walking culture

My alarm was set for 7:40 a.m. At 7:33 I was woken up by the sound of the doorbell. This was entirely a product of my dream imagination—I don’t even have a doorbell—but it got me up, and I figured it wasn’t worth going back to sleep for seven more minutes. We live in times of plenty. It’s fine.

I haven’t been up to the office since mid-March. It’s been a gradual slide downwards from going in most weeks, to finding specific reasons not to go (rain in the forecast, or a FR content update), to just plain not going. I expect this is going to change with the new boss. So I came up today as a sort of test run to remind myself how leaving the house works (and I really need to get out more anyway). It was a fantastic morning as I headed down to the train station. I should be taking advantage of the summer while it lasts, even if I don’t have anywhere in particular to go.

One striking thing about The Magnus Archives is how much people walk. Cars obviously exist, but no one uses a car in the city. It seems like a completely routine part of life to walk 20 minutes to get somewhere. It’s so utterly different from the parking lot-to-car-to-parking-lot culture in suburban USA. (But of course on your walk you encounter some supernatural entity that scars you forever…well, one can’t have everything.)

While I’m on the subject of The Magnus Archives, I really like the reader-as-Eye parallels. John extracts a tale of terror and trauma from some hapless individual, and he is fed, and we as readers are fed too. I binged the entire Archives in a week and I am incredibly well fed.

“He looked at me like he’d just eaten, like, a perfectly cooked steak. You know what he said, he said ‘Thank you.’ Thank you, just like that, like—like reliving the worst parts of my whole life were just a bit of a favor that I’d done him.”

Yeah, me too! Thank you!

(And of course, the reader also wants to see the apocalypse. It’s like this in every work where the seals on the Dark Lord’s prison are weakening or whatever—if the heroes are too successful then it would be anticlimactic. Getting to see the Dark Lord awaken is just good storytelling.)

Anyway I did a lot of walking and did not encounter any terrifying supernatural entities, and did have a solidly productive day, so it was worth coming.