the old world
Renzo Piano’s ‘Shard’
A lovely little dragon!
I have been imagining London for probably as long as I can remember but I had never set foot in the place until last week when I arrived there with Ruth, who is on tour promoting her new book – A Tale for the Time Being.
The novel, which is a multi-layered affair, incorporates among many other things, fictionalized versions of me and Ruth who through happenstance come across the jettisoned diary of a troubled Japanese girl, who may or may not have ever existed. So far, the reviews and personal feedback have been great, though sadly I won’t be seeing much of Ruth over the next months as she travels far and wide.
The distinction between existing or not existing is, as Ruth’s book points out perhaps a false one. According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an actual world or universe. At the point of something happening, there is a kind of branching in which the thing that happens happens and yet the things that could have happened happen also in an infinity of alternate realities, which can of course include the option of nothing happening at all, as the protagonist in Michel Houllebecq’s bleak little novel Platform reminds us : “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
Yet while on the plane, I anticipate that something will happen, though air travel these days is an exercise in forbearance; an interstitial and excruciating nothing that only ends when the landing gear thuds against the tarmac with the promise of fresh, albeit jet fuel-infused air wafting into the cabin to displace the bacterial foulness in which one as been roiling for the past however-so-many hours. Until then I am a bit like Schrödinger’s cat, the London I am about to experience and the London I am still imagining coexisting in a quantum state pregnant with potential, which thanks to ‘many-worlds’ won’t collapse completely into hard reality when I step out the airplane door. Or so I hope. I like to think that somewhere in the multi-verse is a place for my illusions.
The late winter metropolis into which we glide via taxi from the bowels of Paddington Station seems hyper-illuminated, suffused with a golden oceanic glow which I never would have imagined. I had after all spent the last month beneath the sepulchral skies of Cortes Island where there was pretty much no light whatsoever. At this time of year I was expecting London to be all fog billowing across cobblestoned squares and gas lights winking on conspiratorially in picturesque mews at three in the afternoon. But passing outside the window is a shifting sunlit cityscape of splendidly diverse architecture, its streets full of angles and curves so eccentric they look as if they had been laid out by some mad geometer. Oldness! Newness! A brilliant palimpsest of edifices jostling like icebergs in a sea of history. What a contrast from the dreary, machine-like rectangularity that characterizes the average North American city! Delightedly catatonic, yet still in the thrall of our movement, we drop our bags in the hotel room and proceed more or less immediately to the nearby British Museum. There we will allow ourselves a quick commune with things truly ancient before collapsing at last into our waiting beds.
