Nothing happens. You can give it up now if you’re waiting for something to happen. We’re like micro-hemmingways; just looking. We see nothing happening, just a bare bulb in a tarnished socket giving off a practical glow of only a few watts. We see some local furniture, not well made, and mismatched. One of the pieces is an oak chair draped with a flannel shirt. There is motion because a ceiling fan is running, and, staring at the blades, you can think of an ancient airplane in flight but we’re not on it because nothing ever happens. The fan stirs the air and the lace curtains flutter suggesting life outside the windows, which are big and high. The life outside the windows moves from left to right, from birth to death, with many things in between taken for granted, but always taken away by death which is always both lingering and sudden, but we are not riding this train either. We are not on any conveyance at all. We are in a chair draped with flannel, looking at all of that. Detachment is not perfect. Into the vacuum left by not doing, much nothing is done. Narrative cannot be arrested. Thoughts long and lyrical, move down a tunnel and fade into the distance. The one up close suggests languid action but even languor is too much. We want to inhabit the wood on the walls, because the wood has come to rest. It is not oak, but some sort of maple stained to look like oak. Some expense was spared, but we can imagine the bare wood brought in from somewhere at sometime, long enough ago that we know it was done by men and only men. They refuse to be described, but they knew how to do these things and here we are. We are doing nothing. But somebody built these bookshelves and wrote the books. Let’s bet on women with power tools and typewriters for getting things done and done properly. Not all of it is pressed paper and pulp fiction. Something, at least, got done by somebody. We’re thankful that it wasn’t us.