Before he exited the glass doors an old lineman whispered to me that the Rapture is coming. He had just told me about his ongoing suit against the Internal Revenue Service in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Lou Reed sang in "Some Kinda Love" that "Between thought and expression lies a lifetime." What about between what is thought and unthought? What happens to all the events that speed by during the day -- the escalators rides at night, the petty slights delivered by heedless supervisors, the sips of coffee, the furtive glances at Google News, the trips to the latrine? All instantaneously forgotten as if they never occurred. This would have to be what time is.
Each day it seems I discuss a new cataclysm with a coworker who occupies the cubicle next to mine. Typhoons demolishing the Philippines. Tornadoes ravaging the Midwest. War in the Middle East. Sometimes we talk through the fabric wall of the cubicle without looking at each other. Sometimes we stand and stare at each other through the panel of Plexiglass that tops the cubicle. "People don't believe in science anymore," we say. "It is End Times."
But what I wanted to quote is the final two paragraphs of the slightly sneering New York Times obituary of the great Doris Lessing written by Helen Verongos:
After a stroke, in the late 1990s, Ms. Lessing said she would no longer travel. Constantly reminded of her mortality, she said she became consumed with deciding what she should write in the precious time that remained.
But in discussing her writing in 2008, she said: “It has stopped; I don’t have any energy anymore. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”(On the train home tonight I was given energy by Mike Watt & the The Missing Men's "Toadies" and Penetration's "Don't Dictate.")
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