We Have No Future

I was recently re-reading Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk, and once again came upon an account of some weather research done years ago that yielded unexpected results. I’d read about Edward Lorenz’ computer simulations before, but the implications of his failed attempts to build long-range weather prediction models hit me for the first time.

In the 1960’s, Lorenz fed data about some hypothetical initial atmospheric conditions into his early computer. He let the program run, watching how the computer’s projected weather patterns would evolve based on this data input. After a while, he recorded the results and shut down the program. A few days later, he decided he wanted to see how weather patterns would have developed if he’d let the program run longer. Rather than typing all that starting point data into the computer again, he just used the printout information from his previous session. He expected the projection to develop exactly the same way it had up to the point he’d discontinued the experiment, and then to proceed into a more distant future.

But Lorenz got a shock. When the computer simulation reached the point where he’d previously left off, it wasn’t reporting the same weather conditions at all. Its predictions up to that point varied wildly from what the computer had originally projected. How could this be? The computer had started with the same data input each time.

But wait a minute. Lorenz saw that the starting data fed into the computer hadn’t been exactly the same in each of his computer sessions. When he had fed in the data by hand for the first session, he had carried out each data point to six decimal places. So for example, he might have entered a number as 0.293416. But when he had just looped back the computer’s print-out numbers, each data point had only been carried out to three decimal places. The computer had abbreviated what Lorenz had entered when it produced its final report. So Lorenz’ first number had been entered only as 0.293 for the second session. And that had made all the difference.

This discovery played a big part in the development of chaos theory with its famous “butterfly effect.” As everyone started to hear about chaos theory in the 60’s and 70’s, we were learning that the tiniest alteration at the start can veer the trajectory of events off into a different direction. A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could create a breeze that would invalidate all predictions, all projections that hadn’t taken that butterfly’s action into account. After a relatively short period of time, such a small difference in “initial conditions” could cause the trajectory of realty to diverge immensely from the predicted trajectory.

Being reminded of this statistical fact made me think again about current projections of climate change. I certainly don’t mean to be a “denier.” However, the ideas advanced by chaos theory, which had been such a popular subject of study some decades ago, seem to be largely ignored now. Many individuals are speaking with great certitude about how global warming will progress and accelerate in this century. Well, we are certainly causing massive damage and depletions with our run-away consumerism. However, we can’t be sure that the result will be global warming for our generation and for the next few generations to come. The climate is a complex system, subject to diverge from prediction with the slightest change in initial conditions. It’s like two children of absolutely equal weight poised level, motionless on a teeter-totter. Let one child put a ribbon in her hair, and the balance will be tipped. She’ll go down. Or that darned butterfly in Brazil might decide to flap its wings on a whim – invalidating all our computer projections.

Seriously though, there are potentially so many more substantial causes that could result in unforeseen results when it comes to future weather conditions, or future anything. Sticking with the example of weather prediction for the moment – we might consider the effect of sunspots. These are flare-ups caused in part by magnetic fluxing on the sun. The presence of a lot of sunspots seems to have a small warming effect on the earth. We currently seem to be going into the trough of a weak cycle of this activity. There’s disagreement about whether we can expect a surge of sunspot activity in the coming decade, or if activity will remain at unusually low levels. If the latter, earth might experience a slight mitigation of any warming trend.

Then there’s precession of the equinoxes. The earth can be pictured as a big spinning top, with its spindle running from pole to pole through its center. When a spinning top slows a bit, it’s easy to see the way the top wobbles. If the tip of its spindle could be made to leave a trail of luminescence, a viewer would see a glowing, irregular circle traced in the air. That’s the kind of circle-path the earth’s axis is tracing in the universal skies. Depending on how the tip of the axis wobbles, depending on how it’s oriented relative to the sun - the earth (particularly its more northerly and southerly latitudes) could experience periods of either sweltering heat or bone-chilling cold.

Many scientists believe we are entering another ice age now, in large part because of the orientation of the earth’s axis. They believe it’s only our burning of fossil fuels that’s staving off the kind of mini-ice age that England experienced in the early 1800’s when the Thames River froze over and when people were literally skating on thin ice wherever they went. Despite all this burning we’re doing, many still think an ice age is coming. Or not.

Then there’s that question of pollution itself. The smog that’s being generated more heavily now in developing countries could paradoxically prove to be a boon by working to block the sun’s rays, resulting in a cooling effect. Some say we didn’t do ourselves any favor in the long-run by reducing smog in Los Angeles, in London, in other big cities in the West. This environmentally good deed has let the sun beat down on us.

