The Fair

A friend gave me a gift last week — a box of postcards. One hundred classic covers of Vanity Fair magazine.

She handed it to me with the kind of smile that says: this is so you.

I laughed. Because she's right. If I'd seen it in a store I'd have bought it myself.

People have things to say about how we look. I note this the way you'd note weather — it arrives, it passes, I cannot quite locate it in the mirror. What I can locate: the makeup, the dressing, the full hour most mornings that belongs entirely to surface.

That hour has not shrunk. If anything it has grown more considered.

The name, though. Vanity Fair.

Bunyan put it in Pilgrim's Progress in 1678: a fair that never closes. Thackeray borrowed it two centuries later for his great sardonic novel — not about beautiful fools, but about the one person at the party sharp enough to see the game and ruthless enough to play it anyway.

And then the magazine took the name — and proceeded to spend a century proving the joke on themselves. The most serious journalism, the sharpest criticism, the most enduring portraiture in the English language.

All of it at the fair. All of it awake.

We are all there. The only question is whether we know it.