Closing Time in the USA

 

            It’s mid-afternoon and you’re exiting Woolsey Hall. Maybe you’ve just had a late lunch at Commons or maybe, like me, you’re coming out of a mandatory student safety lecture on your third day of college. You exit Woolsey the ugly way—away from the libraries and sculptures—and cross the street. Walk a block to your left and you’ll end up at the great entrance to the Grove Street Cemetery. You can’t miss it: the monolithic columns connected at a top by a slab bearing the epigraph “THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.”

            Here I spent one peaceful hour when the living had gotten a little loud for my taste.  I basked in the vastness, the silence, the solitude. Or the near-solitude: at one point, when I had reached the back of the cemetery, I made eye contact with a woman in a bathrobe staring out the window of a nearby apartment building. But mostly there was only the dead and I.

            Perhaps I tend to romanticize. At the cemetery, I listened start-to-finish to my favorite baroque album. I looked around and imagined the cemetery’s residents were my nonjudgmental friends. But the dead are no better than us. I mean, towards the center of the cemetery were grandiose graves featuring spires and sculptures and even, in one particularly questionable case, sphinxes. At the cemetery’s periphery were mostly short and modest graves with sparse ornamentation. I wonder if the latter roll their empty eye sockets at the old money men entombed in great shrines? Even the dead have to deal with economic inequality.

I’m sure if you do the math it works out, but I can never quite believe that an hour is made of sixty minutes, nor that a day is made of twenty-four hours. Time is much too elusive for all that. After all, days when I have nothing to do stretch out far beyond my grasp and days when I have all too much to do are over as soon as they begin. And when I go home, months haven’t passed since I was last there: time just picks up where I left it. So, when I see people in britches and saddle shoes crossing the of Grove and Prospect Streets in front of the corner of the cemetery, rushing to get to class on time in spite of the blustering winds, the photograph[1] may be labeled as a Monday morning in January of 1922, but I promise you it was taken yesterday, just hours before I crossed the street myself. Only the car and street lamp parts of the picture were taken ninety-two years ago.

            Okay, you’re onto me. Maybe I am a little bit afraid of time, given my denial of its passage. And shouldn’t I be? Time carries all sorts of unpleasant things: deadlines, bills, so many trivial distresses. And those responsibilities will just keep coming, taking away from the things I love—reflection, beauty, and so forth—until we’re dead. So what is fear of time, then, but a repressive compartmentalizer’s fear of death?

Here’s another treacherous little thing time can do: Let’s say you’ve been having an overwhelming few days. Perhaps you’ve been urged into countless micromanaged social mixers and ushered from mandatory lecture to mandatory lecture. Perhaps, in those first three days of college, balancing all the activity with the already noisy expectations in your head is getting a bit much. And let’s say you finally get a moment to yourself. You find a quiet cemetery, stroll around, listen to your favorite album, and revel in feeling more mental clarity than you have in weeks. And let’s say this moment is so incredibly peaceful, perhaps because you are romanticizing again, that you feel it could go on forever. But then, amidst your reverie, a man on a bicycle passes by and says something that at first you can’t make out, but it sounds directive. You take your earbuds out. It’s closing time. Apparently the cemetery closes at four o’clock. You’re thrust, insufficiently resurfaced, back into your world. Being a girl, I’ve never had to contend with blue balls, but this must be the spiritual equivalent.

The moment had ended. I sought beauty in ephemerality, but could find none.

In the cemetery, I kept to the walkways for fear of disturbing my quiescent companions with the thunder of my footsteps. Yet, upon leaving I noticed the epigraph above the columns of the gate. I translated it to myself: No rest for the weary. And so, while we’re young—and, mind you, so long as I’m alive I will consider myself young by disjunctive syllogism—let’s appreciate the beauty right now.


[1] Sheffield Hall, Sterling Tower, and Strathcona Hall, Yale University, Photographs (RU 614).

            Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

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