Millions now living

In a cold room in a castle, in files entitled ‘Ancestors’, are hundreds of sepia photo portraits of anonymous people from the past. Most have lost their moorings on the page and have slipped down into a slush of moustaches and frowns. In another room in a damp bookshop is a tabletop piled high with magazines and journals on everything from motorcycle maintenance to the Kennedy dynasty. In the corner – towers of detailed instructional paperbacks on obsolete technologies. All these forgotten people and words – what can you think about except death? Or in fact worse than death, the utter futility of everything in the face of death?

Hurray – welcome to Hay on Wye.

I don’t know, in the past it’s always been a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, browsing around the various bookshops – but this time it was just a slow slide into despair. I couldn’t work out why this was so – then I realised it was the disorder. If the magazines had been sorted by genre and date and piled neatly…..if the ancestors had been stuck down properly and all the moustached men put in one file, the milky eyed women in another…then it would have felt like a triumph over oblivion. That was when I realised that the first weapon in the ‘War on Death’ is tidiness. Our parents obviously knew this – this is why they went so crazy when they saw the state of our bedrooms – it wasn’t crayons and Beano annuals they saw on the floor – it was the abyss.

1 thought on “Millions now living

Comments are closed.