Our pollution may have acted like a milder, more temperate form of the meteor that apparently hit the Yucatan Peninsula sixty-five million years ago. The impact of that meteor likely raised so much particulate matter into the air that the sun’s rays were blocked, precipitating a deep ice age, killing the dinosaurs and 75 percent of all other species.

The eruption of volcanoes and the California wildfires could similarly act as a sunscreen and lead to cooling. Whether or not there could be such a detectable effect from these more limited catastrophes might actually turn on the color of ash that they float into the air. Brown ash would intensify the greenhouse effect and heat up the earth. But white ash would reflect the sun’s rays out and away from the earth and lead to cooling. Or not.

Quite a number of respected scientists in the 1950’s and 1960’s thought the pollution we were generating might veer us toward a dangerous cooling. In fact, if any kind of specter of disaster was being raised in those years, it was the specter of an ice age resulting from industrial pollution and, more pointedly, from the nuclear fallout that would result from failure of our Cold War negotiations. “Nuclear winter” was the alarm of that period. However, the scientists were then admittedly working with primitive computer simulations and they almost always conceded that things could go either way. Or not.

Then there’s the looming possibility of “geomagnetic reversal.” Every half-million years or so, our earth flips polarities, with the North Pole becoming the South Pole and vice versa. Or put another way, the positive end of our bar-magnet earth would become negative, and the negative would become positive. Many believe that the word “flip” carries a connotation of too much suddenness. The earth’s entire iron magnetic core doesn’t flip all at once. In the course of its molten fluxing, a section here will flip, then a section there, until finally the balance shifts and the poles can be decisively said to have reversed.

There’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that we might be near such a decisive reversal right now. Instruments that detect the strength of magnetic fields have found the earth’s field is clearly weakening, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. This is likely already the cause of the increasingly frequent failure of satellite communications that has been noted especially in southern latitudes. A weak magnetic field allows the sun’s ionizing elements to penetrate our atmosphere and to wreak havoc. It’s not clear what effects geomagnetic reversal might have on our climate overall. It could greatly accelerate global warming. Or not.

There are a thousand other factors that could play into invalidating any predictions we might make about climate change. But the point of this essay is not to argue either for or against the reality of global warming. I was only using our climate as an example of how unpredictable any complex system of interacting parts is.

The larger point of this essay is first to issue a general reminder about the lessons taught by chaos theory about attempts to project into a presumed future. If we think we will ever be able to predict the weather, or political outcomes, or social trends, or life, or the fate of the universe, for any appreciable length of time – we should “fogedda aboud it,” to quote the Sopranos. The lessons of chaos theory and of Edward Lorenz’ serendipitous discovery should dissuade us from that kind of hubris. We have to remember the power of that Brazilian butterfly to thwart even our best laid plans and to contradict even our most careful predictions.

But then I wanted to go on to make an even larger point about the nature of reality that my re-reading of the account of Lorenz’ experiments suggested to me. This time, I stopped to consider the results of further extensions of Lorenz’ simulations. What if he had extended all his data points about humidity, barometric pressure, cloud cover, etc., etc., out to one-hundred decimal points for an initial computer run, and then increased the accuracy of his measurements to a hundred-and-one decimal points for a second run?

Chaos theory and logic tell us that once again, the two predictions would eventually diverge. Perhaps they would generally match for a longer time, although even that isn’t certain. But they would eventually diverge. Well, then what if Lorenz was able to achieve an accuracy in his measurements of a million and a million-and-one decimal points respectively? But the result would be the same. Significant divergence might be postponed for a longer period of time, but the two projections would still be destined to diverge. It would be the same if Lorenz registered his measurements to a trillion decimal points, a quadrillion, a quintillion… In order to get absolutely congruent results between the two computer runs, Lorenz would have had to carry out his measurements to an infinite number of decimal places.

But then to extrapolate a little further, in order to get a prediction to be congruent with what would really unfold in life farther ahead - a programmer would similarly have to make an infinite number of measurements, carried out to an infinite number of decimal places. The programmer would have to consider an infinite number of variables because everything affects everything else. That South American butterfly’s wing flapping, the leaking of your neighbor’s garden hose, the degree of perturbation of an asteroid in our Solar System’s Asteroid Belt (or any solar system’s asteroid belt), the splash created by a diving puffin off the Hebridean Island of Stornaway, the barking of a dog in the Melbourne suburb of  Yarra, a supernova explosion in the galaxy Messier 81 - and EVERYTHING – would all have to be quantified to the nth degree and fed as input to the computer.

