Limitless

I paused again, unable to believe that I’d taken so much of it in, even the obscure stuff – details, for example, about what was used as fill for the enormous land-reclamation scheme in Flushing Bay, where the fair had actually taken place.

Ash and treated garbage.

Six-million cubic yards of it.

Now how did I remember that? It was ridiculous – but at the same time, of course, it was fantastic, and I felt extremely excited.

I went back over to the desk and sat down again. The book was about eight hundred pages long and I reckoned that I didn’t need to read the whole thing – after all, I’d only bought it for background information and I could always refer to it again later on. So I just skimmed through the rest of it. When I’d finished the last chapter – and with the book closed in front of me on the desk – I decided to try and summarize what I had read.

The most relevant point I extracted from the book, I think, was about the Loewy style itself, which was popularly known as streamlining. It was one of the first design concepts to draw its rationale from technology, and from aerodynamics in particular. It required that mechanical objects be sheathed in smooth metal casings and pods, and was all about creating a frictionless society. You could see it mirrored everywhere at the time – in the music of Benny Goodman, for instance, and in the swank settings of Fred Astaire movies, in the ocean liners, nightclubs and penthouse suites where he and Ginger Rogers moved so gracefully through space …

I paused for a moment and glanced around the apartment, and over at the window. It was dark and quiet now, or at least as dark and quiet as it can get in a city, and I realized in that instant that I was utterly, unreservedly happy. I held on to the feeling for as long as possible – until I became aware of my own heartbeat, until I could hear it counting out the seconds …

Then I looked back at the book, tapped my fingers on the desk, and resumed.

OK … the shapes and curves of streamlining created the illusion of perpetual motion. They were a radical new departure. They affected our desires and influenced what we expected from our surroundings – from trains and automobiles and buildings, even from refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, not to mention dozens of other everyday objects. But out of this an important question arose – which came first, the illusion or the desire?

And that was it, of course. I saw it in a flash. That was the first point I would have to make in my introduction. Because something similar – with more or less the same dynamic at work – was to happen later on.

I stood up, walked over to the window and thought about it for a few moments. Then I took a deep breath, because I wanted to get this right.

OK.

The influence …

The influence on design later in the century of sub-atomic structures and microcircuitry, together with the quintessential Sixties notion of the interconnectedness of everything was clearly paralleled here in the design marriage of the Machine Age to the growing pre-war sense that personal freedom could only be achieved through increased efficiency, mobility and velocity.

Yes.

I went back over to the desk and keyed in some notes on the computer, about ten pages of them, and all from memory. There was a clarity to my thought processes right now that I found exhilarating, and even though all of this was alien to me, at the time it didn’t feel in the least bit odd or strange, and in any case I simply couldn’t stop – but then I didn’t want to stop, because during this last hour or so I had actually done more solid work on my book than I had in the entire previous three months.

So, without pausing for breath, I reached over and took another book down from the shelf, a study of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I skimmed through it in about forty-five minutes, taking notes as I went along. I also read two other books, one about the influence of Art Nouveau on 1960s design and one about the early days of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco.

Altogether, I took about thirty-five pages of notes. In addition, I did a rough draft of the first section of the introduction and worked out a detailed plan for the rest of the book. I did about three thousand words, which I then reread a couple of times and corrected.

I started to slow down at around 6 a.m., still not having smoked a cigarette, eaten anything or gone to the bathroom. I felt quite tired, a little headachy perhaps, but that was all, and compared to other times I’d found myself awake at six o’clock in the morning – grinding my teeth, unable to sleep, unable to shut up – believe me, feeling tired and having a mild headache was nothing.