Seeing the Works:
How do we ever delude ourselves that we are secure, or ever can be secure? Things explode. Stampedes begin under a clear blue sky. Ice starts to fall and then forgets to stop. The sea, sometimes, comes right through the front door. And we are changed. Dashiell Hammett's detective Sam Spade tells a story in The Maltese Falcon about tracing a missing man. The man explains that he was walking down the street when a girder fell from a building and crashed down right next to him. A little chip of concrete cut him on the forehead. He said that it was as if "someone had taken the lid off the world and shown him the works." There being no way to account for such things in the life he had led, he just walked away and started over. Hammett, an early fan of irony, has Spade say that what he liked best about the story was that the man's new life was remarkably like his old one--that he had adjusted to a world where girders fell out the sky, and then, when girders stopped falling, he had adjusted right back. May the girders stop falling soon.