The Discovery of Slowness

Sten Nadolny

Writing was as arduous as a sea voyage; it generated the energies and hopes it needed while also providing enough for the rest of one’s life. Whoever had to write a book could not be desperate forever. And despair over proper formulations could be conquered with sufficient industry.

He also sat in coffee houses. There he could get pen, ink, and paper whenever anything important occurred to him. Actually nothing occurred to John, but he ordered writing materials just the same, stared at the white sheet of paper, and thought, If I have something important in mind, I’ll just write it down. Well, perhaps it also worked the other way round: If I have something to write on, perhaps something important will come to me. And so it happened: suddenly the Idea appeared. It seemed foolhardy to John, but that spoke more for the Idea than against it, especially since the project was in some respects similar to a long journey. The Idea: writing! John conceived of writing a book to justify himself, a fat book in which he would seek to convert all skeptics and convince them of his system. And since he knew what a footloose fellow the human will was, he committed himself in writing then and there. He wrote on the white sheet: Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea—not under 100,000 words. That rescued the plan at the last minute, for the head had already begun to whisper its objections. For example, John Franklin, if there is anything you cannot do, it’s writing books!

The compulsion to be constantly occupied with what is important to mankind necessarily affected more and more thoughts and actions. John sensed that someday, simply out of duty toward equality, he would have to discover that he was interchangeable with others. But from his time in the navy he knew full well what it was like when one’s unique self became insignificant. There remained only the escape into quickness. Someone was better if he could do the same thing faster. And this choice was not open to him.

That’s not the point, replied Eleanor. This sentence worried John, for since the time with Flora Reed he knew only too well: a quarrel in which one person told the other what it was all about left no room for a solution.

We ourselves are the chance. The listeners turned their heads: Franklin. Not that they had understood him. But if anybody considered carefully what he said, it was Franklin. So they still thought about it for a little while. He always had the courage to look stupid long enough to be smart—one could well copy that! In other respects, too, he had a tough skull. No bullet could get through it. God surely still had plans for Franklin. They helped him where they could.

Friendship consisted of plans and actions; everything else only falsified it.

I have been reading many books about Sir John Franklin lately. The Terror by Dan Simmons which was so pathetic I didn't read more than a quarter of it; Rifles by William Vollmann which I did finish, and also this one by Sten Nadonly. Of all of them, I think I like Nadonly's portrayal of Franklin the best. It is by far the most sympathetic. Simmons' painted Franklin as a selfish, deluded, simpering idiot. Vollmann made him a haggard old failure of a man, but Nadonly gave him something unique.
I don't imagine that Nadonly's fiction of Franklin is anything other than fiction, but as long as we are dealing with things I don't know, I'd like to now know Franklin in this way rather than any other.
The Discovery of Slowness is rich with the marvel of a child. Nadonly's Franklin moves through the world as a circle within a circle, somehow cut off from the reality by his slow speed. It gives you a sense of peering out of a submarine at the ocean world rather than being a fish with Franklin in the sea. It's a pleasant feeling.

Tigers of the Snow

Jonathan Neale

There is a word that people use a lot in Khumbu—dhukpaai. Dhukpaa means hardship, but also suffering. It means work that is unfair, and too hard. It also means the oppression of employers who hire people for that work, and who treat them unfairly, who make the poor suffer. Dhukpaa, dhukpaa, they say, and sigh, meaning: There it is, what can you do about it, you have to put up with it, but this is not how things should be.

Lincoln's Melancholy

Joshua Wolf Shenk

Never has the conditions for a president-elect been so severe, and never had one seemed, by his credentials, so poorly prepared. Lincoln’s fifteen predecessors had included war hero generals, vice presidents, secretaries of state, and veterans of Congress. His own resume listed, as he put it, “one term in the lower house of Congress.” He’d had barely a year of formal education; he had few connections in the capital and no executive experience. Before coming to Washington, he had been east of the Alleghenies just a handful of times and still bore the stamp of a man raised on the frontier.

Can we say that Lincoln was “mentally ill”? Without question, he meets the U.S. surgeon general’s definition of mental illness, since he experienced “alterations in thinking, mood, or behavior” that were associated with “distress and/or impaired functioning.” Yet Lincoln also meets the surgeon general’s criteria for mental health: “the successful performance of mental function, resulting in productive activities, fulfilling relationships with other people, and the ability to adapt to change and to cope with adversity.” By this standard, few historical figures led such a healthy life.

