I hate subways. Traveling in tunnels under the earth is a mode of transportation more appropriate for moles or hamsters. Human beings need light and air. Much of my misspent youth was spent on the London subway, called the Underground, and I have no fond memories of it.

But last time I was in London I took the Underground again, and found myself sandwiched between an exotically scented street person and a tight Teutonic knot of German tourists. Claustrophobia kicked in. The advertisements along the top of the carriage were the only entertainment, so I looked fixedly at them until my eyes collided with a poem. It was a shock, like finding a diamond in a garbage dump.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
Where the right road had been lost sight of.

That poem spoke directly to me. Substitute “tunnel” for “wood” and it described my situation exactly. It turned out to be a fragment from Dante’s Divine Comedy, “The Inferno,” which seems particularly appropriate for that or any other subway. In fact Dante is in every way the perfect poet of the Underground. His famous line: “All hope abandon ye who enter here” should be posted at the entrance to every station.

After so many years of avoiding subterranean travel I had forgotten about “Poems on the Underground.” This valuable service, which posts a constantly changing selection of poems all over London’s huge transport system, began in 1986 as an initiative of the Poetry Society. Now the idea has spread all over the world from Adelaide, Australia to St. Petersburg in Russia. The Chinese are thinking about it. Here the MTA started its own program, called “Poetry in motion,” back in 1992. You can be surprised by cool poems even in the steaming inferno of the New York subway.

This is one of those small things that almost restores one’s faith in the sanity of the human race. It was a stroke of genius to put poetry where no one would ever expect to find it, and so make it available to millions of people who would never open a book of poems, or perhaps a book of any kind. Poetry can have an impact like nothing else. A few lines between station stops might change your life. It’s a pity that, like Dante, we have to descend into the bowels of the earth to find it.

Personally I would like to see more poetry in more places where it might do good – places where the human condition is at its most desperate, like the Long Island Expressway and the Department of Motor Vehicles. Above all these days we need to see poetry in airports, and in the aircraft themselves – a form of transportation that Dante in his worst nightmares could never have imagined. A few uplifting verses here might make the difference between hope and despair. But where is the poet who can rise to such a challenge? How about our own local Long Island genius, Walt Whitman?

O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying
clouds, as one with them.
Or, just to remind us of the fragility of our in-flight situation:
O human race, born to fly upward,
Wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall.

Copyright: David Bouchier (and Walt Whitman)

Marooned in a waiting room, I picked up a magazine and started reading a sensational article about reincarnation. The article speculated on the past lives of some enormously famous celebrities I’d never heard of. The author appeared to believe that every media celebrity must be the reincarnation of a past media celebrity, a theory that runs into problems as soon as you get back a couple of generations to the time before media celebrities were invented.

The idea of reincarnation is one of the most appealing and at the same time one of the silliest of all human fancies. But, if we set aside the logical and metaphysical problems, there’s no denying that it has an awful fascination. The belief in reincarnation emerged way back in the mists of antiquity, and it may be one of the oldest human beliefs. Life was pretty rough a million years ago, and it was only natural for our ancestors to imagine another and better life. They probably got the idea by looking at their cats, sleeping by the fire at the back of the cave. Reincarnation was absorbed into various eastern religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism and, in our addled age, it has reappeared as a significant part of quasi-religions like Spiritualism, Scientology, and various so-called “New Age” therapies such as past life regression. According to the Gallup Poll, twenty-five per cent of all Americans believe in reincarnation.

It’s easy to understand why. We don’t want to just disappear when we die, and we don’t want to do the same thing all over again. It’s exciting to imagine that we might come back as something or somebody completely different.

The catch, of course, is that there’s no knowing what or who we might be in a future life. We might come back as anything at all – a bear, a broccoli plant, or a bug. I quite like the idea of being a bear, because I wouldn’t have to make many changes in my lifestyle. But the sting in the tail of traditional reincarnation doctrine is that it has a moral dimension. We come back as the thing we deserve to be, whatever that is. If we haven’t lived well in this life, our next one could be pretty nasty. On the other hand, if we have lived well through many lives we achieve Nirvana. We escape the endless wheel of rebirth and enter a kind of disembodied state of eternal bliss, much like retirement in Florida. Most people find this uncertainty about the future disturbing. They prefer to focus on their past lives.

