The Turtle Bay Novels

By J. Hayes Hurley

TWO NOVELS ARE SET IN TURTLE BAY, an upscale neighborhood in midtown Manhattan east. In The Historian at Eventide, an eighty-five year old historian races to find the meaning (if any) of global history before he dies. During his two-year struggle, his quest becomes quixotic, and the various characters he deals with are either trying to save

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781685154097

J. Hayes Hurley

J. Hayes Hurley is the author of 69 novels, including Those Brownsville Blues, Dawkins and Daughter, and The Turtle Bay Novels. As well, he holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University.

Book preview

Book One

The Historian at Eventide

A novel by

J. Hayes Hurley

Part One

One

W

e have a new doorman working in my apartment building. He is a short, pudgy, shifty-eyed fellow, and I do not like him. I have not introduced myself to him, or even inquired as to his name. I swear that he hesitates for a split second before setting the revolving door in motion for me whenever I leave the lobby. When I cross the marble squares to go to my mailbox, his sly eyes follow me as would a coyote the family cat. I take his faint smile, one that still manages to expose his grayish teeth, to be a veiled sneer, and his little wave to be symbolically dismissive of me. Yet he is other to me, just as I am other to him. I grant both of us that difference, that sameness, and to that I extend my usual courtesy. Thus, my dislike of this man in particular, does not cancel my empathy for the whole human race. I can only hope he feels the same, though I doubt it. I suspect that his mind is hopelessly undeveloped. So many are.

* * *

I am of late in great fear of being struck by a bicyclist when crossing Second Avenue, heading west on East 46th Street, even with the walk sign in my favor. I have had many close calls. Especially dangerous are those food delivery men whizzing along on their illegal electric machines, and those sweaty pseudo-athletes who imagine they are competing in the Tour de France, which they are not. Both groups ignore strings of red lights as they go; their behavior is both rude and reckless. Cars and taxis turning into the walk lane I can handle, having long experience with them; wayward bicycles, no. Bicycles! What is this, now? Do they mean to turn New York City into a third world metropolis?

* * *

I fell on the sidewalk on Forty-Second Street recently, and while returning home from the library. I was not dizzy; I simply failed to see a bit of broken pavement while proceeding along with my eyes looking straight ahead. As a result, I broke bones in my left wrist. Because I am on a blood thinner that wrist swelled up until it looked as if I had an eggplant growing out from the end of my forearm. It was stupid of me, and I own up to my responsibility in this matter. But don’t get me wrong. I like living in Manhattan. I was born here. I was brought up on Nagle Avenue in Inwood. I am a native son. I look forward to going on living here for the duration. Besides, where else is there for me to go? Queens?

* * *

From your reading my throwaway complaints, reader, you must have guessed that I am an elderly person. I am indeed old; I am eighty-five. And while I hold that my mind is sharper than ever, I concede that my body is rapidly failing me and that my emotions do get away from me at times. This latter consideration puts me in a rush; I have to jot down a few things I have been putting off until now. They are my musings on—stay with me now—global history and, of course, my place in it, as well as your place in it. But do not worry: I have no intention of proceeding in a weighty or scholarly manner—only. In any case I confess to being irritable through most of the hours of every day, though who can blame me? I am surrounded by rude, careless people.

* * *

When I was a child, Nagle Avenue was known as a provincial habitat. Few of us thought of the greater world, much less of our being enveloped in its common course. We were for the most part just who we were; our time and place identified us completely. Looking back on that now, I find it sad that, while tucked away in our little enclave, we managed to be both conscious and clueless. What would you call that state if you had to name it? Was it merely animal awareness? Perhaps.

Worse, it annoys me to realize how long in terms of years. it takes any of us to shed the clueless state, if we ever do. We are like puppies that seem to take forever to learn toilet training. I ask: why do so many of the inanities of living take so much time and effort to conquer, or, failing that, to be controlled imperfectly, and this when the total allotment of our years is so meager? I suspect it has to do with misplayed loyalties to whatever state of immaturity we happen to be stuck in at any time. And loyalty, as we all know, is not a virtue.

* * *

I do not know the new doorman's name, but I will give you my own. I am Henry Fitz Means. No one who knows me personally uses the Fitz. I don’t use it myself, except when signing legal documents. I am just plain old Henry Means. Besides, Fitz is not an aristocratic marker; it is an Irish prefix. I am a widower living alone in retirement in a one-bedroom apartment on a high floor of a building on East 46th Street. My windows face north. The view is spectacular. I am lucky in that regard. I like it here. I have no intention of moving. Though I have no doubt there are heinous plots working.

* * *

At age eighty-five, I have outlived most everyone I ever knew. I have no close friends left from the old neighborhood, and no former colleagues. My deceased wife, Joan, is someone I miss dearly, and daily. Nevertheless, I am, of late dating a sixty-four-year-old woman named Helen, whom I met at the Amish Market on East Forty-fifth Street a few months ago when we stumbled into one another trying to make it out the door. Helen and I restrict our activities to going out to dinner at local restaurants here in the Turtle Bay neighborhood. We go Dutch. Our favorite eating place is called Le Bateau Ivre, a French bistro located on East Fifty-first between Second and Third. The food there is excellent, and our waiter, Pierre, is a fine fellow whom I am getting to know quite well. Pierre, a life-long bachelor, lives in a studio apartment in one of the few remaining rent-controlled buildings left in this city, and that is on East 57th Street. Pierre is not well-educated, but he enjoys listening to me spouting history. We get together at my apartment on Tuesdays, his day off, where I bounce my ideas off of him. You might call him my foil; I like to think of him as my Platonic yes man. I have deliberately chosen to go this way with my latest work; I am not consulting with anyone qualified in the profession of history. Besides, who would I get? Everyone I knew is dead. How my making use of Pierre, a waiter who is perhaps the only man in New York more naïve than I am is working out, I will detail ahead. But for now, I want to give a brief history of my own self. And I do mean brief.

