And, in London, after all, there were the phone calls. Sometimes he was asleep. Sometimes I was. He said, You’ve left. It was my third trip, that fall and winter, standby, New York/London. I said, I haven’t. He said, You have. For no reason, and without warning, you’ve left me, and I’m devastated.
There exists an order of social problem that appears to be insoluble, but is not. At least not in the terms in which resolution of it is represented as impossible. A problem of that sort has at least some of the following features: it appears immensely complicated, with a resolution of any part of it seeming to bring about the aggravation of another; it has a long history, in the course of which it seems to grow, to accrete difficulties, and to merge and overlap with other problems, so that an attempt to solve the single problem appears hopeless without an assault (for which no sufficient resources can exist) upon them all; perception of the length and nature of that history must be inaccurate, and the terms in which it has been defined must be so imprecise (or so precise, but inapposite) that any formulation of the problem leads inevitably to argument, and great energy is dissipated in argument of that sort. Ideally, in other words, in its historical dimension, such a problem appears to have existed forever; and in its contemporary manifestation to be inextricable from every other problem in the world. Ideally, too, there should have grown up, over time, a number of industries and professions nominally dedicated to the eradication of the problem but actually committed, consciously or unconsciously, but almost inevitably out of self-interest, to the perpetuation of the problem, and of any misconceptions of it, for all time. Wait a minute. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine. In the matter of problems that appear to be, but are not, insoluble, the class is the class of all those who profit from a social blunder. The class does not want to be laid off. Wait. Wait.
In London, I said, But can we live this way.
Quanta. Well, but I, don’t you see, I had just taken the shuttle from Boston to LaGuardia, the ordinary shuttle. There was a blizzard, but we took off. When we had been flying for about an hour, the pilot said, Sorry, folks, there’ll be a delay of about twenty minutes; the runway’s closed. So we circled LaGuardia a long time, waiting for them to clear the runway, and finally turned back. In Boston, we all ran through the snow for cabs to the railroad station. The rumor passed among us that another shuttle, from Washington to LaGuardia, in that blizzard, crashed. Then we heard that the plane that crashed was not a shuttle. I had settled, though, in my seat on the train, with my little suitcase, and some Scotch, and three bags of potato chips that I’d bought with what remained of my cash, from the bar car. I had settled, wondering how long the train would take. A couple came toward me. The woman was Amy, whom I had not seen since she married the man her parents preferred. I knew she had been divorced, not many years later; that she had two children; that she had become a college professor. I knew her parents, and the boy with whom she had been in love when we were children. She introduced the man she was with. She said they were going to spend the semester break in Guatemala. They had been on the same shuttle flight as I. When she came back from their seats to talk for a while in the seat beside me, she said she had met the man she was with at a college where she used to teach, and where he was the dean. Then we talked for a long time. The blizzard outside was the most dense I remembered, and the train was several times delayed. After a while, I said, Amy, how has it been in your life with unhappiness, did it come in days, months, decades, years? Softly but without hesitation, she said, Quanta. Quanta. There were all the intervening years, and the professorship. There was the dean. Quanta. Not here. She had loved him with the operatic intensity of a basset. Or a diva. Or a child.
Here’s what I think is wrong with boring people to no purpose. It’s not just that it corrupts their attention, makes them less capable, in other words, of being patient with important things that require a tolerance, to some greater purpose, of some boring time. The real danger lies, I think, in this: that boredom has intimately to do with power. One has only to think of hypnosis, of being mesmerized. Monotony, as a literal method of enthrallment. So this claim to find art in boredom, for its own sake or as one of the modes of alienation, is not simply a harmless misunderstanding, which finds it avant garde to stupefy. Deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power. Of course, that is not always our problem here.
I said, But it’s you who always leave. You’ve just come back from your island. And next week, you’ll go again. And anyway. He said, Those are just excuses. The fact is, You’ve left. I said, I could never really leave.
But, in London, after all, there were the phone calls. And after that. And in the matter of the Irish thing.
This is about the Chinese hypnotist. Here is exactly how it was. I had gone back, after all these years, to the university, and I had six papers due, that last year, near the end. So did all the other students, so I guess have all students since the sixties; but they were going to do them in the end, and I was not. I had, I might as well mention this, a long history of not doing papers. In my first year of college, we all had to do a paper every week. After the first few weeks, I didn’t do them, couldn’t do them. There were no dropouts, though, in those days, I think. When, at the end of the spring term, the dean said, Miss Ennis, the college requires papers; I suggest, in fact I must insist that you see a psychiatrist this summer. I did. I took a train from Red Hill, where my parents lived, and arrived, two hours later, with a change of trains, in New York. I walked to the office of a tall, pale man, who swept the doily of the previous patient off the couch, replaced it with a relatively fresh one, and said, Well, Miss Ennis, what have we been thinking and feeling. After a week of this, one of my brothers said, This is absurd, you can’t keep taking the train to see that fool, this is August, it’s too hot. And he wrote my papers. My brother, I mean, wrote my papers. Let me say that I know of few instances where someone has been rescued from something in quite this way. But there it was. More than twenty papers, the weekly ones and the long term papers for other courses. My brother wrote them all. And then, of course, I realized that they were not exactly right; he had not, after all, gone to the same courses or college; so I wrote them, and went with relative serenity through the following years. No, that’s not true, the serenity. But the weather changed for me. And the fact is that, had there been nothing to rewrite, I would have been stranded. I would have become, well, I don’t know, someone with whom to avoid eye contact, on the subway or the street.