Chronicles Of The Return

All is right in my world this morning as I sit on the patio of my favorite coffee shop reading the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books. I only recently renewed my subscription, as I was uncertain how long I was going to remain in the US upon returning home in late June of last year. But here I am, and while I do hope to travel again in the near future, it’s strange to say this, but I think I’ve found a home in Austin–or at the very least, a home base.

In my opinion it is the single finest magazine in English. Where else can you get esssays on particle physics, Dickens, a detailed deconstruction of the baleful influence of Israel on US foreign policy, a lengthy exposition on the differences between Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia? All of which are grounded in reality, not Fox News fantasy?

The New Yorker is a fine magazine as well. But my problem with it is that it’s not nearly as comprehensive, nor, in a sense, is it as curious. Generally speaking I think the flaw with the New Yorker is it sees the world from the prism of New York City (in itself not a bad prism, just limited.) It’s gravitas comes from the City, not the world, like the New York Review of Books.

Of course, the New York Review of Books is most certainly not a propaganda mouthpiece for the neocon/Likudniks like The New Republic is–and Walter Lippman is spinning in his grave, I tell you. I was a subscriber to the New Republic for ten years. It was the first serious magazine I read in college. It was hard to let it go, but by 2003 the magazine had changed so much it wasn’t worth my time or money only to read one or two essays an issue.

I also subscribed to the New Yorker for a few years, but canceled my subscription when I realized I was only reading one or two articles a week from it. Not a good return on my money. As a general rule I read the New York Review of Books from cover to cover every two weeks. And with that I don’t need to read the newspaper and all its attendant noise, daily. I get signal from the New York Review.

And that’s the beauty of The New York Review: I read it from cover to cover and I learn something new every two weeks. Where else would one read an essay on Tennesse Williams followed by an excellent essay on the emerging food movement? Or a long essay on biology, or the glaciers, or evolution, followed by an expose or sorts on George W. Bush? You don’t get anything like the intellectual diversity in the New York Times, much less the Austin American-Statesman.

And don’t get me started on McPaper: a simple paper for simple minds if ever there was one.

Here’s one from today I liked: jobs that have to do with mountains. As long as you’r enot blowing them up, and you find one, please let me know. I love me some mountains. Preferably with a beach in front of them, but hey, as I am stuck in cubicle-land, I’m not picky these days.

Alas, sometimes the searches are very strange: compare and contrast Singapore and Somalia? Really? Really? Why? One’s in Africa, the other in Asia at the southernmost tip of the Malay Peninsula. One is highly organized and prosperous, the other is desperately poor and chaotic. Not to mention a failed state. And you needed google to tell you this?

My good friend and former and sometimes editor Tracy Barnett is leaving today to travel for a year. She’s an exceptional writer, covering primarily the environment. I’m sure with a full year to travel she’ll have many misadventures and exciting things to write about. She’ll be spending most of her time in Latin America, so please do give her a read, and better yet, put her blog in your RSS feed.

We’re having server issues at the moment. I appreciate your patience.

The sun beats down on the sand. Waves crash in and roll back out. After a week of surfing I’d realized there are limits to a 38 year old body, even one in reasonably good condition. My body was telling me I needed rest. I heeded it. Physically tired, but mentally alert I sat down under the thatched room of my favorite palapa, ordered ceviche with a Fanta and set about to read Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Yes, I know that’s heavy reading for the beach, but I don’t do things by halves.

As the sun rose in the middle of a cloudless, desolate blue sky, climbing down through the minutes and hours of the tropics my mind joined with another in three dense, intellectual chapters of masterful literary criticism.

But first a digression.

Several weeks ago I went out on a date with a well-educated young woman. A stunning, tall brunette with dark, penetrating eyes, a nip of a nose and a warm smile. Being the avid reader I am the topic circled around reading and books, the internet and modern communications. Sadly, while the young woman in question was bright—and educated—she was far from literate. (I know that’s a smug judgment, but I’m the one dating, not you!) In the words of LA Times book editor she had bought into the ideal that “it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.”

“The last book I read was on an airplane. Something I picked up in the airport. I can’t remember what it was,” she said.

