I do not want to see the face of God,

I want to see her mask,

where and for whom it cracked.

These lines hail from a poem, “Claim for the Meek,” written by Bernardo Antwerp. I am specifically thinking of these lines as I think of the mask, the many masks I have modeled, like isolated arias, throughout my life. Different masks for different occasions. Yet when I take off one mask to put on another, my face is not bare. There is another mask beneath the mask covering my face. That is because my mask has a mask, and that mask has a mask. It is an endless supply. Where, then, the face? What, then, is a face?

While I am thinking of masks, I am also thinking about readers, specifically asking this question—Are there readers who still read deeply? Of course there are, is the obvious answer. We, via the web and social media, take in more words, more content than ever before. We are, as the saying goes, at record levels. If we are swallowing, ingesting and consuming at a hyper-accelerated rate, then how deeply are we reading? Are we gleaning, skimming, glossing over, grazing? I am someone who has always read fast and eaten fast. Chances are, I am not processing and digesting in the optimal manner. Yet the hyper-cyber-expedient nature of the world in which I live, the information and image stream which exists as a rising flood, all of this has made me want to stop, reconsider, pause, slow down my speeding train and direct it off the track and to the nearest station for hermitage.

If I give enough thought to this business of masks, where will I end up? Why spend precious time thinking about metaphysical mask-wearing? It is a diversion to keep you busy. We do things to pass the time. Nothing eases the passing of time, not even the passing of time. Someone once wrote that and it remained with me as haunt and refrain. We choose things to pass the time and some of those things are deemed, by society, or by society’s aggregated coherence and agreements, to be more important or worthwhile than others. Writing about the nature and volume of masks is not one of them. Finding out what happened to choose-a-celebrity-name last night, or seeing a well-sculpted Asian woman in a thong and bra conducting her morning workout routine on social media is honeyed enough to draw us in for a taste, three to five seconds of your life is all I ask.