* * *

My father was a butcher; my mother a housewife. I was their only child. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a building that ought to have been torn-down decades before the war. Regarding my very early childhood, suffice to say that I was the short kid in the brown and coral colored windbreaker, pass me down bell bottom pants, and five-dollar shoes purchased at the Army Navy store, the boy who once managed to get lost in Inwood Hill Park at high noon.

I will say a bit more about my high-school years, for I am still resentful about how I was treated. While a freshman. I told one of my teachers that I was interested in global-history. He scoffed at me. He asked me where I was going to get all my research, seeing that I wasn’t much for doing homework. I wasn’t even getting an A in American History. I told him I was using H. G. Well's Outline of History. He told the other teachers and they ridiculed me. In any case, I turned out to be an average student at a relatively bad high school. And when I applied to Columbia, those teachers were furious. They thought I was mocking them.

I got into Columbia regardless. The teacher who had initially insulted me doubled down on his insult.

Now and again the Ivy League schools take in a token, lower-middle class snotnose. That would be you. I know we gave you lukewarm letters of recommendation, but even that was all bullshit.

My guidance councilor agreed. He offered an explanation.

You are lucky, Henry. For it ain’t about you, really. They rotate these acceptances. Our school was due. But now that you are in, see to it that you don’t screw this up, because it will reflect badly on us. Already we are being threatened with receivership.

When I got to Columbia, my advisor knew all about me. He told me this.

Forget about your grand notion of doing global history. What is that all about anyway?

I told him straight out,

I want to explore the meaning of history.

The man swore at me. This was the advice he gave me.

Dial it down, Henry. Strive to be an ordinary academic, if it is grad school you want. Do something safe. Make it your ambition to teach history in some small college one day. That is all a kid like you ought to dream about. That is a big-enough stretch, but at least it is realistic.

I followed his advice. I put my nose to the grindstone for four years, and for that I got into the doctoral program in history right there at Columbia. Once again, I got the same advice, this time from the chairman of the history department, who was clearly miffed that his admissions committee had taken me.

Put parameters on your ambition, Henry. Do a doable dissertation. Otherwise, you will never make it out of here.

I followed his advice as well. I selected a topic that was so well-picked over that my advisor yawned, that being the life of the fourth Roman Emperor, Nero. I had, along the way, tabled my thoughts about the meaning of history, per se, and got busy studying to be a professional history teacher instead. Shortly after starting my graduate work, I met my future wife, Joan, who was getting her doctoral degree in psychology. We got married while we were both students and we moved into university housing in Morningside Heights, this being but a short walk up the hill from where I grew up. Joan never completed her studies, something that saddened us both. I got my doctorate after nine years of struggle.

For the next forty-five years I taught history at a small college up in Westchester. I commuted to work from a one-bedroom apartment Joan and I moved into on Dyckman Street. Yes. I was back in Inwood. But I did not mind. Joan and I loved one another. We had no children. Well, that is not true. We had one son. But I do not wish to talk about him here.

About my teaching years: I kept to the same advice I had been following since I turned fourteen. I played it safe. The college I worked for had no graduate programs, its mission was strictly to do with teaching. To advance to tenure, and then to full professorship, we faculty members got involved with school programs, ran committees, and the like. I was constantly buried in inane activities. I was a team player.

You may be wondering why I do not name this college where I taught for so many years. There is a reason. When I became eighty years of age, they wanted me to retire. I did not want to retire and I told them so. They insisted; I resisted. I got into some ugly confrontations with the administration, and there were lawsuits, some of which have never really been settled. I want to put all that behind me; I do not want public records uncovered. So, the name of my college will remain unnamed. Finally, I did a complete turn-around and embraced retirement. But this was only after I developed a sore knee and had to limp around in my classrooms, while the students tittered.

Once I did stop teaching, Joan and I decided to move further south in Manhattan and start enjoying life, finally. We took this one-bedroom apartment in Turtle Bay. Joan died a year later. At once I began to age ungracefully, and now, four years later, I am an obscure curmudgeon.

Recently, I have returned to the ambition of my freshman high school days. I dare to ask the question: What is the meaning of global history? In short, I have returned to my early, naïve state, but with this caveat. Only a precious few people have made the serious attempt to grapple with the meaning of human history per se, all of them are recognized as geniuses. If I threw my hat into such a ring, my teachers, in high school, college, and graduate school, and my colleagues at the college, would all be laughing at me from their graves. So, I am doing this, ostensibly. I am compiling a book that examines the main theories put forth by the geniuses, and if some of my thinking proves relevant, then there you go. In any case I mean to comment on what the others wrote using my critical voice, though even that is a tall order, especially for a man my age. And yet this must be asked: is my belated unleashing of my life-long interest in the meaning of history to be seen as a breakthrough or a breakdown, for me? That, you and I will have to wait and see. I have only just begun my project.