This is a woman who probably makes $100,000 a year, but what poverty? I wanted to ask what she’d take to the grave, but that’s on the cruel side (and glum) for a first (and last) date. Of course, she does read. She talked about the blogs (mostly liberal and feminist) and websites, newspapers, magazines she read and the books she listened to.

“Listened to?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, audiobooks,” she replied, looking at me as if I was from outer-space. I knew what she meant, but couldn’t divine the “why” of it. I don’t want to listen to a book. I want to inhabit it. I want the writer to take me off into her world. I want to have congress with his mind. Isn’t that why we read? Not to “be in the know” but to know, to feel, to become? Alas, if reading is a lost art—as Ulin says, I’ve made damn sure I at least know when to ask for directions. For without books I would be lost.

And so I sat on that beach and read, first about Bocaccio: Frate Alberto and his misadventures, presaging Casanova in Venice. Prose filled, in Auerbach’s words, “with malicious little thrusts at the preaching friars” of his day. Clearly little has changed, I think, as I consider the pecadilloes of American preachers and their bountiful harvest of bimbroglios.

Then came a chapter on Antoine de la Sale, writing with a verve and realism, movingly so about the loss of sons to mothers during war. One can read the New York Times any day of the week with its grim statistics of lives lost in Iraq or Afghanistan, some insurgency in Africa or civil war in Asia and never know of true loss: the kind of loss that carves out a hollow cavity in a mother’s soul. But pick up a book from the ‘canon’ and reality is right there, staring at me, defying me to disagree that little has changed over the last five hundred years.

And then comes Rabelais and Pantagruel. Auerbach’s chapter is a long, discursive essay on the giant and the comic adventure. Now here was something I could relate to: present company included. Barton and Reyes are no Pantagruel or Gargantua and I no Alcofrybas. But my time in Mexico was nothing if not comic. And, like Alcofrybas, I have in the last year discovered, if not a new world, at the very least a new self. Whence I was once far too serious I am now, in Auerbach’s formulation, “more protean, more inclined to slip into someone else’s shoes.” In a very real sense I attained a level of empathy I never knew I was capable of. I’d much rather live this way, mocking myself—and the world with me than be stuck in “thick headedness [un]able to adjust” full of “one track arrogance which blinds a man to the complexity of the real situation.” Or, to reformulate Auerbach’s comment on Montaigne to my own purpose (which Montaigne would appreciate): I may often contradict myself, but I never contradict the truth.

The wind crackled up the beach. A coconut thumped into the sand. I sat with what I had just learned, eager to find a book store and read more, the original—with the vain hope that one day I would read something other than Caesar, Cicero and Virgil in the original.

This is why I read. This is why I sit down and make quiet hours for myself. A blog may provide a momentary distraction or a pungent sound-bite. But our lives, such as they are, are best mirrored in those works which will never die. It is the ideas which inhabit them, truly hoary but verities none the less, that I turn for solace and understanding. These ideas make the human condition bearable. And to them I always return.

As the bus twists and turns up the Sierra Madre del Sur coming out of Zihuatanejo the first thing you notice are the lush green hillsides. The next thought that logically follows is: wow, there is a lot of water here. But like the coastal ranges of California the water is deceiving as I soon discovered.

After climbing above the first range of crests, outcrops and rippling ridges we descended into a broad valley, much as I imagine the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck’s retelling. It was dry, cactuses proliferated. Grasses burned off in the heat of a Mexican summer. Corn fields baked on the banks of a river.

“Lago muy seco,” I asked the bus driver. “Si,” he replied, “it’s the lowest it’s been in twenty five years.” The scene was well nigh apocalyptic. Everyone here in Austin is concerned about the levels of Lake Travis, one of a chain of Hill Country reservoirs built for flood control (and water management) on the Colorado River during the Great Depression. LBJ’s pork for the area when he was a Congressman and Senator. But this Mexican lake? It was forty feet low. In part of the lake fields of corn had taken over–the river snaking through where water and fish once thrived. This lake provides necessary drinking and farming water for the States of Guererro and Michoacan and now it was almost empty. The landscape was parched. Sure, I was in a rain shadow. But the sources of the lake were not, as they sat at the crest of a watershed, which in most years, brings in ample water to the region.

