You and your companion hesitate on the threshold. But you’ve both traveled such a distance to get here, to this dangerous building in a disreputable quarter of a dying city on the edge of a lost continent. So, what the hell? You both pick your way up the ruined, ancient steps and push through the revolving doors.

The man at the ticket booth reminds you of an actor you can’t quite place. Maybe from some sad silent movie you once saw, or a David Lynch film. He reminds you, also, of that smarmy waiter at the crap Italian joint where you had your heart broken the summer before you dropped out of university. You got wasted that night on pills and cheap chianti. After that, for years, every time you ate antipasto it tasted a little like vomit and ashes in your mouth. Without asking, the attendant slides two tickets through the aperture. When you fumble for your credit card, he tells you not to worry, you’ll pay later.

Inside the lobby, cramped and dim, there’s music playing through tinny speakers: “Killing Me Softly” and a muzak cover of something you half-remember (by Morrisey maybe?), all breathy vocals and synthesizer strings.

The gallery itself, once you finally get there down the seemingly endless hallway lined with closed doors and ominous portraits, is disorienting in the extreme – labyrinthine, with no clear layout or discernable organization. The floor plan in the pamphlet that came with the tickets seems to have been contrived by a madman or imbecile, or else it’s a depiction of some other building altogether.

Nor are the exhibits at all what you had expected. All the walls are covered in nothing but rows and rows of flyblown mirrors inside cheap looking junk shop frames. As you move about, standing before each looking glass, you’re appalled to see they are mirrors of the distorting funhouse kind. Some of them make you look leering and gargantuan, others make you look tiny and mean. Or sexy, or melancholic, or sinister, or angry, or reckless, or confused. In some of them, your companion – standing right beside you – is reflected upside down, or separated from you by vast stretches of black space, or is semi-transparent, or not there at all. In a few, there are whole other people you don’t recognize looking back at you, with different dreams and different eyes. When you hold your hand up to the glass, one of the strangers does the same. It’s hard to interpret the meaning of this gesture.

This place is seriously beginning to creep you out. Certainly a far cry from the “whimsical and romantic” outing the literature had described. It doesn’t help that there is apparently nobody else around you, even though you can hear the indistinct sounds of many voices drifting in from other rooms, around corners, down hallways, on the other sides of walls.

You exit, of course, through the gift shop. There are displays of glow-the-the-dark plastic saints, lucky cats, evil eyes, novelty handcuffs trimmed with pink faux fur.

The revolving doors spit you out, weighed down with shopping bags, onto the rush hour sidewalk. It’s only when you’re already halfway home, fighting through the anonymous press of humanity all around you, that it even occurs to you to wonder whatever happened to that companion of yours, or (come to think of it) if there had really ever been one at all.

mde

Time. It’s the most valuable commodity we have. More precious than U.S. dollars, African diamonds, and Siberian caviar. More precious even than beauty, or sleep, or love, or dreams. For, without time, none of these desirable things—and a million other desirable things, besides—could possibly exist. Naturally, there’s never enough of it to go around, and we all want more of it.

It’s just a myth that time is something that cannot be bought. It absolutely can. (As much as some of us might wish to believe otherwise, because the thought attributes a certain satisfying fairness to the universe.) There is a direct correlation between material and social affluence and longevity. Access to better quality health care, better food, better schools, better job prospects, safer neighbourhoods. On average, if you are relatively well-heeled your days will be more pleasant and there will be more of them to enjoy. Once again, the rich get richer.

Still, nothing is ever guaranteed to be so. People who seem to want for nothing frequently choke on their silver spoons or fall from penthouse balconies. Others,  the seemingly unlucky ones, can thrive despite the direst of odds, and end up living long, long, lovely lives.

Kids, I think, are the ones who have the healthiest relationship to time. After all, they have vaults full of it, or at least go about their lives based on the core belief that they do. Children are the billionaires of time, carrying about thick bankrolls of hours, days, weeks, and years, peeling them off like little tycoons. The hours of their days are kept track of with Daliesque clocks, melting and malleable. Time enough to burn it up like marshmallows on a bonfire branch, fritter it away like dandelion fluff. After all, when you’re young, several lifetimes can be lived in one summer, or possibly before lunch. Time enough in a single day to be a pop star or an astronaut, explore the Amazon, hunt a tiger, escape a monster, cross an ocean, and fall in love.

