Lawrence Weschler shrinks the world. By demonstrating how small but highly significant pieces of it are linked across time, space, perception, experience, and language, he brings those pieces together so lucidly that you feel a brief, optimistic sensation that any such mystery of existence could potentially be so illuminated.

In this spirit, his new collection of old essays is no mere chronological hodgepodge, no mercenary recycling. Rather, the pieces are curated—grouped and ordered—to evoke the sorts of connections that the essays themselves are about. “Adventures in the Narrative,” reads the subtitle, and our fearless guide Weschler says or implies “bear with me here” on several occasions. You do, willingly. Why? How does he make these pieces, which are often cerebral and maddeningly, exquisitely detailed, so damn compelling?

Let me describe the book and perhaps it will become obvious. It opens with the title piece, “Uncanny Valley,” on the difficulty—near-impossibility, in fact—of creating a convincing digitally-animated human face. Apparently, we will feel rising empathy with a creature, a robot, for example, or Shrek, that is human-like, the more human-like it becomes, until a critical juncture around the point of 95% resemblance, after which that little bit that is not quite human becomes monstrous, “… no longer, that is, an incredibly lifelike machine but rather a human being with something inexplicably wrong.” The term “Uncanny Valley” refers to that dropoff, that gulf, which all the technological, mathematical and whimsical skills of Hollywood and Silicon Valley have failed to bridge.

Weschler quotes an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre on the face and what it does: “… now the eyes are becoming a look… they are not fastened in his head, serene like agate marbles. They are being created at each moment by what they look at.” Weschler continues on to Sartre’s conclusion, a quote he brings back several pieces later, in quite a different context: “… to be a visible transcendence is the meaning of a face.”

“’Being a visible transcendence’ is,” says Weschler, “Sartre’s way of saying (and at the same time, granted, emphatically not saying), having or expressing or being a soul. And try animating that!”

All the pieces take this intimate tone, including asides, digressions, even setbacks: Weschler’s own narrative of discovery. It’s as though he gives us his eyes, for this short, precious time, his mind, “being created at each moment by what they look at.”

When the Sartre quote comes back, it’s in an essay from one of the center sections of the book, the darkest, “Some Probes into the Terrain of Human Rights.” The piece, “Gazing Back: The Disappeared,” concerns an art exhibit memorializing the “disappeared” of Argentina’s Dirty War. The exhibit is full of faces, but it is the absent, the unseen, that the viewer most notices. The Sartre quote is transformed here: no longer a philosophical or aesthetic goal on the other side of Uncanny Valley, but an emotional one across an ethical gulf. At its precipice is the gaze “interrupted, cut short.” And beyond the gaze: Weschler goes on to discuss loss and redemption, invoking French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and American poet W. S. Merwin—not building an argument, as such, but a densely layered thought sandwich, to be digested slowly.

Lawrence Weschler

And so goes the book. Next is “Four Easy Pieces,” a section devoted to a few unexpected encounters with art. The first another face-piece, “On Coming Face-to-Face With Myself,” in which Weschler unexpectedly meets up with a Hockney portrait of “mein very selbst,” as he puts it, in the home of an art dealer, and is at pains to describe the peculiar embarrassment he feels at seeing his own face living in this stranger’s home.

Several of the essays turn on such coincidences and the realizations they provoke, or “convergences,” as Weschler calls them, one of his pet topics. An example: Weschler is sitting on a train perusing a journal he likes and he happens to see a word, “Walloons” that reminds him of a joke he likes and then sees “ANC” which reminds him of where he first heard it, and then sees the words “There’s one a journalist told me…” This is a poem by Robert Pinsky about the joke, which Weschler told him once upon a time. Uncanny. This story is footnoted: it happened again. Weschler stumbled on a Billy Collins poem in which “a bearded man with a colorful tie” tells a joke. Weschler is wearing the same tie even as he finds the poem. “Uncanny, too, the way that, just like Pinsky, Collins couched the joke in what became a meditation on death, and an exceptionally moving one at that. But I guess the lesson of the whole story for me is that I really have to stop telling jokes to poets.”

The questions of geography and death accompany us into the section on human rights. The longest piece here narrates the proceedings of the Rome Conference that led to the formation of the International Criminal Court. While as zingily told as all the others, it is also the densest and the longest, the only one where I felt that some of the details were not perhaps as self-evidently compelling as the overall thrust of the story.

There are words Weschler favors and uses across subjects—luminous, pullulating—words which jump out only because the essays have been collected. This is not linguistic laziness. Rather, the words themselves start to become convergences. They are of a piece with Weschler’s way of seeing the world.  James Wood says it best, talking about similar examples in Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy: “Such things are rarely examples of haste and more often proof that a style has achieved self-consistency. And that a kind of Platonic ideal has been reached—these are the best, and therefore unsurpassable words, for these subjects.”

“Five Further Adventures in the Narrative,” the concluding section, for all the wonder of the others, was my favorite. While the collection demonstrates throughout the elastic limits of narrative, here Weschler enters the vexing territory of the “how.” These are intensely absorbing stories of artistic process, bound together by Weschler ‘s preoccupation with “…the workings of grace. You work and you work and you work, and then it is as though whatever happens, it happens by itself. It never would have happened without all that prior work, that preparation, but that prior work did not make it happen.”

Given Weschler’s interest in revelation, in convergence, in the possibility that jokes have a life almost independent of their origins or vehicles, it’s not surprising that the book’s concluding words invoke some divine spirit: “God invented Man, the wise man says, because he loved stories. And maybe the other way around: Man invented God for the same reason. Or maybe Narrative invented both of us… Hallelujah. Amen.”

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Welcome to Leïla Marouane’s The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris. In June, 2006, Basile Tocquard, a fortyish Parisian banker, rents an apartment. He is a man of means. It’s a nice apartment in a chic neighborhood. This all sounds true-to-type, says the attentive reader. What’s the catch? As our chic monsieur tells an invisible interlocutor, his real name is Mohamed Ben Mokhtar, Momo to his friends and family, Algerian-born Muslims.

