Went to the state fair yesterday with a friend, where an amusing thought struck me as we strolled beneath the creaking, flashing rides.
You enter from the larger reality—in this case, the city of Columbia, SC or, more broadly, the state itself—and don’t quite know what to expect. You come in. There’s a lot of food the eating of which feels really great for that moment and the penalty for which is an expanding waistline and gastrointestinal distress the likes of which could fell pachyderms. There are many distractors: sirens blaring, lights flashing, rides running, workers shouting their a priori approval of your skills at whatever rigged game they’re standing before to entice you to spend wads of cash on meaningless oversized schwag that somehow seems really important at the moment. Everything seems urgent, controlled chaos. The amount of work it took to throw this expensive multifaceted party is almost inconceivable—and it’ll all be over in a few short days, mere moments in which children cry and laugh; in which children of all ages eat and overeat all sorts of things that even a McDonalds junkie wouldn’t touch more than once a year; in which fun will be had, people and jackets will get lost and found, and then—they’ll tear it down for another year.
And it hit me: the fair is like Creation. Insofar as we may attribute “labor” to omnipotent deity, God labored for six days to separate the waters, to scatter the stars in the heavens, to make plants and fish and man. People enter not knowing what to expect, get distracted by all sorts of things that at best don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, eat too much, are unhealthy—then POOF, everyone has to leave the fair sometime and go out into the larger reality, and at the end of time the fair is taken down, and that’s it. All that hullaballoo for just a short burst, in terms of the long run. (Of course if I held to the Greek conception of time, the analogy would go further: the universe would be remade and unmade, time without end, in a cyclical pattern. But I digress.)
