Temperance
As the previous entry indicates, not much is going on at this end. I've been vacationing at the spa in our bedroom. Ordinarily, I can't wait to get out of bed, but for two days now I've had a very hard time not staying in. Don't think I'm staring at the ceiling though. I've been reading. Reading and reading and reading. I intend to do the rest of today's reading sitting up, but I think I'll actually plan next Monday's Day of Rest. I caught up on a lot of stuff yesterday, and I listened to Volume Two of Jean-Yves Thibaudet's recording of Debussy's piano music, which combines very well-known things such as the Children's Corner and the Suite Bergamasque with the highly abstract Études, not to mention the jolly "Danse (Tarantelle styrienne)." And I started reading Ceux qui prennent la large, the translation of Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away, which I've not read in the original, and, as I thought, Highsmith's kinkiness is more graceful in French. Today, I read David Owen, in The New Yorker, on the city's golf courses, of which there are many.
Something about a recent public outcry (from which I have decided to remove the feeding tube by leaving it nameless) has so heavily clouded my outlook that I can't summon my usual enthusiasm for social observation. It is not the particulars of the case itself, but the eagerness with which it was embraced, first and gratuitously by the right, then, necessarily but still too gleefully, by the left. The insistent focus on what is happening right now this very minute gives me the phobic feeling of being trapped face-up beneath a bed. A good deal of the richness of life - my life, anyway - comes from a sense of the past and an idea of the future. And a reasonably calm environment.
The question on my mind is whether Web logs can be interesting without being exciting or immodest. This is a question about readers, really. It's a question about citizens. Has the body politic developed an addiction to extremes? That's what Paul Krugman writes about in today's column. The right may be the source of much contemporary intemperance, but I can't help seeing it as a response to the anarchic left of my youth.