Momo-Basile is trying to escape his upbringing and his milieu. He has lived his whole life with his mother, the last thirty years in the same apartment in a North African-dominated suburb. He has worked hard and saved. He has not, despite his devoted mother’s pleas, married. Rich and technically unfettered, at least according to the standards of the West, he wants—who doesn’t?—to get laid. Hence the straightened hair, the new name, and the flat, where he hopes to escape his extended adolescence and commence the life of sexual profligacy that he feels he has earned. He says he’s especially, if not exclusively, interested in “… white women, regular users of the pill and condom, free in their bodies and their minds…”  Oh, and he’s a writer: any brief interludes between banking and acts of lust, will be spent writing “…poetry to make Antonin Artaud and Octavio Paz weep in unison in their graves….”

Literature and sex meet in this enterprise. The title itself alludes to a notorious book of ten years ago, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., art critic and editor Catherine Millet’s recounting of her long and densely packed sexual history. Momo has started too late to accumulate anywhere near her level of experience, but that’s only one of many ironies in his half-lived life. First, when he starts meeting women, they are not white but rather fellow Algerians-on-the-loose. They have suffered more than he in the pursuit of their freedom, not only sexual liberty, but also freedom of thought, something that doesn’t (for all his literary aspirations) seem to interest Momo as he tries to trade one sort of conformity for another. It’s not only the white world that is barred to him, though, each of his Algerian lovers finds an excuse to deny him sexual intercourse while permitting him sex in some partial sense.

Non-consummation, anonymity, avoidance: these themes at first echo, and then thunder through this book. The story is told to us by someone we never see, though her existence is increasingly alluded to. The first sentence of every chapter has a “…he said,” or “…he continued,” inserted into the otherwise-first-person narration. Momo’s first amour is reading a writer she is acquainted with, and he buys this author’s work. “Your books,” he calls them, addressing the narrator and so seeming to give her an identity: Loubna Minbar, prolific, controversial, and “sunk into paranoia worthy of psychiatric confinement” because someone uncovered her pseudonym (we’re not told whether it’s one of the names we know her by) so that now she fears for her life. Her original name is said to have been Louisa Machindel, an Algerian-Christian, of unknown, possibly mixed heritage. LM (also the initials of Leïla Marouane, born Leyla Mechintel: clever or heavy-handed?) is always interviewing someone, writing their life story. Then, her friends and acquaintances say, “when it’s all over, she moves on.” “When it’s all over?” Momo asks. When what’s all over? What does that mean? No one answers.

At the end of the book (when it’s all over) he invites his concerned family to a feast in his apartment, which he says he has painted Muslim green and redecorated in the Algerian style. When they show up, it is to take him to a psychiatric institution. Momo’s cousin, Driss (another Loubna Minbar interviewee) has killed himself and Momo tells his brother he also has met LM many times. “Sometimes she was a brunette, sometimes a redhead. Even a dyed blonde. Or a student,” he says, referring to his many girlfriends. “I am sure she thinks she fooled me with her disguises, just as she must have fooled Driss.”

Leïla Marouane

From Antonin Artaud, an epigraph to the first part of the novel, titled “Dissidence,” reads, “Before you are someone, you must first be no one.” But Momo only vanishes, he never reappears. He is a cipher talking to a cipher. “He lived like a hermit,” the concierge says as they leave. “My name is Lisa Martinez but he had decided that my name was Loubna Minbar.”

There’s an early reference in the book to Camus and I did find myself musing on parallels to L’etranger. Meurseault kills an anonymous “Arab”; Momo effectively kills himself by thrusting himself into a type of anonymity. Meurseault’s thoughts, histories, and actions, externalized in the courtroom, have little to do with him, while Momo effaces himself. Anything he writes—the manuscript he is working on, his emails—vanishes. He leaves his mother’s home at the end of the first section, but we’re never positive that he has moved into his own. After all, we only have his word to go on. He has multiple names, none of which truly represent him. Also, while Camus’s book is known in English as The Stranger, the title translates equally well, in the abstract, as “the foreigner.” This is Momo’s permanent state: alienated from both of his countries and from himself.

The references, the epigraphs, the aliases of the vanishing unreal narrator, as well as those of Momo himself, imply that there is no identity, and so, no reality for anyone in the book who tries to leave one world and enter another. One of his sisters is married off into invisibility in Algeria after threatening to go astray in the West. By contrast, another marries a Frenchman who converts to Islam, and this couple remains within the fold, along with Momo’s orthodox younger brother. The strong implication is that Algerians who fully embrace a stereotypic identity get to live while those who attempt to cross over vanish, whether into a zenana, into a liminal world of unhappiness, or, as with Momo, into their own confusion. The controlling, unseeing, self-sacrificing Algerian mother is skewered, and the Algerian family seems sadly atomized.

This is an existential vacuum, with characters as poles, not people, as though Leila Marouane underestimates the human capacity for complexity. I’ll go so far out on a limb as to say this brand of “post-modernism” feels a bit dated. I understand that Momo is being satirized, and that satire tends to be broad and moral, but I like him, at least initially, and it was hard not to wonder if a search for some murky narrative middle ground might have revealed more complex truths about the instability of identity. What starts as an understated formal trope, “…he said,” becomes a virus as LM—a projection of Momo himself—steals his soul and so destroys the book along with anything resembling truth or identity. It is an ending sadly inadequate to the story, which, until then, deftly threads fantasy, humor, and frustration, leading us to expect more.

*Author photo: Hermance TRIAY/Opale / Albin michel

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This delightful picaresque is a portrait of the Cold Warring western world, as seen through the Maltese mind. Terrier, that is, one with a sense, from birth, of his historical place. “We Maltese,” our narrator informs us, “are suffered to know ourselves to be the aristocrats of the canine world… We have known philosophers and tyrants, dipped the pink of our noses in the ink of learning and the blood of battle…”

As though Maf’s testimony were not enough, our first glimpse of him is in a veritable hothouse of twentieth century culture, the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, in whose parlor Cyril Connoly sits grumpily awaiting his tea. Maf will soon go to America to join his “fated companion,” the book’s other eponym. Before he leaves, his literary provenance is stamped and sealed: Bell fastens about Maf’s neck a collar that once belonged to her late sister Virginia Woolf’s late spaniel. Maf is escorted to Hollywood by Natalie Wood’s mother, who hands him over to Frank Sinatra, who gifts him to Marilyn, who has just separated from Arthur Miller, and if you think those are some heavy names to drop, well, that’s not even the first 50 pages.

