According to the Romance Writers of America, a romantic love story has a romance between two people as its central focus and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending to that story. Everyone loves a romance, whether we admit it or not, and the RWA touts that fact on their website, regaling us with statistics. Romance fiction generated $1.39 billion dollars in sales in 2009, and had the largest share of the consumer market at 13.2%.^[1]  Well-regarded as McCarthy may be (and even if his name has already started to be tossed around for the Nobel Prize), his writing isn’t exactly what I think of as mass market paperback consumer friendly. Most people would rather, I will venture to generalize, read a love story about the young and beautiful, not a man and his son walking a desolate earth prowled by cannibalistic slave drivers. McCarthy’s work, in The Road or otherwise, is by no means romantic, whether in its sense of love or genre, though nature frequently ravages both McCarthy’s work and the novels of true romantic writers. And yet The Road is certainly a love story.

The Road is the story of a man and his son on their journey south to the coast after the world has been ravaged by fire storms and god knows what else, leaving the earth burnt, crusted, and covered with gray ash. There is little left remaining that would allow humanity to survive (much of the day-to-day we experience in The Road consists of searching for canned provisions not plundered by survivors now dead), so many of those who have endured this far have resorted to some of humankind’s most base behaviors– enslavement, rape, cannibalism. With the sparse and level dialogue between father and son, McCarthy shows us that in this new world mankind can only see itself developing in one of two ways. It can follow the path of the “good guys,” the path of love and a hope to preserve what’s good, or it can follow the path of the various “bad guys,” embracing only evil and cruelty. Certainly nothing is that simple in The Road, but for the sake of the boy, the man tries to reduce the world to this good guys/bad guys dichotomy.

Out of this need to be good, the man and his son sustain themselves on their love for one another.  McCarthy writes,

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

Individual pasts have been eliminated, and there is hardly hope for the future, so it is only possible for the man and his son to live for the relationship they have at present. This relationship, the only one we know, developed after the end of most of humanity. It is not predicated on memories of a world that no longer exists; it is formed in the rubble of a world broken and stagnant. The man eliminates all traces of his life from the old world.

He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a cornershaped hole in his trousers. Then one day he sat by the roadside and took it out and went through the contents. Some money, credit cards. His driver’s license. A picture of his wife. He spread everything out on the blacktop. Like gambling cards. He pitched the sweatblackened piece of leather into the woods and sat holding the photograph. Then he laid it down in the road also and then he stood and they went on.

The man sacrifices his memories for the sake of his survival, recognizing that there is nothing to be gained from remembering what used to be. There is only one specific memory that the man recalls with a bitterness about and anger with a world now gone.

He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music… She held her hands in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

But such reminiscences and longings are sparse. We are made to wonder “How does the never to be differ from what never was?” It hardly does; both are hopeless, and memories of an extinct world are too. Haunted by dreams of all the possible terrifying futures that exist, the man and the boy both try to suppress fears of the unknown days ahead and memories of the past, which doesn’t even exist for the boy. Their love for one another is a necessity, all that is worth holding on to, and even more than that, it is the new divine.

The Road asks us how we can hold on to the things we love in a vacuum, a world void of all the structures that help us find and make meaning in our lives. On the road the world is “shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities,” and only a love founded on surviving the here and now is sustainable, and it in turn sustains the man and his son. The road gives them purpose; love gives them the strength to fulfill that purpose.

As the man lays dying in the woods, he tells his son

You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.

“Where men can’t live gods fare no better,” says an old man the boy insists on helping along the road. Yes, God has been dead since at least the time that Nietzsche said so, but he has clearly died a second, more recent death not long ago. New rituals may evolve in the absence of the God or gods we’ve known for so long, but it takes time. “Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” the man thinks as he cares for his child. Slowly the boy is initiated in a new religion, a religion still based on love. Anointed by his father’s gentle care, left starving and alone in the woods by him, the boy emerges from the road with his father his own god. Without the man’s presence, prayer must sustain the boy in the next phase of his journey on the road.

He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

In the epilogue and benediction of Revelation God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” And so is the love that the man and the boy have for each other.

