Vol. 163: A blessing or a curse?

When there’s nothing to do but read

Imagine yourself largely immobilized, with a cumbersome boot on one foot, and restricted 24/7 to maybe two rooms of your home, and nothing to do all day but plow through a pile of newspapers, magazines, and books that you never previously got around to attacking. That has been my situation since January 19, when I broke a couple of bones in my left ankle after falling off my bike on an icy city street. (For the ludicrous details, click here.)

I underwent ankle surgery on February 6, and since February 24 I can at last take showers (a sublime and previously unappreciated pleasure) and remove the boot at night and sleep on my side or stomach (ditto). But essentially, my primary task these days is waiting for the damn thing to heal, which will take weeks and maybe months. After that, supposedly, I’ll be back in my old form and free to resume my place by the telephone, there to await the inevitable summons from the Philadelphia Eagles when their kicker, Jake Elliott, blows another field goal.

My dear mother-in-law, Ann Rubin, often exhorted us never to push a day away. Forgive me, Mom, but lately, much of the time, that’s exactly what I have been doing.

Rabbi Kaplan’s daughter

Goodness knows this experience has given me newfound empathy for my single friends who were isolated in their homes for months during the Covid pandemic. (I at least had the companionship of my wife. Still do.)

But the good news is, I wake up each morning, knowing I can finally go through all those unread back issues of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, not to mention a folder’s worth of articles I’ve clipped here and there, some of them three years old.

Then there are the books that I’ve never had the time to sink my teeth into, much less read from cover to cover. For example, Promised Lands, by Sharon Ann Musher, a Stockton University history professor who also happens to be a great-granddaughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist branch of Judaism. (I was raised in Kaplan’s synagogue in New York.)

It was Kaplan’s inspired perception that Judaism is not so much a religion as a civilization that has constantly reconstructed itself through a trial-and-error process among thinking men and women. His mantra— “The past has a vote, not a veto”— always struck me as good advice, not only in religious matters but legal matters as well. (Supreme Court originalists, I’m looking at you.)

Promised Lands concerns a year-long trip to Palestine that Kaplan’s high-spirited daughter Hadassah (the author’s grandmother) took in 1932, when unchaperoned 20-year old girls were not expected to venture anywhere, least of all to the Middle East. Her traveling companion on that audacious trip was another feisty 20-year old chum, Reba Isaacson, who almost 30 years later married my grandfather. So, yes, here’s a book I’ve been eager to read, if only I had the time. And suddenly I have nothing but time.

William Faulkner’s rule

And there is Sons of the City, by my Philadelphia neighbor Scott Flander, a one-time police reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News. His novel attempts to venture where journalists can’t— inside the head of a policeman to discover why cops don’t trust anyone aside from each other.

Who could ask for any more delicious way to pass one’s waking hours? And yet….

The flaw in this scenario was identified years ago by William Faulkner: “The only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”

Faulkner might have added: You can’t exercise, play golf, go to the movies, listen to music, or watch TV for eight hours a day. And that goes for reading, too. Faulkner‘s law explains why even the super-rich, and even retirees, feel the need to find some kind of project to fill those eight hours.

‘The Twilight Zone’ revisited

And that’s not all. The sheer effort of dragging this weighted foot up and down stairs produces a fatigue that makes my eyes tired. Printed words that last month jumped out at me now demand that I squint. And before I know what hit me, I’m nodding off.

I feel like that fellow in the old “Twilight Zone” episode— you know, the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust. He resolves to spend his days in his local public library, reading all the great works that he never had time for before. As he eagerly enters the library building, he trips and accidentally smashes his only pair of reading glasses to smithereens.

In his excitement, you see, he took those glasses for granted. How, you ask, could anyone be so dumb? Well, have I told you about the 83-year-old man who was still bicycling to work in the middle of winter, just as he did when he was 30?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com