It’s often hard for us older ones to wrap our heads around the fact that we will never be that rich again. One thing we can do is try to slow the passing hours down by stuffing them as full as possible. Squeeze in a fifteen-minute run before work, a quick swim at lunch, a pottery class in the evening. But this can just make the chronological units feel bloated and tired.

Or else we can keep track of the passing time with watchful and miserly eyes. But it’s a strange fact that the more observant we are of this rare and precious thing, the more enslaved we become to its fleeting beauty, and the quicker it seems to dwindle.

Like love, no one really knows how to make the hours stay. So perhaps we should just waste them as though we have an endless supply. Three hours lingering over breakfast in bed. Sitting in a movie theatre at three in the afternoon. A few stolen hours after midnight, smoking cigarettes and identifying constellations. There are so many things that are worth the cost.

It gives me a great sense of comfort that there are women and men out there—countless multitudes of them—who are vastly more intelligent, skilled, and disciplined than myself. People who are able to design buildings that won’t fall down, build airplanes that won’t tumble from the sky, decipher radioactive signals from the outer edges of the universe, conduct a symphony, execute a Black Swan pas de deux, or bake a perfect croissant.

There are so many things, after all, that I am both unable and unwilling to do for myself. I am not completely helpless, of course. I consider myself to be a competent driver, I can talk a bit about movies, music, books, and art, and can make a passable moussaka. But I will have nothing to do with baking or electrical wiring, amongst a myriad of other things. I would no more think of repairing my own hot water heater, for instance, than I would attempt to plumb the mysteries of the kabbalah or perform gallbladder surgery upon myself. I hire someone to do my taxes, because whenever somebody talks to me about anything to do with finances it always seems to me like they are recounting a long and boring story in some made-up and gibberish-y language.

It’s exhausting to even think about developing the seemingly supernatural skills that some people have. I begrudge the half hour or so it takes to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for assembling a propane barbecue, never mind devoting the ten thousand hours that it takes to master playing a French horn.

As a mere ordinary mortal—and a barely passable one at that—I tend to have an almost superstitious admiration for the sort of people who operate at the highest levels of human proficiency. I think of them as rarefied creatures, a breed apart from regular human beings like myself, who do everything in an okay but half-assed kind of way. Some illogical part of me wants to think that they are not merely good at one thing, they are superb at everything. I like to imagine, for instance, that any woman who can pilot a commercial airliner probably also learned to ride a bicycle by the time she was six months old, speaks seven languages, and could, if she chose, scale K2 or translate Finnegan’s Wake into Japanese.

I am always a little disconcerted, disappointed even, when I have some inkling that they might be just human beings after all. I want them to be perfect. I don’t like to overhear my doctor telling her receptionist that she locked herself out of her car that morning, or wore two different shoes to work.

Above all, I would like to think that the people who actually make decisions on behalf of our magnificent, ever-so-fragile planet are operating at a pretty high level of understanding. I am not naive; I know that politicians and captains of industry are often insatiably hungry for wealth and power. But I had always believed that anybody who got to a significant level of influence in a democratic nation must—surely?—have at least a few principles, a deep understanding of complex issues, and some respect for the institutions that prevent us from toppling into base and bloody savagery.

Well, colour me disillusioned. I mean, if we had fewer options to choose from, and less potential as a species, it might be more understandable. But to have such a wealth of brilliance all around us, in every corner of the world, and to willingly, knowingly, put the future of our planet in the hands of the very dregs of humanity seems bewildering. A thug/mobster/rapist over there; a smug, oil-mongering quisling over here. Neo-Nazis? Sociopathic media tycoons? Venal, emotionally stunted tech- and finance-bros? People I wouldn’t trust to manage a 7-11 are now grinding away at all the levers of power. What the fuck gives, homo sapiens?!

Like I say, I’m nobody’s idea of a genius. But it seems to me that we could—and must –do a whole lot better than that. I’m just hoping smarter people than me are thinking about a solution.