* * *

My work plan unfolds as follows. I arise mornings at seven. I drink a lot of coffee, during which time I organize a portion of my thoughts. I sit down at my computer by nine and, if I am with it on any particular day, I write down what is ordered in my mind or, as a bonus, what comes to me spontaneously. At noon I pause for brunch. I eat alone while standing up in my tiny kitchen. I usually have a bit of hummus spread on crackers, maybe a slice of cheddar cheese, along with some warmed-over coffee. Afternoons I make my way over to the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at West 42nd Street. I go here instead of to the library up at Columbia, because I get dizzy riding the subway.

* * *

New York City's main library is overwhelming. Just getting from the outside entrance to the reference room is a chore. Then, after ordering my books for the day, I have to wait nearly an hour until they are delivered. Often enough, make that mostly, I am so wearied by just being here I am sorely tempted to give up, go back home, and take a nap. I do not do so, as a rule, though fatigue, a newly discovered enemy of mine, stays with me so long as I remain in that vast book depository. Plus, I am one of those who connects libraries with laxatives, and this means my having to make several long trips through the bowels of this place, excuse the metaphor, to get to the men's room to empty my bowels, literally. I do not mean to complain further, but this building is of late filled with a multitude of brightly colored signs pointing to the location of women's rooms. You would think that—but never mind.

* * *

I consider New York City's main library to be my second office, so I resent the pressing crowds that file in here. The pseudo scholars, the tourists, the idly curious; there is a sign as one enters the main reference room telling everyone that no cameras are allowed beyond a certain point, but at least a hundred times a day people ignore this and snap photos of their friends, or relatives, or lovers, often sticking their behinds in my face when doing so, or brushing me with their coats in order to get a better angle. Their voices grow louder as they click, and then they laugh uproariously, though for what reason I do not know, and then, capping all this off, they shout with joy when eyeing their product. That drives me wild. Regardless, I hold my tongue and maintain my dignity. Not that they notice.

* * *

I am transformed into a ripe fool every time I strike a keyword, having to acknowledge the overwhelming amount of bibliographic information appearing on the screen. I might as well be counting stars. Millions of eminent scholars, sans me, have their books stashed away in this library, the majority of which are ignored by patrons for decades running, if they are ever taken out at all. So, what, I ask, am I doing here at my age and with such a pie-in-the-sky notion propelling me? Do I, too, want to get onto some biographical list one day, only to be tucked away and forgotten? No, but, ah, yes. My stuttering, stumbling response to that question offers a quick glance into the mystery attracting me to the greater mystery, world history.

We humans count for a time as individuals, or at least we hope we do; yet the sheer number of individuals that accrues soon overwhelms us as individual individuals, and in an ever depressing and damaging manner. If you are inclined to ponder that tongue twister in historical contexts you will find, as I am finding, in my post-professional years, that we are all living lives that, even if they do count for a limited time in some context, are woefully wanting in the main. Pascal called us thinking reeds. I say we are more like a mound of conscious yeast, spreading ourselves into bits of matter to puff them up and make them move about for a brief time, before being completely absorbed into the greater mass and, finally, brought to stillness.

To bring this home I will confess to one more whopping bit of naivete formed in my childhood. I said that my upbringing up in Inwood was provincial in that we did not think of ourselves as being in any sort of shared temporal stream to do with history. Yet, and because it was taught to us as a subject, we approached it as we did the dead language, Latin. It was assumed to be of no use to us, and I cannot say that any of my teachers tried to knock that bit of nonsense out of us. I did master Latin, it is true, but never mind.

To be sure, we were given a few lessons to do with our own cultural setting, we were told about the Indians living in Manhattan, and how dumb they were to give it away to the Dutch for twenty-four dollars. Being what I would call an exception to the rule, I held myself to be above this déclassé bit of parochial training, even as I fell into it. As such, I was a blue-collar product and a would-be scholar, too.

And what about scholars? Historical scholars spend their entire careers fussing around with just one of those aforementioned fractions of history, and they take it to be de rigueur that they would never have time to read all the chronicles, annals, memoirs, or whatever stemming from or having anything to do with their specialty. I was one of these uninspiring scholars; I did Nero. I left the rest of the Roman emperors, and all the billions of other figures in world history, to other specialists. But of late I ask, I shout,

"Isn’t global history the issue that ought to concern us?"

It does concern me, but what can I say about what I am about? I am not quite sure what to answer, here at the outset. Could it be that I count for something, while I exist, and as much as did Julius Caesar counted for something when he existed? Can I go forth, boldly as it were, and attach my take on history to both our lives? Don’t laugh at me. There are depths of awe to plumb, somewhere, somehow. And these depths may have something to do with some sort of meaning that encompasses both me and Caesar.

My God, who is no-God, I know that my words sound like a line out of musical. Let me say this. In my old age I am reviving my long-suppressed naivete, and I am declaring it to be my method of operation. More on this stuff later.

* * *

I do wish I could nap in this library, afternoons. I should suggest it to the librarians. They could set up little kiosks holding bunks, not chairs and desks. But I would in all likelihood be angrily dismissed for bringing this up. Worse they might even tell the guards to start watching me. They tend, these watchdogs, to dissolve all differences between the homeless and the elderly when it comes to stretching out in order to snatch a little sleep at midday. I wonder if it is like that in socialist countries like Denmark where all a person's needs are being met?