Lincoln, of course, is not the only nineteenth-century figure in whom intense suffering coexisted with great achievement. Modern researchers have identified one or more major mood disorders in John Quincy Adams, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Disraeli, William James, William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert Schumann, Leo Tolstoy, Queen Victoria, and many others. We may accurately call these luminaries “mentally ill,” a label that has some use—as did our early diagnosis of Lincoln—insofar as it indicates the depth, severity, and quality of their trouble. However, if we get stuck on the label, we may miss the core fascination, which is how illness can coexist with marvelous well-being.

I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.

I make no apology, gentlemen, for my weakness.

I, like sloping rock, lie on tumble hill test, to fall or fly, or stay on just where I am. There is only one way to go and that way is down because there is only one way gravity pulls and that is towards itself. Can't be that stones should one day have flight? Gain the air and make off into the beautiful blue that is open up there?
Gentlemen, I make no apology for my weakness. I make no apology at all. That's why all these rocks are migrating through our airspace, Mr President. Like a sudden flight of insects or the airborne bombardment of a flock of angry birds the rocks are rising. What would you have me do? Grin so that they might knock out all my teeth? Well, no, but tears surely won't help. I beg to differ, Mr Secretary. What is the one substance that has dominion over stones, though it may be a slow dominion? Why, what else, Mr Secretary, but water. But saltwater, Mr President? Do you expect me to believe saltwater is better your sovereignty than gunpowder? Especially the saltwater of tears, Mr President? You are President, not Pastor. Oh, dear Mr Secretary. What do you know of the powers that be? You think gunpowder more able to split rocks then water, especially tear water. This is not a little foolish.
I could go on for some hours, Mr Secretary, but I am fatigued. Would you be so kind as to see these gentlemen out? Shoot them in the front of their heads if you would like, I only thought it would be less unpleasant for you to do it from behind. And so it goes.
They tell me I was killed in a theater. Unfortunately, I did not know how to act. I believe this inability directly led to my death. Had I acted, put on a bit of a show, prevaricated some you know, made a few nods to the grim opposition, they might not have shot me. Useless, useless he said when he shot me. And so my friend joined the long list of men who had to find nothing to find everything. It saddens my heart that this man should have struggled so hard to kill me and thus find meaning, when all he had to do was talk with me. While I am not such a brilliant orator as to persuade a man from murder, I am such a miserable man as to impart some bit of the futility rife in life to a man, thereby disarming him more thoroughly then any martial arts expert might have. There is a great defeating force in depression: Douglass Adams knew this: just look at Marvin. But that isn't particularly surprising: many wise souls have known this: Quoholeth, Lao Zi, Lewis Carrol, and Junious knew.
But then again, Junius always knew.
What can a dead man say? I was shot in the back of the head. If I hadn't been shot there, they would have shot me in the face, or perhaps failing that, torn me limb from limb. And there isn't really anything for it. My heart was doomed, and that's why it was so heavy. Or maybe my heart was heavy and that was why it was so doomed.

Rifles

William T Vollmann

He had the knowledge that manhood isn’t something you only earn once, even when you’ve been circumcised by the Elders or you’ve killed your first tiger, but something that must be achieved over and over, always by pursuing what you fear; if you stay still you will only come to fear more and more things. Being a man doesn’t mean being afraid of nothing; it means being warned by the fear, not mastered by it. There was nothing wrong with being afraid of what he was about to do. He had never done it. He was doing it. Later he could feel proud or ashamed of it.

It is strange when the light fails. Since it happens so gradually, you are deceived. The river is still blue – surely the same blue! The fractures in the rocks on the far side are as numerous as ever (not that you counted them), and the tundra is still there with all its little mosses and leaves. Everything is still there, and yet everything is harder to see. Logic proves that certain things which were visible a quarter-hour ago cannot be anymore. But which?

A polar bear killed a man and didn’t even get to eat him before it was shot.

Maybe life is a process of trading hope for memories. When the snow was deep in September maybe you did not remember very much. But you did remember, I am sure, how many flat rocks of a sulphurous color there were which had been shattered into slabs stacked neatly one against the next like the slices of a loaf of bread; you could pick up a book of these slabs and turn their livid-yellow pages in your hands, reading the words of lichen-dots and listening to the moaning of the wind; then, if you chose, you could skip the pages into some Arctic lake one by one, and watch them smash into two as they struck the water, sink, and lie shimmering among the greenish rocks, and the water rippled over them in the wind, as if trying to turn them, but they would never turn or be together again. – All books are like this; they stand shoulder to shoulder in the library stacks; perhaps they are ‘popular’ at first, perhaps not, but eventually they stand anonymous, unread, forgotten; and that is how it should be, for that is how it is with lives.

These appearances, however were but gimmicks of the present, whose artifice it is to make everything seem new.

