Beautiful essay in the NYT about what we lose when we are alone

I was very struck by this passage in a beautiful essay published in the paper about a month ago: Is It Strange to Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers?:

In the way that absence illuminates desire, and breakage illuminates function — you don’t notice the doorknob until it twists off in your hand — quarantine has made it plain to me how much I miss the daily, unspoken, casual company of strangers, the people whose names and lives I’ll never know, who populate my ordinary urban days with their bodies on the subway, their glances on the sidewalk, their stray comments at the A.T.M., their hands holding whole milk and gummy bears in front of me in the bodega line.

It was in the early months of my separation that I started to become acutely aware of this gratitude for the peculiar anonymous company that urban living offers — for the cafe just downstairs from my new apartment, where many of the same regular customers gathered each morning: the amiable elderly man chain-smoking and mansplaining trans-Atlantic politics; the mom-friends with their parked bassinets; the 20-something boys reading Bakhtin and Heidegger who never offered to help me carry my stroller up the stoop stairs. In the aftermath of my household unraveling, it was an acute and unexpected comfort to find this daily ragtag cohort just downstairs — a looser household, but a household nonetheless.

Walking late at night on Flatbush Avenue, I appreciated all the anonymous strangers I passed for the ways they suggested, even if I didn’t know their stories, how many different ways it was possible to craft a life. The man buying mangoes at the bodega just before midnight? Maybe he was a father of five. Maybe he was a single father of five. Maybe he and his husband were trying to adopt. Maybe he and his wife had been trying to have a child for years. Maybe he and his wife knew they didn’t want a child; maybe they were saving up to travel the world instead. Maybe he lived alone with his aging mother. Who could know his story? I never would. But I didn’t need to. I only needed to know, through his presence on that sidewalk, that so many plotlines for a life were possible.

When we lose the ability to live among the bodies of strangers, we don’t just lose the tribal solace of company, but the relief from solipsism — the elbow brush of other lives unfurling just beside our own, the reminder of other people’s daily survival, the reminder that there are literally seven billion other ways to be alive besides the particular way I am alive; that there are countless other ways to be lonely besides the particular ways I am lonely; other ways to hope, other ways to seek joy.

"So many plotlines for a life."

Exactly.

Marvelous article.

Enemy Women: a very short review

I cannot get enough of Paulette Jiles.

This summer I read News of the World; this fall I read Enemy Women. I cannot think of two finer books with which I could have occupied those rare few hours when I sit down to read.

Enemy Women is set in Southern Missouri during the Civil War, and tells the adventures of Adair Colley, a young girl living with what remains of her family on the family farm in rural Missouri. In the space of just a few days, the farm is destroyed, the family is scattered, and Adair finds herself in jail, held as a prison by the Union forces in an attempt to force her to give up secrets about the Confederate activities in the Ozarks.

Harrowing adventure after harrowing adventure proceeds, as Adair confronts and surmounts one obstacle after another, supported by little more than her treasured horse Whiskey and a fiercely burning desire to survive.

And somehow, unlikely though it often seems during these episodes, Adair does more than merely survive; she comes through her experiences realizing that what she and Whiskey have witnessed is not just a cataclysm, but perhaps a new beginning:

The next day Adair woke up to a clean sky and the sound of Whiskey devouring the new bluestem grass nearby. She sat up in her blankets. Whiskey dropped down to his side and rolled over and wallowed on his back, his feet swimming in the morning air. He jumped up and snorted and shook himself. The forests of the Ozarks had never been cut, so the yellow pine and oaks were sometimes fifteen feet around at the base. They stood far apart from one another without underbrush, and it was good traveling then, through the greening world. At the seeps and springs, there were banks of violets and fern, sweet williams and miniature wild irises whose flowers were no bigger than a person's thumb and two fingertips held together. Wild pansies looked up with lion faces, the shadows of the new leaves were faint as the shadows of an eclipse.

