Evanston: the last of the white
Evanston: the last of the white
We are the first owners of this condo, and when we moved in the interior was painted white. Ceilings. Moldings. Walls.
I rather liked it that way; but over the years I have repainted most of it. In the last two days I painted the second bedroom and bathroom a shade of light beige the paint manufacturer calls “wicker.”
The title above is not precisely true. The ceilings and moldings remain white, as does the master bathroom. While I don’t mind painting, which is one of those few activities that give immediate gratification, I hope it remains so.
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As I have noted here before, I am a serial machine. I concentrate on one thing; then another. I rarely try to multitask, and in fact don’t even believe it possible. Recently I came across a review of a book, YOUR BRAIN AT WORK, by David Rock, that suggests science is on my side.
Mr. Rock, who is a business consultant, interviewed thirty leading neuroscientists, and concludes that people who multitask are fooling themselves. The brain does not function that way. At least not efficiently. People who think they are multi-tasking are really shifting their attention constantly and doing nothing well.
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I read the last fifty pages of ARCH OF TRIUMPH last evening and had forgotten how good an ending it is.
On the way back from seeing his dying American friend sail on the NORMANDIE, Ravic, whose true name we learn on the penultimate page is Ludwig Fresenburg and that he is not Jewish, passes lines of horse drawn army wagons heading toward the border in a scene reminiscent of the ending of Emile Zola’s THE BEAST IN MAN in which a trainload of soldiers rushes toward that same border at the start of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He stops at a service station, where the man who pumps gas says, “I’ve got to go tomorrow. My father was killed in the last war. My grandfather in 1870. I go tomorrow. It’s always the same. We’ve been doing this now for a couple of hundred years. And it doesn’t help; we have to go again.”
The soldiers being mobilized in Zola’s novel were deliriously confident of victory.
Much more happens in those last fifty pages that I won’t reveal in case any of you decide to read it.
ARCH OF TRIUMPH ends on the day war is declared.
In addition to causing me to buy a bottle of calvados, from which I am about to pour, it will also cause me to reread THE BEAST IN MAN.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009