When a Native American first fired a rifle, he agreed to the unstated contract that doomed all American tribes and guaranteed European success on the North American continent. This is because technologies, like species, can have catastrophic consequences when they migrate. You have heard of invasive species--the rifle was an invasive technology.
A technology develops in a specific context and when the higher levels of that technology migrate to another context there is always the risk that the balance will be so disturbed that the context will be driven to extinction before it can reattain equilibrium--and this is usually through ignorance.
When European traders brought firearms to North America, the natives were presented with a vastly more effective tool that was also much easier to use. But what natives did not understand was that firearms rely on a massive infrastructure which is in turn based on an even more sweeping set of technologies and values. By using a rifle, a native endorsed and became a part of such things as mining, manufacturing, industrialism, corporations, markets, capitalism, western philosophy, and even Christianity. Without passing judgment on any of these things, it is safe to say that their transplantation into a society might be dangerous--and is undoubtedly worrying when they are transplanted in secret.
In Western society, where the aforementioned technologies and values were evolved, the society was adapted to their presence and at balance with them. But when they were brought to North America, the same protective shielding of slowness and time was not available to act as a buffer to their integration into native societies. The technologies were available and ready-to-use, so who could wait?
But with their use came a reliance on Europeans because native society lacked many of the technologies off which firearms are based. They had to blindly agree to these without the ability either to develop them for themselves or observe and consider how they would change their society.
After fifty years of rifle use, what was left of the original hunting technologies and cultures of natives? Not enough to kick the addiction to European supply of ammunition and firearms and technology. It was in this way that Europeans conquered North America.

Currently, we have the moral enlightenment to shake our heads and wag our fingers at this behavior. We think we would have had more respect. But at the same moment we advise developing countries to accept our boon of modern medicine (just as an example, there are millions of advanced technologies that we are giving as impossible debts). Many of these countries cannot help but take this fruit we offer--it's miraculous after all--yet they do not understand that by taking their are agreeing to all the technologies and values that are the context for the development of modern medicine. And in many cases developing countries are also agreeing to a reliance on developed countries that sometimes looks more like subjugation than philanthropy and aid. And so when they've forgotten how they used to do medicine, when their own technologies have been choked into extinction by the invasive species of a far more pernicious species, what will they do if the new species suddenly dies off? What will they do if they decide that they don't like these new flowers? They were hooked but they didn't even know it.

And on an even more startling scale (well, maybe not, but it will be to you, because if you're reading this, you'll probably care more about what I'm about to say than what I just said), all technology is the same. We never really understand what we are getting into when we adopt a new technology, especially in our culture where new is a very good word and old is often a bad one. We've been raised to believe that if it's new it's worth our attention and maybe worth a shot. But who knows how addicting the technologies we develop are? What if one shot is enough to hook us?
So now we've got the Internet, cell phones, television, plastic, nuclear bombs and we don't really understand all we've agreed to in our contracts with these technologies, nor do we even know if there is a way to go back. We assume that if a technology catches on and becomes widely in use it's good. But by that definition, we are forever doomed to what is new and can never, never go back. If five years from now we find out that the Internet is actually more of a chain than freedom, we won't have anything for it but to bind our wrists a little tighter.

Victoria

Knut Hamsun

No, I’m smiling, the husband says. It’s my way of smiling. I want this grimace to be uniquely my own.

Thank you, thank you, Johannes, dear; it’s so sweet of you not to be furious with me, she said, wiping away her tears. But you mustn’t think I don’t love you too. By God, I’ll come and see you much more often than before and do everything you desire. It’s just that I love him more. I didn’t want it that way. It’s not your fault.

Love is God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, “Let there be light!” there was love. And everything that he made was very good, and no part thereof did he wish undone. And love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

Love is not just. Love does not deal in equality, nor does it acknowledge rights. Like the unreasoned whims of fate that make one man tall and smart while another is left deformed and brainless without even material comforts as compensation, love gives to the undeserving and takes from the worthy.
Love is the truth in "To those who have much, more will be given, and to those who have little, even what they have will be taken from them." Love gives and takes in scandalous disproportion. Like Joseph Merrick, love is a misshapen Elephant Man. Like Proteus, it shapeshifts while we try to pin it down (which never we can) but we will try anyway.
You disagree? Love isn't out of its mind? True love anyway. But what of all things is true love if it isn't a madman on a dream? Who would say that scaling Cliffs of Insanity, enduring the Pit of Despair, and fighting Rodents of Unusual Size is anything but a wildly inappropriate response to life?
Love is inappropriate.
If you seek balance, do not venture near love or any of those who move in that circus crowd: mercy, selflessness, humility, kindness, compassion, sacrifice, forgiveness, and grace--these are not well-balanced individuals. They are a set of lunatics prancing about in their underpants; they are flower bedecked babies fully grown, who have scraped their knees and elbows. Their giddiness makes us feel embarrassed for them, but that feeling's tricky since in its loftiness it has pity which might be disdain and if we look at it our embarrassment on their behalf looks very much like jealousy on their account. After all, they do seem to be enjoying themselves, for all their scrapes and bruises. And love is their tyrant leader, the great extortionist.
Do you see, love just isn't just. You'll pardon that literary atrocity because love works in atrocities and outrages and in disturbing and in discomfort.

