▸ Column · Modern Midgard (contemporary Earth), seen through the eyes of an Asgardian prince walking among mortals — the gravity Thor brings to all human things applied to a December cul-de-sac dispute
THOR replies.
The letter
For eleven years I have maintained what my neighbors call the finest December display on our street in Midgard — hand-crafted lights strung in careful order, a nativity scene I repaint each year, and a wire figure I bend by hand into a new shape each season. A newcomer next door has now erected a monstrous forty-foot inflated figure that swallows mine entirely; at night his belly-glow turns my careful lights the color of ash. When I raised this with him plainly, he patted the thing's enormous fabric boot and said "competition is healthy" while plainly enjoying my distress. I have already priced a sixty-foot counter-display and a wind machine to drive it, but my husband says that is how a person ends up on the evening news. Do I escalate with the larger display, or is there a quieter form of justice available?
Thor replies
Good soul, I have met your neighbor's kind on the battlefield of my own pride — and I was him once. The loudest warrior in the hall, certain that size was the measure of a thing. My father Odin sent me to Midgard stripped of my hammer and my certainty, with nothing but my name, and only then did I begin to understand what worthiness meant: not how large your display, but why you built it, and for whom.
Here is what you stand to lose in the arms race you are considering. The nativity you painted yourself. The wire figure you have bent into a new shape, every December, for eleven years. Those things are what they are because your hands made them so, season after season, for the love of it. A sixty-foot inflatable has no love in it. Only feet.
Bartosz called this competition. He did not understand what you had built, because what you built was never a competition — it was a tending. That is a wholly different thing, and no inflatable can diminish it unless you decide to let his measure become yours.
As for the other path you named: do not let the air out of his Santa. That is grievance dressed as justice, and it will make you smaller than it makes him. I have felt that pull myself. It never leads where you think.
Tend the wire figure. Repaint what needs repainting. Let your display be the thing it has always been — made, not purchased to win.
— Thor
Thanos weighs in
The Odinson counsels you to accept being diminished and call it virtue. How like him.
Little one, the arithmetic is not complicated. A balance that held for eleven years has been disrupted. You did not ask for it. Bartosz introduced the imbalance — forty feet of it — and your neighbor Thor now asks you to honor that disruption with graceful silence and call it tending. I call it capitulation with a pleasant name.
The sixty-foot Frosty is not spite. It is a correction. Do not perform reluctance about it. Commit fully, execute cleanly — the wind machine, the footage, all of it — done with calm decision, not drama. Your neighbor told you the terms when he said competition. You do not get to pretend the game is not being played simply because you'd prefer it weren't.
The local news fears the hesitator. Make your correction with such quiet certainty that it appears inevitable. Because it is.
— Thanos
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