The Space-Time Continuum

Adventures in Nonlinearity

Sunset Avenue, Wanamassa, N.J.

One day in March, I was standing in our bedroom on the third floor of our house in Philadelphia, looking down into the garden. It was still raining.

I thought of a day in Paris. I was standing looking out of one of the French windows in the living room of an apartment a friend had lent us. It was raining. I was in love with Paris in the rain.

But, back in Philadelphia, I was tired of the rain. I went downstairs and mentioned to my wife that I wouldn't be tired of the rain if we were in Paris. She said she was tired of the rain, and would be tired of it in Paris too.

We had just gotten back from Asbury Park, where we have a small apartment near the beach. It had rained a lot, and we had snuggled in quite happily.

During a break in the weather we had run our errands, including putting gas in the car at our favorite gas station, in Lois's hometown of Wanamassa, which is next to Asbury Park. That's where we saw the man in the leather suit, getting gas for his car.

Time travel in Wanamassa.

When I saw the car, I thought of time warps. The guy and his car probably belonged in the Indianapolis 500 around 1920, and yet here they were. (I assume that the engine cowling was hanging in the garage at home, perhaps awaiting some minor adjustments. And on second thought, this may be too small to be an Indy car - perhaps a sprint racer of the same era.)

Things like this happen - to me at least - quite a lot in Asbury Park. You're walking along, minding your own business, and then you notice that you've slipped into a slightly parallel universe. You're in a different place, at a different time.

It's not always a guy in a leather suit trying to gas up an antique race car. Sometimes it's a little girl in the Batman car on the boardwalk. If only we could get the carousel back. Or sometimes I'm just watching a sailboat catch the light out on the Atlantic Ocean, a few feet from where I'm standing in the sand. Something punctures the surface of prosaic reality, revealing surprise and delight, and perhaps wonder.

Reality is a shape-shifter. People spend a lot of time ignoring this fact. I used to do that too. Then I took up running marathons, and I got a lot more comfortable with my ride on the space-time continuum.

In Paris the rain stopped, and I found myself standing by the Arc de Triomphe, waiting for the race to start. We would run down the Champs d'Elysees, the Rue de Rivoli, through the Place de la Bastille (the refreshment table handed out figs, among other things), up to the Bois de Vincennes with its fabulous medieval castle, and then turn and run through the park back towards the town. And then we would go around a curve and find ourselves at the top of a hill, looking out over the City of Paris. I hadn't noticed the gradual climb up, and the unexpected and spectacular view took my breath away.

There was another refreshment station. There were no refreshments, not even figs - one of the penalties of being a back-of-the-pack runner. "Ils ont pille tout," said the nice lady behind the table, apologetically. I didn't mind. We ran down to the Seine, and up to the Bois de Boulogne, and along the Avenue Foch, and back to the Arc de Triomphe, where we finished in pain and euphoria.

Through this I was also in Philadelphia, out on the Wissahickon, doing my long training runs through the woods, battling injuries and sadness. One day I noticed that my knees were better and I could attack, both uphill and down. On one downhill turn on the way home, running on a muddy surface, I noticed the ghostly forms of my mother and father, and Socrates. They were cheering me on from the inside of the curve. I was very tired, but because I am a child of the twentieth century and not the fourteenth century, I knew right away they weren't real. Still I was happy to see them. I guess what I'm trying to say is you don't have to go to Paris to enjoy the rain.

There are a bunch of magical places in Philly. The Wissahickon is only one of them. And yet the moments where we pierce the veil of everyday reality seem harder to come by in Philly than they do in Paris, or Asbury Park. I've been trying for years to help "improve" Philly's public spaces, and it occurs to me that I've only recently started to be honest with myself about the reasons why, and our path to what I think would be a better city. Yes, we need to kill fewer people on our streets, and we need to design public spaces where people feel - and actually are - safe. But we, as a city, also need to stop denying our potential for the magical. I hope we're up to it.

Near Convention Hall, Asbury Park.

See also Lafayette: We Were There, A Cure for Anger, No Fear, Rush Hour at the Endorphin Factory, Runners Are Different, On Breathing.

Where Have All the Grownups Gone?

Home Alone in Montaillou

Harvest hand, Ohio. Ben Shahn/FSA, 1938.

In 1308, a hundred years after the pope declared war on southern France, there was a rafle, or roundup, in a little village on the north edge of the Pyrenees. The Inquisition came and hauled off almost all the adult and adolescent residents.

It was a little town, Montaillou - maybe 200 or 250 people. We don't know exactly how many. It's likely that they didn't know either.

At an elevation of 1,300 meters, it was definitely up in the hills. The people grew crops, and they herded sheep. The sheep went higher up in the summer, and sometimes, in the winter, they went down into Spain instead of coming home. There were some amorous connections.

The people taken away were suspected of the Cathar heresy, which had been endemic in southern France, Lombardy, and the Balkans for many years. The Cathars lived good lives, or tried to. But they believed that evil existed independently from God. The church disapproved.

I've been wondering what it was like for the children - probably none more than twelve years old - left home alone. With all those sheep. And chickens. I'm suspecting there were some cows that needed milking.

Children went to work early in those days, on the farm. I'm guessing they did okay until their parents started dribbling home. The grownups and the nearly grownups had been hauled off to an infamous jail in Carcassonne. Most of them were heretics, but the Inquisition hadn't been able to get the goods on them. I'm thinking that the mass arrest was an expression of official frustration.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote a book on Montaillou years ago (Montaillou, 1978). I recently re-read it with older eyes.

The book is based on the Inquisition's records of its interviews with suspects and witnesses. It's a pretty amazing story - lots of sex. The local priest, Pierre Clergue, had sex with at least a dozen women, including a young cousin, aged fourteen or fifteen (people didn't always know exactly how old they were).

But I keep coming back to the kids. The church had been persecuting these people, who thought of themselves as good Christians with a few unusual opinions, for a hundred years. I imagine the little ones standing around, watching their parents being hauled away, wondering what the hell was going on.

The answer? History. A hundred years of oppression, and for what?

It's a good question to ask. The church lost a lot of its moral authority over those years. It did develop the Inquisition during that time - one of the most important institutional innovations in the high middle ages, although perhaps not the most popular. And the big winner was the French crown, which had originally thought the crusade a bad idea.

I think there are some lessons for us today. I'm not going to tell you what I think they are. Try figuring it out on your own. That's what the children in Montaillou had to do - with the help of the sheep, of course.

See also Submerged Narratives.