I. Ekphrasis

It is hard to really notice anything in the wintertime. Snow blurs. Blue air chills. Spring is an awakener of the senses, especially in its paler moods. It is the first time of the year that things can be noticed.

Spring is felt best on overcast days with a slate mist in the air. The new leaves glow indistinctly. The pinks are a little pinker; never do the blooms of magnolia loom so grandly at the borders of one’s vision, never does the stir of the wild geraniums carry sugar and dew so easily into the air, never does the whole sensational mass of floral pricklings in sight, scent, and sound have quite the same effect as in spring. Small animals are invigorated. At any moment, the muzzle of a fawn might nudge apart two billows of mist, briefly flashing a glossy smattering of spots before darting away in a stumble of hoof and hide. Roosts of melding colours titter excitedly in the drizzle. Droplets roll off their feathers.

Hummingbirds migrate. It seems wrong; those little whirlwinds, usually flitting between bright pools of nectar, suddenly rising into the air as one and taking the long, sober flight southward. Like the crack-blinded Thursday oracle that runs howling at undergraduates on the Commons suddenly investing in low-yield government bonds. Birds are the flowers of the animal kingdom. An embellishment of life, not a condition of it. Human life, that is. Man in his arrogance presumes that such beings are placed on Earth merely as furnishings for his own living. It is natural that they have their labours, as we have ours.

It is late spring and two young men walk a few paces ahead of us. He wants me to move to Miami to work on the startup, one says. Oh yeah? Yeah. We’re trying to be, like, labour-disciplined. Like a Chinese factory worker. You’re lucky, man. I’m at Goldman and I’m only earning $33k for the whole summer. The last tardy flowers are unfurling in the shade of the sun-baked stone bridge. They walk on, loafers clattering against the flagstones.

In the wide fields of trouserbutton brown outside the town lies the roof of a red barn. Torn off, rotting on the ground. The body of the barn is nowhere to be seen. We are on the way home from New York City and the girl in front of us is earnestly explaining American college basketball to three disinterested Scandinavians. We pass a gravestone shaped like a trowel. It must have belonged, we reason, either to a giant or to six people who only had one very large trowel between them. Small bluebells grow from the litter covering it. New York, city and state, is characterised by decay and innovation; every bit is falling apart, but green shoots burst through the cracks, and through the places where the cracks haven’t yet thought to appear. It is not unselfconscious: they dip every rose in poison so it lasts longer.

It would be a mistake to think of spring only as a beginning. A graver mistake still to think it a mere passage. Sense, frenzy, work, hot. Spring is a painting and the colours are running; as fast as they can and away from you.

II. Denver

A grainy camel-hair sheet is draped lazily over the Denver piedmont. Blooms of dark brown brush and rock mar it like freckles, and acrid city-mist hangs morosely in its divots and bowls, sticking in the top of the nose with each breath. It is intensely quiet; nobody seems to live there. The streets of its cities, Boulder, Golden, and Denver, stretch lone and straight, and every second shopfront is a cafe, but the wide hills and the yawning sky seem to draw all the noise and heartbeats upward, dissipating them into the atmosphere. My classmate Nicole and I walk to our hostel.

Bella is a hydrochemist. She is short, leather-booted, blonde, and funny. She works near Golden, at a laboratory that tests water quality for the parched nearby cities. Her primary colleague at the water lab, she says, is “very nice, but I think he did hit two people with his car last year. He is imparting, frankly, his unmitigated mental health disaster on me”. Interestingly, I learn some months later that the company Coors was shown by a professor of mine, in a rare break from his chemoprovenancing murdered corpses for the FBI, to be falsely advertising their beer as brewed entirely with Golden’s water supply. An incorrigible scientist, she derides my classmate’s and my humanistic theses, calling them “easy literature! I’ll put them in my ludicrously capacious bag, next to my shoes for the subway”. She tells us that, having studied and worked in the area for so long, she’ll soon be leaving. Explaining her impending expatriation, she informs us that “you have to move back to a real metropolitan area and serve c*** the way God intended”. She seems a bit maudlin, though: “I’ll miss my old college house because we had this huge tub because our landlord was a freak pervent and it was just full of mould and spiders” . She leaves us with stern advice to avoid teabags, apparently containing a credit card’s worth of microplastics in half a pack.

Rae is a digital nomad. In practice, this means email co-ordination of a team of spotty programmers at a California financial technology firm from poolside in various sunny climes, accommodation usually having been secured from a local resort with a salvo of bikini photos and the details of an impressive Instagram following. She seems kind and lonely. We three walk in the stifling heat through the city gardens, and the supermodel sheen gives way, briefly, to a girlish interest in the small cacti. She hopes we three shall remain friends.

We fly back a few days later. Driving in, and out of, the City, there are signs for accident lawyers everywhere. I Got Hurt In Jersey! and ¡Me lastimé en Jersey!, they read. Even after so long, the naked greed of this society shocks me. The entire economy is composed of middlemen scamming each other, with the ultimate goal of turning every conceivable human experience—in this case, snapping a leg in three places and puncturing a lung after wrapping oneself around a tree trunk—into a money-making exercise through a legal loophole. The most admirable thing an enterprising person can do is enrich himself by cheating the system; you’ve got to respect the hustle, the man on the street says, as his lawyer settles his case with a forty percent commission. This is agency; we are all highly agentic here.

The natural response to this is embarrassment. Our time might well be defined as the Age of Embarrassment. No other time in human history has ever been so deeply embarrassing to inhabit. To cope with this embarrassment, everything has become ironic, detached, layered, and very self-conscious. Perhaps this last fact is also because a whole generation has been born and grown up under examination; under the gaze of the camera. One feels sorry for the humble mirror; it is too much to imagine that the image of her own face that a teenager sees in her mind’s eye has a large nose and thin cheeks, just like in the fisheye lens of the selfie?

The most countercultural thing a person can be today is earnest. It’s nice to whistle a meaningful tune, for example. On the bus home, I hum my alma mater. I overhear a passenger telling her neighbour that in India the hit songs only come from the movies. Quite charming, in a way. But I chide myself. Only in the Age of Embarrassment would a person miss the monoculture.