A body, it seems, has been found hanging from a banister, or poisoned by hemlock or black mamba venom, or with a neat bullet hole through the temple, or displaying wounds that could only have been caused by a hatpin or a Venetian dagger. A retired judge, a faded actress, a vicious food critic, a wealthy dowager with a penchant for blackmail: someone has met their maker by the hand of a clever and shadowy villain.

Of course, the crime must seem unsolvable. The roads have been closed by a sudden snowfall. The room is bolted from the inside. Means, motive and opportunity are stubbornly elusive. The cast of suspects is shadowy and colourful. Perhaps there is a dashing American film star, or a dissolute French sculptor, or a disgraced psychiatrist, or an eccentric Edwardian-era colonel (retired) who breeds exotic beetles or collects black market orchids or mummified tiger penises.

Possibly the detective has been dispatched by the Metropolitan police force to solve the crime, or possibly she has been fortuitously invited to the ill-fated gathering. She may be either brilliant or methodical, even-tempered or beset by demons of her own; whatever the case may be, she will solve the crime. Painful secrets will be brought to light, nobody’s life will remain unchanged. But at the end of the day, the truth will be revealed and some form of justice, however inadequate or bittersweet, will have been served.

It’s a delightful formula, in all its infinite variations. So much more satisfying and agreeable than the so-called real world – slippery, elusive, endlessly labyrinthine – in which nothing much of anything ever seems to get resolved. Like nesting dolls, lies hide inside more lies. Mysteries lead to more mysteries, before they dissolve into confusion. Conundrums and secrets; bewilderments and riddles. Sometimes it seems even our own identities and motivations remain eternally obscure.

Maybe the solution is to accept that there is no solution. Anyway, the resolutions to the mysteries are never really the source of pleasure. Rather, it’s the grandeur of the scenes, the intricacies of the plotting, the parade of twists and surprises, the marvelous quirks of character, the gleam of the candlesticks, the howling of the wind beyond the French windows, the flickering flames of the hearth, in which the joy is to be found.

Perhaps the universe is ultimately irrational, unfathomable. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates as he considered the choice between exile and death. But does too much examination undermine the joy of living? Isn’t there something to be said for just sinking into a nice hot bath with a mug of hot chocolate and a dog-eared paperback copy of Death on the Nile? I dunno. It would take a far more astute mind than mine to decipher that puzzle.

When I imagine the months of high summer, I think of them as a sort of enchanted, cozy cabin. Something out of an Arthur Rackham illustration of a fairytale cottage, perhaps. Located between the woods and the sea, with climbing ornamental roses and an herb garden filled with basil, tansy, rosemary, camomile, and mint. The air is filled with a complicated smell of sea and storm, cherry blossoms and gunpowder. In the morning, sunlight sparkles on a dancing river. There are tire swings and hammocks making lazy arcs There are children whooping and running wild through the woods, and older folks reading fat mindless books while chips of ice melt in bourbon cocktails. At night the skies are carnival bright, with wild stars and a huge gold moon.

October, by way of contrast, is a hunting lodge. The stuffed and mounted head of a magnificent antlered stag is displayed upon its wall, and there is a fireplace large enough to roast a whole hog upon a spit. The long dining room table is aglow with candles, and it’s set with the finest silverware and silk napkins. The room is fragrant with roasting and baking. Bottles of red wine are breathing on the sideboard beside bowls of fruit and dried flowers, waiting for company to arrive. One of the walls is floor-to-ceiling glass, and we can see the distant mountains, already resplendent in their winter snow, gleaming in the sunshine.

January, though, is a wholly different place, in another country altogether. It’s a haunted house, dark and frightening. A crumbling gothic pile in a far-away land where the days are fleeting, and the nights are eternal. Night winds scream through the trees. Their denuded branches, all sheathed in ice, clack like witches’ bony fingers. The ancient timbers are always shifting and creaking, so that it sounds like the feet of long dead dancers are moving above our heads. Like children staying the night on a dare, we pretend to be brave here. We huddle together, and tell each other stories, and wish we had brought extra batteries for our dimming flashlights. Our eyes dart about, seeing strange shapes swirling and congealing in the velvet shadows. The walls are decorated with yellowing portraits of sinister ancestors, their malevolent eyes following all our movements.