Putting people in touch with their previous lives has become a major therapeutic industry. Oddly enough these past incarnations were all rather splendid. Everybody was famous, powerful, and beautiful. Nobody, it seems, was ever a scullery maid or a dirt farmer in a previous life. When you talk to people who believe in reincarnation, which is always a surreal experience, they always talk about the important characters they used to be. Napoleon and Cleopatra seem to be popular choices. They don’t seem to reflect that this descent from glory to obscurity must have resulted from some pretty bad behavior in their previous incarnations.

One version of reincarnation doctrine suggests that when you die you are reborn at once, which means that your previous incarnation must have died on your birth date, if you follow me. This immediately sent me to the genealogy pages to discover who had in fact died on my birth date. I found a lot on nonentities, a decorated Major General from the Boer War (I can’t have been him) and, to my amazement, the remarkable Pope Pius XI – and I don’t think I could have been him either.

If you really believed in the moral purpose of reincarnation it would keep you on your toes. Nobody wants to come back as a carrot or a cockroach. But I don’t believe there’s any justice in this life, or the last, or the next. Why couldn’t I have been reincarnated as Sean Penn, or even better Catherine Zeta Jones? My life would be quite different, to say nothing of my wardrobe. So what exactly did I do to deserve this?

The only really strong argument in support of reincarnation is the existence of cats. If you are owned by one or more cats you know, you just know, that they have lived not just nine but hundreds of lives over thousand of years. Their wisdom and cunning are infinite. They like to pretend that they were aristocratic princes and princesses in their previous lives. But that’s just a cat joke: they have more sense. Cats always arrange to be reborn on the very highest step of the ladder of reincarnation, as cats.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Since the economy collapsed on our heads in 2008 a huge number of people have lost their jobs, and there’s not much sign of any improvement. Even before the recession the habit of sending American jobs abroad (outsourcing) was a big issue in the coming years. Its supporters claim that, if we can produce more goods more cheaply overseas, we will be more competitive. Also, outsourcing lowers the cost of goods and services for Americans, so everybody should be happy. People who lose their jobs in the process should contemplate the BMWs lined up outside the golf club, and take pleasure in the good fortune of others. As a consolation prize they can buy a Chinese-made DVD player for thirty dollars and while away the empty hours watching movies.

Those who condemn outsourcing warn that every kind of paid work can potentially be outsourced, except direct service jobs like lawn care and waiting tables. Millions of manufacturing, data processing and phone service jobs have already gone. There’s no end to this rational economic process. One estimate says that fourteen million more jobs will vanish in the near future.

Nobody’s job is safe. Teaching, for example, can easily be outsourced. Many colleges are doing it right now by creating online courses that can be taught by anybody, anywhere. A novel by Deborah Moggach, These Foolish Things imagines outsourcing the care of elderly people to Bangalore in India. The climate is perfect, with temperatures in the senior citizen comfort zone between 68-80 degrees, and staff wages are minimal. Do you want to bet it will never happen?

The rules that govern outsourcing are simple, and brutal: if the job can be done just as well and more cheaply elsewhere, then it should be done elsewhere. So let’s consider the economics of the U.S. Congress. What Congress does, essentially, is to talk – and it is very expensive talk. Members of Congress get $158,000 a year, a combined wage bill of almost $77 millions, not counting their very generous perks and benefits. Now, many jobs are being outsourced to India, where wages are a tiny fraction of this, and Indians are wonderfully adept at talk and argument. A Congress relocated to India would talk just as much about such issues as term limits and campaign finance reform, with exactly the same result. Of course they would probably also vote to raise their own salaries, which would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Aye, there’s the rub, as Hamlet might have said if he had been a corporate executive instead of a verbose prince. When we outsource work to poorer countries we raise their living standards. Expectations rise, and wages are pushed up. Those foreign workers won’t always be so cheap. Back home, shareholder’s profits and director’s salaries will be swallowed up by pointless extravagances like housing and health care for these foreign workers. Outsourcing is a short-term strategy. Meanwhile, after years of unemployment, millions of impoverished Americans will be willing to work for peanuts. So the jobs will come home, eventually. The process is called globalization. Everything goes around and comes around.

