American Fez

In the Spirit of the Thing

Once upon a time, things were generally reliable although sometimes experienced failure. Nowadays, things are mostly unreliable but occasionally can prevail. Such is the state of things. 

I remember when you could trust things to work out. Back then, things were actual physical things. Alas, things have become invisible data on solid-state things on computer hard drives  ... or worse, things are intangible things on the so-called Cloud, which is a thing I don't understand. 

Yesterday's something is tomorrow's nothing. Apparently built-in obsolescence is a thing that affects us all and everything has its sell-by-date, even that thing you thought was inviolable fact. Nobody believes in that thing anymore. It is a thing of the past.

I should probably just pack up my things and go but quitting is the last thing on my mind. I need to see this thing through to the bitter end. A demonstration of personal resilience is the important thing in times like these.

Fahrenheit 451 (Preheating)

Here is the imaginary, fog-shrouded library housing all the books I've loaned to other people but were never returned. Someone who looks a lot like a particularly forlorn Franz Kafka sits behind the desk, informing a long line of my former friends that anything by Albert Camus is at least forty years overdue. Two copies of Pessoa are still in circulation somewhere, also the novel about death in Bruges, whatever that was called. The Confessions of Zeno, the Manuscript Found At Saragossa, At Swim Two Birds, Jakob von Gruten, all the Anthony Powell and Patrick Modiano, just leave them in the bin and my assistant, Gregor, will sort them out later. 

This library is obviously Brutalist style architecture, set back from the road in a sort of concrete piazza featuring a solemn statue of the Unknown Reader. A shadowy figure sprawls across a perimeter bench, thumbing through a copy of Waystations of the Deep Night, an old paperback I'd forgotten I'd even owned, never mind who had borrowed it from me. The scene recalls a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, a monograph of whom no longer graces my bookcase because I didn't get it back from that guy who lived upstairs in that apartment I rented in the early nineteen-nineties.

I think, perhaps, I should receive an award for my services to adult literacy. Maybe a small arts grant to support and maintain my library's collection. Alas, it's too late for that. Patrons are fewer and fewer each year so it seems my years of lending are coming to an end. A book, whether low brow or high, is no longer special, merely an unread travel accessory to be left behind in an Air BnB when it's time to check out. Somebody else will surely peruse a couple of chapters before leaving the dog-eared curiosity in the back pocket of their airplane seat. Books do furnish a room, but only in the same way that peeling, unfashionable wallpaper does.