However, the question of scale would have to be considered. All the above events come about because of the actions of individual atoms. So the real operatives that would have to be measured would be individual atoms and sub-atomic parts. The actual barking dog wouldn’t count, only the minute particles of chemical/electrical activity in its brain. You’d have to consider their starting point and the starting points of all the universe’s minute particles.

What’s more, this infinite number of measurements would all have to be made simultaneously and fed into the computer at the same split second. If you measured atomic events in the vicinity of the barking dog at 10:00 and then waited until 10:01 to measure the atomic events impinging on the Earth from Messier 81’s explosion – you would have already invalidated your results. That’s because the conditions that resulted in the first reading could very well have significantly affected the nature of that second thing you measured. Then while you had dilly-dallied recording that second set of numbers, the first causative agent would have changed, going on to radiate a completely different sort of influence out into the universe.

You’d be like the man with a clock in the bedroom and a clock in the kitchen, rushing back and forth between the two trying to use the time showing on one to set the time on the other. Let’s say the man heard a peal from the church tower and he immediately set his bedroom clock accordingly. Then he’d remember that setting and rush to the kitchen to set that clock to the same time. He’d calculate that it took him thirty seconds to rush from one end of his house to the other, so he’d allow for that when setting the kitchen clock. But when he got back into the bedroom, he might find he had overestimated how long the journey took him. He had set his kitchen clock to read 3:15:15, but the bedroom clock only reads 3:14:45. So if the man is a stickler for accuracy, he’ll feel bound to make another mad dash between rooms, and then another, etc. He might eventually enlist the aid of a friend. Standing in the bedroom, the man would yell out the time he’s setting his bedroom clock to and expect his friend, standing ready on the mark in the kitchen, to set the kitchen clock accordingly. But then they’d have to take into account the fact that sound waves take time to travel.

Well, you get the idea. There’s an old proverb that states “The man with one watch knows what time it is. The man with two watches never knows the time.”

Going deeper into the physics of the problem of taking a simultaneous measurement of all elements – you’d run into other problems. Your hired phalanx of universal measurers would immediately realize first-hand the truth of that part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that found the concept of simultaneity to be one of those relative things. Two events that look simultaneous to one man will appear to be separated in time to another man. It all depends on where the men are standing, and on how fast they are moving relative to each other.

But then also Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle would have to be considered. That principle says that you can never simultaneously know both the position and speed of an object. Some popularizers of this concept have explained it by saying the measurer himself will alter the position of an object in the act of measuring its speed, and vice versa. So no one can pinpoint both values simultaneously. The actual explanation of Heisenberg is a little more technically mathematical and has to do with the dual nature of everything as both particle and wave. However, it can be useful to think of the intrusive measurer as a metaphor for the impossibility of simultaneously knowing both the speed and the position of anything.

One summary of all this physics and logic is that it’s truly impossible to measure all relevant influences sufficiently to make detailed predictions very far into the future. Scientists and philosophers have long debated the issue, particularly from the Renaissance onward. Many were committed to the idea of a “clockwork” universe, one in which all the gears that they saw as making up the God-given universe would ratchet forward in predictable lockstep to a series of inevitable positions in the future. If you knew the positions of all the gears at the start, you could predict their positions at any given future time.

Most of the philosophers taking this view acknowledged the practical impossibility of knowing all the starting positions of the gears and calculating the successive movements they’d make from there. However, they believed that such knowledge of the universe was available in theory. It was only the limited reach of the human mind that would forever prevent us from such omniscience. But they believed the gears were grinding away to a preordained terminus.

However, I think the lesson of Lorenz and all the complications cited here lead to a more radically disabling conclusion. I believe they demonstrate not only that the future can’t be calculated – but that the future does NOT exist!

Despite Einstein’s and Hawking’s extrapolations into how “the future” might conceivably be reached by burrowing through wormholes and the like, there actually is no “there.” Something that would require a simultaneous measurement to an infinite number of decimal points of an infinite number of entities – is something that goes beyond being practically impossible. It’s something that is also theoretically impossible. The future is a fiction, a metaphor that derails clear thought.