* * *

I had an amusing idea while sitting here in the reference room today. I imagined my writing a children's book in which my hero would arrive at the New York Public Library each afternoon and head for the third-floor reference room, known to us insiders as Room 315. Which would make a great book title by the way. As the hero stepped forward magic would occur. Rooms and walls and corridors and elevators and stairs and librarian's kiosks and museum displays would get jumbled together, along with the ages of mankind, producing a physical environment mixed in together with a psychological mood, and with an abstract aesthetic thrown in as catalyst, so that the whole of it added up to an ontological hodgepodge in which history became, for the hero, a series of dialogues, easy to read graphics, and images conducted in an atmosphere that Henri Rousseau, the primitive painter, could not hope to capture with his brush.

In each fantasy room an historical personage would be hovering, there to greet my lead character. Together they would hash out the various theories of the meaning of history (leaving structure and function out of it, for the kids wouldn’t get it). Then the hero would, gently, but firmly, critique each personage while admiring his or her clothing, demeanor, personality, or whatever. Like my foolish childhood assumption that I could read the whole of global history in a single book, all this meaning business could be experienced, digested, and then be over and done with, in a few sessions, and in a book that would cost under fifteen dollars retail. I am attracted to this format as a daydream, but as for actually undertaking it, I think not. I was never much for children anyway. They disappoint so much.

* * *

Before I continue, let me get this out of the way, or let me say it again. My high school teachers humiliated me when I told them I was relying on H. G. Well's Outline of History to provide me with the materials for coming up with the meaning of history, life, existence, whatever. My teachers at Columbia, in my undergraduate days and in my graduate days, kept me in check, drilling it into me that personal ambition needs to be severely contained and that unchecked speculation is a sign of weakness. Everyone who knew about my loftiest ambition, or who only heard about it second hand agreed; my wanting to rely on one truncated source of information to explain for the whole of history was a howler.

So, at age eighty-five, is this howler resurfacing in a new guise? I think not. I think that I have practiced patience long enough. I do not know if my impatience is being driven by my urgency, or my urgency by my impatience. And remember, I am starting in on my mission only after spending forty-five years as a college teacher who stayed in his narrow lane and did not even have the sentimental sendoff of a Mr. Chips when he left.

* * *

Sitting here this afternoon looking at a book to do with Kierkegaard's theory of history, or what you might call his subjective rejection of objective history, I wonder why I bother. Wells aside, I do have my outline of the whole meaning of history all ready to go. If that is so, then why should I get bogged down in details? Why empirically confirm what I already know? In short, why should I read as much as I can, on top of having spent decades reading what I could, knowing I cannot even begin to read it all, and only then expect to spring my idea of meaning on an unready world? Why not start with an intuition and then look for selective instances from history to support it? Which is a way of saying that I am not really learning anything new anymore; I am merely reiterating materials long pawed over by me. Then again that is not quite the case. I do discover new niceties to add to the work of the giants, though I hate the very idea of calling myself an under-laborer. I find that repugnant.

These are not insignificant questions I am raising. Somewhere between the a priori and the glut of experience there is, I contend, a lot that I have to say about the broad history of mankind based on what I know aside from what I know in narrow detail about the Emperor Nero. There is a lot I feel about the passing of the generations. I can only hope that I do get on with the saying of what I have to say in my own voice, no matter how faint, and with my heart aching. One more thing: I want the objective and the subjective realms to become fused together in my theory of the meaning of global history. This is more than a wish list; that is my wish.

Did I just say my theory of the meaning of global history? I did. That, perhaps, is the silliest thing I have ever said. For it is one thing to explore the meaning of history as written by men with large reputations, it is quite something else to declare myself a player beginning at the age of eighty-five. But haven’t I already said this? Damn it all! I am repeating myself before I even begin!

* * *

Please note: leaving this library on late afternoons gives me more pleasure than does entering it earlier on in the day. Like a man on a mission, I go straight back to my apartment, strip off my clothes, and take a thirty-minute nap. I have no qualms with the sudden onset of oblivion that comes rushing as I am sliding into sleep. I find it delicious. I wake up more or less refreshed.

* * *

Let me use this opportunity to describe my girlfriend, Helen. At sixty-four she is not a bad-looking dame; in fact, she is the poster child for the out-and-out New York career women. Her hair is dyed honey blonde. The skin around her blue eyes is pulled tight; she might have had one face lift. I do not ask. Her upper lip is still smooth, thank the Lord, and her cheeks form two, rouge-red apples. Her nose is unobtrusive. She wears clothes designed by people I never heard of, and her manners are sophisticated; her college degree was in mathematics, and she gets her cultural ideas from the Financial Times weekend edition. Helen is still working full time for the one boss she has had throughout her whole career, a man named Harry Longbranch. Whenever Harry moves up, Helen moves up as well. But I do not look closely into her career ambitions; I do not know much or care anything about finance, just as Helen does not know much or care anything about history.