I thought this was all quite amusing until I realized that it applied to me too. Ironic essayists must be two a penny in Bangladesh or the Bahamas. The whole machinery of culture could be outsourced. With satellite communications it doesn’t matter what comes from where, and a few more indigent writers and artists will scarcely be noticed. I may have been outsourced already, and nobody will ever know.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Let me tell you how it was to spend two weeks in England with my ninety-seven year old mother. We wanted to give her a break from her busy life of watching television and drinking tea at home, so we stayed in a rented cottage on a sheep farm in the middle of the beautiful Sussex countryside. The cottage was so isolated that we all experienced a kind of sensory deprivation. The nights were utterly silent. During the daytime we could hear various comments from the surrounding sheep and birds, the occasional tractor, and nothing else.

All our regular activities and commitments simply stopped – no meetings to attend, no classes to teach, no deadlines to meet, no radio programs to prepare. Without a telephone connection we didn’t even have access to the greatest time waster ever invented – the Internet. Nothing was left to do but a bit of shopping and cooking.

Within twenty-four hours of arriving at the cottage our days had filled up. Suddenly, we were busy, thus proving yet again the infallibility of Parkinson’s Law. This famous law, promulgated in 1957 by the English genius C. Northcote Parkinson, states simply that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law explains many things: why retired people always seem to be in a hurry in spite of apparently having nothing to do, and why government agencies take twice as much time and five times as many employees to accomplish anything. We all know the truth of the old adage that if you want to get something done you should give the job to a busy person. Unlimited time means unlimited delay.

I decided that our vacation would be an ideal opportunity to study how Parkinson’s Law actually works. This is the sort of thing I do when I have nothing to do. I observed carefully how a very tiny number of activities had so quickly expanded to fill the empty hours of each day. It turned out to be very simple. We just took much longer to do all the everyday things we usually do in a hurry. Everything was stretched out. In the village shop, choosing a salad dressing took two minutes instead of two seconds; a shower might take half an hour; getting postage stamps fifteen minutes. Odd moments were filled in by talking with the farm’s three sheep dogs, Billy, Bramble and Moss, the farm workers, the nameless farm cat and (when absolutely desperate for conversation) the sheep. Cooking became a major enterprise, washing the dishes was a whole evening’s entertainment. Taking a walk could occupy half a day instead of half an hour. We also took long pointless drives in the countryside, just to fill up the time, often stopping for lunch at small country pubs where service was extremely leisurely. We watched television. We drank tea. Everything happened in dreamy slow motion, like a Tai Chi class.

Our lives were arrested, like speeding bullets fired into a barrel of molasses. Each day seemed like a week (or, when it rained and we had to play cards, like a month). We filled time. We wasted time. We lost track of time altogether. Time ceased to matter. We entered the Zen zone of timelessness that is the goal of all true vacations.

There’s a lot to be said for sharing your holiday with a nonagenerian. It slows you down, it lowers your blood pressure, and it prepares you for the future. As for my mother she said she had a lovely time: it just went by too fast.

Copyright: David Bouchier

There are good reasons to be nervous about traveling these days. We share the roads with drivers who are absorbed in phone calls or texting, and perhaps enjoying some kind of drug experience into the bargain. When we take to the skies we are at the mercy of mad shoe bombers, underwear bombers and soon, we are warned, bombers who actually hide explosives inside their bodies. That will really slow things down at the airport check-in.

But I love to travel, and hate the idea of being stuck in one place. The environmentalists are right of course when they say that pointless travel and tourism are eating up the planet. We could use the ecological argument to stay at home and avoid all the worries. But, inevitably, we head for the airport and join the huge crowd of other people who have made the same irrational and immoral choice.

