The train comes out from the underground and we rejoice, this car full of strangers, all of us looking across at this infinity of brick and chimneys and bright graffiti, calmed, reassured, somehow, like the real world is a TV show that could have been canceled while the subway took us through dark nothing. The Bronx is immense and still, dark clouds overhead and rain impending.

The Kenyon Review, via my Google Reader, informs me that it is Dalloday - which I take to mean the day on which Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway takes place, or at least a day when people are supposed to read the book. And I realize I need to re-read it, not having done so since college. I loved it then. but could not help read it as an attempt at another Ulysses, rather than a critique of it (or maybe I did read it as a critique and could not see where it succeeds as such). What I see now is that Mrs. Dalloway is a book about people living life, in community, in an astonishing state of interconnectedness, whereas Ulysses is about people who are fundamentally alone, whose interactions and circumperambulations (not a word, I know) and encounters only serve to underscore their basic isolation from one another.

And then I’m at a funeral and overhear someone say that it’s the 118th birthday of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, and just last week I was reading about his death in prison, where he was held by a Soviet-sponsored military junta. And how when he died, his captors declared “the end of the Solomonic dynasty.”

And then I’m at Walking With Dinosaurs at Madison Square Garden, me and J. taking Christina out for her birthday, and there are ENORMOUS ANIMATRONIC FRICKIN DINOSAURS, and the place is full of squealing dinosaur-obsessed kids, like I used to be, like I still am.

But the dinosaurs are all dead now. They were awesome and huge and had big claws and fangs and ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years - and they’re gone. Everything ends. Every system eventually sputters out. No oppression goes on forever. Dynasties fall. Corporations and governments crack apart or get consumed. People die. The fat wheezing man behind us, the little kids shaking their plastic glow sticks in the row in front of us.

Everything dies, and is it any wonder we want ways to keep on living? Royal dynasties, great books we hope will keep on being read long after we’re gone? The hope that one day someone will dig up our bones and bring us back to life as robots?’

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 10:58 am and is filed under Culture as Resistance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.