We see Maf (shortened from Mafia Honey, though he also answers to “Snowball”) consorting further with such Kennedy-era kulturatchiks as Lionel Trilling and Lee Strasburg, but the book’s point is that while epochs and their opinions pass, truth is eternal. And so, apparently, are dogs—in mind, at least, if not in body. Says the ever-pithy Maf, “The great comedy about most people is they think this life is the only one they’re going to live: they stock it up with panic, pain, worth, and glory… but they haven’t yet grasped the basic facts. God is not in his place of work and is not answering his phone – get it? You don’t get saved, brothers and sisters, you get reassigned.”

Everyone in this book is on a quest for meaning, but Maf puts it all in perspective because he has a direct line to the wisdom of the ages. How? There is some past-life recall, but it’s mostly sheer doggie intuition. He recalls “… the story Stanislavsky used to tell about the dog that came to his rehearsals. The dog would sleep through the sessions but would always wake up and appear at the door just as it was time to go. The Great Russian Ham said this was because the dog always responded to the moment the actors returned to speaking in normal voices. For all their truth-seeking, the players would always be something other than themselves while acting, and the dog could hear the change.” Maf’s own bullshit-o-meter occasionally hits the red (he would call it dark grey) zone in rooms full of the famous and opinionated, when he’s forced to stop philosophizing in favor of other dog behaviors such as yapping and biting. It’s tough, accompanying the long history of human folly while powerless to influence it. ”We allow the human story always to take centre stage: that is what makes a dog the perfect friend.”

Maf himself lays out the essential drift of the book early on, a scene where he’s in the back of a van with a bunch of other dogs emigrating to America:

A voice came from the other side of the bus, from a Jack Russell-style mongrel who had kept himself to himself in the quarantine facility. He seemed to know a thing or two about life, and he spoke, when he spoke, with a kind of plain honesty. … ‘The truth is people know we’re looking at them,’ he said, ‘and the smart ones know we’re talking about them. People aren’t stupid. They only behave as if they were.’
‘Golly,’ said the sheepdog.
‘I’m serious, man,’ said the mongrel. ‘They worked it out for themselves a long time ago. They just don’t listen to what they’ve already worked out. It’s us that got listening. It’s us that remember…
He paused to scratch his ear.
‘It’s there in Aristotle,’ he continued. ‘He laid it out about animal intelligence.’

Maf works up a response, which I will condense here, unfairly omitting a great deal of doggie shout-out as the atmosphere builds:

‘People lead the way,’ I said, ‘and we follow. But how we follow. The great leader in this respect was Plutarch not Aristotle.’ Some boos and low hisses and general disputatious hubbub and lots of ‘come on’ followed on from this… ‘You can say what you like. It was Plutarch who recognized our speech,’ I said. ‘He allowed us the power of ‘picturing.’ Isn’t that something? He has us talking and dreaming…”

After some further debate, the plain-spoken mutt who opened the conversation ends it. “’… nobody would be human if they had the choice to be something else,’ said the mongrel. He licked his paw. ‘Anyhow,’ he added, looking up at me with humor in his mismatched eyes. ‘You seem to have plenty of opinions.’ ‘Breeding, old cock. Breeding,’ I said.”

Andrew O'Hagen

But it’s not only dogs whose lives human thought has filled with significance. It’s seemingly every creature with more than two legs. A fly in Marilyn’s soup denounces the restaurant patrons: “’They say of the world as it is, that it ought not to exist, and of the world as it ought to be, that it will never exist.’

“’I’m not doing Nietzsche tonight,’” Maf replies. “’There’s too much fun to be had.’

“’Schopenhauer, actually,’ he said. Then a spoon came down on top of him and that was the end of that.’”

Amorous butterflies speak “in the manner of Nabokov”; bedbugs have “… a perfectly Russian attitude, seeming to doubt the reliability of everything”; and cats are typically hated by dogs “not for the typical reasons, but because they show an exclusive preference for poetry over prose.”

Not every reader will be able to buy into the doggie psyche, let alone the canine cosmology, as O’Hagan has constructed it. One can imagine humorless objections that while the book purports to give voice to animals, it ultimately makes them little more than a projection of us. I’ll let Maf answer that objection: “That’s what humans do… they talk for you. And so they create a personality for you which is defined by the way they act you out…. I suppose it’s all acting. And I’m not going to pretend I don’t love that aspect of people, the part to do with acting. Other animals don’t have that capacity, and are all the poorer.” Many great novels in the animal genre do this, mostly because we could do worse than imagine how animals might see us, granted certain gifts we suppose only we possess. As I said earlier, this book defines and fulfills its brief. It is an astonishing feat of imagination, and this particular reader was hard-pressed to find a flaw.

So much for the animals. What to say about Marilyn herself? Is she no more than a vehicle for Maf’s aphorizing, a stage in his life cycle, much as a dog to a flea? Hardly. First, Marilyn is an emblem of her age in America, and Maf becomes wedded to that age via his dedication to Marilyn. Second, her aspirations to be taken seriously, to be a serious actor, perhaps even a serious person, dominate the years Maf spends with her, and his spontaneous, protective ruminations mount to deliver an intimate portrait so complex that one wonders how any prior Monroe biography, minus the canine insights, could be considered complete. “If she brought out the artist in me, I brought out the philosopher in her.” A dog without a human, after all, is like a human without a dog.

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The stories that open this new and slightly obscure volume, The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, are analogous to the first few rooms in a museum retrospective. The stories are presented chronologically, beginning with “Madeline’s Birthday,” Gallant’s first-ever published story, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1951. The first half-dozen or so are good in their own right, and give signs of future promise, but they may also be forgettable. (I haven’t forgotten them yet, but I might. They blend a bit, which isn’t true of the Gallant’s “later and collected” stories.) The reader familiar with Gallant’s work might just feel a pleasurable bit of smugness and impatience in knowingly comparing these works with the masterpieces around the corner.

