Here and Now

There once was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself--not just sometimes but always.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered

--Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

I'm a Milo. As long as I can remember I've always wanted to be somewhere else--any place other than where I was. And I'm not talking about physical locations so much as positions in time and positions in society.

Of her three sons, my mother tells me, I was always the one who wanted to be older. As a teen, I was thoroughly disgusted with high school life and couldn't wait to get to college. Not only that, but I was thoroughly appalled by the mid-1980s in suburban Greenville, South Carolina--which, having never lived anywhere else, I found sterile and intolerably boring--and wished beyond wishing that I could live in some different, better place and time.

I read science fiction and fantasty in my early teens, and both the misty ancient mythology of J. R. R. Tolkien and the geeky utopian/dystopian future of Larry Niven's Ringworld fueled my imagination far more than the world of MTV and Ronald Reagan. For a while, during my junior and senior years in high school, I was enamoured with both the Beat Generation and the hippie 1960s and listened to the music, read the books, and generally tried to adopt the overall style of those eras, which seemed so much more vital and exciting and idealistic than my own.

In my early twenties I lost interest in those decades, as the ideas and styles that once were compelling began to seem juvenile, doe-eyed, and silly. But that didn't make me any more interested in living in the 1990s. Instead, I fell in love first with the modernistic 1920s and 1930s--the ex-pat world of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the sophisticated New York of the Algonquin Hotel. And later it was the sentiment-laced noir of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, with the heat and longing for values of days past.

Even today I remain enamoured of the styles of the past--Art Deco hotels and old postcards and black-and-white movies. But recently it has occurred to me to ask a basic question: what's so wrong with the present place and time?

And, to an extent that there is a unifying theme to this blog, that's what it is: an attempt to take a good look at the here and now, neither to uniformly celebrate nor uniformly condemn, but rather to explore interesting contemporary trends and try to understand them a little better.

And maybe, like Milo after his long trip into The Lands Beyond, I'll realize that we don't really need a Phantom Tollbooth after all:

"Well, I would like to make another trip," he said, jumping to his feet; "but I really don't know when I'll have the time. There's just so much to do right here."