Protection, not Connection

Under the dusty sun.  You can tell there is a nice day up there.  The sun is setting in a sky with fluffy blue clouds like you might see in a Thomas Gainsborough painting with a seventeenth century lady in blue and white satin standing beneath an impossible sky, on some afternoon you justified for yourself uptown at the Frick.  If you look up, you could convince yourself that all’s well in the world.  But as your eyes arc down to the horizon the buildings only five hundred meters away are obscured by grit.  The view on the highway before me is distorted after the first kilometer.  At least we’re moving.  We just jumped on to the airport express at 4:00PM and who knows what might have happened.  As it is, there was next to no traffic and we’re making far better progress than I could have hoped for. 

Three days left in 2015.  It’s a banal thing to note on 12/29/15, certainly.  But if you read that from the pen of someone writing in 1913, or 1939, or even 2000, you might pause and consider all that was about to befall that person.  Do we sit before another year of local dramas with no particular significance as perhaps 2015 will be remembered or will this year yield something that fundamentally interrupts the normal flow of my or your life?

Vladimir Nabokov navigated a fundamental change or two.  Born in Russia in 1899, in month of April, he must have been eighteen during the October Revolution that forced he and his family to leave St Petersburg.  He would have then watched as the country was demonized, Godless, and then lionized, the victorious ally and then cast solidly once again by the west, as arch enemy.  That is how Russian would remain, from his perch in the U.S., for the rest of his life.   I remember reading “Pnin” in my twenties and being spellbound.  I picked up a copy of “Bend Sinister” a few years back and didn’t enjoy it nearly so much.   Now I have begun “Despair” on a friend’s recommendation.  The trap established with his doppelgänger Felix, is about to be sprung.

A young lady came and begged just now beside my taxi window while we were stopped at a traffic light.  She must have been in her thirties.  My mind is on a snap-trigger reflex:  You have decided to engage me because you see I am foreign.  I look you over and you do not look old, you do not evidence a handicap, you do not have a child to care for.  I role down the window, still on auto pilot and say: “this is something you shouldn’t do.”  She goes on to the next car.  It is only at this point that my humanity returns and defences ebb.  Have I never known anguish in my thirties?  What does age or relative appearance of need or number dependencies have to do with someone needing help?   This city’s as heartless as they come.  You reach the bottom and you hit the street.  Maybe it’s a scam.  But who cares. It’s a painful scam.  One’s humanity is coated over and dulled, in order to make one's way through a city of twenty million and the immediate instinct is protection, not connection.