REFLECTIONS ON THE DAY

1. At the office Each day has its own menu, a sandwich of activities that are governed largely by location: before, during, and after the office. At the center of the sandwich is the university office, in my case the Cowles Foundation, a fine three-story building on a street in the town of New Haven that Charles Dickens once called the nicest street in America. There are long days and short days. A long day starts before the a.m. rush hour at 6:30 a.m. and lasts till 7:30 p.m., travel times that help to ensure a smooth commute to my home and family some 20 miles away in the rural town of Madison. New Zealander that I am, my home must not be too far from the ocean (albeit in this case the grey North Atlantic). Short days are sometimes dictated by the timetable of my children's school bus and they last from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Not all days take me into New Haven and those days offer peaceful islands of research, reading and writing at home, punctuated by the telephone, e-mail and nowadays the occasional controlled eruption of a fax machine. Daily activity is governed by main events — committee meetings, teaching class, seminars and periods with my students — and the remaining time is spent in correspondence dealing with what is often a mountain of mail, some e-mail and regular incursions of faxed documents which bear the signature of a deadline that is being transferred from one office to another at the latest moment that modern technology allows. All of which conspire to increase the metabolic rate of academic life, sometimes to unhealthy levels. On a tough day my secretary and I will put out forty odd letters, about ten e-mails and a few faxes. On a quiet day we manage two or three of each and bring our Paradox data base and files up to date. Much of the volume of mail and office activity comes from editorial work of one kind or another, scholarly evaluations from outside the walls of Yale, refereeing requests, enquiries about research, visits, conferences and so on. Some days we get caught up with our office work completely. But each new mail brings fresh burdens and we treat them philosophically — what does not get done one day waits till tomorrow. And house rules that I have instituted help us …