Time Enough At Last

"Time Enough At Last", starring Burgess Meredith as a book-loving bank teller who misses the apocalypse, is one of the most famous episodes of the Twilight Zone. It's one of the ones--along with the one about the thing on the plane--that even people who've never seen an entire episode are likely to know about, and it didn't even star William Shatner or get re-made for the movie.

But it's one that some people find puzzling in a way that leaves them either vaguely uncomfortable or with a sense that the story is ultimately lacking in the sort of philosophical underpinnings that make the Twilight Zone more than just a schlock anthology.

Submitted for your approval: Meredith's Thurber-esque character of Henry Bemis is exactly the sort of put-upon protagonist that in another episode might find himself vindicated or rewarded by the twist of fate. The idea that his "bad habit" of hiding away during his lunch hour to read both saved his life and freed him from all obligation to a society that had no use for a dreamer is sufficient premise for an episode of TZ all in and of itself.

The twist where he breaks his glasses (oh, by the way: spoiler warning) and can no longer read his beloved books is the sort of fate that would normally be reserved for someone who actually conspired to bring about the end of the world just to get away from everyone.

It's the kind of cosmic punishment we expect to be doled out by the Twilight Zone, but that raises the question: what's Henry Bemis being punished for?

Stuck for a moral, a lot of reviewers pick up on Bemis's own words on the subject: "That's not fair," he tells us. "That's not fair at all."

Life is not fair. The universe is not fair. But that's a little bit pat, and I think it also misses the mark. I think to get the actual message, we have to set aside the bit about the unfairness of life as a given and focus on the rest of his words as the central theme about how life is unfair in this case.

"That's not fair," he says. "That's not fair at all. There was time now... there was all the time I needed. That's not fair."

It's not "not fair" that he broke his glasses. It's not fair that he broke his glasses now, now that there was time. This is not a trivial distinction. The sentiment is referred to in the title of the episode, after all.

And that's the lesson: time makes a mockery of us all.

We know that nothing in this life can last forever--least of all this life--but we put things off for later. When? Later... y'know, when there will be more time for it. But the future by definition never holds more time for us, only less.

How much less?

We don't know.

We never know.

And the thing of it is, even if we learn the lesson and take it to heart, we can't avoid time's trap. There are times when you have to make the gamble that the future will hold time enough, because even though you don't know if it will or not, you know that the present doesn't. No matter how many days you seize there will be plans that have to be put off and dreams that have to be deferred and processes that take time, no matter how slow and painful they may be.

All we really can do is weigh the time that we have, not knowing how much we have but knowing that it can't be infinite, and make the best decisions we can about how to spend it.

Tuesday, April 1st

The Daily Report

So, yesterday was a zombie day. It was never going to be a good day, given that I was coming out of an insomnia phase and we had an outside engagement in the late afternoon early evening, but it seriously just ended up being a zombie day.

"There are likely to be rough times ahead for me" is a statement that evaluates to true for all possible values of me at all times right up until the point that it doesn't, but it has a special value of true for me right now. It's not something I'm dwelling on (to the extent that it's up to me), so consider this a head's up that there will come a time sometime when I need to ask for patience and support from my loyal audience.

The State of the Me

The good news is that I'm coming out of my insomnia.

Plans For Today

I find myself in a reflective mood today and without a lot of focus or energy, so I'm going with reflection. I've been doing a lot of the writing equivalent of "furious scribbling" lately and I think it's time to sit back and take stock, get some of it organized. I'm dividing the rest of the day up into three blocks, and devoting each one to a different project that's been heating up on the back burner.

Block 1: The sequel to Gift of the Bad Guy. My initial burst of enthusiasm for the series (and the high for novella length fiction I was riding in general) were knocked off the rails by external events, but I think it's past time that I revisited it.

Block 2: Star Harbor Nights. I've been low-key working on a specific story/project in the Harborverse. I think part of the reason it hasn't been progressing is that the idea--as interesting as it may be--doesn't fit the milieu of SHN as well as it would the gifter series. A lot of the inertia I've been having with writing in the Harborverse comes down to the fact that I've been resisting the idea of writing straightforward, unabashed superheroic tales in favor of trying to come up with a twist or a spin every time.

I think in general as a writer I need to give myself more permission to just write the stories I want to write. I mean, that's the point of doing it myself, isn't it? This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, in terms of epic fantasy... the fact that territory that is seen as cliche was established as cliche by a narrow subset of humanity writing stories about a narrow subset of humanity. Breaking new ground is important, but it's a shame to raze the playground before everyone gets a turn just because a contingent of Straight Cis White Beardy Dudes spent so much time playing on it that it seems done to death.

Block 3: Organizing my thoughts on a short work of interactive fantasy fiction.