At the next ridge south of Mungar's was an open prairie of grasses of several acres. It was what the people called a barrens. Adair could see for a long way. The hills poured out southward, one after another. The wind tore at her hair and she felt herself lifting like a kite. She stood for a long time to listen for the sound of a mill wheel or a church bell, or foundry or circle saw squaring logs, the ringing of an anvil.

The hills were silent. She stood listening for a long space of time. There was only the long wind singing off the top of the receding ridges and their heavy forests.

It seemed all the people were gone. Soon there would be some other world and some other people to take their place. The grasses on the little barren seethed in the wind with their new seed-heads, and the wind was chill, and so they went on as the road drove downhill toward the main fork of the Black River.

The seventh day of slow traveling found them up and moving by dawn. It was very cold that morning, for it was yet early in April and she wore the Zouave jacket and the down quilt over her shoulders on top of it. They followed the road as it swung along a steep hillside in a oak forest. They were southwest of Iron Mountain, and she had no idea what was the name of the road.

I love this vaguely biblical ("seventh day of slow traveling") passage, and its lyrical, eloquent telling of how harsh change is yet intertwined with the continuity of life. I love the graceful placement of human change within its natural setting ("good traveling then, through the greening world"). I love the way Adair feels with all her senses ("see for a long way", "hills were silent", "wind tore at her hair", "thumb and two fingertips", "devouring the new bluestem grass", "lifting like a kite", "swimming in the morning air"). And I love how the passage packs an cosmological eternity ("a long way", "a long time", "a long space of time") into an instant of recognition of the change that had come upon her: "she had no idea what was the name of the road".

In an afterword, Jiles describes how writing Enemy Women was an attempt for her to imagine what might have happened with her own great-great-grandfather, who lived in the Missouri Ozarks during the Civil War but whose full story has been lost to time. The Civil War seems like a dusty old relic at times, but obviously it remains a crucial element of the country's history and development, and really, it is not so long ago: consider this remarkable observation from blogger Jason Kottke that virtually the entire history of the country can be spanned by just three generations:

Last weekend, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. died at the age of 95. Remarkably, Lyon was the grandson of John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States. His brother Harrison Ruffin Tyler is still alive.

Jiles's Civil War is vivid, and immediate, even if she recognizes that most of what she depicts, and most of what anyone can in fact depict about the war, is the cloudy convoluted result of untold vaguely remembered tales:

She would not sleep in the tavern, either, not in any place, not in the kitchen or the woodshed but went to the barn instead with a wool U.S. Army blanket taken from Jessie's stores and slept in the barn loft over Whitkey's stall. Listened to him grind up the corn in his great molars, got up often to look and see if he were down or still standing on all four feet. For more than a week he stood with his leg drawn up and moved with great difficulty.

Still the men came. They slept in the mill loft or came to sit on their heels in front of the tavern. Many sat under the eaves and watched the rain come down, and some came in and looked at the shelves and said nothing, for they had nothing to spend. They listened to the June rain.

They talked in low voices among themselves and then there was laughter, for they were telling stories. They were making their past lives now into tales, and they were exchanging the tales so they could go and tell not only their own, but also others', and somehow this would make a sort of thin, fragile text or texture that might give way and might not, might hold, might be raveled out and be gone forever.

I love Jiles' stories, her own and those of others, and I would say that her text is certainly not thin or fragile, but rather does not give way and should hold. Adair proves to be fierce and resilient, and is (or should be) a heroine for the ages. I hope Enemy Women still finds new readers like me, decades after it was originally published.

Although it was far from her first book, Enemy Women was the book that brought Jiles her breakthrough success. Enemy Women was published when Jiles was 59 years old, but in the 20 years since then, she has certainly not slowed down, publishing five more best-sellers, including this year's Simon the Fiddler. I won't get to that one immediately, though; I've still got several more to catch up with first.

Thank you, Ms Jiles: I'm looking forward to reading many more of your wonderful books!

Robert Bechtle's photo-realistic Alameda

I only just realized, reading an obituary of him, that Bay Area artist Robert Bechtle passed away.

I wasn't really familiar with Bechtle, but I sure am familiar with his work!

