Morgan Meis

… I used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.

As you stand near a pool of fetid water outside one of these crumbling factories you realize that the era of the Industrial Revolution (at least in this part of the world) is truly dead, never to be recovered. It is, thus, possible to visit the Rust Belt with the same mood one would visit the chateaus of France or the medieval cities of Spain. You are looking at the remains of a civilization that has passed away. We are not ready, perhaps, to think about visiting Detroit in the same way that we would visit the Palais des Papes in Avignon. But what, really, is the difference?

Europe is a train. The countries are all so close together, train close. A plane is too fast. You must fly over vast quantities of land or sea to get something out of an airplane ride. You have to stare out the window for hours at the unchanging surface of the ocean or the mesmerizing openness, for instance, of the American plains. To understand space in Europe you have to be on a train.

You sit near the window in your compartment. There are the forward-sitters and the backward-sitters. Both have their logic. Forward-sitters like to see what is coming, they tend to feel positive about the European Union. Backward-sitters are a more melancholy lot. They think of Europe as something you grab glimpses of after the fact, after it has already passed us by. Thus we see that space has something to do with time.