An Introduction of Sorts
Q. What is The Golden Hour?
A. The Golden Hour is a period of time — sometimes more than, sometimes less than an hour — during which people experience sensations best described as “Golden”.
Q. For example?
A. When you are coming back to town after a weekend during which you sort of learn to ski. One of your oldest friends is driving, and although there is much to say, there’s really no need. You both have clean lungs. The same muscles ache. Snow covers the fields and the hills; there will be work tomorrow, things to measure, but none of this seems likely because you are in the car and moving westward at an even rate. The sky is purple, orange, red, precious yellow, blue. And that song’s on the radio, the one you don’t own, whose name you forget, which you hear every few years and think, Fuck, I love this more than bread, and oh God it’s blasting. Your brains drown in the wash of it. Your wagon keeps on westward. There is just a rush of light. You breathe and see and hear. And it is Golden.
Q. What if I don’t like skiing or music? Or do not have friends? Is there some other way I might know what it is to be “Golden”?
A. When a really nice cat, a beautiful one, with tall ears, or lemon eyes, or just very soft grey fur, sits on your lap as you stroke her, up and down, up and down, until the purr is so loud and regular that it seems mechanical, as if the cat were an engine, and you keep stroking the cat until it feels like just another part of you that you would no more think of removing from your person than you would your anus. That is utterly golden.
Q. I do not prefer living creatures [pause] What if I found a pile of gold? Surely that would be “Golden”?
A. In fact, probably not.
Q. Why not?
A. It just wouldn’t.
Q. [sound of large book being opened in an ostentatious fashion so that there is one of those library-hated thumps as half of it strikes the desk] “Gold: a yellow malleable ductile high density element resistant to chemical reaction, occurring naturally in quartz veins and gravel.” [meaningful pause] “Golden: adjective denoting an item made from or consisting of gold.
A. “Or precious; valuable; excellent; important.”
Q. [sound of book slamming] Is it possible that all of you, in this book, and on the CD, are living in an indulgent, student-esque bubble, and that just because you performed once a month, at the Forest Café, Edinburgh, to great huzzahs and hullabaloos, you think it gives you the right to twist an innocent word like `Golden’ until it becomes a best-selling disease, an in-joke for a clique of fools who laugh and scratch each other?
A. Yes. Because our bubble is Golden. As is our scratching, this CD, this Book. Thank you. You can go.