To keep our spirits up, we tell ourselves that the days will soon be brighter, and we’ll walk again through warm and sunlit rooms. But somehow, in the dead of night, it all seems like a false hope, a false dawn, impossibly far away. We wonder if we will ever leave the haunted rooms, with their chilled air and flyblown mirrors. We know, in our primitive, superstitious souls, that we may never see another summer. After all, if any month can last forever, January can.

This Thanksgiving weekend, as I always try to do, I reflected upon some of the things in this life that I’m truly grateful for.  (I find this conscious effort to remember and celebrate at least a few of the ways I’ve been ridiculously fortunate and privileged over the years helps keep some of the more selfish, narcissistic, whiny, and overly precious aspects of my nature in some sort of balance.  Honestly, knocking my worst character traits back down sometimes feels like playing an exhausting and never-ending game of whack-a-mole.) One of the things that seemed to form a bit of a theme for me this year was my appreciation of those extended periods of time in which it seemed to me that time itself became slower, more elastic, more spacious, and capacious, and forgiving.

I remembered, for example, a time last Autumn when I found myself staying for two beautiful days and nights at a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania.  It was so quiet and still.  I walked around late at night, listening to the sounds of crickets and the barking of a fox.  There were seemingly endless fields bathed in an eerie yellowish light.  I sat on an abandoned Naugahyde armchair outside an abandoned gas station, watching bats and cumulonimbus clouds moving overhead.  It felt as if I had somehow stumbled upon some strangely beautiful liminal space, a threshold between the ordinary world and a more mysterious place ruled by dream logic, where ordinary concepts of time are rendered nonsensical.  It was surprising to me that a U.F.O. didn’t descend from behind a cloud to silently hover above the grain.  That night I fell asleep to the hiss of traffic on the distant freeway that sounded like the roll of faraway surf.  It had been a long time since I had felt quite so peaceful.

More recently, I was traveling by plane between New York and Texas, when I wound up on the receiving end of a nine-hour delay in my flight.  It involved planing and then deplaning, being stuck in a bus on the tarmac of JFK, and ultimately being shuffled through multiple airport departure lounges.  I wasn’t especially put out by this, as it’s happened to me many times; I like to travel, and it sort of comes with the territory.  Beyond that, it seemed like something of a rare treat, because I had luckily packed along a copy of Tana French’s second-to-latest novel, The Searcher.  It’s a beautifully written and deliciously slow-burning crime novel set in rural Ireland, seemingly tailor made for extended periods of waiting.  While a hundred frustrated travelers all around me were on their devices complaining, yelling, canceling, and re-booking travel plans, I was turning pages and imagining myself in Irish woods and pubs, lost inside someone else’s imagination.

Increasingly often, I find myself seeking out these moments of solitude, of stillness, of waiting.  Or else embracing them when they come my way.  I linger in bookstores, and light candles in empty churches.  I wander through graveyards and sit on park benches, watching my dog bury her head beneath the fallen leaves, thankful for the elegant slowness of all the precious passing hours.

Although it was only a few months ago, this installment of [blue rare], from our Thanksgiving (October 18th) edition, seems to hit home even harder now than it did then. Perhaps it’s a result of the Christmas Season, and how it seems to get busier and more frantic each and every year.  So I was quite happy when a Voice reader reminded me of it, and agree that it certainly fits as part of the Best of.

Of course, metropolitan living has skewed my instinct for gathering, as well as hunting. So, instead of searching on the mountainside for mushrooms and blackberries, I can be found picking out chanterelles at the farmer’s market, or jars of antipasto at the Italian deli. On any given Saturday afternoon, rather than hiding in a duck blind, I am hunting down freshly roasted coffee beans.

