It’s another morning where I wake up arranging and rearranging a lecture in my mind, and who’s it for if not for me? I’m the author and the first and foremost audience, always. A disquisition, then, on a favorite line —

Oh miserable age, where the only reward for doing well is the doing of it!

I know the line comes early in The Duchess of Malfi, but just now I can’t remember the date of the play, which is rather to the point here, and I may be misremembering the line a little, too, but forget it! Don’t Google it! Oh wretched, externalized brain, oh miserable age!

It’s a bracing line, in any case, particularly for someone like me who’s been steeped in Miserable Age rhetoric from his very religious youth. Also and not incidentally steeped in Death of the Novel lore from the time he started reading and loving novels.

I don’t mean to suggest that apocalypses aren’t real — and okay, I’ve just looked up the line again, and the date, leaving a few more of my breadcrumbs for Big Data to follow. First performed in 1612 or 1613, The Duchess of Malfi was finally published in 1623. 

Very early in the play we hear our aphoristic complainer, Bosola, complaining to a divine who’s held out on him for preferment —

BOSOLA: I have done you better service than to be slighted thus. Miserable age, where only the reward of doing well is the doing of it!

CARDINAL: You enforce your merit too much. 

Notice that dig from the cardinal — and who says you’ve done well, anyway? I’ll come back to that in a minute, but I see I was carrying  

the line around in my mind with a lamenting “Oh” added in — always gilding the lily, huh? — and a few other syntactical changes to make the line travel better, into my own century.

What braces me about the cardinal’s response? What makes me want to laugh and cringe at the same time? It’s that combination of self-interest from the close-fisted cardinal — self-interest and truth-telling. Is it really the age you’re complaining about, Bosola, or yourself? And aren’t we all enforcing our merit a bit too much?  

……

From my running notes yesterday —

Felt sluggish and out of rhythm until I hit Bayshore about halfway through the run. And that despite several knots of headwind, a lovely breezy morning. Probably best to warm up at 162 spm but only for the first mile, ramping up to 165 by the time I stop to stretch at the fifteen-minute mark

For what it’s worth, I feel a little embarrassed recruiting these notes over from my Google calendar (oh miserable age!) where I plan out the week’s runs, and the writing blocks, teaching blocks, etc. You feel that the notes are almost too ordinary to include in any polished tally of words. 

A little novel to see all those numbers, paces, steps per minute, all those Arabic numerals encroaching on a literato’s standard output = Roman letters = all letters all the time. Perhaps running and biking and gardening will make a more objective person of me yet, an homme d’nombres . . . 

……

Another theory is that I’ve always been an homme d’nombres, and a rather embarrassed one at that. And that the entries in my homme d’nombres file probably contain more of my real life, in their very ordinariness and dailiness, than all the “inciting incidents” of my life put together. That my life will be measured out in coffee spoons, inevitably — and how not to feel apocalyptic about that?

This from just this morning, for example, from my Notes app (oh miserable) just a few minutes ago —

What about switching to a watering schedule that hits every third day — 30 and 45 minutes in the zones, respectively — instead of the current Monday and Friday waterings? You’d have to check the rain gauge, of course.

You want to metaphorize the rain gauge, the garden, the routines of a life, but what if the life is the routines? What if you’re metaphorizing just to flatter yourself? (“You enforce your merit too much.”) One must imagine Sisyphus happy setting his rain gauge, updating his running log, compiling little lectures in his writing journal that occasionally spill over into essays that occasionally spill out into the world. At some point the body will begin to break down anyway — and at some point after that the body will disorganize into death and maybe sometime after that your little particles will make up some other little-c conservative or worrywart trying not to Google in a different century, a different universe. It’s a useful thought experiment at least, usefully humbling.

Also, you need a haircut.