This world is at the end of history– no past, no future, every day the same. Hegel wrote that “God governs the world; the actual working of his government– the carrying out of his plan– is the History of the World.” ^[2]  There hasn’t been a God to understand, no History of the World to unravel, for some time. Rather, the man and boy exist of their own free will and determination, not by the grace or loving-kindness of God. Hegel writes a lot about Spirit, which he defines variously as “self-contained existence,” “Freedom,” and “self-consciousness.” “Spirit is immortal,” he writes, “with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now.” The essential now of The Road consists of survival and love, but in the end, the boy finds a kind of god in his father’s death, and perhaps history resumes.

[1] http://www.rwa.org/cs/the_romance_genre/romance_literature_statistics
[2] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History, a general introduction to the Philosophy of History

Certainly not.

For me, eating is about contentment– the satisfaction and physical fulfillment that follows a good meal. A happiness without accomplishment or self-congratulation or pride, good or bad. Happiness found in the shushing of a grumbling stomach and the ever more severe curve of your back as you slide further and further down into your chair at the table.

And even more than that, it’s about sharing that feeling. Satisfaction at mealtimes isn’t just the singular goal of one’s own stomach; it’s the purpose of serving a meal and lighting candles on the table. Folding cloth napkins into triangles and trying to remember if the spoon goes to the left or the right of the knife. There are a million formalities available to restrict you at dinner, so you pick and choose the ones conducive to your aesthetic, putting on a show to satisfy that most basic human need: hunger.

You let the spilled candle wax harden on the table because it’s easier to clean up that way, and the crumbs blur as the shadows on the table lengthen under failing light. You fill up your guests’ bellies and watch their eyes droop as they stare out the dining room window. As the cat under the table brushes your leg, begging for a scrap and a scratch, you stare at dinner’s remains on plates and in serving dishes and wonder why you don’t make every meal feel like this.

So, why not?

High school student that I was back then, I was inclined to write off anything that I didn’t enjoy as useless and boring. I couldn’t excuse it as bad because it’s “old” (the fate of many a pre-1900 author before a 16 year old) because what resonates more with a teenager in the suburbs than a story about growing up in the suburbs? Unfortunately, I was too impatient—or maybe just too young—to appreciate Dillard back then.

After a little bit of prodding from my English department advisor, I enrolled in a creative non-fiction class during my final semester in college. Susannah Mintz, professor of EN-280 on those Wednesday and Friday mornings, assigned a satiating variety of short pieces for us to read, study, analyze, imitate, (and probably butcher), and gnaw on throughout the course of the semester. Dillard came up, of course, and by this point in my academic life I knew that “Annie Dillard” meant something. We read “Living Like Weasels” for one of Mintz’s first classes and, much like everyone else, I loved it. Dillard has a way of describing those woods behind her house in a way that’s exciting and surprising without feeling overwrought, aggressive, or esoteric. I look forward to reading—nay, luxuriating in—An American Childhood, especially because I have a sense of what’s in store. The first sentence of the prologue is enough to remind me of that.

When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capital, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.

At the end of last semester Mintz commented on a piece of my writing that it seemed I was most comfortable describing landscapes. She may be right and that may be why I’ve come around to Annie Dillard so completely… even before I’ve read An American Childhood in full. The land is a beautiful thing to bring to the page, and remembering the topology of our lives—not just the ground we stood on—is too.

All of these things– packing bags for two different vacations and to move everything from New York to Boston– has me thinking about just how much stuff (mainly clothing) I have. I spent some time packing boxes yesterday and then came across this article in the NYTimes.

If you can’t stomach the whole article, the gist of it is that a pair of friends decided to wear only six items of clothing for a month, underwear, shoes, outerwear, and accessories excluded. About a hundred or more people jumped on board after the women started a website, nearly half quitting, cheating, or giving up before the month was through. The funny thing is, many claim, that hardly anyone noticed, spouses, close friends, and laundry-washers included. But, those who did notice tended to relentlessly badger whoever was recylcing their outfits.

It’s obvious that many of the people who are involved are fashion-conscious or at least smart dressers, and some admit they are to a fault and hope that this experiment will help them break compulsive shopping habits. So the outfits the people featured in the Times article put together look great, but they’re definitely not cheap. A white Hanes t-shirt would probably start looking tired a lot faster than anything most of these people have lined up.  At the same time, though, no one is claiming this is an anti-consumer/anti-fashion industry protest while they wear $400 jeans.