The earliest of these pieces center on young women among strangers and in foreign circumstances—strangers including but not limited to boyfriends, husbands, and mothers. The stories take place just before something happens, or just after it has failed to happen. If the former, it is something that should be of great consequence but will likely turn out to be less interesting or peripheral. If the latter, well, disappointment is always interesting.

This is the thing about Gallant’s writing, early or late: its relentless interestingness, which seems naturally to proceed from hers. The one time I heard Mavis Gallant read, it was in her native Montreal, about fifteen years ago. A prize in nonfiction was being inaugurated in her name, and in honor of the honor, she read non-fiction: some selections from her journal of the previous year, brought to us, she said, straight from her bureau drawer in Paris. She was barely visible over the top of the lectern as she read for an hour or more her thoughts on the shopkeeper downstairs, on French politicians, and on trying to find a friend who would accompany her to the site of some recent race riots. It was thrilling to hear unpublished work from someone so much published; private thoughts from one so private; nonfiction from one of the greatest fiction writers of the 20th century. The notes showed Gallant to be a very, very curious person, compulsively observant, driven to record what she sees and to derive further observations from the act of recording.

Mavis Gallant

In the 1980s, she published a series of stories about an apparent alter-ego named Linnet Muir, many of whose life-details Gallant, by her admission, shares. The stories are presented as a grouping within The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, which she herself selected, arranged, and introduced. In her introduction to that massive, delectable volume, she talks of her childhood love of a comic strip called Pip and Squeak, of an imaginary land called Marigold that she populated with paper dolls, of her interment in a French convent school, of her youthful Marxism. She omits her early marriage to a western Canadian with a French-sounding name, but that detail returns, along with the others, in the stories about Linnet Muir. Linnet, in these stories, grows into a young woman who takes copious, speculative notes on everyone she encounters: the men she works with in wartime, the wives she glimpses in yards, and anyone else she might, from witnessed details, blow up into full, mysterious life.

None of the young women in The Cost of Living are so assertive and knowing. Rather, these explorations are confined to a world chiefly divided by feminine (often youthful and silent) vs. masculine (often older and vocal) impulses and needs. The exception is the satirical “Bernadette,” also the only story set in Montreal, in which the title character is a quasi-illiterate Francophone maid in a striving, liberal Anglophone household, with all involved parties skewered and left to founder.

Serviceable as these early stories are, there is a leaping-off, with a 1959 story called “Travelers Must Be Content.” It begins, “Dreams of chaos were Wishart’s meat; he was proud of their diversity and of his trick of emerging from mortal danger unscathed.” Wishart is a middle-school teacher of dubious origins who cadges European holidays by providing amusement—gossip, mostly—to moneyed women in need of same. The dream at the beginning is happening as he snoozes on a train pulling into Cannes, where he has come for such a gig. The arrangement, though, falls apart because of a misunderstanding: He takes his hostess to be hinting that Wishart might be a suitable husband for her daughter. She is not. The story, far darker than the preceding ones, turns on the question of Wishart’s self-deception, a practice necessary to his survival, and serves as a reader’s first glimpse in this volume of Gallant’s mad talent with particularity.

From “Travelers Must Be Content” onward, Gallant’s characters cease to be interchangeable, whatever they might have in common, characters who might even have been unknowable if it weren’t for their observation by a writer of such skill. Her knowledge of the human heart is discomfiting. The title story is possibly the best, a story of an Australian woman, Patricia, who goes to teach in Paris and whose sister Louise joins her there in a rooming house shared with strivers and succubi calling themselves artists. Common to all the stories in this book is the long shadow of the Second World War, lingering for a full generation, particularly in Europe, where almost all of them are set. Ghosts abound. When Louise arrives, she industriously begins touring Paris on a bicycle “left by a cousin killed in the war… I thought of how she must seem to Parisian drivers—the very replica of the governessy figure the French, with their passion for categories and their disregard of real evidence, instantly label ‘the English Miss.’” Both Patricia and Louise could be figures from the early stories, English-ish women abroad in the world—but here they are older, more contained, their own mysteries acknowledged and waiting to be dealt with head-on.

Louise ends up nursing both Patricia and a young actor and erstwhile lover through several rounds of illness. She does this with resolute cheer, all the while tirelessly acquainting herself with Paris, within the strict bounds of her budget. She records expenses in a ledger with neat columns titled “Necessary” and “Unnecessary.” This is Europe-on-a-shoestring, until Louise, for reasons we might understand but not accept, buys an expensive necklace for a neighbor named Sylvie.

We meet Sylvie in the first sentence of the story: “Louise, my sister, talked to Sylvie Laval for the first time on the stairs of our hotel on a winter afternoon.” But it’s a slow build to the realization that Louise might willingly go broke trying to buy Sylvie off, even while she never buys Patricia so much as a bowl of soup. But then Patricia, unlike Sylvie, is not Louise’s lover’s lover. Long after Louise has left Paris, Patricia tells us how she accounted for the necklace:

I know now that she went straight upstairs to her room and marked the price of the necklace under “Necessary.” It was not the real price but about the fifth of the truth. She absorbed the balance in the rest of her accounts by cheating heavily for a period of weeks. She charged herself an imaginary thousand francs for a sandwich and two thousand for a bunch of winter daisies, and inflated the cost of living until the cost of the necklace had disappeared.

Again, the survival strategy of deliberate self-deception, but mutated here and increasingly transparent.

For all her careful dissection of her characters, Gallant is never clinical. And so we feel for them, often agonizingly. Even the silliest, the least likeable, cannot be dismissed. Here, for example, from “Malcolm and Bea,” a story about a husband married to a remote-seeming woman, is a passage revealing either Gallant’s knowledge of Bea or Malcolm’s lack thereof:

Malcolm is convinced he will never have an idea about Bea until he understands her idea of herself. Of course Bea has an idea; what woman hasn’t? In her mind’s eye she is always advancing, she is walking between lanes of trees on a June day. She is small and slight in her dreams, as she is in life. She advances toward herself, as if half of her were a mirror. In the vision, she carries Ruth, her prettiest baby, newly born, or a glass goblet, or a bunch of roses.

