Vermeer, Mister Softee and J. Alfred Prufrock walked Into a Bar...

Last week it snowed, big fat flakes without consequences, like a dream of snow, falling on the magnolia and the forsythia blossoms. Now it's warm enough to walk around without a coat, but refreshingly cool and breezy on the shady side of the streets. The flowering trees and the Mister Softee ice cream trucks are both out; afternoon light like something in a Vermeer painting. The blocks of historic town houses in Brooklyn Heights date back only to the middle of the 19th century, yet walking around this afternoon I had the strange sensation of having stepped into one of those 17th century Dutch cityscapes. The streets looked just about right, and I somehow managed to tune out the cars. The people were dressed wrong, yet engaged in the timeless customs of city life: children were playing, dogs were being walked, people were washing windows from the inside, squishing white cloth against the clear panes.

It felt, in short, like coming unstuck in time, painfully beautiful and somehow paifully painful at the same time. The beauty of the flowering trees is so transient! A memento mori stark as a skull in the middle of a still life, to continue with the art history metaphors. When am I going to get serious? I thought. Half my life gone and nothing to show for it.

What did I think I should have accomplished by now? People write novels, they raise children, they build business empires or sequence DNA or save lives. Some people do, anyway. The rest of us kind of hang around the margins and comment on the action. Perhaps part of getting older is recognizing your own ordinariness and dealing with it.


No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.


The problem with this is I always felt that T.S. Eliot was protesting too much. He attempts to appear very much taken with the plight of the ordinary person and the tragedy of modernity and all that, but in the end, doesn't he secretly think he really is Prince Hamlet?

I guess, in the end, don't we all?