Just this year Helen moved from her apartment on West 15th Street to a similar place on East Forty-fourth Street in Turtle Bay, doing so, she said, on a whim. She wanted a change and is willing to take a taxi to work five days a week. I am just thankful that Helen is old-fashioned in one respect; she prefers dating older men. I do not know what she will do when she gets to be my age, for the pickings will be slim and none.

To get to the essentials of our relationship, such as it is, let me say this. Helen, a devoted career woman who has never been married, has always practiced what I call The Redbook strategy. I will explain. Redbook Magazine, a sophisticated women's publication for well over a century now, struck me, in the early 1960's, and at the height of its circulation, as having achieved the successful, upscale women's official position regarding the male of the species. Such women, who do like men, nevertheless do not want the man in their life hanging around them all day and night, thus being there in the rawest physical sense. They do not want to put up with a man's snoring, sneezing, pipe smoking, occasional failure to shave or bathe, and with their voluminous passing of gas, etc. Above all they do not want to see that growing belly hanging out beneath a stretched undershirt. What they do want, and indeed what they need most from a man, is having him escort her ladyship to dinner while wearing a well-tailored suit or even a tuxedo. Men never look so good as when they are performing this vital role. That I can still do at my age, though barely. I escort Helen to dinner and I do so with a certain level of panache. While at dinner we chat away quite aimibly. That is enough for both of us for now. I am not over the death of my wife, Joan; Helen has had many a Redbook escort through the years, or so I presume.

By the way, I never tell Helen anything definite about my burgeoning history project. She knows I keep busy at something to do with my field and that suffices. Instead, she tells me lots and lots of gossip about the people she works with while I just sit across from her with a smile on my face. Pierre slips in out of sight while we are at Le Bateau Ivre, and it is our secret, Pierre's and mine, that he comes to my place on Tuesdays to listen to my thoughts on global history. I doubt that were we to tell Helen of our arrangement, that she would comprehend, much less care.

On another night a week Helen and I go Italian, and our favorite is Angeletto Ristorante, on Second Avenue at East 47th Street. There the manager and the owner-chef treat us like family. The place features Roman dishes with lots of pecorino Romano cheese, and we like the Rigatoni Alla Carbonara best. That, and a little red wine is divine. Our conversations are the same here as they are at Le Bateau Ivre, they are light and polite. Helen, by the way, had a blue-collar upbringing very much like my own. She grew up in the Bronx and had nothing handed to her; she paid her own way through New York University by working nights as a waitress. Having a good head for numbers, and having ice water in her veins when it came to risk taking, she has moved well in financial corridors. She pays attention to her mentor, Harry, and he guides her well. And let me say one more thing here at the outset; Helen has not visited my apartment, and I have yet to visit hers. We have not as yet advanced beyond the cover of Redbook.

* * *

Oftentimes, in Room 315 at the New York Public Library, I fall into a musing state. This means I am neither working away nor fighting fatigue, but merely letting my mind roam. I will give you a sample of what I was thinking about this afternoon, for it will make an impact on the very foundation of my history project. We are, all of us and without exception, in the stream of time, though precious few of us are in the history books. Think about it. The vast majority of human beings are enfolded into the cold embrace of obscurity. It must be asked, what value has history for this larger group while they live, and again after they die, if they do not make it into the books dead or alive? Do they take comfort in knowing that some selected members of the human race are so honored or so demeaned? Many historians would claim that they do.

I think not. In fact, I think it is a sad situation. It is a neglected situation. I feel, now that I am freed from the shackles of my teaching duties as a professional, that history ought to address itself to the whole of humanity. And at this point, reader, you are free to ask me just how would this idealist stance I am taking come about? The answer is that I am working on it, but what a difficulty it presents! It staggers me from the outset to have to acknowledge that this thought I have is influencing the crux of my history project. As such, I must consider the sheer number of individuals lives unfolding in time, and then go ahead and enfold every one of those lives into one towering message to be delivered over to mankind per se as an historical message to do with the meaning of history. I must do this knowing that everyone who lives, and then dies is aware that history, until now, only records the doings of a few, and that, and let me suffer this one like a slap in the face, the majority of humans who are lost to history could care less about that while they live, their indifference being taken on out of necessity and as a defense mechanism held up against oblivion. What they do is wrap oblivion up in the cloth of nothingness and send it out beyond the horizon of their own death. Damn it all, I will, I must care for them regardless. I must think of their indifference to history as being a deficiency that does not lift them out of history, just as Heidegger pointed out. Even my doorman deserves as much. Notice here, how loaded the word meaning becomes in such a context. I am returned to the stage where I started as a high-school freshman, and where I am tempted to extract some kind of children's book magic from it. That is the equivalent of magic thinking on my part, I suppose. Let me pause here.

* * *

I will try again. Magic aside, how in the name of nothingness can I ever hope to approach this problem I have gone ahead and set for myself? I am in a way dismissing myself as, or declaring myself to be, a silly old man. I am taking on a project that cannot be accomplished and for two very good reasons. First, my project is too vague. All my high school and college teachers told me that, and as a retired professional, I know that. Second, even if it were logically possible to try fulfilling my project, it is beyond me, empirically, due to its vastness, my unpreparedness, my age, my health, my personality. I was a run of the mill specialist; I did not spend my career preparing for what I am attempting to do now.

