ALOFT, on a plane headed for San Francisco, reading the early pages of the excellent biography of the Sanskrit scholar Max Muller by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, I came across the following item about life in the ducal city of Dessau in Germany, where Muller was born in 1823: “One thing which helped the peace of the town was the absence of newspapers. In his young days at Dessau Muller knew only one, which gave nothing but reports of actual events on one, or half, or even quarter of a sheet.” I have long ago given up on Utopia, but this seemed a sound state of affairs. On holiday, I never read a newspaper. As a preface to going away, I call the New York Times business office in Chicago, and cancel my home delivery subscription for the days I shall be gone. Invariably, the polite person to whom I give these instructions asks if I would like my papers for the time I will be away to be sent to a local school. Invariably, I answer: “What! Put that poison in the hands of children? Surely you jest.” Silence is generally the response. One of the reasons for going on vacation is to get away from the daily routine, part of which for me is newspaper reading. Someone once said that each day one picks up one’s newspaper in eager anticipation and puts it down in disappointment. Smart person, that Someone, for that has been my lifelong experience. I know the importance of newspapers to modern government, but my sentiments have come to resemble those of the character in Tom Stoppard’s play “Night & Day” who says, “I’m with you on the free press. It’s just the newspapers I can’t stand.” I currently read one newspaper a day, but there was a time, living in New York, when I read three and sometimes four a day. I say read when I really mean skimmed. Still, I did this skimming compulsively. There was this thing called the news, and one wanted to stay abreast of it, not miss out on anything as significant as, say, the resignation of the minister of defense in Italy. I now read only the New York Times. Since I neither read any Chicago newspaper nor watch local television news–“Triplets Found in Dumpster, more on Eye Witness News at Ten”–I am splendidly ignorant of what goes on in my own city. A serial killer could be living upstairs, the aforementioned dumpster could be in my alley, and I wouldn’t know it. After consulting the obituary pages, I read the children’s sections of the New York Times–sports and the arts, in that order. In recent years I’ve been reading more business news, chiefly that having to do with media mergers and large-scale scandals and the demise of once overpriced executives. Pride may go before the fall for them, but I come after, grinning through my Schadenfreude. I read the front of the paper–the adult section–in something just under the world record for the mile. Op-ed and editorials I glimpse quickly; I’d as lief read a Times editorial on, say, the environment as memorize the last fifty pages of recent changes in the tax code. I go through the rest of the paper, glancing at headlines, attracted mainly by the monstrous, the goofy, the egregious. I find very little that would make the Dessau news criterion of “actual events.” During my week in California, I didn’t once consult a newspaper, and missed it not at all. I turned on the hotel-room television–it was the last week of the Olympics–to watch people sliding around on skis, skates, and sleds; and occasionally I clicked over to CNN, whose crawls of news squibs tend to interest me more than what the broadcasters are reading. While on this self-imposed newspaper boycott, did I miss anything? Possibly moderately famous people I know or have heard about have died; perhaps some of the professional athletes in my city have decided to rent themselves out to teams in other cities. Arthur Miller will no doubt have received another award carrying with it a heavy cash prize. Public affairs, I assume, will have been conducted at their usual varying intensities of stupidity. For the week that I didn’t read newspapers I read instead about the immensely impressive Max Muller and also “Virgin Soil,” a novel by Turgenev that I feel I could have written myself, so familiar is its plot of the Russian intellectual going out among the people only to find they are insufficiently impressed by his idealism. Don’t worry, Mom, I’m reading good. When I return to Chicago, that day’s New York Times awaits. No sooner do I put down my suitcase and take off my coat than I find myself turning to its obit pages. No one I know has pegged out. In the sports section I learn that the White Sox have rented the services of Kenny Lofton, the excellent center fielder of the Cleveland Indians. Turning to the arts section, I wonder what new prize Arthur Miller will have won. I guess I’m home. –Joseph Epstein
