“Go to my files,” you might say as you sit in the airport, “and get everything I’ve said in the last five years about Descartes. I made a remark with a metaphor about the law, co-ordinates, and virtual prisons. When you get it, put it on the screen in blue. Take a letter to Schultz, and file a copy at home and with the office.”
But as you issue, you must also receive, and it never stops. Though the screen of your portfolio is electronically textured to feel like paper and is as buff or white as flax or cotton, you miss the days of your father, when one could hold the paper in one’s hands, and things were a little slower. But you can’t go back, you can’t fall behind, you can’t pass up an opportunity, and if you don’t respond quickly at all times, someone else will beat you to it, even if you have no idea what it is.
The world flows at increasingly faster and faster speeds. You must match them. When you were a child, it was not quite that way. But your father and grandfather did not have the power to make things transparent, to be instantaneously here or there without constraint. Unlike you, they were the prisoners of mundane tasks. They wrote with pens, they did addition, they waited endlessly for things that come to you instantly, they had far less than you do, and they bowed to necessity, as you do not. You love the pace, the giddy, continual acceleration. Though what is new may not be beautiful, it is marvelously compelling. Your life is lived with the kind of excitement that your forbears knew only in battle, and with an ease of which they could only dream.
II.
AUGUST 1908, LAKE COMO, ITALY
You are an English politician, a member of Parliament suffering patiently between cabinet posts, on holiday in Italy. In the two days it has taken to reach your destination you have fallen completely out of touch, although you did manage to pick up a day-old Paris newspaper in Turin. The Times will be arriving a week late, as will occasional letters from your colleagues and your business agent. Your answers to most of their queries will arrive in London only slightly before you yourself return at the end of the month.
The letters you receive are in ecru and blue envelopes, with crests, stamps reminiscent of the Italian miniaturists, and, sometimes, varicolored wax seals over ribbon. Even before you read them, the sight of the penmanship gives away the identity of their authors, and may be the cause for comfort, dread, amusement, curiosity, or disgust. And as you read, following the idiosyncratic, expressive, and imprecise swells and dips like a sailor in a small boat on an agitated sea, the hand of your correspondent reinforces his thoughts, as do the caesuras rhythmically arrayed in conjunction with the need to dip the pen.
Some of your younger colleagues use fountain pens, and this you can detect in lines that do not thin, pause, and then fatten with a new load of ink. Occasionally, a typewritten letter will arrive. This you associate with the Telegraph Office, official documents, and things that lean in the direction of function far enough to exclude almost completely the presence of grace—grace not in the religious sense, but in the sense of that which is beautiful and balanced.
You will receive an average of one letter every two days, fifteen or sixteen in all, and will write slightly more than that. You are a very busy man for someone on holiday, and wish that you were not. Half the letters will be related to politics and governance, the other half to family and friendship. An important letter, written by the prime minister eight days before its reception, will elicit from you a one-page response composed over a period of an hour and three-quarters and copied twice before it assumes final form, for revision and so that you may have a record. You will mail it the next morning when you pass the post office during your walk. The prime minister will receive his answer, if he is in London, almost two weeks after his query. He will consider you prompt.
During your holiday you will climb hills, visit chapels, attend half a dozen formal dinners, and read several books, more than a thousand pages all told. If upon reading a classical history you come across a Greek phrase with an unfamiliar word you will have to wait until the library opens, walk there by the lakeside, and consult a Greek lexicon: one and one-half hours. Sitting in your small garden with its view of lake and mountains, you will make notes as you read, and some of these will be incorporated in your letters. Most will languish until your return to London. By the time you look at them in a
