I keep seeing people post about how January is such a slow month. As if that’s a bad thing. I know COVID screwed with everyone’s sense of time, but age is doing the same for me. I don’t see friends for months, but when I do, it feels like just a few days have passed. This is perhaps a measure of the strength of my friendships. As well as the ways in which social media keeps us in touch. But I also think it’s just that time speeds up the older you get.
The poet Louise Gluck wrote: We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Alice, back in Wonderland, had this exchange with the Red Queen:
Alice was puzzled. ‘In our country,’ she remarked, ‘there’s only one day at a time.’
The Red Queen said, ‘That’s a poor thin way of doing things. Now here, we mostly have days and nights two or three at a time, and sometimes in the winter we take as many as five nights together—for warmth, you know.’
‘Are five nights warmer than one night, then?’ Alice ventured to ask.
‘Five times as warm, of course.’
The older we get, the less new experiences we have, the more time contracts…is what I assume is happening. It leaves me feeling like one day I’m going to go to bed and wake up in the morning — toasty from the warmth of taking so many decades together — to find I’m eighty. And not because I’m sleeping through my life. I’m most definitely not! Every decade just goes quicker, like the speed multiplier option on podcasts. I’m currently living at a 1.5x. I assume it’s only going to get faster. (Add in here, all the caveats about health, which is speeding its way into being the central keep-your-fingers crossed concern.)
I like a slow January, because once it’s February, it’s basically September. Especially now that the seasons are so flattened. It used to be, February was weeks of bleak coldness, but it was 60* here two weeks ago. The planet is also off the clock. It might already be Thanksgiving by the time this hits your inbox.
Speaking of being 80-years-old. This piece on E. Jean Carroll by Jess Bennett is so good. I can’t stop thinking about it. This passage in particular:
“I couldn’t stop thinking that this trial was also about something else: the value of a woman, long past middle age, who dared to claim she indeed still had value. Just how radical was it for Ms. Carroll, 80, to demand that she was worth something?”
It brought to mind that line from Tennyson’s Ulysses: “but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done,”
Noble and so freaking brave in the case of E. Jean. A heroic heart, to be sure.
Housekeeping: I’m hoping to be in Paris for a few weeks next month. If you have any burning Paris questions for a person who continues to speak questionable French, send them my way.
Good decisions (links edition):
Talk Easy podcast interview with Wesley Morris: I could listen to Wesley forever. (Still Processing, which he co-hosts with J. Wortham, is a forever fave). The part of the convo where they discuss the loss of the middle film, and the middle culture, has really stuck with me. We’ve also lost middle news, ie, local news. And subsequently are losing so much more as a result. Also, the idea that Working Girl, a perfect film, wouldn’t get made today, is too painful to contemplate.
“It’s so important to set intentions.” This had me laughing out loud to myself last night. And reminded me of this “her wardrobe is made of curtains” perfection.
Now that Truman Capote is back in the news (is he ever really gone), a friend reminded me of this 2015 piece I wrote for the Guardian, which, in part, is about the time I went to Holcomb, Kansas with a friend who was writing a piece on In Cold Blood and discovered that some people there, who’d met them both, believed Harper Lee was that book’s true author.