By admitting up front to all of this vagueness and vastness, I am inviting a recall of the derisive laughter of not only my high school teachers, but my primary school teachers, too. all of whom were of low intelligence and possessed of bad manners. They were folks who stuffed their faces with mashed potatoes in the school cafeteria and who plotted their next sick day when they were supposed to be doing lesson plans! Lesson plans! Why not try painting by the numbers!

Yet, and to give myself some credit for my whole human race consideration, is this not what the great speculative historians and philosophers were trying to do, include all of us into their idea of what our collective history meant? Let me see. If we are all in the stream of time, then history is in the stream of time, too. If that is so, then I do not think there is such a thing as a standing eternity out of time, for us, but that there is only a very long and growing amount of finite time passing, and always in direct relation to the life of any one of us, physically, and to the lives of everyone of us as conscious, human individuals, and this despite our places on any social hierarchy in any one age. I am talking about both Julius Caesar and nameless numbers of galley slaves. Time begins, and there is an open future, we have time to come to appreciate my way of thinking.

And what is time? Ha-ha. Here is a surprise for you. Unlike Augustine, I have my answer ready. It is the relative rate of heat loss that all physical things undergo in this universe, doing so as they decay, and with the option of having the privileged state of measurement given over to self-conscious physical things, and, get this, with consciousness understood to be the epiphenomenal expression of their heat loss, at best. You see, I have cut to the chase. There are only two approaches to time, one involving physical decay only, and encompassing all physical beings equally, and wherein conscious beings are not privileged, and one involving physical change wherein conscious human beings are privileged. Time marches on regardless of us, though we have the privilege of naming it. If we take the latter approach, we should not be hasty, and conclude that time is unreal, or at best an undefined tension in the mind. We must instead opt for the sympathetic expression of heat loss over the generations of mankind (and refuse to go ahead and identify heat loss with consciousness exclusively).

Despite what I just said, we must grant everyone his or her place in history. It is here that I am tempted to chuck the name history and try to express the unfolding of the generations of human individuals in a new guise, but what would that be, or be like? Shall I come up with a new name, and then define it through the formation of a theory; or shall I produce the theory and then come up with a name for it? There do exist ideas of transcendental, pre-established harmony, fate, Providence, what have you. I will take such theories up in their proper places. But I remind myself on the spot that I have just ruled a standing eternity for us out of bounds, so even I am prepared to quash speculation at its most unrestrained levels. And I say this, curiously enough, while allowing such theories into my studies. That I am willing to speculate within the bounds of spacetime only is another thing. Or, as I used to advice junior faculty members when they were hired to teach at my college,

Listen to your critics the way a lecturing professor listens to his students, but never, ever give up the chalk.

Let me give a running summary just here, for my opening salvos have been terribly diffuse. First of all, I recognize that the entire human race is subject to time passing. There are no exceptions. The overwhelming majority of us, obscure even while we live, are plunged into oblivion immediately after or, at best, soon after we die. Hope for immortality in some literal sense is a childish wish, as Aristotle said, and as for our notions of eternity, and in relation to us, they are hopelessly incoherent, not to mention fanciful. The passing of the universe will take ages; the passing of the human race within the universe will in all likelihood not take nearly as long, and as for another Heideggerian theory, the one that says we are only present to nature and to clock time—please. But has any of what I just recounted have anything to do with the meaning of human history? That is what I am getting to; that is what I want to find out.

* * *

Generations of individual, conscious human beings have, for the most part, had little choice but to call upon the stars to witness their coming and going. History is in turn selective and is a product of human labor. I mean to fuse these two very different realities into one. In doing so I will not settle for mere bricolage. I mean to include every individual into the one global history of the human race in a meaningful way, and while preserving the trappings of ordinary history.

All right, reader, you can get in line and, when your turn comes, you can declare my wish, or my intention to be utter nonsense and, if you are still here, demand to know how it is that I will do what I call for. Well, if you are reading this carefully, you may have noticed that I am already doing it. I am doing it by turning my back on what I was trained to do. I am bracketing the so-called scientific method in which the historical researcher leaves his self or herself out of the research, at least until the time comes to pronounce judgment. I see things differently in my old age. I see that we have to intrude into our own findings in so many mundane ways—a kind of observation-affects-reality phenomenon right at the outset, and as applied to the study of the entire history of mankind that is to be all-inclusive. We have to complain about our doorman, or about the dangers to be found while stepping through the Second Avenue bike lane, or of the more esoteric complications of aging, doing so while conducting our research into global history. Mine is a kind of all-inclusive existential memoir if you will, though one that does not treat existentialism first, and history later. We are to take in, in equal measures, and doing so simultaneously, the work done at the library and the fatigue we fight while doing so. The only thing that comes tumbling after would be the ultimate result we extrapolate from there in terms of our forming judgments. Does that make any sense, reader? You need not answer me now.

Instead, let me go to history for an example of what I am about. Louis XIV met with his minister, Colbert, on a daily basis while, at night, producing more bastards than history can list. Then he met with his minister, Louvois, while suffering gout and practicing a cruel form of piety. In addition, Louis waged a series of disastrous wars that left the French nation penniless. What I propose, is that everyone's dalliances, and everyone's false moves must be recorded into a single, general or global history, in some manner yet to be determined, of course. Now you may object that allowing talk of Louis’ ailments and peccadilloes, too, may be admitted into history only because he was both a great historical figure and an absolute monarch. His age was golden; his age was a disaster. Then you can turn to me and tell me that I am neither great nor absolute, that my faults are as insignificant as are my accomplishments. You can add that while Louis and Caesar can make it into the same expanded history book, the majority of us cannot. Well, I can counter-counter and claim that choosing the right theory about the meaning of history can give me the last word on this subject because I have turned the subject on its head. Or, as they say in the variety store where I buy my lottery tickets,

Somebody's gotta win.