Here's Alameda Gran Torino, 1974

Here's Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006

Here's Sterling Avenue, Alameda II, 1991

I visit these places every day.

And that stretch of Alameda has barely changed since 1974!

I would have liked to have learned more about Bechtle while he was alive, bad on me. But it's nice that I learned about him, eventually.

Creek Fire and Beasore Road

Here's a fascinating report from a backpacking group who had to make some complicated decisions in the middle of their one-week planned east-to-west traverse of the Central Sierras: Escape from Creek Fire. There's additional information here, though I don't know how to do a great job of Twitter linking.

I don't think I realized just how close our hike was last year to this area. The maps are a bit hard to read but I'm pretty sure that Beasore Road, our access road to the Fernandez Trailhead, has been crossed by the fire at this point.

In 2002, on a backpacking trip to Mosquito Lakes from the Mineral King trailhead, we had to cut our trip short and make a hasty exit due to a fire about 20 miles south of us.

That was dramatic, but nothing like this!

Generally we have been well-prepared for fire conditions on our backpacking trips. We are alert to the dangers, and have talked regularly about how we would handle such situations.

But we were never tested like this group was tested.

It appears that if we had been on that trip at this time, our primary plan (detect the fire early, abort the trip, hike out and leave), might not have been an option. We might have had to choose a different option (for example, we knew that an alternate plan was to hike about 10 miles north, where a trail led through a pass and into Yosemite National Park and then out through Wawona).

I'm glad they shared their experience, and their thoughts as they were reacting in real time.

Lots to think about.

Gipsy Moth Circles the World: a very short review

Continuing my Summer of Armchair Adventure, I spent the last month with Francis Chichester and his tale of sailing around the world single-handedly: Gipsy Moth Circles the World.

Chichester was really a remarkable fellow. He set off on this adventure shortly before his 65th birthday, and completed the entire trip in 226 days: 107 days to get to Sydney Australia, where he docked and repaired and re-supplied the boat; then 119 days to return to England.

He did all this in Gipsy Moth IV, a 54-foot ketch-rigged yacht which was custom designed and built for the adventure. (After years of being docked as a museum piece next to the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, Gipsy Moth has since been restored and is still actively sailed!)

Perhaps even more remarkable, Chichester had few of the tools that are used in modern-day sailing: no telephone, no GPS, no radar. He had a 75 watt radio that he could operate sparingly; he used it primarily to report regular dispatches to be published in (I think?) The Times. And he had a self-steering wind vane, which was a relatively recent innovation for ocean sailing, having been in use only for a few decades by this point.

Instead, Chichester had his bound paper copy of the Admiralty charts, two sextants (his primary one and a smaller less accurate backup sextant), and a Rolex Oyster Perpetual wristwatch (of which the Rolex corporation are justifiably proud).

You probably don't even know what a sextant is; you almost surely have never used one; you might have seen one in a museum somewhere; you're unlikely to be able to summarize how it works. But for centuries the sextant was the only way to navigate on the open seas, and if coupled with a reliable time piece it can be extremely accurate.

Moreover, Chichester literally wrote the book on how to navigate using a sextant. He so thoroughly comprehended this now-vanished skill that during WWII he taught RAF aircraft pilots in navigation, including his own adaptation of astro-navigation to a technique that allowed the pilots of single-handed fighter aircraft to navigate across Europe and back while under complete radio silence.

Anyway, enough about Chichester the adventurer; how about Chichester the writer?

Many reviews of Gipsy Moth Circles the World call it "under-stated", or "dry", and those are fair. Chichester basically developed the notes from his log book (his eight log books, more than 200,000 words across them all!) into a full-length retelling of his sail, and his style was to basically tell it like it was.

