When the Not-World Is Too Little With Us

[Image: “Tales from the Loop,” by Thorsten Bonsch; found on Flicker, using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you! The photographer explains the title: “‘Tales from the Loop’ is a series of illustrations and short stories by Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag about fictional 1980s in which robots and magnetrine (antigrav) ships exist. The Loop is a particle accelerator close to the city, where strange things happen… I love his art, his books and together with some friends, we enjoy the ‘Tales from the Loop’ RPG.” He also refers to the Amazon Prime streaming TV series by the same name.]

Those of you who’ve been stopping by RAMH regularly over the years may be wondering about the USA road trip The Missus and I had been talking about so much (and I, occasionally mentioning here). The bottom line:

• We moved out of our apartment in North Florida as scheduled, put into storage all we wouldn’t need for the next six months, and set out in our 2016 Honda CR-V.
• After completely leaving Florida at the end of July, we stopped briefly in Savanna, GA, and Charleston, SC.
• In North Carolina, we stayed in Airbnbs in a couple of towns we might consider as “retirement destinations,” post-trip.
• Stopped for a night in NJ to visit The Brother and Sister-in-Law.
• Spent a couple nights in Salem, MA, three in Bar Harbor, ME, two in Lincoln, NH, and four (!) in Saratoga Springs, NY.
• At the moment, we’re still in upstate New York for a few more nights, then off to central Vermont for what we hope will be a quiet, restful, full week stay in an Airbnb.

I’m leaving out a lot of stuff that completely whacked out our schedule and caused us to gallop through or past things we’d imagined to be “destinations”: a so-called “breakthrough” case of COVID-19 while still in Florida; two hurricanes (Elsa in Florida, Henri in New England); a collision which totaled our car (no injuries, thank the gods) and required the purchase of a replacement, ASAP; the temporary loss of a really nice digital camera (well, it was a permanent loss — electronics damaged in the car crash — but again, managed to be replaced, just yesterday, thanks to the wonders of Internet shopping and overnight delivery); a hearing aid put out of commission thanks to an inadvertent bath in a sinkful of water; …and I know I’m omitting a lot but trust me: the world has been just a bit too much with us since we’ve been out in it.

So I read this over at whiskey river a few days ago and was reminded of the balm which certain kinds of fantasy provides:

Children understand that Once upon a time refers not only—not even primarily—to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and that (as often happens after I’ve visited whiskey river) inspired a memory of something somebody else once said about holding reality at bay, if just for a while — this, from Albert Einstein, in a 1929 interview published in the Saturday Evening Post:

[Einstein:] I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.

[Interviewer:] Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?

[Einstein:] I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

(George Sylvester Viereck [source])