* * *

One other thought to do with my intent to conjoin time, which envelops us all, and history, which selects but a few of us, needs be fitted in just here. It is that most human beings, if and when they are staggered by the overwhelming sadness to do with the upcoming loss of their consciousnesses, their lives, their loved ones and their self-interests, and we can couple that with the seeming hopelessness of their getting into a standard textbook of history, give up at once and turn to religion. From there they turn their religion over to theologians who then tell them what is to be believed. Worse, the theologians, classically speaking, threaten the believers with damnation if they do not believe what they are told. This allows a very large set of human beings to stop thinking about both time and history altogether and to concentrate, instead, on their supposed moral transgressions. That this does not suffice for the likes of me is something the herd then turns a deaf ear to, and condemns me as not being one of them. Thank the non-God for that, ha-ha.

What distinguishes me from them, exactly? I say it is that my refusing to turn to religion means my refusing to give up on the problem of oblivion. In doing so I retain an enormous feeling of awe. And without the aid of belief contexts, awe is pretty raw stuff, as I have found out over the course of my lifetime. And why not? Most people can’t take the pressure of the awe, finding it too raw. They turn to belief, instead, something that is, using Marx's word now, an opiate. I have rejected this anodyne. I have stuck with awe until it become ache.

Secondly it is because selectivity grants a false sense of elitism to those few who dabble in history, those pretenders who then go on to assume that they are running the world, for a time. Consider Hegel's pronouncements on Africa. He accorded it no history at all, and that in turn encouraged small pockets of Europeans to become big-headed. Hegel suggested that if there took place a large battle in Africa wherein thousands were killed but no one wrote that down, that would place the fallen in battle outside history.

But I am not an elitist. I see what Hegel said as being but a special case of what I am talking about in general. I am in awe for us all; I ache for us all. I am aware of the countless gaps there are in written history. I am looking to close the gaps. I look to include not only the Africans, but also those poor Huguenots who were pressed into being galley slaves in the time of Louis XIV, and those kids I went to grammar school with who are now retired from careers as doormen or postal workers, and who are going to stay up late tonight to watch the Grammys.

* * *

There was an old man, a very silly old man, a man who was not a prophet in his own city, who sought to eliminate what he dubbed The Phenomenon of Loss suffered by the commonwealth of humans, not by taking some insipid leap to faith, but by managing, somehow, and towards the end of his life, to wrap his sadness up in words that he set down in a single, vast literary tome, hoping to insert it into recorded history in some objectively and subjectively combined meta-manner, so that everyone who lived and died in time would be accorded a place in history despite the fact that their being there at all was commonly taken to be a prime example of historical insignificance. And when told he couldn’t do it, when told he was trying to pound pegs of round wishful thinking into squares of unyielding reality, he went ahead and tried anyway, and while shouting over the din,

"My capacity for audacity

Tis a sure sign of my sagacity.

Which was not an argument, but an example of false entailment, leading his critics to shout back at him,

"We will not put up with your vanity,

We’ll call it your coming insanity."

He had no comeback for that at present, and so he went away for the day, mumbling to himself,

"Only I envision the generations

Of mankind held together in one book,

Erasing our need to choose between Caesar

And eternal happiness in heaven."

Two

P

ierre is a middle-aged man, completely bald and ever smooth-shaven. His nose is wide and bent, and his cheekbones look as if they are getting ready to leap off his face, though to counter-balance that, his cheeks are, as well, like two rounded mounds of earth worn down by the seasons. His large blue eyes always look startled, but in a very mild way; I would classify Pierre as being a sweet man. He can remember, though imperfectly, what Helen and I ordered for dinner going back through our last ten meals at Le Bateau Ivre. His ability to follow my historical ideas is not nearly so impressive, but I am bringing him along carefully. On Tuesdays, at my place, we begin slowly. I pour him a glass of red wine and let him have his head. As a rule, he chats on merrily about Broadway revivals that he loves but that I will never attend, and about television shows that make him weep with pleasure but that I will never watch. These minutes I spend humoring Pierre are good minutes. Pierre is as much alone in this world as I am, and his life accomplishments are meager. And while I never mention my youthful days, I do encourage Pierre to remember anything he wishes, and to tell me about his own childhood. You see, I want my Platonic yes-man to be fully human. But I am not getting very far with this; Pierre was always as sweet back when as he is now.

* * *

I am so frustrated sitting here in this library! I cannot, at my age, give up the childish notion that I can do this work all on my own. I should know better, being trained as I am, but I am revisiting my high school prejudices. I told a classmate, once, that one doesn’t really have to go to college, let alone graduate school, all one needs is raw intelligence and a library card. It wasn’t until years later that I became humbled by my grasp of counter-intuitive arguments in logic.