But the project does raise some interesting questions outside of your run-of-the-mill why is consumer culture so evil and where did I get these nasty shopping habits questions. It’s making people stop to think about what they own, what they use, and how they ended up with so much shit they don’t even like. The sixitemsorless-ers have also found that even when their six items don’ t come together into an entirely appropriate outfit for a special occassion, again, they say, hardly anyone notices. So, unsurprisingly, it’s a reminder that no one notices you as much as you do. Maybe those who are always trying to make a statement with their clothing will be humbled by the fact that, fortunately or unfortunately, most people you encounter don’t really care what you’re wearing. That’s not to say there’s no point in getting dressed however you see fit or to ignore the undeniable, if unfortunate, value of looking “right,” but when you don’t, there doesn’t seem to be much fallout. So, no pressure, I guess.

If nothing else, it’s giving me some inspiration to pack light as I get ready for vacation. If a businesswoman can make it work for a month, I can figure out how to bring less clothing than I might think I need on a three-week trip. Hopefully that’ll lighten my backpack, so I have room to bring all of you souvenirs.

College is over, summer is underway, and a lot of people are taking stock of a lot of things in their young lives. School. Maybe finding a new one. Finishing up that final year. Work and avoiding it as best we can. Hoping that paychecks will be bigger than they are. Friends. Those now distant professors. Vacations. Finding our favorite air-conditioned room. Living with our parents. How to move out as soon as possible, even in spite of what our bank accounts might say.

It’s an easily denied transition– summer is summer is summer for most of us, but the prospect of summer not ending with that drive back to school, the anxiety over the first grade of the semester, the first weekend back with college friends is unsettling and a little disappointing. Our routines have been disrupted and those of us who find drastic change unpleasant may be finding ourselves rather displeased. I think even those of us who are excited to get moving, get away from the undergrad life, are still hesitant in some ways to make the break, start using a personal email address instead of that .edu one.

Sometimes it seems as though we’re assured that every step in the life process is going to be the best years of our lives, the beginning of a new era, something to reminisce about. And sure, that’s possible. Why can’t every year of your life be an improvement– different, exciting, a new sort of fulfilling? That sounds great, but a sound isn’t a sight, so who knows what’s headed towards us?

And we’re a cynical bunch, this recently graduated class of college students, though I’m sometimes impressed by (occasionally jealous of) the things people are doing… Or at least impressed by the people who have figured out what they want to do for the next few months of their lives. All this seems to leave us in the emotional lurch, wondering what to do, where to go, who to take it all in with. Most of my professors this last semester weren’t particularly optimistic on our behalf either.

“It’s a tough time to be graduating,” most of them say.

“Good fucking luck.”

So it looks bad, but who wants a 9-5 anyway?

Though as they say on The Wire, “It ain’t about right and wrong. It’s about the money.”  …ok, so there isn’t necessarily a moral dilemma here, but we do need jobs, even if they suck.

In any case, for me, the break with academia that comes with graduation is an ugly one, but now we can fill our time with the books we always wanted to read, the magazines we never had time for, the movies that couldn’t be justified during the busy nights of the school year. I’ve gotten through a few books already, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to start with, and it feels good. Every day can be a day at a Montessori school.

And so it goes.

Competing for space, some redwoods yield to give others the privilege of eastern branches. Some trees would be bare on one side if not for the spindly caress of its neighbor who, whether out of negligence, for beauty, or in haste, chose to push westward and deny growing room to its brethren. There’s nothing selfish about their encroachments; nothing can be called selfish at that momentum. If they paid enough attention to see those fiercely pointed branches approaching, they probably could have avoided being made to sacrifice. With so much ground in the forest, you wouldn’t think it would be so hard to find the middle of it—that place where everyone is at least satisfied with the knowledge that no one got their way. But this is a forest of extremes, and I don’t think there is a middle-ground here.

At their bases, the trees cede to the forces—time, mostly—that rend them open and create dark, damp cubbyholes for spiders and birds. The triangular emptiness is affirmation of the coastal redwoods’ vulnerability. It is a sign of an intimate hospitality, though perhaps not for humans. They will let small visitors help fill the void, keep them company as they grow indefinitely, comforting them in their singularity and loneliness. Tall enough for a man to stand in upright, the trees’ holes welcome me to cross the threshold that otherwise separates me from nature. My head clears easily below where the tree closes up again, over six feet from the ground, and the tree stretches that height a dozen times over before thinning at the top. Once you’re inside, they will let you look at their skin from beneath it and touch the underside of the bark. When I passed through the door frame created by a tree’s torn flesh, I realized that my eyes were not meant to penetrate the darkness above me. Maybe there isn’t anything worth seeing on the inside. All I could do was look out at the hill that rose across the path from me, hoping that nothing lurked in the surrounding nooks and crannies.

