseudo-physics, this totalitarian approach had no truck with uncertain outcomes or unanticipated discoveries. Even if you did bother to read Aristotle (never very agreeable on the best of the days), you failed to find anything in his texts that still had any application to life, except in terms of the broadest generality. Aristotle’s role in the history of ideas was not relevant, because history itself was not relevant. (History and science proceed according to incompatible principles.) Without knowing it, I sensed that I was living through a mild sort of Cultural Revolution. I don’t believe that higher education ever recovered. A sinking ship during the theory years, it has now dropped to the bottom of the sea: say “college,” and what comes to mind is sport, student centers, and binge drinking. But it all began with course evaluations, which transformed undergraduates from students into consumers.

“Relevance,” in American society during the past fifty years, has been a deadly corrosive, breaking down the connections between things by demanding too much clarity of them. A few weeks ago, George Packer surveyed recent books about the parlous state of the nation’s human economy, and he ended it with a powerful warning.

But Occupy turned out to be a moment of its time — a cri de coeur, stylish, media-distracted, and (to invert one of Agee’s best-known senteces) not so hardly wounded as eeasily killed. There’s no shortcut back to the thirties. Without an idea of the future that’s genuinely shared by large numbers of people — a real and lasting solution to the conditions described in these books — an arrest on Wall Street becomes one more story from an age of individuals.

Because, qua individuals, no one is really all that relevant to anyone else. (Interestingly, David Brooks uses his column today to regret the recession of community-oriented language in recent decades. This is the conservatism of Charles Murray’s latest book, but it amounts to the same complaint that Packer makes.)

At this stage of my life, I am following connections, in my library mostly (of books and movies), and keeping a written record of them here. It doesn’t matter where I began, and I’ll never reach an end. But I believe that the data base of connections that I’m compiling will show some larger ideas, and reveal a mental reality to me that is more comprehensive than anything that can be grasped in the moment. Connections are none the less important for being slight and accidental. (We begin by assuming that we don’t know enough about what’s important and why.) I can pass through these connections relatively quickly because I’ve been intellectually inhabiting an increasingly inclusive model of West Civilization for more than forty years. Something like my search needs to be conducted in what, a moment ago, I surprised myself by calling human economics: the connections between persons, goods, and property. (I believe that this is what Packer is calling for.) Otherwise, what are we all doing here?