and how they’ve given up butter, because it’s too fattening, even though, ringing wet, neither of them comes close to a buck. They are small adults in children’s bodies. Who would have guessed that the democratization of information would also democratize maturity? We’re not in Wilton, anymore, Toto.
In my idealized family life, my wife and I would dress for dinner, discuss lofty intellectual quandaries with our children, and after tucking them into bed, would sit quietly while listening to Wagner and nursing a scotch. The scotch part being essential. Instead, I spend most evenings at the computer while my wife returns phone calls. She wears one of those phones that plugs into her ear, so when she talks, I sometimes forget, and wonder if she’s having a schizophrenic break. Who could blame her? She’s an event planner and answers at least two hundred e-mails a day.
We don’t use our kitchen to cook. We reheat. Last night, after the kids went to sleep, we watched television. The program was not Masterpiece Theatre, but a reality celebrity drug rehabilitation show starring washed-up has-beens in all their drug-addled glory, their problems neatly resolved in one-half hour. We learned that the comedian from an 00’s sitcom enjoyed his crack from a pipe, while the child star from that same show preferred her self-destruction via sex trade. Was a love connection in the cards between these crazy kids? Would they live happily ever after and drug-free, or, more likely, when the camera faded, and the limelight to which they are addicted ceased to shine, would they crawl back to their former slop heaps, only to make the news once more, this time with the story of their overdoses. Who can resist such titillation!
Bradbury and Debord alike admonished us not to spy on our neighbors, but to learn their names. And yet, we’ve installed cameras in practically every room of our homes, voluntarily. I cannot help but wonder if Warhol’s fifteen minutes, now truncated to fifteen seconds, signals the death knell of the human mind. Where once, it interpreted and recognized patterns, now it regurgitates without comprehension.
The modern world is defined by absence. Religion, family, work, and even our American nationality have lost currency. Instead of finding suitable replacements for the vacuum their loss has created, we deny that they are ailing and cling to their rotting remains, quite aware of the paradox, the hypocrisy, the inevitable corruption. In 1966, Time magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” Now the question is reassuringly quaint: it assumes God once existed.
It is the nature of a vacuum to be filled. Our government drops more bombs on more countries every year. Our friends, undependable and temporary, make poor substitutes for our broken families. We are taught that it is our patriotic duty to consume, and so we fill our leisure time with the pursuit of more and better leisure. Our malls have become our churches.
And so I return to the apocalyptic social critics of the 1930s, who’ve fallen into obscurity over the last few decades, and wonder if their prognostications might have been correct, after all. Perhaps there is a reason for the obesity, and the lawsuits, and the war-waging that erodes our Roman walls. Easy gratification has stunted our development and rendered us eternal adolescents. We find the old and sick distasteful, and so sequester them from our sight. In their absence, we’ve become so accustomed to having our way that we cannot even perceive our own deaths.
Our wealth has prevented us from having to sacrifice, or even choose. And in the end, what separates us from animals, save choice?
It is with these cheering thoughts that, like Joseph Mitchell before me (though I flatter myself by the comparison), I lie awake some nights and ponder my mortal coil. The bells of St. John the Divine attend my thoughts, chiming the hour, and I examine the unexamined until it frightens me so dearly that I must surrender to my insomnia, and rouse. My perambulations lead me always to the same place. First the church, and then, The Breviary.
For those who’ve never seen it, The Breviary is a marvel of gargoyles and hand-carved stone. Among the rest of the modern glass condominiums on the block, its sooty façade and westward orientation appear like a twisted, blackened tooth along a gleaming white smile. Even the inside of the place, though its windows are high and massive, is dark.
On more than one occasion, its kind, white-gloved doorman has permitted me entrance to its lobby,