Redwoods can ignore the deep crevices in their flesh, the mounting pressure to topple inward on their hollowing shells. You can touch their wrinkles. Fissures texture their bodies, and they do not shrink under your scrutinizing gaze. Passersby are only a few rings on the inside of their trunks. I will live and die in the span of an inch or two of growth. Although I will remember this place once I’m gone, the trees will find my transient presence insignificant, forgettable, one flash of lightning in a long storm, in the face of many years to come.

The light renders them brown at one angle, red at another, nearly black in the shade. As conditions change they melt from color to color. Sometimes when the light swells in the uppermost branches, there is a gradient from dark to light that stretches from brown-black ground to blinding white. It’s hard to avoid searching for sky through the branches, my eyes scanning for a break in the leaves like a miner panning for gold. When I find the gold it burns; it is a pin-prick of sunlight dilated on a retaining wall of leaves. I looked right at it, focused my camera on that burst, and it hurt my eyes in exactly the way you would expect it to—slowly, then intensely, then even after I averted my gaze. The light, the trees—they are uncompromising.

The trees stun me first with their inestimable height, then with their strangeness. Redwoods have abnormal growths and swellings, warts and tumors that force the bark to bubble and crack with oddities. Delicate leaves pop from the trees’ tangled green veins that invade crevices, crawling across the trees’ surface just as I walk between their roots and trunks—quietly, lightly, like a Lilliputian. If you didn’t know what a bare redwood tree looks like—a tree without creeping vines and moss—you would think that the green lines were a natural growth coming from within the tree itself. Suggesting gentleness among hard cracks, the lines diminish the bark’s toughness. I don’t think it would be hard to tear the tender plant flesh if you could just get a hold of it. There’s nothing and no one to stop you; some of the redwoods and firs, even the ones still standing, are already dead. I didn’t see anyone try to test that, though. You treat the forest like a museum when you’re there. You have to be careful trying to make sense of this evidence of a distant past.

* *

The stream is a garble of hushing advances. Constantly sounding gushes mingle with the many languages of the forest’s visitors. I hear it beneath all other sounds and can extract its melody from my memories hours later. It is a place of incessant and steady noise, a bedroom shared by whispering children. Your voice might take precedence for a moment, but the stream’s perpetual movement is the loudest voice of all. Even leaves that whoosh overhead in breezes and storms will eventually silence themselves against the chatter of water over uneven ground. The stream sustains its sounds infinitely. The forest is subjected to the noise of a constant exhale.

The water simpers at the edges, caught in eddying flows around petite branches and cluttered piles of dead leaves. I see it swirl and mirror the leaves that twirl and spiral down to meet the surface. When the leaves first hit the water they are crisp, but unlike their robust and supple counterparts that dangle from branches above, when they reach the water they crumble and disintegrate. In the water they are not refreshed; they dissolve. The alien environment of the stream does not welcome newcomers; it tumbles over them with disregard.

In the central flow, the water pushes forward amicably, ambivalent about its spectators and shoreline disruptions. It doesn’t notice that it runs perpendicular to the trees above who, from ground-level, appear to arch elastically across the stream, like buildings that seem about to fall over into city streets. It is preoccupied with its own eternal task—to thrust bubbling over stones and mud. I imagine that it’s content with its position, safely sequestered between shorelines and hills, and unconcerned with the possibility of change.

Below the magnitude and solidity of the trees, the running water is shallow, transparent, palpably fickle. I can see the blurred bottom through a rapid flow that turns foamy white in the most turbulent places. If you touch the water it will lose interest immediately. It will seek opportunity and excitement elsewhere, forget it ever knew you. Whatever doesn’t trickle to the ground is absorbed in the sleeve of your sweatshirt, an unpleasant reminder of your impulse, a punishing discomfort inflicted because you’re forcing this moment to last. You can hear its conversations at the stream’s edge while the bubbling center of the flow fusses over the rocks and pebbles that upset its course. Even the dampness lingering on your fingertips and clothes soon evaporates. All proof of contact is lost.

* *

The moss is a plush and creeping thread. I see it tying rocks to dirt to roots, dampening sound as it grows. Bark is overcome by it, grows green with tender, probing plant life. I imagine it blanketing decomposing animals as their living shrouds. You can feel the moisture that lies beneath its clutches. It is intricately woven into the earth, though a simple brush with a heavy hand could tear its short threads. I adjust my gait to avoid upsetting the moss’s slow movement.

