Retired
In an essay, "Metropolitan," in The New Yorker, on William Dean Howells, the neglected but still vital American man of letters, Adam Gopnik writes (of Howells's move from Boston to New York),
No doubt there was the search, constant to any writer, to make more money in a livelier place.
That lets me off, I guess. The truth is that I have never personally associated having a productive and satisfying life with earning a living. (Rather the reverse.) This state of mind has made the aristocracies of the ancien régime somewhat more intelligible to me than they seem to be to most Americans, who write off leisured viscounts as bored parasites. While I grasp and condemn the evils of enjoying life at the expense of serfs and slaves, I don't see anything wrong with living off of investment income or lottery winnings. The need to make money sharpens some minds, but distracts and even deranges others. I'm squarely in the latter class.
As for livelier places, I live in one of them, but you wouldn't know it from following me around. I've been out of our apartment building only three times in the last seven days, once to run to some errands and twice to go out for dinner dans le quartier. A rash of doctors' appointments will get me out of the house next week, and I will try to take pictures, but the sudden descent of summer has put the kibosh on pleasant strolls. I have yet to sit down on the balcony this season. The weather went from being too hot to too cold in about an hour.
Not that I mind much. I sometimes wonder if I have entered Proust's cork-lined room phase - voluntarily. There is no need to renounce the world, because I'm no longer drawn to it in the first place. Going to plays and concerts is a kind of gym routine for me, something that I never want to do when it's time to do it but that always makes me feel better afterward - when I'm back at home. The same goes for seeing friends. As much as I like a good conversation, I don't miss it, not at least in the way that I miss having a nice long letter to answer.
Howells helped invent a kind of American prose that was not so much plain writing as easy writing - not easy to write (nothing is) but easy to read, and giving an instant note of common sense based on common pleasure.
No doubt there is the search for that.