The beleaguered Malcolm’s thoughts merge dreamily at the question what woman hasn’t? into those of the narrator, much as described in the image itself.

The progress of this book does make it appear, though, that Gallant took some time to develop those excruciating sympathies. The essential bewilderment of those early protagonists, as well as Gallant’s satirical impulses, are increasingly directed inward, to the hearts of the stories themselves. They are given to the characters rather than used as escape valves for the unseen puppeteer.

Jhumpa Lahiri, who may be Gallant’s inheritor in stature, if not in style, writes a worthy introduction to The Cost of Living. It ends with a sense of where Gallant was going, artistically and thematically, by the time of the later stories, and makes a nice companion piece to Gallant’s own introduction to The Collected Stories. That 1996 book contained 52 stories that, as I said, Gallant herself selected and arranged. On the process of choosing, she said she “rejected straight humor and satire, which dates quickly… stories that seemed to me not worth reprinting, stories I was tired of, and stories that bored me.” She added that to collect all the stories she had ever written would make this already sizeable volume as long as “the King James Bible from Genesis to about the middle of Paul’s first Epistle to the Romans.”

All this implies that the stories contained in The Cost of Living are ones that Gallant herself excluded from The Collected Stories. Which means…? As with a retrospective, if you don’t know Gallant’s work already, go to the masterpieces first. Spend time with them. If you’re hooked, as I admittedly am, you may want to trace back and study her origins. The Cost of Living will be of enormous interest to fans and scholars who need to read all that Mavis Gallant has written, but for someone coming to her fresh, it’s not the essential volume.

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What you typically notice first, when you open one of her books, though, is not the revelatory subject but the seductiveness of the prose. She, as editor Tom Engelhardt has said, “writes like an angel,” gritty, lyrical sentences that make you follow like a zombie till you realize you’re seeing and thinking in ways you haven’t before.

A partial list of Solnit’s productions would start with Secret Exhibition:  Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, a story of art-making and counterculture in the ‘50’s. Savage Dreams voyages into Native American territory to crack open the twinned stories of Yosemite National Park and nuclear  weapons testing in Nevada.  Some other books that seem to follow more obviously one on another include A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland, Wanderlust:  A History of Walking, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Her newest book, too, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, is partly an expansion on themes and moments from an earlier book, Hope in the Dark, a tour-de-force essay on organized dissent in the late 20^th century, reassuring activists of the importance of their actions even when they don’t see—or can’t recognize—results in their lifetimes. (Hope is very short; I recommend reading them together.)

A Paradise Built in Hell is a startling look-again at a number of disasters and how regular people behaved when their lives were torn asunder: not as the mob that our leaders and news programs counsel us to guard against, but in spontaneously caring and rationally generous ways. Solnit, a forceful iconoclast, quotes disaster research and disaster victims in arguing for a much more optimistic view of what can be called “human nature” than what’s taught in Psych 101. In doing so, she suggests we reconsider the ways that democratic societies are best structured and run.

The Rumpus asked her about it.

The Rumpus: Although A Paradise Built in Hell is structured in a rough chronology spanning the last century, I’m guessing that your own journey into the material was more circuitous. How and when did it first start occurring to you that there might be strong, hopeful, useful evidence that disasters briefly perfect human nature—that people behave generously and courageously under duress, as opposed to transforming into a dumbly selfish mob, as a prevailing view would have it?

Rebecca Solnit: The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, centered in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but felt powerfully in San Francisco, is where I began. I was startled by my own and others’ remarkably positive emotions in response to the situation. This cued me in to pay attention to subsequent disasters–9/11 was another occasion when I noticed people were having–what is the language for this? We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless. In the aftermath of 9/11, people had not a good time, but a deep, profound, rousing time, woke up from their ennui and isolation and trivialization to feel engaged, connected, purposeful, ready to give, to engage, to care, to learn. There was a tremendous opening in which the country could have gone in other directions, an opening in which people wanted to understand Islam and foreign policy, wanted to sacrifice and engage. I saw the Bush Administration wrestling these forces back into insignificance and urging people to fear, to shop, and to withdraw instead and then to duct-tape the leaks of the space into which they’d withdrawn. A few years later I did  research for a project on the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and again I found these remarkably positive responses, emotionally and practically, and realized that this was pretty standard and pretty interesting and pretty unknown.

Rumpus: Can you talk a little about the differences or interactions between human and natural factors in the disasters you examine?

Solnit: Actually the Halifax explosion was of war munitions and was entirely manmade, as was 9/11, and these are two of my five main examples. There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.  The tsunami that devastated southern Asia in 2004, for example–it was unforeseen, almost unprecedented, and I don’t agree with people who blamed class for who lived nearest the water–after all, waterfront property is a privilege in many parts of the world. But the Thai government decided not to give a warning, because it would disrupt tourism in the high season, and they were not certain the tsunami would be a problem. Profit entered in, and political and economic forces shaped the response. In Hurricane Katrina, you have a possibly climate-change augmented hurricane, which hits a city made vulnerable by the decision to build canals and channels that bring the storm surge into the city, by the poorly built and maintained levees, the decision to build in low swampy places like New Orleans East, and to demand but not to provide resources for a mandatory evacuation. And then various local and federal forces essentially do everything possible to make it worse–not all of them, for there were good cops, and the Coast Guard and Fish and Wildlife were great, but much of the loss of life, suffering, divisiveness, hysteria, demonization and even murderousness was as unnatural as war. And a huge counteroffensive of altruism, inprovisation, guerrilla rescue and guerrilla community-building and then rebuilding and support for the displaced mitigates this official failure and meanness. So it’s all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.

