Having spoken to Meredith, and then spending some time reading the news and checking my email — no messages in the personal account, more messages than I wanted to read in my work account — I decided to find something to watch on TV, an old western or even a football game, if there was one of any interest, but the box that had arrived loomed before me on the coffee table and I felt compelled to open it, though it’s true that sometimes I leave my bank statements unopened for weeks or months, and there have been times in the past when a letter has arrived (when letters were still routinely sent) that I so little wanted to read it might sit unopened for days or weeks or even — I remember a letter from a French ex-girlfriend in college that I only opened after the color of the envelope had faded, changing from blue to violet to pink — for years. I went back to the kitchen for a knife and slit open the brown wrapping paper, revealing a brown cardboard box taped shut with brown packing tape, but with no other marks or writing. I looked at it for some time and even thought of calling the police, because I had no idea what it might contain, whether it might be a bomb, since every professor has his host of disgruntled former students, and my mind wandered — in a careening, full-tilt way — to my attachments at Oxford whose loose ends might yet be curling round to bite me. After pressing my ear against the cardboard and hearing nothing, seeing no signs of leakage or other hints that a threat might be packed inside, and having shaken it with no conclusive results — it sounded, simply, full, and I had no sense of parts moving inside when I shook it — I took up the paring knife and slit along the tape to open the top flaps.
For children the opening of packages is almost always a matter of joyful expectation, but as the years progress and one discovers that some packages may not bring happiness and can just as frequently deliver disappointment or anxiety, one looks upon boxes, particularly ones as mysterious as that which arrived at my apartment on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, with a vague feeling of trepidation or even sometimes dread. Perhaps, for me, this shift in the possibility of packages dates from my move to Oxford, when, after six weeks, the shipping container finally arrived in Britain and the vanload of possessions I had thought I could not live without — books, music, a few pieces of art, clothes, but no furniture, since I did not go to Oxford thinking I was staying permanently — was unloaded at the College’s lodge. For the first year I lived in rooms on site, so the porters helped me carry the boxes around the front quad and up the staircase to the top floor, where my furnished rooms were in the eaves, the windows overlooking the sandstone battlements. When I began opening those boxes from home, I found the anticipation and happiness of being reunited with my possessions quickly give way to small irritations — the covers of some valuable books had been damaged, the glass in several framed pictures was cracked — and then to an overwhelming sense of nostalgia that crested only to leave in its wake a sense of despair and regret. I could smell not only New York on my belongings, my books and clothes in particular, but the apartment on the Upper West Side I had so recently shared with my wife and daughter and which I had left of my own accord because I believed the marriage to be finished; I was the one who chose to leave, though it was Susan who had made clear the relationship was coming to an end and our legal severing came only a year later. Sitting in that Oxford room with its cream-colored walls and institutional furniture, surrounded by the carnage of boxes that came freighted with memories of a life abandoned, I wept, and wept so loudly that my neighbor across the corridor, a postdoctoral Fellow from Geneva, knocked on the door to offer me a sherry and then, because he was sensible and helpful and became one of my closest friends during my first year in that city, helped me unpack my books and arrange them on the shelves. If I had been left to do the unpacking alone, it might never have happened. Since then, if not before, a taped-up box has been an object of threat more than one of desire or expectation.
I opened the flaps of the box on my coffee table and realized on catching sight of the contents that it was some kind of file carton, because it contained an unbroken stack of 8½ × 11 sheets on which were printed, in dense, single-spaced type, thousands upon thousands of web addresses. At first I thought the top layer of paper might conceal something else beneath, but as I paged through — there must have been twenty-five hundred sheets of paper or more — it was all the same, one address after another, separated only by a comma and a space, no returns, no paragraph breaks. I thought there might be some kind of message, though I did not at first look at each page individually; that was a process that took parts of a few days. There was no message, however, and it was only later that I would understand the full significance of what was before me. Some of the addresses were familiar — websites for newspapers and magazines — while others meant nothing to me, or seemed to have been composed almost entirely of numbers and a random assortment of characters. It was a puzzle, but because there was no message, no explanation, it was one that only a small part of me had any interest in tackling. My mind is not the puzzling kind, it takes no joy in crosswords or number games, I have never been a card or chess player, I would much rather read a book or watch a movie to make the time pass. I assumed it must be an error, that whatever this list of addresses might be it had nothing to do with me. I put the pages back in the box, closed the flaps, and slid it under a side table.
So I switched on the television and by chance happened upon Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which I am teaching on my senior seminar later this semester. Since I had not watched it recently, I slumped into the couch with that satisfying relaxation that comes from finding the kind of distraction which can be relied upon to last for two hours and lull one gradually towards sleep. I had first seen The Conversation as a boy, and it was possible to imagine that it might then have put me to sleep, at least in the beginning, because it starts slow and even when the pace begins to pick up and Hackman flushes the toilet, which overflows with blood, it remains deeply adult in the sense that it is a sober vision of the consequences — psychological as much as tangible or physical — of snooping, consequences so profound that the snooper becomes the snooped upon, driven crazy by the skill he has perfected when it is turned against him. It had been some years since I last saw the film and in the interim I had watched Das Leben der Anderen, which now seemed to me to be engaged in a subtle conversation with Coppola’s film, the two main characters isolated men working for institutions or corporations that are somehow distant, if only in the minds of the men, who seem to hold themselves at arm’s length from the higher echelons of their respective organizations, listening to the people they have been charged with monitoring before finding, at some point late in each film, that all they thought they knew and understood, all the received wisdom that has supported their appreciation — perhaps even passion — for the work they undertake, is held together with little more than the illusion of some higher moral purpose, its bankruptcy disguised and defended by cultures of fear that they both, too late, discover at great risk to themselves. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, like Coppola’s, presents its subject, the man charged with surveillance, as a species of obsessive monk who has discovered a vocation in monitoring the lives of others — targets who may or may not be innocent, whose guilt, if indeed they are guilty, occurs only because the laws are themselves so ludicrous or, in the case of Coppola’s film, because of a dark conspiracy, though the work of the Stasi could itself be judged a sort of dark conspiracy, however virtuous the organization might have believed its mission to be. Gradually he cultivates his work into an art, a private virtuosity, but one that only he can fully appreciate. In contrast, Gene Hackman’s character, Harry Caul, is paranoid about defending and policing his own privacy.