For an episode of his “Genius” documentary series, Hawking divided his student explorers into two teams. One team stayed with a clock close to the ground, while the other team carried an initially synchronized clock up to the top of a high mountain. There was an ecstatic exclamation of having ventured “into the future” when it was found that, after a while, the ground team’s clock registered a miniscule lag behind the mountain clock, due to gravity’s effects. But calling that a glimpse into the future seems to be a misnomer. The somewhat more obscure, but more valid term of “time dilation” fits better. However, “time dilation” soon morphs in the public imagination into the possibility of literal access to a future place, given the right technology. Given a souped up DeLorean, the “future” becomes a definite, preexistent place you can visit.

It’s a sliding of meaning that even scientists themselves fall prey to and promote. Going in the other direction, it’s like saying that when you make your way down into the Grand Canyon on the less high-tech conveyance of a mule, you are going “into the past.” Well, yes, that’s true in a sort of metaphorical sense. You are witnessing the successive effects of past geological events as you pass the different layers of rock and sediment. But you are not literally going into a place where your great grandparents might be seen, wafting through in their top hats and crinoline skirts.

There’s another aspect of Heisenberg’s Principle and of quantum physics in general that might be considered to confirm this nihilistic view that there is no literal future. Quantum physics teaches us that the future actions of individual sub-atomic particles cannot be predicted. Like the manager of a lottery, a quantum physicist can only inform you of the odds. She can tell you your chances of winning, but she can’t tell if you or any other specific individual will in fact win. Quantum physics is about statistics. It can tell you on average how many atoms in a clump of Uranium-238 will emit an alpha particle, causing those atoms to decay into Thorium-234 each year. But it can’t tell which atoms will be responsible for that radioactivity.

Without meaning to anthropomorphize the atoms, it could be said that even the atoms themselves don’t seem to know the moment they’ll make the transition. There seems to be no discernible precedent for any individual atom’s radioactive expulsion. So it becomes evident that the non-existence of future states starts with the lack of definite starting points at the lowest levels of matter and energy.

When Lorenz’s repeat computer simulation showed that you’d simultaneously have to make an infinite number of measurements to an infinite number of decimal points – they not only showed the towering impossibility of making highly detailed, long-range predictions, they also showed that there is no preexisting state down the road that could be predicted. There is no room of the future lowering ahead of us, no altered arrangement of the furniture of reality that we might dimly glimpse through the haze of time. Just as some members of Columbus’ crew feared a void in the space they were sailing into, so there is truly a void when it comes to the future. There is no tangible certainty. There is only a vanishing into what is an imminent (and immanent) nothingness. The concrete reality of existence only comes into being each successive moment.

(In a future essay, I’ll examine the impossibility of there being a preexistent future from another angle – from the angle of the nature of time. Wait for it…)

The Bad Butcher

I went to the bank the other day to conduct a few transactions. First, I wanted to exchange a hundred-dollar bill I’d been given for tens. Hundreds are always problematic for me. I hardly ever spend anywhere near that amount in any store. Handing over that excess usually draws sour looks from the check-out clerk. Since I’m not buying much more than a coffee and some bananas, a hundred-dollar bill creates a huge drain on a clerk’s change drawer. What’s more, a bill of that size has to be carefully inspected and validated as a non-forgery before a clerk can accept it. All-in-all, hundred-dollar bills are nuisances.

So I handed over my bill to the bank teller and she quickly pushed a small stack of ten-dollar bills back at me. Just as I was reaching for this more negotiable supply of money, the teller barked out, “Wait! Wait a minute. Hand those back. I think I gave you too much.”

Reluctantly, I pushed my apparent bonanza back under the plastic shield and dismally watched her re-count. Yes, she found she had given me one too many ten-dollar bills. She stashed the extra bill back in her tray and this time carefully counted out one…two…three……ten - and only ten - bills back to me.  I accepted the new stack and contemplated my reduced circumstances as the teller went on to complete other items of business for me.

I wondered if I should tell her the tale. It was a rainy day and no other customers seemed likely to have urgent business in the walk-in bank cubicle at that moment. It seemed I’d have time. So I launched into the “Parable of the Two Butchers.”

I told the teller that our corrected exchange had reminded me of a story. There were two butchers both doing business on the same street in a town. Both store owners were friendly, knowledgeable professionals. They both sold reliably tender, tasty, high-quality meat. They both kept their stores immaculately clean. They both sold their products at comparable prices and both ran frequent, advertised sales.

Yet one butcher almost always did overflow business, while the other butcher’s shop usually just had a trickle of customers. What could possibly account for the difference? The butcher with the failing business hired an outside consultant to see if he could find the reason for his poor patronage.