The panicked military of 1906 essentially burned down a lot of San Francisco and shot an unknown number of people as looters–one estimate says as many as 500. Who shoots people for minor property crimes, who thinks property is that sacred a basis of civilization? Who fucking cares when people are dying? The answer is the people in power, often, because the 1906 earthquake and Katrina 99 years later have a lot in common. . ‘Elite panic’ is a term coined by disaster sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke to describe the way that elites freak out in crises (while the general public generally does not). Because they have so much power, their fears are magnified into policy, institutional violence, response or its lack–all the things you see in 1906 (when the mayor of San Francisco issued a shoot-to-kill proclamation for property crimes and some of the wealthy feared, as they often do and maybe should do in crisis, that disaster would unfold as revolution, with the roles of the powerful delegitimized and civil society recharged). For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive–Mexico City’s big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.

Rumpus: Built in to your essay is the fact that a state of disaster is temporary, as are the societal changes that come with it. You talk a little, in the sections on the Mexico City earthquake and the Nicaraguan revolution, about conditions that can help to make change permanent, and also talk, in the section on 9/11, on what happens when a government seizes hold of elite panic and uses it to advance a pre-existing agenda. Where do you see the possibilities for structural change in the USA, a country so large and so diverse? Is there anything to be done to counter that negative perception of the mob, particularly given that those worst affected by any natural disaster are the poor, who are vulnerable, and the non-white, in part because they are disproportionately poor?

Solnit: Well, I’m a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America and really interested to watch the Latinoization of parts of this country. Many places  have become more lively and engaged or are becoming so. In his study of the Chicago heat wave, Eric Klinenberg points out that the vitality or lack of your neighborhood had a lot to do with whether you lived or died. You also see in the US a lot of localities taking more sane and inclusive approaches to disaster preparedness and planning (if not in some of the pandemic plans the Bush Administration put forward). And a lot of enthusiasm for public space, farmer’s markets, the idea of community–but we still build car-based sprawl and what I think of as the northern Protestant tradition of privatization of the social is still a major force.

I think that fear of the mob, the expectation that people, particularly poor and nonwhite people become mobs almost automatically in the absence of coercive authority, is inculcated by the media, the movies, and politicians. I hope that my book will do something to make it clear they’re spreading destructive distortions about how most people actually behave and make visible some of the remarkably brave, altruistic, and resourceful ways people often act in crisis and disaster.

We are entering a new era of populism and, finally, a turning away–not enough, but some–from adulation and deference to the rich and to the corporations. Nothing may come of it–but much could if people whose work it is to offer new ideas and tools seize the moment. And the poor have often been subversive just because they don’t always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and this new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work. Maybe even the era of identifying with the rich is over…..

Rumpus: Your writing, in Hope in the Dark and A Paradise Built in Hell, as well as in many articles, is compassionate and lyrical but also politically uncompromising. How do you manage to be exhortative—because both these books are calls to action—without being preachy? Also, you make a sympathetic but unstinting critique of some elements and assumptions on the left.  I love the way you characterize Orwell in Hope, in which you talk about breaking down old right-left binaries, that he was “too rigorously honest a man to toe any political line…” Do you ever get flak from people who shouldawouldacoulda been your allies?

Solnit: I’m delighted to hear that I’m exhortative without being preachy. That’s definitely in the eye of the beholder, or the ear. I grew up around preachy people–the Bay Area liberal-to-left galaxy. While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left–not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc. There are lots of older writers and pundits I just so passionately did not want to be, or become, and that helped. A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don’t want. Hope in the Dark itself came out of a fierce disagreement with the defeatism and despond that were everywhere in the antiwar sector of society in the spring of 2003. Sometimes I sign the book, “Never surrender.” I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence. For one thing, I’d been watching history unfold for decades by then–I’d seen the status of queer people change profoundly, in both public imagination and representation and the law, seen something of the same for Native Americans, seen new ideas enter the mainstream about the environment, notably an ability to think systemically, and seen how all that began with ordinary people at the margins and in the shadows. And I am not so surprised that the Bush agenda took a hideous toll but in so many ways has failed, profoundly. Not enough–the power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.

I don’t see A Paradise Built in Hell as a call to action, rather as a tool for the situations we face, equipment for responding to the sudden crises that are disasters and the ongoing issue of making a society, for societies are based on beliefs and desires, and this book addresses some of them. I do see it as hopeful. And that came as a surprise. I took up the subject of joy in disaster lightly, as though I had opened a door into what I thought was a garden or a room and found spreading out before me a colossal new landscape that needed to be mapped and described. And found too that it connected up very much with Hope in the Dark, with an enhanced sense of popular power. Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority; the underlying premise about human nature (to use an infinitely problematized but necessary term here) is fundamentally positive. And the evidence that in disasters people are really pretty kind, generous, brave, resourceful and creative fed that.

Rumpus: How has your experience in direct-action affinity groups, particularly against the war in Iraq, figured into your proposition that people are best able to look after one another in small, voluntarily assembled groups, dedicated either to “mutual aid” or to some greater good?

Solnit: It goes way back to the war against Iraq and way beyond affinity groups, the small groups into which people organize when risking arrest or otherwise acting directly in politics. I’ve seen the world changed by ideas and perspectives that began with–well, Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I’ve seen that happen quite a bit. So that’s who we can be when we have political agency, or take it, and keep it, and to keep it you need the longterm perspective that, as the graffiti in Seattle ten years ago said, “we are winning.” On some fronts. More people and more perspective and we could win on a lot more. But in 1993 if you opposed NAFTA you were called all sorts of insulting things by the American mainstream, as you were for opposing globalization at the WTO in 1999. The world has changed so much that Hillary Clinton felt the need to lie and say she had always opposed NAFTA; it was as impolitic to be for it as it had once been to be against it. How did that change take place? It came from below, from the margins, the shadows, to the center stage of governments and policies. In the decade since Seattle, most of Latin America had liberated itself and moved to the left, another unforeseen but profound shift.

