On Cults and Mayonnaise

Silverberg, Robert. The Masks of Time. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973. Print.

While I highly doubt the average person would admit it, there is no doubt in my mind that we live in an age fueled by cult madness. You, your best friend, and your mother might disagree, but we’re knee deep in it even though no one’s pulled out the pitcher of kool-aid yet. I don’t think anyone realizes how truly Bizarre with a capital ‘B’ the world is. Everyone is so hell-bent on pushing the terror of meaning out of their mind that they’ve set up alters to the most ridiculous, shocking, and grotesque things.  It’s all about the meaning and priority you assign to the things in your life. Would you believe that some of the most straight-laced, square people are members of some of the sickest unofficial, unorganized organizations in the world? Facebook can be a cult, and so can fashion and yoga and rigid, organic lifestyles. It all depends on how a person treats a thing, institution, pastime, or whatever. We dedicate abnormal amounts of time to things that don’t matter at the end of the day, all the while suppressing the mortifying and frightening thought that this is where we’re looking for and assigning meaning. 

Robert Silverberg’s The Masks of Time is a novel about cults. Two cults, really. One that does a merry dance of death around the thought of an impending doomsday, the other putting all their faith and love in a man that might be from the distant future (could also be an alien, a hoaxer, or a crazy). The story is told from the perspective of Leo Garfield, a professor of physics assigned to a team that is supposed to chauffer Vornan-19, the man of the future, through the United States, protecting him and assessing him as they go. I won’t say whether Vornan turns out to be what he says he was, because it doesn’t matter. An object is only what others perceive it to be, and for people looking for meaning, for a god to creep out of the rubble of anarchy and provide a Way Back Out, Vornan-19 was a god. Whether he actually was from the future or not. Whether he was all-powerful or not. Whether he was even likeable or not.  I really enjoyed this book. For me, Vornan-19 was the perfect personification of the kind of weird attitudes I notice in the world today. Hell, you can polish up a jar of mayonnaise real shiny and call that your god, if you feel so inclined. And our handy human brains will allow you to do it subconsciously, without wasting the time of even acknowledging the beatific mayo’s divinity.