The Void

Modern life is a continuous flight from any encounter with the Divine.

Seven Virtues, Six Sins

I dreamed that, back in the 19th century, out in West Jersey, perhaps near Stokes, a group of city swells in some kind of fraternal order purchased a plot of land on which they built, all wood frame, a "vacation" community seemingly based on the planetary designs of a Tommaso Campanella or the like. There were cabins set aside for each planet, with all the requisite design elements, in a rustic Americana style. Over decades, the order vanished, and by the end of the century the whole place had been bought by Methodists and turned into a "camp." But the Methodists had not done away entirely with the apparently magic substructure of the place, keeping many of the structures intact, albeit repurposed, and once a year, around the time of the autumn equinox, they would "convert" it back to something of its former shape, and gawkers would come from miles around to wander and wonder through the weirdness of a past barely recalled.

The family and I went up there, and in the late afternoon milled around with the various other tourists hoping to see something strange out in the woods. I noticed on the side of one cabin, with a hexagonal shape seemingly dedicated to Jupiter, a hand-painted old sign that was partly stripped by the weather but clearly read "seven virtues, six sins." And as I puzzled over that, my kids, now younger again, ran ahead of me with their mother through a snarl of haphazard wooden posts like a poorly thought out labyrinth, chasing random shadows and other schoolkids and their custodians through the dimming light.