“It’s the hottest and dryest summer I can remember,” said Resendo, the owner of a small cafe in Melaque. Melaque is on the coast. Tropical. It is supposed to rain every day in July, August and September. Not this year. And when a Mexican complains about the heat, you know it is unseasonably warm. “It’s the rainy season,” he went on. “And you’ve been here, what, almost two weeks? Has it rained?”

“Once, for half a day?” I replied.

“Exactly,” he said.

In the last year I have traveled in almost twenty foreign nations. And there were only two (Vietnam and Singapore) where the people didn’t complain in one sense or another about massively altered traditional weather patterns. I’m not talking about ‘global warming’ here. That’s a misnomer, in my opinion, for what is happening. What I’ve heard about and what I am discussing is nothing short of global climate change.

In Indonesia Lake Toba was 10 feet higher than it had ever been. “Too much rain,” said Efan, the young man who managed the guest house I stayed in.

“The Highlands are extremely dry this year,” said Les an Australian ex-pat (and bug collector) living in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. “I haven’t seen my favorite beetle this year at all. And it’s not rare. It just needs water,” he said.

In Laos and Thailand the late onset of the cool season messed up food production. And it’s almost paralyzing Cambodia.

Although the Monsoon didn’t fail in India in 2008, my farming friends in Kerala had already almost run out of water in the Western Ghats and were worried about the cardamom crop failing. “It’s not as water hungry,” said Ahmed, “as cotton, but it is a thirsty plant.”

Oman had been devastated by a hurricane the year before. Yes, a hurricane.

Turkey? Central Anatolia was greener than many people could ever remember. But spring was late in coming. And it was a cold spring. The Judas Trees blossomed a full month later than they normally do.

“We only had a week or two of snow this year,” said Stuart, my best friend in Denmark.

Yes, you read that correctly. Viking-land lacked real snow.

And here I sit in Austin, Texas. The mercury in the thermometer is at the point of bubbling and it’s only 1100am.

All this is anecdotal. Dismiss it. Or don’t.

But here’s the whole point of my anecdotes, from an interview of Jared Diamond:

“The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world,” says Diamond. “That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans.” The problem is not the number of Kenyans, the problem is when Kenyans or, more pressingly, big developing countries such as China, gain the ability to consume like Americans.

Can’t humans simply increase the supply of resources as they have done before? “We can change the supply of some things if there is only one limiting resource. If it is food, then we can have a green revolution and produce more crops,” he says. “Unfortunately, we need lots of resources. We need food, we need water. We are already using something like 70 or 80 per cent of the world’s fresh water. So you say, ‘Alright, we’ll get around water by desalinating sea water.’ But then there’s the energy ceiling, and so on.”

That’s the big question. The question no one is willing to voice. Am I, a member of the advanced world willing to forgo some of my standard of living for those in the developing world? And if I do so, do I have the moral and ethical standing to ask those of the developing world to forgo some of their wants?

I don’t have an answer.

I can promise you one thing: we cannot have it all. The Chinese cannot live like Americans and the Americans cannot continue to live as they are. Something will break.

One night in June, as Stuart and I sat in the garden, polishing off a bottle of tequila, he asked me how I saw the world in fifty years.

“Hotter, poorer, hungrier and more violent,” is how I put it. “But it’ll still be round,” I said, taking a swipe at Tom Friedman.

“That’s pretty grim, brother,” he said, smiling at the joke.

“If history has taught me anything, Stuart, it’s this: life can be grim and history is inexorable,” I held my finger up silencing an emergent query. I gathered my thoughts and finished up, “but humanity will muddle through.”

I don’t know if I want to bequeath a world of ‘muddling through’ to our children. But that’s what they’ll get.

Sean Paul told Reyes, “the only condition I have is no internet. I’m sick of checking my email every five minutes. This damned phone is like a third testicle”

Reyes smiled. “Juan Pablo: sun, surf and ceviche, claro?”

“Claro.”