I have another guiding prejudice that has surfaced of late. I hate not only the scientific method I practiced so lavishly for decades; I hate just as much any idea of a division of labor. Divisions of labor, and already I see them forming on the meta-level of my intellectual pursuit, are, in my estimation a direct assault on individuality. Sacrifice, cooperation, patience, standing down, stepping aside, taking orders, falling in line, waiting in ignorance and calling it obedience until one is called to duty, why, that cannot be the whole of it. It cannot be that a single conscious individual must await his chance, knowing that his chance is more likely than not, never to come. I suffered such an indignity while working within the system; I won’t put up with it in retirement.

I hear myself. I admit that I am a silly man. But what I am trying to do is more than just be silly. What I am trying to do, if I actually did do it that is, would make me transcendent. Therefore, I declare that I am more than silly. I am absurd! And more, still. I declare that I am being absurd in an absurd manner. How is that! I, for one, like this very much. I do not stuff myself under the floorboards like Dostoyevsky's underground man, nor do I turn myself into an insect like Kafka's Gregor Samsa. I just declare, to the whole world, that I will conjoin time and history. I will make sense out of nonsense. Thus, I am the man who is super-absurd! I do not believe in eternity. I believe there is just a very long time passing, and that the amount of heat loss that it generates is beyond our ability to calculate unless one has the correct intuition all ready to go. I say I have such an intuition hovering out there, and that I can one day find out what history means.

* * *

I have given you my daily schedule. But I should provide more details to do with my afternoons in the library. I jump around on one of their computers, and I do selective reading. And this will come as no surprise; I read history exclusively. I read history that I did not specialize in as a professor, and so much the worse for Nero. I call up some book of history or other at random, though most times I confine myself to the Greeks or to the Romans or to the Age of Louis XIV, doing so with no justification at all given the breath of my intended thesis, and while passing my eyes over from eight to twenty pages of my random selection in an afternoon. I know that whatever I choose to read is too selective from the aspect of part-whole difficulties, but I try to counterbalance that by making a plea for hegemony, something I both acknowledge and have acknowledged through the decades. Hegemony just has to be. Though I must add that I am not happy with bullies, even those of the natural sort.

I have read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from cover to cover nine times, and I have read many of his Latin sources, and I have read their earlier Latin sources, and I can point out places where Gibbon made howlers.

Well, that is almost the case. Let me confess that I have read every line of Gibbon each time out, but with the sole exception of one short passage that does not run past three pages in any publication of his work, and this is one having to do with a single reference to Bulgarian history and its relation to the Romans. Oh, and to be sure, I read all the other passages in Gibbon to do with Bulgarians, and other places in Thrace, just not that one. I simply could not, ever, force my eyes to take in the whole. I am thus selectively recalcitrant. Moreover, I am being silly even to bring my little idiosyncrasy up here. I know it is silly. But there it is. Let us explore my little failing and then see if we can extrapolate something deep from it.

We are told to be specialists because no one individual can read everything. And by everything, and with the nod back to Wells, no one would say that Gibbon gives us the last word and the only word on Roman history. Why, he doesn’t start until the Republic is long gone. We cannot do the whole, as sober-minded historians would be quick to tell you as well as me; we must adhere to a division of labor that includes giving the nod to Tacitus and—but I refuse to give out a list of Roman historians here, even though I am maddingly familiar with the whole lot, and have read everything they wrote. But you get the point. We not only have to leave out one three-page passage to do with Bulgarians, we have to leave out millions and millions of historical documents contributing to global history, or just to Roman history for that matter. Roman history! What about Cambodian history, for Christ's sake?

Let me pause here to say something more about that division of labor business that galls me so much. It is that it does not suffice, ultimately. Entire historical collections, parts of which are referred to now and again, or not, by an individual, are ultimately become subject to decay in the temporal sense if you will permit me to say so. But I am letting that separate problem go for now. Suffice to say that once I conjoined time and history, I simply opened the floodgates and swamped the whole of history including the placement of gun turrets by the British on the Falkland Islands during their recent and mostly farcical war with Argentina, and the size of the moles created by the engineers working for Alexander the Great.

Here is the lesson I want you to take away from this, reader. And I do not think that what I am about to say you will find to be either boringly pedantic or hopelessly idealistic; though if you merely find it trivial then to hell with you. Those of us, and I now include myself amongst the group, who are silly enough to examine theories as to the overall meaning of history, never mind proposing them, and who operate on the meta-level, cannot get bogged down reading that much history to begin with! Do you follow me? If one reads a good deal of history, chasing details down every rabbit hole, one is left with little time for theorizing. If one spends the majority of time theorizing and then defending their theory, and with an eye on eventually giving meaning of the whole of history, one must recognize from the outset that to set out to read a great deal of history, though it does come woefully short of the whole, takes away from the time needed to give a judgment as to the whole. There is no official or correct balance to be found here. There are no ideal scholars; there are no ideal thinkers.

I am sure Toynbee would have disagreed with me, that man who delved into twenty-three civilizations and then explained to his readers what was going on in all of them. Then again, his master theory, claiming that elite minorities take hold of entire civilizations, organize the activities of the majority population to attain positive results, and then cling onto their rule for a few generations before corrupting from within, is, I say, giving us a gloss, not a theory of the meaning of history. Or, if you do not like that one, then I will fall back on saying that his theory is to do with the structure of, rather than with the meaning of history. I am saying as well that enormous input will not automatically produce lasting insight.

About that: I noticed years ago that journals of philosophy to