There are mornings, and this fifteenth of May would seem to be precisely such a one, when the air of New York – a temperate, partly clouded air settling, with that almost decorous indifference our city extends to all weathers, at fifteen degrees of the European measure – contrives to suggest, by the very mildness of its disposition, the existence elsewhere of climates far less considerate of the human heart. I had occasion this morning, in the unhurried interval between coffee and correspondence, to consider that the temperature out my window was perhaps the only quantity, among all the quantities at present being bruited about the wires of the world, which could be relied upon to mean precisely what it said. Fifteen, and partly cloudy. There the matter rested; there it would, with becoming reticence, remain.
Elsewhere, the matter rests nowhere at all.
One had received, as one does, the intelligence that the American President had arrived in Peking – the city presents itself to me still, I confess, by that earlier name – to be received by the Chinese sovereign with a ceremony whose every gesture, every minutely calibrated rank of welcoming dignitary, was, by a curious tacit understanding, to be read for what it withheld quite as much as for what it bestowed. The Beijing court, our correspondents inform us, dispatched a high-ranking but ceremonial figure to the airfield: a substitution of symbolism for substance, the despatches put it, although one wonders whether, in the high and intricate commerce of nations, the two qualities have ever been so usefully distinguished. To trade symbolism for substance is, after all, the precise stratagem by which substance is preserved.
I had, I should remark, lived long enough on either margin of the Atlantic to have arrived at a settled conviction – it amounts very nearly to a creed – that the encounter of an American with an older civilization is, whatever the parties may believe themselves to be transacting, an essentially moral occasion, an examination, conducted under the impassive eye of History, of how much innocence the visitor may yet retain and how much knowledge the host may consent to share. The President proposes, we are told, to ask his counterpart to "open up" his country; the counterpart, in turn, will press upon his guest the long-deferred question of an island that lies, geographically and otherwise, between them. The Iran war, meanwhile, hovers above the proceedings as the third, unnamed, and most insistent guest at every dinner – a circumstance which has driven, by a beautiful irony, the price of fuel high enough that the energy-hungry nations of Asia are turning, in unprecedented numbers, toward the sun itself, as if to forswear earthly intrigues by patronizing the celestial.
It is the nature of our age, and not, I think, the nature of mine alone, to have rendered the word truce into a kind of polite euphemism. The dispatches from Eastern Europe brought word that the Russian assault upon the Ukrainian people had resumed upon the expiration of an arrangement which, the analysts assure us, had become "a tool of performative diplomacy, an end in itself rather than a prelude to a lasting settlement." How richly, how sadly the formulation invites contemplation! For the truce, when it functions in this denatured fashion, is converted from a pause within a sentence – a comma, as it were, before the next clause of human suffering – into a kind of full stop after which the sentence simply, and shamelessly, resumes. Six were dead by Wednesday's drone strikes; eight children, our correspondents add, among the twenty-two killed by Israeli ordnance in southern Lebanon. One sets down these numerals with a hand that should, in justice, tremble more than it does.
Across the water, in that England which formed half of my own divided allegiance, the political weather is reported as scarcely more settled than its meteorological counterpart. Five leaders in a decade, the headline pronounces, and the present incumbent's promise of stability is now widely understood to have been a species of advertisement. I find I cannot read these communiqués without an irrepressible smile of recognition: it is the smile, the rueful smile, of one who long ago discovered that the English faculty for seeming to remain the same, even while undergoing the most thoroughgoing convulsions, was the truest of their national arts. Mr. Farage, meanwhile, is to be investigated for a gift of five millions; the gift is, I gather, the news, the investigation a mere formal acknowledgement that the gift has been observed.
The Dutch, in their turn, have provided what I confess is for me the day's most touching item: a village near the Belgian frontier has, by digging beneath the floor of its church, produced a skeleton which it ardently hopes – ardently, mind you, against considerable evidential headwind – may yet prove to be that of the historical original of Dumas's d'Artagnan, the fourth Musketeer. There is, in this small endeavour, a sweetness which the larger commerce of the day quite fails to furnish: the spectacle of a community digging earnestly into its own soil in pursuit, not of treasure or of resource or of strategic advantage, but of a story – of a confirmation, perhaps, that the imagined and the actual have, in some happy parish, briefly coincided. One wishes them well. One wishes, indeed, that more of our diggings produced no worse than fictions made flesh.
A South Carolina court, we further learn, has overturned the convictions of a man named Murdaugh – the rhythm of the name is, I observe, almost too operatically appropriate – and ordered him retried for the killings of his wife and son. The American passion for the second act, the third, the fourth: it persists, undimmed, into our present century. We are, as a people, constitutionally incapable of allowing a story to end where the law has placed its period.
And so the morning advances, with its fifteen mild degrees and its partial clouds, while the great chancelleries of the earth conduct their intricate business and we, the watchers, the readers, the observers from our windows, are left to compose – out of news of summits and strikes, of skeletons and senates, of children dead and chocolate bars deceitfully diminished – such provisional sense as the unfinished hour will yield. There will be, the wires assure us, more news by evening. There always is.