Mallory's Camera

On the same trip to Monster Video I grabbed Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Now usually when I rent movies, I never watch them. If they're good enough, I assume they'll channel their excellence into me through a kind of osmosis, possibly when I'm asleep. I don't have the time or mental energy right now to watch movies. My attention span is approximately .01 seconds.

But yesterday I'd spent the morning ordering - will six-foot long bamboo curtains with bleeding hearts inscribed Te Quiero really sell? How about Loteria games? How about bottles of hot sauce with bad caricatures of Kerry and Bush? - and then I walked the dogs with Max who was in a whiney, petulant mood, and then I called Abe who was ditto.

“Maybe I'll just drop out of school,” Max said. “Maybe I'll just lie on a beach reading books. I'd get a better education.”

“Go for it,” I said. Thinking: that'll save me the $8000 I have to fork out on tuition which I can then invest in Frida Kahlo tschochkes. Those will sell.

Abe was whining about mistreatment at the hands of his Knopf editor.

“It's axiomatic,” I said. “You don't start making real money until your third book. But see, in order to write your third book, you have to have completed your second.”

But he was already some place where I no longer mattered, footnote to a context that was fading fast.

So then I found myself with an hour and a half to kill before I had to go in to the store. I'm currently reading Donna Tartt's The Little Friend which I like well enough, but I wasn't really in the mood for Harriet the Spy meets Flannery O'Connor.

So I did something weird. I put Girl With a Pearl Earring in the VCR and I actually watched it.

I was engrossed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, light and color. Cinematographer does Dutch realism. Changing standards of beauty. Conspiracy of fluctuating motives.

But what really absorbed me was the revelation of how fucking much work it was to be alive three hundred and fifty years ago.

I mean from dawn to dusk, there's poor Scarlett Johansson, on her knees with that dirty rag and that scummy bowl of water, spreading typhoid germs over every flat surface.

Then I started thinking about time.

Three hundred and fifty years is not so very long ago but as L.P. Hartley noted in the most perfect opening lines ever penned, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

The codicil: the past is one big homogenous country. I can remember reading F. Scott Fitzgerald in my teens and thinking, this is very quaint and irrelevant. The Roaring Twenties were a long, long time ago.

But really they were only thirty years before I was born.

The perception of time is built into the way we perceive the world because neurons code for sensory stimuli through frequency (a time-related function) rather than through amplitude. But really, the present tense is a collective delusion with no more significance than any other molecular collusion.