Thinking about what drives me, I see many ways that my suppressed hunter-gatherer impulses rise to the surface and influence my actions. I will frequently leave the safety of my den and spend hours of my day searching for  rewarding sustenance in the world around me. Beachcombing, for example, or hitting the summertime garage sale circuit. Rooting through craft and design stores seeking out Edwardian-style textured wallpaper and tapered beeswax candles for the living room. Even when I’m indoors, this drive to find and devour remains strong. I can easily spend half a day on Spotify searching out musical morsels for a playlist of progressive rock songs referencing mermaids, or examples of seventeenth-century Latvian lute music.

Nothing quite stokes these deep-seated desires to hunt and to gather, though, like Christmas shopping season does. I fairly salivate over the prospect of finding what I consider to be the perfect gifts for the important people in my life.

Which is why I so despise the idea of people telling me what they want me to buy for them. (And don’t even get me started on the appalling practice of giving cash or gift cards in lieu of presents.) The purpose of gift giving is not so that people can receive things they want (or, god forbid, that they need!). The whole point is to receive things that they would never in a million years have thought that they wanted or needed, but it turns out they really did. A taxidermied cane toad, for instance, or a  glow-the-the-dark garden gnome. The collection of leather and pressed tin shadow puppets that I just gave my nephew is perhaps the perfect example. Like my distant ancestors before me, I headed out into the wilderness and didn’t return until I had bagged my prey. That it might ultimately make its way back into the junk shop ecosystem, or some obscure storage space in attic or basement, does nothing to change the fact that I have – once again – proven myself to be a first class-forager, and a credit to my clan.

This is where I really take heart in my tendency towards paranoid thinking, and my abysmal predictive abilities.  I remember having a hearty, mocking laugh when—was it a century ago, or does it just seem that long?—a certain buffoonish and loathsome rich guy announced his intention to run for the U.S. presidency.  “Nobody would be stupid enough to vote for him,” said I.  Well, I had no inkling of all the bad shit that was coming our way, so perhaps there’s a whole world of pleasant surprises and breathtaking progress on the horizon that will take me completely by surprise.  Given my past track record, nothing is more likely.

In the meantime, though, all of the bad things or good things that may come our way are locked within the impregnable vaults of the future.  And if there is any time of year that invites us to turn our backs, for a little while, anyway, from the realms of the hypothetical and rejoice in whatever the here-and-now has to offer, it is the holiday season.

So, for at least three weeks, I will devote myself to those things that make me feel good.  I will ignore news feeds and social media.  I find more time for the people who make me feel valued and alive.  I will rummage through thrift shops for vintage walking canes and cigar boxes.  I will avoid the shopping malls, ignore the online sales, and spend more time with my dog at the off-leash park.  I will wax up my skis, dig out my woolly socks, and split some wood for the fire.  I will sink into bubble baths and theatre seats and find refuge in the immense spaces between the covers of books and the two sides of my headphones.  I will check out the new display at the downtown art gallery, and book tickets for Swan Lake and Nosferatu.  I will put on the Elvis and Charlie Brown Christmas albums.  I will refuse to travel far this year, set-up the Christmas tree before December 23rd, pop the cork on a bottle or two of prosecco, and sing along with Frank Sinatra, George Michael, Radiohead, Barbra Streisand, and Dolly Parton.

I will, as much as I am able, loosen my useless mental grip on the world and all its worries, and let all the darkness slide from my shoulders.  Because everything looks better in the jeweled glow from candles, and those small, coloured lights.

Sadly, it’s not too hard to visualize a day in the not-so-distant future when an existential buzzer of some kind puts an end to humanity’s game once and for all; when the consequences of fortune, fate, or human activity have rendered the surface of this once bountiful world more-or-less inhospitable to most forms of life.  At this time, it’s looking diminishingly likely that homo sapiens will have developed the means to find some sanctuary in the stars by then, or will have attained the will and wherewithal to begin civilization anew on a conveniently welcoming nearby world.  Perhaps, for a while at least, certain scurrying and burrowing things—rodents, earwigs, and billionaires, for instance—will carry on some form of subterranean existence safely away from all the radiation and cyclones drifting about above.  For some reason, though, I don’t find this thought as comforting as maybe I should.