But the disaster histories really caught me by surprise. I had a fundamentally positive and hopeful view, but this stuff was more so than I might’ve dared–here were major disasters in which, for example, a spontaneously assembled armada of boats evacuated 300,000 to 500,000 people from the lower edge of Manhattan in the hours after the Trade Center towers collapsed, boats going into that terrible cloud of uncertain danger in an evacuation no one directed and no one was ordered to carry out. It was the size of the famous Dunkirk evacuation of the Second World War, but that one took nine days (and was admittedly carried out under German fire). Not very many people even know about it, or understand how important a role the “Cajun Navy” of boatmen played in evacuating flooded New Orleans four years later–also an example of spontaneous, self-organized evacuators operating in circumstances they were told were hideously dangerous. They were rescuing people the media and government encouraged them to see as violent brutes. You start to see a century of such patterns and see that this is more encouraging than you might have dared to believe–encouraging also because most of that stuff about crazy looting panicking mobs in disaster is pure hallucination and slander. And that too is documented by the magnificent work of the disaster sociologists that opened up this realm for me, or rather that gave a stable substructure to the amazing first-person stories I also used extensively.

Rumpus: You have described A Paradise Built in Hell as a sort of follow up to Hope in the Dark, and, rereading Hope, I found numerous points that are expanded and reconsidered in Paradise. Can you talk a little about how your works—not just these two, but perhaps also others in your diverse corpus—are in dialogue with one another?

Solnit: I wish you would talk about the numerous points! I don’t even know if I’ve made that point in public before, about the relationship. My work is on one hand, all over the map–toward that end, I am actually working on making an atlas right now, not of my work but of my home territory, San Francisco and the Bay Area. On the other, it can be mapped to distinguish some ongoing underlying concerns and enthusiasms–for landscape, geography, place, for slowness, dissent, scrutiny, and subversion, for the importance of other ways of seeing and thinking, for power from below, and for the ability of culture to shape politics. If you think of typical academics as having a “field”–for which I always see a real field, one of those hedged-off English rectangles of territory, nice but not so big, then I have public-lands grazing rights of scope, as writers often do–our expertise is in the medium, not confined to a specific subject or discipline of knowledge. Maybe that’s the wrong metaphor; maybe I’m just trespassing or moving without license where the work takes me. I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.

For example, in my second book, Savage Dreams, I got very involved in Native American history in the Americas and fought on the side of the Indians in one of the ongoing Indian wars in this country. That was a deep and formative experience for me that has shaped how I think–and let me see how much the mainstream imagination has been changed by ideas that came from Native American activists and from scholars redefining the history of this hemisphere and thereby the meaning of the present and the possibilities and ethics of the future. Seeing public-school education, public monuments and signage, mainstream media, Columbus Day and other pieces of mainstream culture change in the wake of this insurgency and re-imagination demonstrated for me the power of ideas, of the margins, of the small against the big.

The Zapatistas in southern Mexico also caught everyone by surprise when they rose up on January 1 of 1994 to rebel against both the institution of NAFTA that day and the 502 years of oppression that the Columbian era brought them. They brought a revolution in the nature of revolution in many ways, brought the possibility that the future might draw from the deep past of indigenous culture, brought a new and poetic language to politics, and influenced activists and movements around the world.

Rumpus: You give a couple of Mexican examples of individuals subsuming their individual identities within a cause by using masks, particularly the lucha libre fighter, Super Barrio, and the Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos. The anonymity here is also carnivalesqe, and humorous. You’ve elsewhere mentioned Anglo-American equivalents though not so much with anonymity as a component. Can you talk a little about the uses of hilarity and masks for social justice?

Solnit: The Zapatistas were a big influence on the idea that rather than demanding change you could just make and be it. And that theater, poetry, imagination were tools for revolution–”the fire and the word,” they say a lot meaning guns and ideas. And the word has proven much more central and powerful in their struggle. And a lot of activists thereafter wanted to embody the better world rather than just complain about this one, and Reclaim the Streets out of Britain in particular, with its vast street parties, shifted toward demonstration as carnival rather than protest (in the sense of complaint; with carnival you could mock, critique, insult what you opposed but do it with jubilance and verve and imagination). My brother David’s group Art and Revolution brought giant puppets and street theater into West Coast demonstrations at the same time. Maybe it was just a zeitgeist. As for the masks, they make you no one and everyone, and sometimes they protect you from the information police. And masks are part of carnival, for if you and I are no one and everyone, we can meet in ways we might not as ourselves.

Rumpus: You very much identify as a writer of the American west. How have your long residence in San Francisco, your participation in many western social justice movements and your writing on the western landscape shaped your ideas on human psychology and political action?

Solnit: Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east. You were told that California had no history and culture was always an imported product. Fighting my way back to the west through ideas and histories was my founding struggle as a writer. One important stage was my graduate thesis on the Los Angeles artist Wallace Berman, who was part of beat culture. This turned into my first book, Secret Exhibition, about this milieu. And it brought me into contact with some of the surviving beats–Michael McClure, Bruce Conner, Jess….. Some of those beats–maybe Gary Snyder most of all–exemplify the liberatory ways the west is different than the east. You face Asia, Mexico and the wild spaces and still-present indigenous cultures of the interior west, while the east has always faced Europe first. Freed from that Eurocentric lineage, the field is wide-open. Tradition doesn’t fence you in. Of course you can live in San Francisco as though it were a suburb of Manhattan, and many do, the accursed devotees of the New York Times who have no clue where they are and begin all their vacations with airplanes. Or you can live here as though it is what it once was: the capital of the West, three hours from the crest of the Sierra, four from the desert, from Reno, with mountain lions who can see the Golden Gate Bridge, salmon migrations coming through the Golden Gate and raptor migrations over the city and 36 species of butterfly, some endemic, within it. And a lot of freedom of movement and identity (and rootlessness, concomitantly) that feel very different from the East Coast to me. It’s a different country, and I’ve been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality. And the increasing power of Asian and Latin culture and Native American.

Rumpus: We can’t close this conversation without returning to Katrina. I recall reading your TomDispatch report on the Algiers Point murders and was gratified to see them discussed in Paradise, but it also made me despair all over again for the dispossessed of this country. Where do you see Hope for compassion as a first response in the Dark of national and local assumptions about victims of Katrina?

