![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Silently and Very Fast
Mar. 23rd, 2020 09:17 amAnd as if the End of History isn’t bad enough, Hideous White Stuff is falling from the sky:
I went to the store. I masked! I gloved! I stood eight feet apart from everyone else! I carried a large roll of paper towels and a bottle of Lemon Lysol spray with which I doused all surfaces—including the surfaces of the objects I bought.
All the other shoppers, maskless, gloveless, and congregating in cozy groups, looked at me as though I were insane.
Did I care?
I did not!
I bought a selfie stick.
Because, you know, when it's the End of the World, you need to take a lot of selfies.
Right. I still can’t take a decent selfie. And, yes, that is a genuine Plague Doctor mask from once-polluted-and-now-swimming-with-swans Venice. I'm seriously thinking of wearing it next time I go to Ocean Lots.
###
When I got home, I disinfected some more. And then, I went for a long hike in the Vanderbilt Estate Park. Sans mask and gloves.
It was an incredibly beautiful spring day, and the park was empty, as it nearly always is, as people hereabouts prefer eating Cheetos and watching Fox News to full spectrum sunlight even at the healthiest of times.
One of my favorite pastimes while hiking is what I can only call botanical archeology. For example: There is an empty field in the park that this time of year is covered with crocuses:
Crocuses are not native to these parts, though. Who planted these crocuses? Why did they plant them? I get that the crocuses propagate on their own, but someone must have planted the first bulbs.
The field is out in the middle of nowhere, no buildings around it. There must have been a building here once, though, perhaps a pagoda or some other picturesque place where the very, very rich people who owned this estate, long dead, came to picnic.
###
In the evening, I hunted down I, Claudius, one of the most brilliant television shows ever created, bad 1970s production values notwithstanding.
America has much in common with ancient Rome.
Though it took a couple of centuries for the Roman Empire to really begin to rot, and it looks as though it will only take the U.S. four months.
I thought of W.H. Auden’s poem, The Fall of Rome:
The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
Auden is my favorite poet for a reason, you know.
I went to the store. I masked! I gloved! I stood eight feet apart from everyone else! I carried a large roll of paper towels and a bottle of Lemon Lysol spray with which I doused all surfaces—including the surfaces of the objects I bought.
All the other shoppers, maskless, gloveless, and congregating in cozy groups, looked at me as though I were insane.
Did I care?
I did not!
I bought a selfie stick.
Because, you know, when it's the End of the World, you need to take a lot of selfies.
Right. I still can’t take a decent selfie. And, yes, that is a genuine Plague Doctor mask from once-polluted-and-now-swimming-with-swans Venice. I'm seriously thinking of wearing it next time I go to Ocean Lots.
###
When I got home, I disinfected some more. And then, I went for a long hike in the Vanderbilt Estate Park. Sans mask and gloves.
It was an incredibly beautiful spring day, and the park was empty, as it nearly always is, as people hereabouts prefer eating Cheetos and watching Fox News to full spectrum sunlight even at the healthiest of times.
One of my favorite pastimes while hiking is what I can only call botanical archeology. For example: There is an empty field in the park that this time of year is covered with crocuses:
Crocuses are not native to these parts, though. Who planted these crocuses? Why did they plant them? I get that the crocuses propagate on their own, but someone must have planted the first bulbs.
The field is out in the middle of nowhere, no buildings around it. There must have been a building here once, though, perhaps a pagoda or some other picturesque place where the very, very rich people who owned this estate, long dead, came to picnic.
###
In the evening, I hunted down I, Claudius, one of the most brilliant television shows ever created, bad 1970s production values notwithstanding.
America has much in common with ancient Rome.
Though it took a couple of centuries for the Roman Empire to really begin to rot, and it looks as though it will only take the U.S. four months.
I thought of W.H. Auden’s poem, The Fall of Rome:
The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
Auden is my favorite poet for a reason, you know.
