high time

I.

Our tour of Carol Bove's work at the High Line began last evening in the drizzling rain.  We ducked underneath an elderberry (Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis) to follow the tracks as they bore to the southwest, around the perimeter of the Penn Station rail yard.

Maybe it's the mark of my insociability, but I've always liked the idea that nature is waiting in the wings to take over (even when much of that "nature" is transplanted and invasive).  And I found, on this rainy July evening, that "nature" had composed its own color palate.  The dark reddish-brown steel was punctuated by white Queen Anne's lace, its flowers doily-flat or fisted.  I saw rough buttonweed and the yellow spire of common mullein.  A plant that looked like purple aster clouded the tracks.  Seen together it formed a natural palate of drifting greens against the grey of the Hudson and the grey of the sky and the shiny steel of the railyard below.  Some of Carol Bove's pieces echoed the white starkness of Queen Anne's lace; others rusted in bright orange-red streaks and patterns like something seen on safari.

The guide's voice was muffled by the surrounding umbrellas and drowned out by the West Side Highway and helicopters, so I felt released from the responsibility of paying attention.  In any case, I think that I was not the only person there for whom the art was an incidental benefit.  The tour runs along the High Line's last "wild" stretch, which will be developed sometime next spring.  Earlier that day, when I'd bragged that I was going on a tour of the last wild section, an older work colleague barked, "It's just shitty.  It's like walking on the railtracks in Bayonne in the eighties."  And so my gentrified pretensions were dismissed, and I slunk away, well shamed.  Similarly, critics have scathingly termed the trend of photographing decaying cities and steel mills "ruin porn," arguing that it is self-fulfilling and exploitative.  It's also not a particularly new phenomenon - though the eighteenth and nineteenth century fetish for ruins was, in some sense, a discovery of an unknown past and, for others, a cautionary, humbling encounter with the future.  But we are not even so far removed in time from the ruins we now photograph: it has not been millennia.  This is no Ozmandias.  It is our own recent history, sometimes even a contemporary experience - not our own, of course; other people's, more easily dismissible.  Perhaps it is simply that we don't recognize the danger as we blithely celebrate the replacement of cities that make things with people who tweet things.

Maybe I am being too hard on us, though.  How can I judge when I have loved both Rome and Berlin, the original and more recent manifestation of the city of ruins?  Because there is something beautiful about so many of these places, industrial or not; and I think that the impulse to photograph them is understandable.  Better that we see these places as objects of beauty than as sites of horror.  We aren't good about thinking of ourselves in real time because it would be unbearable if we did - if we were to know that this was the last time that we would ever see a place or a person, or that our refuge would fall, or that this would be the best things ever would be, before an irreversible decline.  We smugly take photographs of these places, and maybe we wonder about the people who once lived there, but we know, we know, that they were nothing like us.

II.

One night earlier, in Rye, my aunt had shown me around the garden: purple clematis and glorious billows of lavender and the sad spent sex of the peonies.  Her prized dahlias were just getting ready to bloom.  Astilbe and clamorous rudbeckia - "black-eyed Susies," my uncle said with affection - had self-seeded in nearly every bed.  In the backyard, on the under-leaves of nameless prairie wildflowers, fat bumblebees slept upside down.  I watched their furry little bodies trembling and heaving with effort.

I imagine that bumblebees must dream about work.

I dream about work, too.


III.

While we sat quietly in front of our emptied plates, my aunt remarked that she had known her good friend ____ for fifty years  - fifty years, a stretch of time so long that, when you're young, you can't imagine experiencing it, letting knowing someone for that period.  (At the millennium, my father told me, "We used to talk about the twenty-first century, and it didn't seem real.  I thought, 'Well, but I'll be over fifty by then, I'll be an old man by then!'"  And he smiled, as though embarrassed, and I, who was then not yet twenty, thought coldly, But fifty is old, I could never be so old.)   I have known, for example, my friend J. since we were twelve or thirteen.  We can legitimately say that we have known one another for twenty years - and those years didn't begin in the mists of pre-memory or the crib.  We have known one another since we were proper young adults worried about social status and relationships and college boards.

This morning, the train passed shaggy clumps of sambucus and chest-high weeds.  (They were probably all the same plants as those I saw on the High Line tour, but if it's in Jersey, it isn't sexy.)  And I realized that summer as I know it - which I define as the long days of late June and July until the end of August, quite apart from whatever official calendrical definitions - was already half over.  I watched the foliage outside my window and was reminded of a similar trip that I took in the first week of August, last year.  And I thought, At this time last year, I had only two weeks left in Berlin - and, honestly, that's all I've got now.  Two weeks until the trip's over.

The years pass more quickly as you get older, I've always heard, but for me it's actually at the level of the day, sometimes even the hour: always the astonished mid-morning glance at the clock, only to realize that it is almost lunchtime and I have been awake already for a quarter of the day, and what have I got to show for the hours since 5 a.m.?  Never enough.  And every night, collapsing into a bed, wondering how the day can be gone with so little to show for it.


IV.

I was re-reading Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, which I remember as one of the most astonishing novels I'd ever read when it was assigned to me as a college freshman, as the train to Rye slugged from side to side.  Standing, I steadied myself against the wall and read,

But upon my word, I don't know how we put in our time. How does one put in one's time? How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing whatever, you understand. Not so much as a bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Nauheim.  And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one's fellow beings—nothing either. Upon my word, I couldn't tell you offhand whether the lady who sold the so expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station, was cheating me or no; I can't say whether the porter who carried our traps across the station at Leghorn was a thief or no when he said that the regular tariff was a lira a parcel. The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't.

I will, of course, having something at the end of all this.  (And I don't mean to imply that Ford was concerned with the sort of corporate self-help sold by LinkedIn.)  I nonetheless find myself thinking this same thought quite often, my plans for the last 10 years having vanished or so transformed themselves as to be unrecognizable.  I could have predicted none of this, I said earlier this year, and I now know it to be truer than even I thought.  People preach about mindfulness, about living every moment, considering every moment, savoring every moment, but my God, such attentiveness is exhausting, it is like the weighing of every penny.  Much easier to wake up, a decade or more on, to look at the waist-high jungle of weeds and rust and wonder when it all happened, how it passed by, if there is anything to be salvaged or understood or made beautiful.