If we human beings were sensible creatures we wouldn’t travel at all; in fact we would never have left our cozy homes in Africa a hundred thousand years ago. The risks of something going wrong on a long journey are enormous. Even the perfectly straightforward from New York to the South of France, which we take regularly, is fraught with possibilities of disruption and disaster: strikes, storms, air crashes, car crashes, illness and this year, as a special bonus, the Icelandic Volcano that may bring us all to a standstill wherever we happen to be, like a global game of musical chairs. Each time (so far) we have arrived safely and decided that had been nothing to worry about.

In the past few years a whole industry has grown up to exploit our fear of travel. We get a catalog for anxious travelers that offers solutions to problems we never even knew we had, including masks to protect against real or imagined viruses, several kinds of antibacterial hand cleaners including some that work with ultraviolet light, and even an antibacterial seat cover to put over your aircraft seat in case your body rests where some alien body might have rested. Fear of pollution outweighs even the fear of looking ridiculous. The same catalog has emergency radios, first aid kits, drugs, health products of many types including portable air purifiers, and all kinds of devices to protect the anxious traveler against foreign bathrooms. It doesn’t make travel seem like much fun, and I suppose it isn’t if you worry about all these things. Robert Louis Stevenson said that to travel hopefully was better than to arrive. But that was in the 1870s, before we were encouraged to travel with gritted teeth and a bag full of emergency products, fretting about the next disaster.

Yet travel was never as safe or reliable as it is now. Before airplanes came along untold numbers of people perished at sea in storms and shipwrecks. The Titanic was just one in a long line of transatlantic shipping disasters. Travelers were (and still are) taken by pirates, caught in train wrecks, kidnapped by bandits, starved, or simply lost and never found. The horrors of old-time travel have been well documented and exhaustively exploited by Hollywood. Yet people still traveled in spite of it all, and not just explorers and adventurers like Odysseus or Columbus. After tourism became fashionable in the eighteenth century the world set out to see the world, no matter how uncomfortable and dangerous it might be. Their robust spirit should be an inspiration to all of us as we wait nervously in the airport security line.

Copyright: David Bouchier

In the merry month of May most of us had had the experience of being almost run off the road by gigantic white limousines racing from one ceremony to the next. We live near a spot much favored for wedding photographs and, on the weekends, the happy couples are lined up like jumbo jets waiting to land.

Weddings are big business, to the tune of about fifty billion dollars a year. The average wedding costs twenty thousand dollars. Now that people marry for life, not just once but several times, the wedding industry’s turnover has increased in proportion. If the President is looking for an example of economic growth he need look no further than this. His advisers should whisper in the Presidential ear that gay marriage is yet another source of economic good news. Six million new couples will potentially qualify for the full wedding industry treatment, and the profits will be vast. That should end the argument about gay marriage.

There is no reason for any bride to go into this ordeal unprepared. She can refer to any one of five big magazines called, with stunning lack of originality, Bridal Guide, Bride’s, Elegant Bride, For the Bride, and Modern Bride. There are no magazines for bridegrooms, unless you count Sports Illustrated. When magazine publishers catch up with gay marriage, no doubt we’ll see titles like Brides and Brides.

I don’t see why they need to keep publishing these bridal magazines. One single issue of any of them – and they are larger than most college textbooks – would have served very well for the past fifty years, and possibly for the last hundred. Nothing really changes. There are beauty secrets, tips on etiquette, articles on choosing the dress, choosing the flowers, how not to insult the in-laws, advice for the nervous bride (but none for the terrified bridegroom), celebrity wedding stories, and so on.

It is a reassuring, highly regulated world, though strangely lopsided. The wedding will last for only a few hours, and the marriage might last for years. Seven years is the average, not too long to keep those old bridal magazines in the closet for a rainy day. Weddings are never easy. Honeymoons are even harder.

We were vacationing on the island of Nevis a few years back. Several young honeymoon couples came and went from the hotel. They were, like most honeymooners, wrapped in gloom, scarcely speaking to each other. They looked the way you imagine bungee jumpers look, about two seconds after they leap into space. They were thinking about the future. Even if they’ve been together for a while, marriage changes everything. Practical questions crowd in: how will they file their taxes? How many cats will they have? Will he get to keep his own name? The honeymoon is a period of transition, out of romance and into reality.

