Living Out of Time

I remember walking past the River Thames for the first time beside buildings and underneath structures that have stood there longer than I’ve been alive. These buildings survived bombings over the last century during world wars and some date back to the 19th century, if not before. (A couple in particular date back many centuries, at least to my knowledge).

I also remember walking through Shinjuku with my wife through the Red Light District to get to our hotel. We were staying on the other side of Tokyo but had accidentally veered off the beaten path. Though a lot of those buildings were new-ish as of the last 60 or so years, the women who had inhabited them and worked within them have existed for hundreds and hundreds of years doing the same thing for the same type of clientele with the same outcomes.

In both of these instances, I thought about how I am not the first person nor am I the last to walk through those areas thinking about this.

I am hopeful that human history will continue indefinitely — all of the anxiety and awfulness be damned — and people continue experiencing those places and elsewhere in the future. (I do hope that the circumstances in Shinjuku progress and change over time, though history has led me to be doubtful.)

I’m constantly thinking about my home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and the various eras that Flatbush has gone through in the last 30 years, 60 years, and 200 years. If you look online, you can actually see a picture of my house in 1906, or 26 years after it was built. You can see it again 20 years later and 30 years after that as well. I’m not going to be the last inhabitant of this house or at least a dwelling on this parcel of land.

Earlier today, I passed my father’s old apartment on 89th and Amsterdam and peered into the lobby. I do this anytime I find myself on the Upper West Side, and I never see the doorman that I saw 26+ years ago. They’ve likely retired or moved on to another building or simply moved on. I also look a few floors up and try to make out anything in the window from my dad’s old apartment, often with no success. Many people have lived there since he moved to Florida in 2002. Many more people will live there again. No one in the building likely remembers him.

This is how I parse the world around me. I consistently think about where I am at any given moment and where people have been in the same place during various times. This is not an occasional occurrence, but something I ponder many times a day at work, on the train, visiting friends, and walking around the city. I am present in the moment, sure, but I’m also thinking of what moments have existed in the past and what moments are to come. Maybe I’ve been a part of some of them. Most of them I have not. This helps inform any and all decisions I make, because I feel that recognizing the history of any place and where it can head helps provide a full picture of the present. I try very hard not to betray the history of a place while simultaneously recognizing and finding awe in seemingly small or mundane things: a building by the river, a pathway clad in lights, a familiar Victorian home, or a regular old apartment building.

They will all be here tomorrow. They will hopefully be here when I am not. And many people have passed them, some narrowed in on something else, but the occasional few sharing the same thought.

Five Things I'm Checking Out

1. Modern Bread and Bagel, because having celiac no longer means eating bad GF bagels
2. Goods for the Study, the stationery store from McNally Jackson
3. The Traveller‘s Notebook insert I bought from Goods for the Study (I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t use these notebooks)
4. Okay, maybe Taylor Lorenz doesn’t like nazis after all
5. Orbital, which I’m about to finish for the second time

Thanks for reading. I tried something new this time by dictating a large portion of the text into my phone, then transcribing it with Whisper. I’m probably not going to do this again from my phone, but it was a fun experiment nonetheless.

See you soon.

-Scott