{"id":712,"date":"2004-12-11T06:21:01","date_gmt":"2004-12-11T10:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/2004\/12\/11\/the-dust-of-time\/"},"modified":"2004-12-11T06:21:01","modified_gmt":"2004-12-11T10:21:01","slug":"the-dust-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2004\/12\/11\/the-dust-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dust of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a691'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Two men came to repair my kitchen ceiling yesterday morning.&nbsp;<br \/>\nSecond time in three years that ceiling had to be fixed.&nbsp; Last<br \/>\ntime it was a professional, three-day job.&nbsp; This time it was a<br \/>\nhack job, two days of <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">patchwork <\/span>followed<br \/>\nby a week of half-finished ceiling and another day of patchwork.&nbsp;<br \/>\nNow the ceiling looks like a failed home-deco experiment, with seams<br \/>\nwhere the repair took place, but you have to look twice to notice.<\/p>\n<p>These men were two of the laziest people I have ever met in the confines of a <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">city<\/span>.&nbsp;<br \/>\nThey moved slowly, came to decisions slowly, talked slowly except when<br \/>\nyelling at high volume (and even then the process of argument was slow,<br \/>\nonly the words were staccato and fast).&nbsp; Their tools <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">never <\/span>worked, and they had to leave on two occasions to buy replacements from a hardware store three miles away. <\/p>\n<p>They also had no common sense, so perhaps retiring to the countryside<br \/>\nwouldn&#8217;t solve all of their problems.&nbsp; They started work with a<br \/>\ntiny tarp and no ventilation&#8230; and began to sand.&nbsp; No wait, they<br \/>\nopened the basement door for ventilation.&nbsp; They turned on a fan<br \/>\nwhile sanding (&#8220;to blow the dust towards the wall&#8221;), and got a fine<br \/>\nlayer of plaster-dust all over the room and the one next to it before I<br \/>\nstopped them.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, a friend&#8217;s apartment complex in central square <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">burned <\/span>terribly,<br \/>\ndamaging many of his things..&nbsp; I remember the last time there was<br \/>\na big fire in that part of town in an apartment complex&#8230;&nbsp; it was<br \/>\njust across the road from Upton St where I was living, and I happened<br \/>\nto miss it by being out of town.<\/p>\n<p>How easy it would be to lose everything.&nbsp; I think of the hundreds<br \/>\nof years of labour put into building beautiful monuments, opulent<br \/>\nhouses, glorious fortifications, which were later targeted not even for<br \/>\ntheft and recycling, but for <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">destruction<\/span>,<br \/>\nbecause of their quality.&nbsp; And of the millions of years put into<br \/>\nbuilding beautiful biomes, life-forms, other crystallizations of <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">order<\/span>, which are inevitably disintegrated, wiped out, crushed into the simple chaos of their component parts.<\/p>\n<p>Our world is built on such layers of dust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two men came to repair my kitchen ceiling yesterday morning.&nbsp; Second time in three years that ceiling had to be fixed.&nbsp; Last time it was a professional, three-day job.&nbsp; This time it was a hack job, two days of patchwork followed by a week of half-finished ceiling and another day of patchwork.&nbsp; Now the ceiling [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-null"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-bu","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}