Old-fashioned honeymoon resorts kept young couples busy with activities and entertainments from morning till night, so they didn’t have time to think about anything. especially not about each other. But modern honeymooners head for the islands – there’s even a magazine called Island Weddings and Honeymoons. But islands are all wrong for honeymoons. Islands are too small, too quiet, and much too romantic.

These are very ancient rituals. The wedding represents the public commitment of the couple to each other, so everybody knows it’s ok. The honeymoon originated with the ancient Norse practice of kidnapping a bride from the neighboring village. The result, then as now, was that she left her family and got to travel a bit. Both rituals function as a kind of test, an ordeal designed to sort out the winners from the losers, genetically speaking.

It’s good to see young people keeping these traditions alive. Those of them who can survive a traditional wedding and a traditional honeymoon will find marriage comparatively easy. Good luck to them.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The desire to make things clean and tidy in the springtime seems to be an almost biological urge. Like most biological urges, it should be resisted. Spring may be the season of renewal and new beginnings, but there’s no point in going mad about it. The energy and optimism we feel at this time of year shouldn’t be wasted on cleaning.

Only a few hundred years ago spring was a season of joy and happiness, music and dancing, not domestic labor. The Romans had a great festival in honor of Flora the goddess of springtime and low-cholesterol and, in primitive countries like England, the annual spring ritual would be the Maypole Dance, in which young virgins, youths and maidens, would dance around on the village green, holding long ribbons attached to the top of a pole. As they circled the ribbons would wind around and get shorter and shorter until the dancers were all very close together. Obviously, this sort of thing couldn’t be allowed in these puritanical days, even if we could find young persons qualified to take part.

Naturally there were accidents during the celebrations – drunken falls, heart attacks, and inappropriate liaisons. Nobody cared much about that. But now we have legal liability, and political correctness, and the health police. A bit of wild partying can easily land you in court. The maypole dance might get you sued for discrimination against the disabled, or the merely dizzy. Excessive drinking will lead to huge medical bills. It’s safer to stay home and tidy the closets.

Another dismal modern phenomenon is what we might call springtime double jeopardy. Not only are we expected to clean, we are also expected to diet. In fact the quest for domestic order is very like dieting. It’s easy to achieve some short-term success, but almost impossible to maintain it. We are seduced by the many forms of disorder, just as we are seduced by the infinite varieties of food. The habits of a lifetime are just that – the habits of a lifetime.

I feel the tug of the spring-cleaning disease myself, but only very faintly like the gravitational pull of a distant star. I never have any trouble ignoring the symptoms. In fact I can allow my mind roam over the many possibilities that present themselves to my imagination as the weather improves. There’s outside painting, of course, and some power washing would be a good idea. The bird feeders need cleaning, the garage is a mess, my car is a disgrace, and there must be a hundred small odd jobs waiting for me to attack them with a hammer, or a chainsaw or a screwdriver, or a power drill. I have a lot of tools in the garage, because I like tools. But I don’t like using them, in case they wear out

The good news is that there are more and more specialized services out there to take over these tasks and allow us to enjoy our lives. Domestic cleaning is a whole industry, and even the traditional handyman is back in the form of a franchise operation. Thousands of “professional personal organizers” are poised to sort out our messy paperwork for about $200 an hour. It’s only a matter of time before we can look forward to dieting services – offering a range of large people who will lose weight on our behalf.

But the best and cheapest solution to springtime madness is just to wait it out. Once the weather gets really warm all these labors will become humid and unpleasant, the great outdoors will pull us away from domestic concerns, and weight loss will come as nature intended: through exercise, heat exhaustion, and plenty of sweat.

Copyright: David Bouchier

From time to time, and especially in April, most of us have wondered why taxes exist. The answer, of course, is that we must have taxes in order to support the government. This leaves us with the question: why does the government exist? That’s easy. If we didn’t have a government, who would collect the taxes?

