We have been encased in fog for almost a week now — more than a week! — and J said that she’d talked to a woman on the bus yesterday who remembered reading about an occasion when Vancouver had remained shrouded in fog for 100 days straight. Or was it 30? The woman on the bus hadn’t been quite sure, but she remembered being astonished by the figure whatever it had been, and J had been astonished too, as was I this morning when J told me about the conversation (and the uncertain figure) as we drove through this morning’s fog to work.

Driving through fog is mysterious and disorienting, and if the fog persists long enough — a week! 30 days! 100 days! — you begin to suspect that the world might not be as solid as you’d once believed, and that you can no longer absolutely rule out the possibility that what you see of the fog-bound world has been hastily assembled to order as you move through it; that unseen figures — gods, perhaps — are occupied in moving a small number of trees and buildings about in order to preserve the illusion of a more completely furnished universe.

You gradually become convinced that you’re not really going anywhere when you drive, that your car is one of those fixed vehicles that they used in 1940s movies when filming scenes where the actors — Humphrey Bogart, say, and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca — are driving somewhere together and talking, and you see a vague urban background projected on a screen behind the actors, who go through the motions of driving while they deliver their scripted lines of dialogue.

You start to believe that you’re acting your life rather than living it, and you wait with increasing anxiety for the fog to lift so that Ingrid can fly safely out of Casablanca, and you can once again begin to live as you did before.