Solnit: That book is called Hope in the Dark with a desire to redeem the iconography of darkness, which has always had racial and even racist overtones in this country. For me, hope in the dark was hope in darkness, in the unknown, in the night in which love is made, things regenerate, identities and boundaries soften, and in the shadows and shade that are so sheltering and almost thirst-quenching for desert-dwellers (and really pale people who have to wear lots of sunscreen, like me–I’m just back from two weeks in the Grand Canyon, where shade was such a blessed thing we sought every day). Dark does not mean dark times; you could call the Bush era glaring times, as though they shone flashlights into our faces, blinding us and invading our privacy, the glare of an interrogation chamber, of those Guantanamo prisons where people were not allowed to sleep, to dream, to restore themselves. Hope in the Dark includes Thoreau saying, ”I believe in the forest, and the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows.”

What is kind of beautiful about Katrina is that even though the media and officials are working hard at telling us everyone in New Orleans was a monster, in the immediate aftermath more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org and an uncounted horde go to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to give, to love, to be in solidarity, and to rebuild–a moment like Freedom Summer magnified a thousandfold. It matters, and it’s deeply moving. And though the official response is harsh and mean, it is countered by this popular power–to provide alternatives, to fight to change some of the proposals and policies, to cherish and support. I think it brought a lot of white people into contact with a virulent racism and gave us–I was one of them–a sense of the nightmarishness and the urgency of the problem. And maybe helped bring on the Obama era.

A lot of people still believe the characterization of the people of New Orleans as barbarian hordes; I meet them too. That’s a crime of the media, though one that only reinforced a lot of old beliefs that media, entertainment, and government had encouraged for centuries. But a lot of people woke up to solidarity, compassion and engagement. I don’t know how you weigh the one against the other. But I know that the more open and idealistic side matters.

Related Posts:

• An Occupy Oakland and Occupy SF Roundup
• Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City
• Rebecca Solnit On Looting
• Reading in the New Year
• The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

Gawande is great on paradoxes, mysteries and ethical conundrums in the practice of medicine, and this greatness of analysis extends to our health care delivery system. I had wanted to mention this article in my day of guest blogging ever since The Rumpus invited me to do it, around the same time the article was originally published, but in the days since then everyone who has talked about health care in The New York Times has beaten me to it. But if you’re avoiding the east coast media giants, you got it here first.

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• Politics in the Exam Room
• Time For A Vote
• Politics Sunday
• Wendell Potter–Healthcare’s Jeffrey Wigand

What is Stephen Harper Reading? makes that explicit. Yann Martel, one of Canada’s most vital and daring writers, took a vow, a little over two years ago, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Canada Council for the Arts. He resolved to send Canada’s conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, “…every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written.” The website gives the books and Martel’s letters to accompany each.

Harper is not a stupid man but he has some (in my opinion) stupid positions, and Martel’s mission seems in part fueled from a fear that national leaders all too easily use busyness as an excuse not to think. The letters are personal and thoughtful and the project, because it is publicly disseminated but addressed to the Canadian Prime Minister, has the delightful air of a personal—if unrequited—correspondence revealed.

I have a fondness for gestures of seeming futility, particularly ones that give the appearance of slyness while still seeming ridiculous. I think my affection stems from history: activism often appears, on the surface, hopeless. Then, every once in a while, against all expectation, it works! Equally miraculous to me are intersections between literature and politics, contradictory enterprises fueled by contradiction. And drama. And blogging. And maybe, someday, stillness.

Martel received a form response to his first gift book, and recently received several in a row, after two years of unflagging generosity.

Related Posts:

• All Past Was Once Now
• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Why Did You Leave Me Open Like That?
• Eyes Open to the Shifting Sky
• My Mouse Field Was a Triumph

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First, Nigeria and Big Oil. I’m not condoning militarism, terrorism, or sabotage, and neither are most Nigerian nationals, even though there’s a lot of oil on that slippery slope to human rights violations. Take a moment to remember Ken Saro-Wiwa as oil prices rise…

Relevant links:

Niger Delta militants vow more attacks

Oil price fears following rebel attacks on Shell

A Path to Peace.

Shell, Nigeria, Militant Attacks, and the Escalating Price of Oil

Further reading:
Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, by Nicholas Shaxson
A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary, by Ken Saro-Wiwa
In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father, by Ken Wiwa

Second, Sri Lanka and the civil war. The eyes of the world were focused on this island nation a few weeks ago. Now they seem to have glazed over. One reason we’re getting so little news from there, though, is that journalists inside are being killed and those from outside are not being allowed in.

Relevant links:

Colombo Blacklists Outside Observers
Why are the Vanni civilians still being held hostage?

Further reading:
Love Marriage, V. V. Ganeshananthan
Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
Funny Boy, Shyam Selvadurai

Third, nationless: Rom, Roma, Romani, Gypsies, yet another people without a homeland. Their persecution has become one of their unifying characteristics. Though often nomadic, many settle and thus become eligible for displacement. This is an update on a smallish group from a war that quickly became old.

Relevant links:

Living in Filth for 10 Years

Further reading:
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, by Isabel Fonseca

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“O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep!”

Sleep seems, as a topic, particularly germane this morning, after a night in which our son (whose middle name is Keats), came howling into our room at 4 complaining of horrible groin pain. Investigation revealed a big lumpy bug bite and my husband and I, after applying cortisone cream and inspecting his bed, fretted until dawn about the possibility of its being caused by a brown recluse: a spider found in Arkansan homes, particularly ours, whose bites can (but usually don’t) necrotize huge swathes of human flesh.

At 8, young Master Ravi Keats woke refreshed and informed us that the bite was much better, but we had already started our day deprived of sleep and thinking of death.

So I thought to begin guest blogging on the topic of our ultimate destination, and how to deal with what gets left behind when life moves on. Personally, I hope to opt for composting. One means to this end recently caught my attention. Here’s an animated version of a technique developed by a Swedish company, Promessa. I don’t think you’d need to go to Sweden (nor buy into the Christian iconography) to take advantage.

I think the video lacks worms, but some people think they are icky and don’t like to think of them crawling through our ribs and eye sockets.

“Save me from curious conscience, that still hoards/ Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;” says the old Keats, possibly partially reincarnated in an Arkansan tyke with an Indian first name. “Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards/And seal the hushed casket of my soul.”

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