In primitive societies, there were no governments, and therefore no taxes. But as soon as kings and chiefs and emperors appeared on the historical stage they acquired an exaggerated sense of self-importance, and a taste for expensive things like gold and jewels, fine foods, rare fabrics, and huge palaces. Naturally, they soon ran out of cash. These important people certainly didn’t want to work, so they had to find a reliable source of unearned income.

About five thousand years ago, some early financial genius noticed that the peasants sometimes had a bit of food to spare, or a few pennies hidden away, and that it was child’s play to take it away from them. If you could relieve a large number of peasants of small amounts of goods, it could add up to rather a pleasant lifestyle for the people at the top of the social pyramid. Thus taxation was born.

In the beginning, the collection system was pretty basic. When a king or a great lord ran out of cash, he would send out a raiding party to strip the nearby villages of everything they had. There were no thirty-day extensions. Anyone who objected to the assessment was simply killed. The taxmen would ride back to the castle with their booty, and that was that.

This slash-and-burn system of tax collecting had many advantages. It was nasty while it lasted, but it was soon over. The king’s men might come at any time, but they might not come for years, so April wasn’t always ruined. There were no forms to fill in, and no audit to worry about, because there was never anything left to audit. And these episodes of random violence induced a healthy respect for the power of government, something that seems sadly lacking nowadays. Above all, primitive tax collection was cheap. There was no huge bureaucracy, not even a computer network, if you can imagine it. A few thugs, a few swords and a few horses accomplished what the IRS struggles every year to accomplish – the traditional transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

By contrast, the modern system of tax collection is a masterpiece of waste and redundancy. Governments have learned to confuse the issue by creating such an intricate smokescreen of rules that we spend all our time worrying about the “how” of paying tax, and never have time or energy to ask “why?” One reason why, of course, is that like the peasants of medieval times, we don’t have much choice. America’s most famous tax rebel, Henry David Thoreau, hid in the woods to avoid taxes. But he was hauled off to jail anyway.

Thoreau had the right idea. He thought that taxes should be voluntary. Citizens should pay for what they want, no more and no less. So April 15 would be like a gigantic charity appeal, with every arm of government bidding for your dollars: the Pentagon would like lots more missiles, the three million federal bureaucrats would like higher salaries, NASA would like to drop more space probes into deep holes on Mars, and so on. Alongside each item, we could choose to contribute $5, $10, $25, or nothing. That would be a truly democratic tax system.

Governments hate voluntary tax schemes, of course. They have an irrational fear that, given a choice, citizens might choose not to pay up. But we pay for HBO, we pay for the Disney Channel. Who would begrudge a dollar or two, freely given, to sustain the greatest show on earth?

Copyright: David Bouchier

The English language is constantly changing, but not necessarily improving. In theory every new word or usage enriches the language in some way. How could we communicate today without verbs like “to Google” or “to outsource,” or adjectives like “supersize”? But, all too often, new terms simply push out the old without raising the quality of our English at all.

The fad for political correctness in the late twentieth century turned a lot of our language into mush. Old people vanished and reappeared as “senior citizens,” stupid kids metamorphosed into the “educationally challenged,” drug addicts mysteriously turned into “substance abusers,” and so on. You’ve heard this all before, but it really matters because language matters. If we talk like phonies we will inevitably begin to think like phonies. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, nailing the problem with his usual precision. Euphemistic, misleading, evasive, and just plain silly language now comes at us from every part of the political spectrum, and from business too. When we had to buy some curtains for our house I was amazed to discover that simple curtains were no longer available. We had to purchase “window treatments,” although they looked exactly like curtains to me.

The weasel word that’s aggravating me at the moment is “issues.” Whenever somebody is being difficult, or unreliable, or neurotic, their behavior is excused with the phrase: “Oh, he (or she) has a lot of issues.” This slippery term can also be used self-referentially, as in: “I have issues with that,” or even diagnostically, as in: “He can’t move ahead until he deals with his issues.”

Now “issue” in old English meant a number of things: the act of coming out, or an exit, or the label for a child in relation to its parents, or the act of publishing or distributing something, or a position taken in a legal case or a political dispute. I imagine that it is this last meaning that has been seized upon and made into nonsense by people who talk about “having issues.”