If I’m being honest, there’s almost no doubt in my mind that these are the last few days, weeks, months, or (at the outside) years of the Holocene remaining to us.  If there’s any consolation to be had in all of this, it’s that nothing makes time feel more precious and rare than the realization that there’s not much more left of it.  In the darkness of the overcast future, the days of the here-and-now can take on an almost fairytale glow as we go about our mundane lives, doing nothing out of the ordinary, but everything that’s important.  Doing vital things like sleeping in late and making waffles.  Taking salsa dancing lessons.  Practicing calligraphy.  Memorizing poetry.  Building Lego spaceships.  Cuddling together under electric blankets.  Shuffling through shag carpeting and zapping each other with static electricity.  Painting the living room eggplant purple.  Getting saucy together by candlelight.  Reading The Hobbit.  Listening to Aretha Franklin or Amyl and the Sniffers.  Tobogganing at sunset.  Skating on the river at dawn.  Searching for owls with flashlights.  Shopping in thrift stores on rainy Saturday afternoons, pricing silk lampshades and ceramic panthers, or trying on shiny satin jackets and moth-eaten fur hats.  Watching vintage Hollywood movies over a dinner of mini Mars bars and reheated egg rolls.  Drifting off under constellations of glow-the-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling.  Stuff like that.

Like a basketball lazily, capriciously circling the rim, the world as we’ve known it is wobbling on the edge of oblivion.  But there is still some time left – perhaps seasons, or perhaps longer – while we hold each other tight, and hold our breaths, and watch the great planet spin.

As some people know, lifetimes and lifetimes can be lived in a single day.  We may not have time to build pleasure domes on Venus, but I bet there’s enough time for all of the above, and plenty more besides.  Let’s hope so, at least.

Years ago, this might have made me afraid to fly.  But today I’m much more sanguine, or at least fatalistically resigned.  If nothing else, I can take comfort in the notion that I’m likely statistically safer forty thousand feet in the skies than enmeshed in the shenanigans going on down below.

As a fairly frequent airplane traveler, I’m always a little bit uplifted and reassured by the pre-take off safety demonstration.  I like being assured that it is “unlikely” that the cabin will become de-pressurized, or that the plane will lose its engines and fall like an asteroid into the oceans below.  It’s nice to think that, should some random (and unlikely!) cataclysm occur, my fellow passengers and I will react with poise and reason.  We will remember the flight crew’s instructions and follow the protocol.  When the oxygen masks come tumbling down, we will calmly adjust our own before looking to assist our families and our fellow passengers.  We will listen for directions and assume the best practices position for our optimal chance of survival on impact.  Should emergency deplaning become necessary, we will proceed in an orderly fashion, following the illuminated floor strips towards the exit.  There’s something whimsically retro about all of this.  It seems to harken back to some (probably non-existent) golden age of air travel, a time of civility and decorum.  To transatlantic cocktails and pleasant conversation in the soothing glow of the dimmed cabin lights.

Lately, I have to confess, this is a notion I’m trying harder and harder to hang onto.  Because it’s been increasingly feeling to me like the global air-ship we are all traveling on is about to hit a pocket of turbulence that could very well send it spinning wildly out of control.  The clouds have been gathering for a long time now, as dense with portents as a stock market report or a pack of tarot cards.  Radars are flashing warnings of bomb cyclones and hard rain, and most of us don’t have underground bunkers stocked with rare vintages, designer shoes, and shock-collared servants to keep us safe, warm, and satisfied.

So…I need to hope it would really be like that safety demonstration if a mid-air catastrophe were to actually happen.  To believe that we will look out for each other, hold each others’ hands in the dark, until the intercom crackles to life and the announcements arrive.

Judging from my experience of humanity, though, especially in light of recent events, I can much more easily picture a terrible sort of mayhem ensuing.  People thrashing about in panic, grabbing each others’ masks, trampling over each other on their way to the escape chute, dragging their roller bags behind them over the backs of the crushed and the fallen.

Perhaps the survivors, if and when they emerge from the wreckage, will be so relieved with their narrow escape, so intoxicated with the precious idea of another chance at the world, that they will dedicate themselves to becoming kinder, smarter, better travelers.  All we have is a wing and a prayer.