Cycle 6

Oh, the women tear their blouses off
And the men they dance on the polka-dots
It's Closing Time
And it's partner found, it's partner lost
And it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops
It's Closing Time

-Leonard Cohen, Closing Time (Surviving Fragments)

—Note: This section has been specially labeled by Commander Jason Silverman as “Winter at The Apthorp”

I have never been one to get drunk on the news cycle. I’ve always read responsibly, knowing that most things purported to be fact are held together by educated guesses, editorial prerogative, and suspect or at least questionable journalistic ethics. The path to the media mortuary is littered with the bones of well-intentioned publishers. Over time, the economics of news had come to favour volume over value. The importance of long-form journalism, trustworthiness, and reader loyalty was unquestionably usurped by digital bits and televised sound-bites. Algorithms were the bait that kept readers clicking and fed into the hyperactive, information-addicted, low resolution ocean of information that so many schools of the softheaded swam in. However, the threat of complete annihilation didn’t seem as hyperbolic as the endless debate over gender, national debt ceilings that were forever being raised, or the latest celebrity scandal and politically incorrect tweet.

War was always worrisome to me, even though it seemed ridiculous to worry about a large-scale nuclear conflict which would surely result in human extinction before it actually happened. I had no frame of reference for imagining what such a thing would be like, much like the concept of death which can only be understood in the abstract sense. After all, mourning the loss of another person does not bring us any closer to knowing what dying actually feels like. To paraphrase Einstein, ‘if the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons the following one will be fought with sticks and stones.’ Einstein was right. It turned out that the war to end all wars banished any further thought of military conflict. We, the survivors, continued living in a time of eerie peace. In the aftermath of the unimaginable, we were separated from the way things were by a silent winter that enveloped everything, closing us off from the past, including the catastrophes that led us to this place of isolation, those events that took place, seemingly, in another world.