Issues are big problems or conflicts. Israel and Palestine have issues, President Obama and the Republicans in Congress have issues God and the Devil have issues. Most of us don’t have issues worthy of the name; we have complaints. I have numerous complaints, as listeners to this commentary know all too well: about computers, international politics, plastic bags, household chores, and squirrels on my bird feeders, amongst many other things. But none of them qualifies as an “issue.”

Nobody likes to admit: “I’m a miserable, negative sort of person who is never satisfied.” But it sounds rather grand to say: “I have issues.” When I floated this topic in conversation I was earnestly told that “issues” are much more significant than mere complaints. “Issues” are the psychic scars left by a lifetime of pain and struggle – divorce, illness, death, failure and all the predictable traumas of modern life. Some people seem to nurture and treasure their unhappy experiences forever. Like the old Bourbon kings of France, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. So, they have issues.

In the course of writing this I inevitably examined my own character. I have been accused of having curmudgeonly tendencies, so perhaps I too have unresolved issues in my life. This would be rather fun, because I could join in the whining chorus about “issues” and feel that I am, once again, on the cutting edge of the English language.

I don’t buy it. Let’s call things by their proper names. We all have complaints, pet peeves, discontents, irritations, disappointments, resentments, bad memories, gripes, grievances, grouches, grudges, and grumbles. We all enjoy being petulant, peevish, whining curmudgeonly, and querulous from time to time. The English language is rich enough to express every good or bad thing that ever happened to anybody. We don’t need “issues.”

I was waiting for a train, and idly watching a young Asian woman whose gaze was intently fixed on the station platform. She forced me to look at the platform too, which was a perfectly ordinary slab of filthy concrete covered in squashed chewing gum, and to remember all the other platforms, sidewalks, stairs, floors and parking lots I have gazed at in my lifetime.

Any object can be a distorting mirror. It beams your own uneasy memories right back to you. A dirty station platform, like Proust’s infamous Madeleine, recalls all the dirty station platforms you have ever seen. And that in turn recalls all the thoughts you have ever had while gazing at dirty station platforms.

I remember the platform where I waited for the commuter train that took me to London every day in the early 1960s, and thinking: Is this all there is? Will I be standing on this wretched platform every morning forever? I remember the platforms at the Gare du Nord in Paris that were at the beginning and the end of some romantic and unromantic journeys, and a windswept platform in Amsterdam where I waited for a military transport train, and other platforms in Milan and Rome that stuck in my mind for some reason. I remember very vividly standing on the platform at Pennsylvania Station in New York, when I started commuting again in the 1980s, and thinking: Is this all there is? Will I be standing on this wretched platform every evening forever?

There’s a whole lifetime history of moments on those platforms, which were all different yet all the same – all in a way continuous as if I can walk mentally from one to another to another, right to the spot where I saw the young Asian woman yesterday. They are, in my blurry memory, a single long platform, united by the fact that I have stared at them. The world is indeed flat, and all connected. My local station platform is no less alien and no less disgusting than one I stood on in Calcutta. The same anonymous feet walk on all and both, going nowhere.

If you don’t have these kinds of thoughts, be thankful. I blame them on early exposure to the literary existentialists, especially Camus, Sartre, Barbusse, and Hesse. They forced me to look at the surfaces below the everyday surface, and to find extraordinary meanings in ordinary things. I think it was in Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre that the narrator Roquentin fixes his eyes on a pair of dirty purple suspenders worn by a café proprietor, and finds nothing in them but sheer horror.

The bottom line is that every object becomes a puzzle, a potential threat, or a potential subject. I’ve written essays about sticks picked up in the woods, dead fireworks, jars of rusty nails, writing implements, and many other everyday things. They all seem (to me) much more meaningful than they appear.

Nobody ever writes to me about these essays, or comments on them. Perhaps they are too dull, or too peculiar. But I will keep on writing them, and blaming it all on the existentialists who corrupted my innocent youth.

Copyright: David Bouchier