Someone asked the other day how my summer was going, and I said it was going. Soon it will be Labor Day and we’ll breathe again. In the meantime, frenzy has us in its grip. The mind is continually racing, day and night, and thoughts run away before taking shape, and this despite the fact that I could well be the last person in the East Hampton metropolitan region not to be chained to a cellphone.
When I told a young lifeguard recently that a school, Sag Harbor, I think, was demanding that students’ cellphones be checked at the door on arrival, she smiled and said it wouldn’t work, that it had been tried before, without success, in Springs and East Hampton. The only thing I ever did along that line was to smuggle a small radio into East End Lutheran’s classroom each fall so that when I put my head down on the desk I could listen to the World Series. In those days, of course, they played World Series games in the daytime, not at night, which, rather than serving as a quiet time for sitting in the parlor with one’s knitting and a cordial, is now given over to manic texting and nonstop televised entertainment.
We plead guilty in that regard, having been utterly transfixed lately by “In The Dark,” a vortex of a tale on Netflix that I can’t imagine will end well for anyone. Oh, what a tangled web we weave. . . . Keeping abreast of the twists and turns is exhausting, even though I watch from a recliner. “In The Dark,” which causes me to stay up well beyond my bedtime, and the continual maneuvering one must do to get from A to B in a C of traffic are probably the reasons I don’t bound out of bed these days. Paying attention can be draining.
Don’t just do something, sit there! That’s the answer. But it’s hard to rest weary limbs on beds of asphodel when all about you people are losing their heads and blaming it on you. Give me dreamful ease. Please.