The moss embroiders thick patterns that the trees watch develop from above. You’re too close to it to see the picture it is creating day by day, season by season. Stepping back across the trail, back against the rocks and trees that line it, I try to find an image but my peripheral vision will never extend far enough for me to see everything that I need to. Discerning shapes would be like finding distinct figures in fog. All that happens when I try to move back is that I realize how much more there is to see. I witness too little of the moss’s progression to create a seamless vision of it.

* *

I walk on narrow paths that are well-groomed by the five-dollar entrance fee taken from each visitor before entering the deepest shade. The paths parallel the incoherent meandering of the stream and cross it with wide and sturdy bridges. Park employees exert a constant energy to keep their walkways and signs and plaques in tact. The marks made on this place may be grave, but they would be lost without attention. Though I follow the trails, they turn in ways that give the impression that they will abandon me abruptly in a lonely copse. I could get lost among fallen branches and the rest of nature’s debris. A foreigner could disappear into soil and leaves. Be absorbed.

Longer loops of the trail carry me upward, though never into unadulterated sunlight. Rather, I stay in an artificial darkness that, though the days are lengthening with spring, is all the longer for the shade cast by the severe hills that the trees grow out of. Some curves in the trails inspire caution when they slim down alongside protruding rocks while others grant hikers a view of trees from above. Some visitors yield to me on the narrowest passages; others, the youngest ones, press recklessly ahead, willing to shimmy by me on the edge.

I wouldn’t look down if I were you. The jagged hills invite inspection only from afar. The trees’ height makes the hill seem steeper and destroys my sense of their scale. Vertigo will remind you that you’ve come too close to the precipice, that you’re advancing too far beyond the bounds of realistic safety. When I get too close to the trail edge, I dare myself to peer just below my toes, to the point where the hill drops off. With that gaze comes a whirling confusion as my mind tries to process what’s before me. Then, with my eyes back on the path before me, I try to focus my sight, relieved that I didn’t pitch forward and become part of this landscape. Even if I did, I know I would always remain in the shadows of the redwoods, a small imperfection on the forest floor in the shade.

Never thought you’d get a Part II, did you?
Maybe not a novelty, but still enjoyable.
Also see: http://www.vimeo.com/1857259, if you’re interested in hats.

• No plastic bags. Sure to be more annoying than anticipated.
• Straight As. Ballet included.
• Get back my edge. Suggestion taken.
• Read books. Parameters yet to be defined.
• Get a real job. This isn’t a resolution so much as a necessity. It makes the cut nonetheless.

All right, this is a lame start, but I’m keeping them in mind. 2008 ended on an undeniably unproductive note. And when I say note, I mean the John Cage “As Slow As Possible”639-year long song kind of note. No more of that.

See you out there.

Tomorrow is my last full day in Copenhagen. I need to eat one last pita kebab before shipping out. I also need to return a library book so that DIS does not withhold my grades.

For those of you who were wondering, I did not in fact win the round trip ticket to Copenhagen this afternoon. Sometimes life is full of disappointments. Shucks.

Hardly 36 hours til takeoff. Weird.

• peroration [concluding part of a discourse]
• immured [imprisoned]
• maidan [any open plain, park, or square near a town]
• cuspidors [spittoon]
• deleterious [pernicious]
• zenana [in Asian countries, part of the house reserved for women]
• triune [trinity]
• Hegiran calendar [lunar calendar used by Muslims, reckoned from the year of the Hegira in 622 AD]
• dumbir [three stringed instrument]
• sarandas [seven stringed instrument]
• solecism [an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence; minor blunder in speech]
• begums [a Muslim woman of high rank]
• crores [an Indian unit of measure equal to 100 lakh or 10 million]
• cavorting [leap or dance about; engage in extravagant activity]
• antediluvian [of or before the flood described in the bible]
• peritonitis [inflammation of the peritoneum]
• unguents [healing or soothing salve]
• plenipotentiary [invested with full power]
• soigneé [well-groomed, sleek]
• rubaiyat [a collection of ruba'i, a Persian quatrain]
• almirah [a cabinet]
• Katdiji style [ ???? ]
• rapacious [taking by force, pludering]
• patangs [ ???? ]