Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING:

SUMNER: ...and today I was sitting in my office with Diane. I looked up from my Proust, she had her nose in her Yeats, and I said to myself, "I'd be crazy to let this girl get out of my life." So right there on the spot I said "let's get married."
DIANE: What he actually said was: "Come with me, and be my love/ and we will some new pleasures prove." That's Donne.
SAM: I certainly hope so.
SUMNER: No, uh, no. John Donne, the poet.
SAM: Ah, well, that's... lovely.

-"Give Me a Ring Sometime"


This is one of those things that makes me sound unnaturally old, but I really think there's very little TV better than the first season of Cheers. I caught it in syndication my senior year--back when I used to regularly stay up late in the evening (what else was I going to do at 1:00 in the morning? sleep?), and at two episodes a night five days a week, it was over a month before they began to get repetititve and formulaic. Friends certainly never managed that.

It's also something of a time capsule--the series began 25 years ago; just barely when I was alive, and obviously not anything I remember. It's very odd to see what passes for style in the early 80s. I've said a few times that the 70s seem like a schizophrenic decade (and must have been odd to live through); this particular prism of the early 80s seems like nothing so much as slow transition.* In a way, it reminds me of Manhattan: simultaneously forward- and backward- looking, and so like nothing quite so much as itself.

*I originally wanted to go with 'hangover,' but I'll have to think more about whether that's an approrpriate analogy.