The consultant sent in an anonymous shopper who spent considerable time shopping at both places on successive days. She bought chops from one place, then the other. The next day it was ribs, then the rarer oxtails, then ground beef, and so forth. Finally, the consultant thought she had solved the mystery.

The butcher doing poor business would almost always respond to a customer’s order by piling a randomly large amount of meat on his scale in front of the customer. Then he’d take off, take off, take off meat - until the scale registered the amount the customer wanted.

By contrast, the successful butcher would always initially put too little meat on the scale in front of the customer. Then he would add more, add more, add more - until the pile of ground beef (or whatever) came up to the weight the customer had specified.

And there you have it. Customers of both stores ultimately came away with their requested weight of quality meat. And yet the customers of the successful store always felt as if the butcher was being more generous with them – adding, adding. “Oh, that’s not enough. Let me go in the back and get you some more.”

It’s a subtle psychological trick our minds play on all of us. Once some meat is put on the scale, we feel it’s ours. The butcher who adds, adds – is granting us more and more. But what about that other butcher? Again, we feel that once the meat has been put on the scale, it’s ours. But here he’s taking away, taking away. Our portion is being whittled down by a calculating stinginess.

Once the habitually subtracting butcher learned this, he changed his ways, and his business soon picked up until he was competitive with the butcher down the street.

The bank teller had caught my point. As she handed over my receipt, she smiled across at me. “So I am the bad butcher?” she ventured.

“Yes, you are the bad butcher,” I humorously confirmed.

We bonded a moment over our newly shared secret about the right way of doing business. Then I walked back out into the rain – with that regrettably diminished number of bills in my wallet.

Dorian Gray in the Flesh

Once every ten years or so, the Chicago Art Institute has a special exhibit of the paintings of Ivan Albright. He’s most famous for his “Picture of Dorian Gray.” Because he was known for his searing depictions of the decay and corruption that human flesh is prone to – he was commissioned to do the final painting of the soul of Dorian Gray for the 1945 movie made of Oscar Wilde’s novel. That painting is now in the Art Institute’s permanent collection. This most recent exhibit of the corpus of his work was entitled “Flesh.” 

In preparation for visiting this latest Albright retrospective, I started to do a little research into the circumstances under which Albright had produced his iconic work. I found several additional interesting facts surrounding that painting. For one thing, it seems Ivan’s identical twin brother contributed to the work. There is at least one photograph showing both Ivan and brother Malvin with paint brushes, poised to work on the picture. 

But then it occurred to me that another arresting portrait appeared in the movie. Everyone remembers and refers to that shocking final reveal. However, there had been the early portrait done of Hurd Hatfield in his role as Gray, a handsome, fresh-faced Victorian gentleman. I wondered what artist MGM had employed to do that other painting, so reminiscent of John Singer Sargent’s full-length portraits of elegant ladies and gentlemen. It took some research to find out who was responsible for that “before” representation of Gray. 

I discovered Portuguese artist Henrique Medina is largely credited with producing that unspoiled version of Gray. However, the several paintings used in the movie were probably a collaborative effort, with the Albrights participating in all phases of the painting and with artist Audubon Tyler largely responsible for a transitional portrait, the portrait in which the first results of Gray’s cruelty have started to register on the face of the portrait. 

George Ladas, on his blog called “Full Circle,” supplies a picture of that intermediary portrait, with the subtle differences from the original labeled. It’s the only online photograph of the intermediate picture I could find. Viewers of the movie catch a glimpse of this transitional form as Gray, standing in the dim attic, wonders if the changes he perceives are in fact there, or if he is merely imagining the tell-tale reflection of his turpitude. It’s amazing how the artist demonstrated the change from open friendliness to imperious cruelty with changes in just a few lines on the face. 

The history of these early, attractive portraits used in the movie turned out to be almost more eerie and interesting than that final horror everyone associates with Dorian Gray. I read that the Sargent-like portrait was given to actor Hatfield at some point after the filming of the movie. When he died, it was inherited by a friend. With some lapses in provenance, it was eventually bought by Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, a relative of Hurd’s. Then in 2015, it went up for auction again and was purchased for $149,000 by an anonymous buyer. No one seems to know who that buyer was or where the painting is now. We can assume it’s in the attic of some modern-day debauchee, ready to start the cycle over again from innocent youth to monstrosity.

