The Melancholy of the Mall
It has been at least ten years, and perhaps more, since I’ve walked through a mall.
Of course there have been occasions, always brief, where I had to stride through a mall on the way to some specialty retailer (like a clock repair or a jewellery appraiser). Those visits, very few and very far between, would place me at the entrance of the place, followed by a direct and speedy walk to my destination and a quick reversal out.
When I was a teenager, I liked malls. They were places to hang out and meet with friends. But after the age of sixteen the malls lost all attraction to me.
The local passport office is located inside a suburban mall. I was dropped off early and after only a few hours, all the documents were done. I had expected to be there much longer, so had not arranged to be picked up for another hour. It was cold outside, so I thought I would wander around and see what this place was all about.
This particular mall was built in 1978, making it one of the earlier centres in Ontario. By later standards, it is quite small.1
Being November, Christmas decorations had already been placed here and there, and in one corridor there was a very dreary Santa’s throne (it looked like a carpet-clad old La-Z-boy armchair dragged up from someone’s basement), surrounded by what appeared to be old cardboard boxes covered in some red cloth that had been stapled in place. Two small plastic Christmas trees flanked the despondent area.
The entire locale filled me with a profound melancholy.
The public space in the mall had no direct light. The outdoors was largely invisible, with the entrances and exits placed at the end of “dead” corridors and with double doors further impeding natural light. The hallway décor was queasily neutral. Despite the funereal pall of the place, upbeat, saccharine and deeply incongruous Christmas songs were playing (In less than one hour I heard several repetitions of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”).
Other than those segregated in a line behind divider ropes awaiting passport services, the mall was sparsely populated with a mix of seniors and middle-aged adults. Almost all were sloppily attired in sombrely neutral colours; greys, browns, blacks, beiges. Regardless of age, all wore soft-soled shoes. Some displayed oddly repetitive movements. Most were overweight or somehow bodily misshapen, many perhaps suffering from some chronic or inscrutable disease. Some were couples, most were solitary. All wandered in a seemingly aimless fashion with no obvious purpose or destination, no determined strides, no brisk steps. They merely shuffled noiselessly along a circuit around the periphery of the space.
Many carried nondescript backpacks; even the women clutching handbags. Whatever could they be carrying? What detritus accompanied their doleful indoor excursions?
Beyond the melancholy, I felt a low-level horror at the scene about me. Being myself somewhat far gone in age and possibly just this side of decrepitude, I had a sense that I was viewing what used to be called “a dire warning”. Could this, oh my dear god, be a foreshadowing of my future? At some point, will others experience a low-level pain when they need to dredge up a certain generosity of spirit in order to put up with me?
Perhaps these people at one time had been filled with hope, dreams and shining possibilities; boundless spaces with borderless hope. Now, no longer. Now it seemed that life had become thin and sour, like milk about to turn.
Perhaps, upon crossing the threshold of what we term “retirement” these oddly corporeal wraiths had envisioned all those magnificent empty hours shining with the light of possibility and instead experienced the start of terminal ennui.
Perhaps they had dimly come to some realization that life had not been a grand sweeping epic after all.
I wondered whether loneliness howled through them like a desert wind.
I wondered what might have happened to the songs they loved to sing. Whether they had dressed uniquely and whimsically and why they now wore such drab ill-fitting clothing? Did they once speak with excitement about their dreams and their passions, only now to fall silent?
It seemed as though failure padded closely upon their heels, like a hungry stray dog. Perhaps they were plodding and pacing through this cage of this mall, barely daring to acknowledge that whatever might have been will no longer come.
And so here we slowly swim through this chthonic level of consumerism, this temple of unnecessary consumption — haunting this bleary frontier between wakefulness and sleep.
The Saami in Lapland once held a belief that their underworld was an inversion of the upper world. Each world is a mirror image of the other, where the feet of the dead, who walk upside down, match those of the living. If a believer of that legend came to walk the mall, what deep existential horror might they have felt?
I am not an ancient Laplander and my cultural traditions (which, incidentally, I no longer believe in) align with Heaven, Hell, and more to the point, Limbo and Purgatory.
Although the notion of Limbo evolved (and devolved) over time, the Catholic Church retained it was a sort of anteroom — a temporary holding area on the periphery of Hell. Unbaptized children would be kept there in a liminal dreamy state until the end of time, when they would be admitted into Heaven. Purgatory was a different sort of anteroom, where those who had sinned would spend an appropriate amount of time contemplating their actions and awaiting forgiveness. Or so we were told.
That day, in the mall, I was reminded of my childhood religious beliefs and, at the same time, contemplated the Saami version of the afterlife — both without the benefit of the Greek Waters of Lethe.
[1] If you are curious, here is a moderately sad and telling list of what the mall presently contains:
- One large supermarket
- One children’s clothing store
- Two adult clothing stores
- One cash advance office
- One footwear shop
- Two “accessories” shops
- Two hairdressers
- One nail salon
- One dentist
- Three opticians
- One hearing clinic
- Two alternative health centers, one of which sells cannabis
- Five small electronics stores (cell phones, repairs, small devices)
- One jeweler
- Three gaming locales
- One Florist
- One tutor
- One cleaner
- One shoe repair
- One tax accountant
- Four dollar or variety stores
- One discount movie theatre
- One older adult centre
- Eight (!!) fast food outlets
Would you like to read other posts? If so, please click the Home Page link below:
You, Dear Reader, are much needed and appreciated.
Everything written requires a reader to make it whole. The writer begins, then you, dear reader, take in the idea and its image, and so become the continuation of its breath. Please subscribe so that my words can breathe. Consider this my hand, reaching out to yours.