The book was, I think, principally targeted at people who have at least some appreciation for what is involved in sailing a boat on the ocean, even if they have never done it themselves, and so there are many (oh! so many!) passages filled with material like this:

I went on deck to replace the trysail with the main. The wind seemed lessening, and I felt that Gipsy Moth needed the main. I did not like that main, it was my least favourite sail. For one thing, it required too much brute force to handle, for it was always pressing against a shroud or binding on a sheet; for another I had to trot to and fro from mast to cockpit about six times during the hoisting. First I had to slack away the vangs as the sail began to rise; then to alter the self-steering trim to head more into the wind so that the head of the sail would not foul the lower aft shroud; then seveal times to slack away the sheet as the sail went up. After that the lower shroud runner had to be released, and the shroud tied forward to another shroud.

Let's be honest: you either find that fascinating (or at least comprehensible), or it's just gibberish and could have just as well be written in hieroglyphs from your point of view.

But at other times in the book Chichester's spare and straightforward approach to re-telling the story leads to passages that are as gripping and compelling as anything you'll find anywhere.

For example, here's Chichester discussing all the flak he'd received over deciding to embark on such an adventure in his mid-sixties:

People keep at me about my age. I suppose they think that I can beat age. I am not that foolish. Nobody, I am sure, can be more aware than I am that my time is limited. I don't think I can escape ageing, but why beef about it? Our only purpose in life, if we are able to say such a thing, is to put up the best performance we can -- in anything, and only in doing so lies satisfaction in living.

And here he is trying to figure out what to do about a few miscalculations that have put him in a dire position:

On Monday, October 3, I sounded the fresh water tank and found that I had only 21 gallons left, plus half a jerrycan (about 2 1/2 gallons) which Giles, my son, had made me take as a reserve.
...
When I started I knew that I had not enough water on board to see me through the passage to Sydney; I had allowed myself enough for all reasonable needs for six weeks, relying on getting enough rain to fill my tanks before there could be any real chance of running short. But I underestimated my use of water, particularly for the twice-daily watering of my cress-garden. And so many things needed water -- baking required it, and all dried vegetables, egg and milk powder wanted it. I could cook potatoes in seawater but not rice. With my underestimation of consumption, I seemed, too, to have overestimated the chances of rain, or at least my ability to catch it. Rain had come with the squalls from time to time, but not in catchable quantity, apparently.
...
What I failed to take into account was that rain usually comes with a strong wind, [...] thus ruining the water for drinking purposes.
...
It is normally reckoned that a man can live well enough on half a gallon (four pints) of water a day; that is of course, for drinking and preparing food -- it allows nothing for washing oneself or one's clothes.
...
I decided to make do on less than half a gallon a day, and to record every pint of water I used. If I could manage on a quart a day, I should have enough for 80 days.
...
By October 14 I was down to 16 gallons (plus the half-jerrycan of Giles's reserve). Considering that I had won 1 1/2 gallons in a squall on October 4, that meant that I was still using rather more water than I reckoned. I rationed myself more strictly.

Chichester estimates that he lost 40 pounds on the outbound leg of the voyage, and was surely dehydrated badly in the final few weeks. But nothing stops Chichester. At one point he breaks a tooth while eating a piece of particularly hard dried bread. Never fear, Chichester is here:

I got out my dentist's repair kit, and spent an hour having a go at my tooth. I succeeded in cementing the broken piece on again, but in doing so I cemented in a fragment of cotton wool from a cotton wool pad I had put in my mouth to keep my tongue away from my tooth while I was working on it. I left the bit of cotton wool in the repair -- I felt I dared not pull it for fear of pulling off the piece of tooth I had managed to stick on.
...
Alas, my tooth-repair did not hold. I tried it out at supper time, and it was no good -- the broken bit simply came off again as soon as I tried to bite. Perhaps the best dentists do not mix cotton wool with their cement. I had another shot at cementing, this time without cotton wool fragments, but the repair was no more successful. In the end I got a file and filed down the jagged edges of the piece of tooth still in my jaw and left it at that.