              

                                                         

The top picture is a black-and-white photograph of Henrique Medina's original painting. Below that is the slightly altered version, seen only briefly in the move. Art teacher and commentator George Ladas has labeled the subtle changes made, likely by artist Audubon Tyler, to show the portrait's movement towards corruption. It's amazing the difference that can be achieved by raising an eyebrow ever so slightly, by altering the lines at the side of the mouth by just the tiniest fraction of an inch.

But getting back to the main attraction, the Albright painting that is most vividly associated with the Dorian Gray movie – I went off to the Art Institute to confront it again. It dominates any Albright exhibit, hanging there, slightly larger than life-sized. It’s in color, and was the only instant of color allowed in the generally b&w 1945 movie. Although whenever I viewed the movie in successive reruns on TV, I always only saw the portrait in black-and-white because my family was probably the last in Chicago to get a color TV. We resisted the gaudiness of color, with its inability to displace the screen action into another world, a dream world of imagination and inwardness. We resisted the way color devalues the human face, making it a pale splotch amid brilliantly-colored surroundings that monopolize attention. Finally though, there were no new black-and-white sets that could be bought, so we had to surrender to the onslaught of technology and Technicolor. I’d never caught the movie after that though, with its last splash of color. 

Even though I’d only seen the final Dorian Gray in black-and-white, it had still made me recoil in horror whenever it was shown on late-night TV. That picture slammed me with a curse, an evil eye and an omen of the savagery that humans could visit on each other. Now as I stood in front of the real thing there at the Art Institute, it still had a searing effect. But I found I could be a little more objective, a little more critical of this outcome. It seemed Albright might have gone over-the-top with this incarnation of misdeeds. I thought it might have been more effective if the viewer could still detect the original man underneath that encrustation of corruption. But there was no resemblance. This foul creature was a thing apart, severed from all connection with the smoothly handsome Dorian Gray. Now, having made a sort of study of the film’s commissioned artwork, I found I could actually be more chilled by the thought of that transitional image with just its subtlety of malign influence. 

Nevertheless, I stood there waiting. I was waiting for that edge of the comical to wear off and for the full horror of the visage to hit me once again. But I also stood there waiting for something else. I stood there waiting, wondering if some sort of witchery would strike again.  

That’s because a strange coincidence of reality and fiction had taken place the last time I’d stood before that picture - in that previous decade, the last time the Art Institute had assembled a retrospective of Albright’s works. It had been raining hard that day, so there weren’t many people at the Museum. There was no one else with me in the Gallery that included Albright’s masterpiece. I was alone in front of The Picture of Dorian Gray, when – the lights went out.  

That whole wing of the Art Institute was plunged into darkness. I heard some sounds of surprise, of hurrying feet coming from adjoining rooms. The darkness was almost total. I was afraid to move, afraid I might lurch in the wrong direction. But I remembered a gift a pen-pal had sent me, something I always carried with me in my purse. It was a lavalier light, a little orange pumpkin globe that she said I could use in emergencies if the lights went out on a plane or in a hotel where I might be staying. I groped in my purse and fished out the little light. I snapped it on. The battery was still live, even though that light had been lying dormant in the bottom of my purse a long time. I was amazed at how bright it was. 

Nervous about how long I’d be allowed to stand there alone in the dark, surrounded by Albright’s images of rotting flesh – I hoisted the light aloft. It swung wildly on its pendant, a rapid pendulum swaying away the darkness. I look up and saw the ultimately corrupt Dorian Gray in front of me in swipes of evil orange exposure. 

It hit me how I was exactly replicating the most harrowing scenes from the movie. When Dorian murders the painter of his formal portrait there in the attic room where his secret has been discovered – when the rush of the outside world breaks into the attic room to find Dorian’s own body – this action causes the lantern light hanging from the ceiling in front of the picture to swing wildly. Back and forth, back and forth – the lantern light reveals the full horror of the picture to us in slashes. 

In that moment, I’d been standing in the movie. Its grim fiction had become my terrifying reality. Luckily, I wasn’t left in that sickening, swaying alteration of fact and fiction for long. A museum security guard came in accusingly, telling me I had to clear out of there. She waved her flashlight in the direction she wanted me to move. I looked back and saw the effigy of Dorian Gray in one last ghastly spotlight sweep. 

I waited for the staged presence of Dorian Gray to conjure another such moment on this recent visit to the Art Institute. But it didn’t happen. With a few other people milling around in mixed attitudes of fascination and revulsion, I was left with the simple shock of: