TWILIGHT GLIMMERINGS

Every evening at about this time a treacly sensation steals over me and I suddenly feel like flinging out my arms and spinning about a flowery meadow somewhere, like I'm one of the Trapp children stuck forever in an alpine loop track of The Sound of Music. I shake my head to snap out of it and realize I'm just hearing once again that same old snippet of the execrable Edelweiss being played on the loudspeakers down in the village to mark the hour of five pm for any farmers who might be out in their fields and feel like dancing and singing of tiny white flowers, or maybe to summon home a Heidi who forgot her watch, and as the treacle washes over me I wonder at what long-ago village committee meeting from hell they made the innocuous-appearing but long-reaching decision to play the same syrupy song loudly in the twilight zone every single day all the way to the end of time, until one day a mountain-dwelling foreigner begins to intuit the actual length of eternity, to sense something new about the nature of madness...