Please indulge me in a longer WORK than usual today. In fact, it’s an entire (short) chapter from what I can honestly call a profoundly moving, poetic book of life…after a flu epidemic has killed 90% or so of the earth’s population.
WORK
AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
—Emily St. John Mandel
—from Station Eleven: A Novel
WORD(S)
adret /ah-DRAY/. noun. A mountain slope that faces the sun. From French, from Old Occitan dialect adreg, derivative of adreit (suitable, correct, good).
“The valley has an east-west trend and so a well defined adret (sunny side) and ubac (shady side).” (Georgraphic Review)
“Aprico (sunny) and opaco (opaque)—in the sense of ubac (shady)—are very rare words, which nobody uses any more in Italy when they speak: aprico exists only in poetry; whereas no Italian knows that opaco can also have the meaning above. I would prefer therefore that more unusual words were used in French as well such as soulane and adret.” (Italo Calvino)
WEB
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“The Year In Great Sentences”. What are your favorites from 2014? [bonus: 51 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature].
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An excellent piece in Wired about experiencing the JoCo Cruise Crazy, a (proudly) nerd cruise (and accompanying existential crisis) with entertainment by Jonathan Coulton, John Hodgman, Peter Sagal, Wil Wheaton and others. They had me at the badges branded with DFW’s cruise ship essay title “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”
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Tim Parks follows up his controversial (amongst readers like those in the Clamor, anyway) piece “A Weapon for Readers” with further exploration of reading habits in “How I Read”.
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Most decade-specific words in Billboard popular song titles, 1890–2014. Some interesting tidbits in the explanatory text too…
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Today in 1972, the final survivors of the Andes Flight Disaster are rescued. The story of the doomed flight and its aftermath was documented in Piers Paul Read’s book Alive, a harrowing tale of will, survival, and cannibalism that terrified my 11-year old self and still frightens me today. In addition to the book, I recommend the Independent Lens documentary Stranded and photos from a 2005 expedition that really drive home the incredible challenges the survivors faced…and conquered.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
- Reader S. submits a contender for the most complicated sentence: The “buffalo” sentence reminds me of a punctuation challenge that my 9th grade English teacher presented to us. Some of the comments refer to a similar sentence, but not this more complex version: ¶ “Where John had had had Mary had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.” ¶ That’s about all I remember of 9th grade English other than having to make lists of metaphors from The Odyssey. — Please feel free to explain that one to myself and the rest of the Clamor! And favorite metaphors from The Odyssey too….
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