When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist – somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope.
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— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941)
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We are all pretty familiar with the trope of time being different during the Pandemic – slowing down, stretching, fading, a year happening in a day and a day that went on for ages. Or was it two days?
The temporal rubber-band feels like it has returned to its semi-normal, unstretched state. But like a broken ankle, it will never be quite the same again, even when it heals. Still, I have been thinking about the ways we mediated our days during the Other Time – can we call it that, in contrast to both Now and the “Before Time”? By mediated, I literally mean media – the Zooms, FaceTimes, YouTube gardening tutorials, streaming services, and even board games that filled up all the empty space left vacant of sociality during Lockdown. How did we pass the time, and how did music, movies, TV, and games put us in a different state, however temporarily, in those days that now look like a blur for so many of us, looking back?
Film is my bag – hopefully, not in a douchey way. I love high-brow and low-brow, officially good and officially bad. A story stuffed into a 90-to-120-minute container is just my preferred medium, as compared to episodic TV, epic prestige HBO miniseries, or even short stories or novels. I don’t know why, but movies have always suited me. (There’s also the perennial writer’s dilemma: do you say “film” and sound like a dick, or do you say “movies” to ring earthy and populist? I pretty much tag-team them in.)
Anyhow, Covid Time granted an opportunity – maybe a curse? – to those of us film-lovers who were single, childless, and could mostly work from home.[1] A grand morass of couches, PJs, and a plethora of “It’s just $3.99? Why not?” moments renting content. I know, the ultimate First-World Problems. Perish the thought! But our lonely-hearts club was sorely in need of companionship, so we synced up our FaceTimes in Miami, San Jose, Philly, NYC and simultaneously watched movies on Amazon or YouTube. It felt awkward and ungainly at first, but we all got used to it. The artificial arrangement started to feel cozy after a while.
Why am I writing about this? It’s not just as a rumination on our innumerable impressions of that bygone time, but more a phenomenological sense of how I experienced it through movies. Without a commute, without office hours, and (newly) without a partner, I had time to fill up. Most of it was brooding and feeling sorry for myself, which is my way. But it was also an invitation to expand my knowledge of film far beyond what it had been before, much like the times when, as a pretentious kid, I rented arty movies from the local video store in high school or later checked them out from the university library – long, stoned days with Bergman and Wenders and Zhang.
Whatever kind of ways we might feel about our tech overlords, it remains true that a treasury of film is now available at our fingertips in a way that would have been inconceivable in any previous age. If I want to round out my education on Cassavetes or Varda, I can do so (in most, if not all cases). I could catch up on movies that I had shamefully never seen, like Rashomon. I could watch Night of the Living Dead with my friend in California in a brisk 96 minutes, or the majestically bloated director’s cut of Until the End of the World in 287.
Media have always held the power to absorb our attention or transport us to a different plane of time, whether it’s Kind of Blue or Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. The folding and pulling of time just hit different when it was seemingly endless and ample. Science teaches us that matter will generally go from a more concentrated state to a more dispersed one; particles will move to fill available space. What happens when Borges’s famously infinite library meets Backrooms?
I have just written the word “infinite.” I have not included that adjective out of mere rhetorical habit; I hereby state that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who believe it to have limits hypothesize that in some remote place or places the corridors and staircases and hexagons may, inconceivably, end – which is absurd. And yet those who picture the world as unlimited forget that the number of possible books is not. I will be bold enough to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited but periodic. If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder – which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.
For a time, I had nightly dreams of being in one building or another and trying to get out – exploring stairs and hallways and elevators in a futile effort to get to the ground floor and find an exit. But, Escher-like, the floors of the building defied any logical arrangement, as I went down but ended up on a higher level, opening a door that led to yet another door. It was ultimately frustrating and scary enough to wake me up, but as soon as I drifted back off to sleep, I was right back in the same place.
To be freed from the limits of time could be the kind of liberation that religious people imagine as Heaven. It could also just as easily be a Hell. As I’ve always said, though, at least the music’s better in Hell.
If I let you go… What then? You’d end up running around here like a chicken with its head cut off and then looking for a way out and you’d end up in the same place you are now.
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— Clark in Backrooms
[1] Sophocles said that “nothing vast enters the world of mortals without a curse.”