Perhaps Chichester's most astonishing aplomb occurs early in the second half of the voyage, shortly after Gipsy Moth has departed Sydney Harbor:

I think I was awake when the boat began to roll over. If not, I woke immediately when she started to do so. Perhaps when the wave hit her I woke. It was pitch dark. As she started rolling I said to myself, "Over she goes!" I was not frightened, but intensely alert and curious. Then a lot of crashing and banging started, and my head and shoulders were being bombarded with crockery and cutlery and bottles. I had an oppressive feeling of the boat being on top of me. I wondered if she would roll over completely, and what the damage would be; but she came up quietly the same side that she had gone down. I reached up and put my bunk light on. It worked, giving me a curious feeling of something normal in a world of utter chaos. I have only a confused idea of what I did for the next hour or so. I had an absolutely hopeless feeling when I looked at the pile of jumbled up food and gear all along the cabin. Anything that was in my way when I wanted to move I think I put back in its right place, though feeling as I did so that it was a waste of time as she would probably go over again. The cabin was 2 foot deep all along with a jumbled-up pile of hundreds of tins, bottles, tools, shackles, blocks, two sextants and oddments. Every settee locker, the whole starboard bunk, and the three starboard drop lockers had all emptied out when she was upside down. Water was swishing about on the cabin sole beide the chart table, but not much. I looked into the bilge which is 5 feet deep, but it was not quite full, for which I thought, "Thank God."
...
I am not sure when I discovered that the water was pouring in through the forehatch. What had happened was that when the boat was nearly upside down, the heavy forehatch had swung open, and when the boat righted itself the hatch, instead of falling back in place, fell forwards onto the deck, leaving the hatchway wide open to the seas.
...
As night fell this day I reckoned up my profit and loss account so far since leaving Sydney. The loss was severe. The boat was still in a dreadful mess, and I had sailed only 185 miles since starting. For four days I had been bumped about and thrown, twisted, accelerated and jerked as if in a tiny toy boat in a wild mountain stream, and I was sick of it all. But everything that mattered on Gipsy Moth was intact; she had capsized and righted herself. She had been through an experience which few yachts have survived intact and she could still sail.

It's remarkable how well Gipsy Moth Circles the World stands up, some 50 years later. I think this is considerable credit to Chichester's straightforward and matter-of-fact approach to telling the story. Surely he knew even then that technology would advance and people would come to look back on his adventure as somehow quaint and dated. But given the tools he had available to him, it is truly nothing short of astonishing how he fared, and certainly more importantly his stubborn perseverance and dedication to overcoming whatever obstacles he might face remain as impressive, motivational, and inspirational now as they must have been on May 28th, 1967 when he arrived safely back in Plymouth.

(And if you ever do read Chichester's book, don't miss the lovely picture of him giving Queen Elizabeth II a tour of Gipsy Moth IV just shortly after she knighted him with the same sword that Queen Elizabeth I had used to knight Francis Drake a mere 387 years earlier!)

Mass Effect 2: a very short review

Mass Effect 2 is the second of the Mass Effect trilogy; I skipped the first game and went directly to the second one (on the advice of my video game guru, who is rarely wrong, and was certainly not wrong this time).

It is a wonderful blend of action and adventure, with a compelling story, ferocious baddies to fight, just the right number of side quests and exploration, and perhaps the most enjoyable final battle I can remember in a video game in a long, long time.

The overall game proceeds through a building stage, in which you must recruit various members of your team, and must build and explore and enhance your skills (and the skills of the members of your team). You can choose to do more or less of this, and can exit this stage at nearly any point, but I was very thorough and I recruited every member I could and finished every quest I could find.

Then you move on to the epic final sequence, which took me a solid 3 hours on a quiet Saturday morning.

An interesting part of the game is the various dialog trees, which provide real character development and force you to make some complex and thought-provoking decisions.

The voice actors are absolutely top-notch in this game, starting with Martin Sheen's voicing of The Illusive Man and continuing throughout.

It may be a ten year old game (it is a ten year old game), but it plays fresh and compelling as ever.

Reason enough to start planning your next computer purchase right now, I'd say!

Here you go: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to the next generation!

Developed to take advantage of the most powerful gaming hardware, the next-gen edition of the game will feature a range of visual and technical improvements — including ray tracing, HDR and faster loading times — across the base game, both expansions, and all extra content.

It doesn't say when this new version might be available, but let's start preparing now!