Last week he read Don DeLillo. This week he is reading Feyerabend and Simone Weil. For days now, he has consciously and continually obsessed with the smallest details of contemporary culture, that is, everything he sees and does from the time he wakes up in the false dawn of the bedroom's single, energy efficient LED nightlight to the time he becomes unconscious eighteen hours later. The only respite he allows himself is the time he spends each afternoon and evening in the oasis of his youngest daughter's playtime, his older daughter's state-of-grace teenage lucidity and his wife's ubiquitous love. As if DeLillo hasn't set a bad enough example, Feyerabend has infiltrated his every conscious thought with a skepticism that would embarrass David Hume. Not only must he pay attention to every cultural detail and quickly categorize it by date, time and logo along with a list of proper nouns, common nouns and adjectives, he must also determine at what meta-layer of so-called reality each point of attention exists in relation to every other point of attention. It is an impossible task. When he feels he is about to strip the teeth from the countless wheels that are spinning out of control inside his brain, he quickly resynchronizes the gears with a quote by the mentat Piter De Vries from the David Lynch version of the movie Dune. "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Snapple that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion." Weil is another matter altogether. She offers respite and comfort. He keeps a dog-eared copy of The Need for Roots on the bathroom countertop next to the toilet.
The parking lot containing his assigned parking space is situated several blocks away from the office building where he works. It is actually one of several parking lots that serve all the office buildings in the area. All the buildings are connected by an aging monorail, a pork barrel project from the heyday of mid twentieth-century Democrat rule that carries passengers from one place to another in the office park. At one time the park was considered one of the finest examples of high-tech urban development in the world. The original developer, one of the original Apollo astronauts who eventually made big money with a national liquor distributorship, sold the property after his only partner, fearing bankruptcy, committed suicide. The buyer was one of the velvet revolution oligarchs who wanted to diversify her hedge fund holdings by investing in US real estate. The buildings are named after various generic astronomical and mathematical terms and concepts: the Sigma Tower, the Omega Tower, the Andromeda Hotel, the Mercury Vista. George Jetson would fit right in.
He works in the Sigma Tower. The lobby of the building rises fifty or more feet into the air. Its rose granite floors and lead crystal chandeliers establish a 1930s art deco theme that is immediately deconstructed by several postmodern sculptures scattered across the floor and the combination food court/mini-mall that lines the walls leading to the elevators. The sculptures, ostensibly manufactured by various subcontractors under the authority and signature of one or more famous young artists, consist of a stainless steel scale-model of the Teotihuacan Pyramid of the Sun (burnished with steel wire brushes in the manner of a late David Smith), a little blue dog approximately ten feet high holding a long yellow string in its mouth, the string connected to a large red balloon floating overhead, and a respectable-size bronze oak tree covered with nude men and women in place of leaves.
He makes a bee line to the Dunkin' Donuts where he finds an acquaintance at the end of the queue. The man's name is Harry Coachella and he works for a landscape architecture firm on a floor somewhere near the top of the building.
"Hi, Harry."
"Hey. How's it going?"
"Fine. And you?"
"Fine."
The line moves forward one customer.
"So, . . ." Harry is talkative today, "what do you think?"
"About what?"
"The weather."
In a world where every person is looking for certainty, the certainty of not-knowing, as great a certainty as that is and as well as it seemed to work for Socrates, has no value whatsoever when compared to the certainty of knowing anything at all. Those who see the world as it is and not as they wish it to be understand more than most that certainty has less to do with facts than with words. To be certain is to ask few questions and to confine the majority of your comments to declarative statements.
"It's going to rain tonight."
"I agree."
He buys two dozen regular donuts and a dozen chocolate covered donuts for his team and heads for the elevator.
