Our century has been remarkably efficient in the manufacture of wastelands. In Uptown you can still experience the sort of passageways down which Mr. Eliot smelt steaks, but nowadays they seem to have almost a period charm. It is the same reading about the Algiers described by Albert Camus; the delicious colonial loucheness of the setting tends to put a pastel patina on the jolly old alienation. It won’t be long before someone turns L’Étranger into a colorful Hollywood costume drama—what price the inner life when Passage to India can become a parade of parasols and solar topees?
To be truly bleak, a landscape must be both familiar and fairly freshly created. The connoisseur might try standing at the entrance of Edinborough Park in midwinter and looking across the glass and concrete tundra of South Edina, all abandoned motorcars and dirty snow and the now-defunct cinderblock multiplex where you once saw flickering pictures of more colorful climes, some of them unspoilt (“Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere,” as the writing on the wall used to say as your train pulled out of Paddington Station, taking you from London to the good green meadows of the West Country).
But for sustained depression, try one of those self-storage places. Concealed in a dip, to avoid blotting the landscape too obviously, ranks of abandoned garages provide the perfect setting for the unsolvable crime at the center of a detective novel. In the alleys between them rattle the skeletons of last year’s leaves. Cryogenics comes to mind. The only people around are keeping warm in the office, and perhaps a bloke working on his vintage Chevy. As you leave, the automated voice that thanks you at the barrier appears to be that of the late Count Dracula.
It is warmer inside these small storage rooms than out in the alleys. One imagines them (for one has seen only one’s own) strewn with the remains of lives, things ugly in themselves (the hideous lampshades, the awful ornaments), which might once have meant something if someone had made them mean it—the gewgaw given as a Christmas joke. Here lies the Nachlass of the maiden aunt whose relations have never got round to sorting out her things; here men (it must surely be mostly men, because the women have the houses) hoard the keepsakes from failed marriages, furniture which no longer lends help or comfort because the couples who owned it are unable to forgive. And the cardboard boxes in which all this is kept give off the sweet but unmistakable smell of decay, as if the things inside were slowly losing the warmth they once acquired from being associated with human life, and are reverting to a mere mineral existence.
Such gloomy ruminations suggest the need for some concentrated sweetness to share with those you love this Christmas. Try liqueur glasses of a 2003 Muscat from Bonny Doon Vineyards in California; it is called Vin de Glaciere, and a small flask will cost you about eighteen dollars. There is a pleasant goldenness and a sweet nose, then, as you sip, a smooth velvety sensation of dried apricots and slight oiliness.
This is not sticky sweet wine; the taste reminds me of nothing so much as Setubal, a fortified wine from Portugal made from a different combination of Muscat grapes, which I favored as a dessert wine in my misspent youth. The Bonny Doon would make good dessert wine in the American sense of dessert—not fruit and nuts nibbled after the ladies have withdrawn to the drawing room in the eighteenth-century manner that so annoyed Virginia Woolf, but “afters”: mince pies, plum pudding, even something creamy like bread-and-butter pudding (with many plump golden raisins, known in England as sultanas from their resemblance to sultans’ wives) or a crème brulée.
Here is no false promise of spring, simply a level winter sweetness. Rabbie Burns walked by the original Bonnie Doon river near Ayr in Scotland and wondered why the birds could sing so sweetly when he was so weary, full of care, having lost his girl (though he seldom seemed to have any trouble finding another). If the bleakness is inside and not simply in the landscape, this Muscat taken as a cup of kindness might cheer things up. What sweeter music can we bring?