It is Victoria who is writing this, and God is reading over my shoulder.

Dark Shadows Falling

Joe Simpson

One distressing incident in this storm illustrates the selfishness of some of the trekkers. Two Western clients had abandoned their Sherpa when he was too weak to move form his tent to the helicopter. The clients broke trail out to the aircraft, which had been unable to land nearby, and then took off, leaving the poor man to die. When asked in Namche why they had abandoned the Sherpa, the same trekkers replied that they were anxious to reach the airport at Lukla so that they would not miss their international flight connections.

If you would like to lose all respect for people who don't belong in the wilderness, read this book (just be careful, you might be one of them).

The Ice-Shirt

William T Vollmann

Do we carry our landscapes with us locked in our ice-hearts, and can we fit them over what was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?

The lambs crunch grass very watchfully, but the old ewes and rams do not look up at your approach because nobody has ever hurt them and they do not understand the meaning of the sheep-skulls that lie in the grass they graze on. – The birds, on the other hand, await the worst with hysterical foreknowledge, so that if you venture into their nesting-fields, where the grass is green and then white, as if frosted, thousands of them begin to swoop and scream and flap until their gull-cousins on the rocks offshore are infected with alarm, and sob like babies. (Would you, reader, rather be a sheep or a bird? I say that the sweet sheep have no cares, and for that reason their stupidity is to be prized).

In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.

Oh, that game of Changing! The players did not really want to be anything; they only wanted to be what they were not. Nobody saw that change came of its own, unfolding as was ordained, so that one would be as ungracious to rush it as to stay it.

Was a woman something she was supposed to be? But she had not started out being one, and she did not want to be one. She did not necessarily want not to be one, but she wanted to be several things. A woman was not all she was.

So, too, Freydis’s selfish cruelties were not originally hers by nature, but came about simply because her stepmother Thjodhild would not own her in her heart – or so it is incumbent upon a historian to believe in this age of compassionate first causes, for how could we hope, if people could be born wicked?

It seems like there’s nothing like a close brush to bring you down to earth, and make your priorities in your mind very clear (for a good while, anyway). I started considering what the fuck I was doing here and realized that while I think it was a step in the right direction, doing that kind of thing, my priorities were all fucked up, that I just had to quit doing things so much for show, just start doing things just ‘cause I wanted to. Real honest things that I wanted to do. I was so ashamed of myself. After that I had kind of a miserable night. Thought entirely too much. And in the morning I packed up and headed out.

In those days there was Power everywhere. You did not have to be wise to find it. Power lived in pretty feathers; Power was in stars and owls’ beaks; Power was in the patterns that the women painted on everyone’s shirts so that they could find the animals they hunted and kill them; they could bring back meat to eat and clothe everyone in their skins and they could all dream of the Star People who dwelled on the black roof above the trees and sparkled at their images in brooks and lakes; they dreamed also of the Plant People who came on green legs bringing corn-gifts and tobacco-gifts; and all the gifts had Power; but the most Powerful color was red, and the women made paint from red earth and birds’ eggs and painted special things on everyone’s shirts, so that red cloth of the Jenuaq was highly prized.

The first part of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, Vollmann begins an impressive project--to detail intimately the various first interactions between North Americans and Europeans. Vollmann's choice to embrace the story-telling histories of various places and peoples instead of generating the traditional history or historical novel, provides a startling conception of our history. Seven Dreams (or what I've read of it so far) opens the mind to a host of new thoughts on history.
Often times histories attempt a detailed look at where we were then but fail to acknowledge where we are now, and comparatively many fictional works attempt to reveal what then was through a reality of now. But Vollman, by a combination of interviews, histories, myths, fiction, and personal experiences, finds a way to tell the story of then and now. What makes him so succesful is his basic theory that he must walk in the footsteps of the histories he is going to tell. The Ice-Shirt circles around the Viking discovery of North America; Vollmann writes their story while he is walking along the shores of Greenland and moving about from island to island in Northern Canada.
There are so many understated but interesting approaches to history in Vollmann's Seven Dreams that one has a strange sense of urgency reading the books. Like any truly novel idea, you read it with some strong sense of disbelief--like watching magic trick, or better, like seeing the impossible made reality before your very eyes. It's very exciting.