Dear Diary: Events
It turned out to be a nice day. Thanks to two nightmares that visited me this morning, though, I expected it to be rather awful. I looked out at the beautifully clear September sky, and all I could think of was that beautiful Tuesday morning nearly eight years ago. I’m not given to anniversaries and commemorations — not emotionally, that is — but the nightmares were discouraging.
The nightmare that I had while I was sleeping was a computer thing — my desktop wouldn’t boot up properly. I’m pretty sure that it was inspired by what I’ve just learned is a new Windows update that won’t install itself properly, and that has to be manually quelled. It’s not a big deal, but it kindles ancient anxieties.
And notwithstanding the nice-day business, this nightmare turned out to be prophetic. When I sat down to start work at The Daily Blague, the site’s server was in the process of melting down. The outage didn’t last very long, and I worked around it with what struck me at the time as supernatural aplomb. Then, in the afternoon, Gmail went down for a few hours. Nobody seemed very upset about it; aside from one feed at reddit, I saw no mention of it at all. Oh, there was a Times story about the “fail,” and all that; I knew that it wasn’t just me. But it seems that I don’t know anybody who really depends on Gmail for anything, and I find that unsettling. Is everyone really too busy otherwise, texting at the wheel of a car?
The much worse nightmare that I had while I lay in bed awake was occasioned by the September sun. In theory, the morning sun ought to fall full strength on my face in in late April, but I’m never aware of it doing so, as I always am in early September, when it’s the first harbinger of autumn. My eyes were closed, but the intense light filled my head with a fiery redness — or at least the hot orange that is so not yellow (the sun’s high-noon color) that we read it as red. Most people, I think, would have rejoiced in the life-giving light and warmth, but I couldn’t.
Whether it’s because I never believed in God or because I read a Golden Book of solar-system science at too tender an age, I regard the sun as a massive and ongoing atomic explosion. To me, the sun is, above all things, violent — a very big bomb. This sort of thinking makes it difficult to accept the fact — and what kind of fact is it, anyway? — that the sun is prodigiously stable. How stable is “stable”? What if there were — an event?
In this nightmare, IÂ got past the total extermination of life part as immediately as life itself would be exterminated in the event of an event. I moved right on to wondering how long it would take the Eiffel Tower to burst into flames and/or melt. And for the ensuing puddle to evaporate, like drops of water in a hot skillet. Thirty seconds?
And yet: it turned out to be a very good day! I didn’t do a lot of work, it’s true. But I read a great deal, and I took an energetic walk. I cooked the first batch of the season’s ragù. And I watched most of two Cary Grant classics. The most remarkable thing about the day was the intensity with which the Cary Grant classics didn’t strike me as classics, as beloved old-chestnut movies. They were as fresh and lively as anything showing in a theatre right now.
The movies, His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, hadn’t changed — I had changed. I was every bit as exhilarated by the witty, deeply romantic dialogue as I was forty years ago by the discovery of the witty, deeply romantic pleasure of intimacy with brainy girls. The badinage between Grant and his leading ladies, Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn, is as joyously abandoned as what used to be called “criminal conversation” (illicit sex). It isn’t a stand-in for sex, it is sex. How had I missed this? I hadn’t missed it, but I hadn’t felt it. Today, I felt it, you-know-where.
On my smiling face.