“This fluke, single, huge, cross-indexed, thermodynamic experiment of a story that the world has been inventing to tell itself at bedtime is still in embryo. It’s not even the outline of a synopsis of notes toward a rough draft yet.”
Perhaps the gravest violence we can do to ourselves is to live out our lives believing the world to be a fixity handed down to us by the authorities of history and life to be a matter of taking immutable givens. Daring to believe otherwise — to believe that even our smallest purposeful action alters the monolith of reality in some subtle, meaningful way — is an act of courage and resistance, an act of immense vulnerability to the possibility of disappointment, vulnerability the commonest cowering from which is cynicism.
James Baldwin knew this when he issued his lyrical and impassioned insistence that “nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed,” that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”
Hannah Arendt knew this when she considered how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world, observing that “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Richard Powers knew this when he made his contribution to Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two (public library) — artist and writer James L. Harmon’s wonderful 2002 anthology of wisdom from stellar minds, a decade in the constellating, envisioned as an eclectic contemporary counterpart to Rilke’s timeless Letters to a Young Poet, which had moved Harmon deeply when he first encountered it as a young man.
Two decades before Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for his sylvan symphony The Overstory, he echoes Seamus Heaney’s exhortation to always remain “true to your own secret knowledge” and writes:
Never forget what you were born knowing. That this fluke, single, huge, cross-indexed, thermodynamic experiment of a story that the world has been inventing to tell itself at bedtime is still in embryo. It’s not even the outline of a synopsis of notes toward a rough draft yet. Buy the plot some time.
19th-century Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, embroidered over the course of seven years as a teaching tool in an era when women were barred from higher education in science and a fraction of the presently known Solar System objects were known. (Available as a print and a face mask.)
We buy the plot time with the currency of our conscious choices, the grand and the mundane alike — the daily actions that make us what we are, the people who make the world what it is. Powers writes:
Take in more, consume less, recycle everything; book-keep all hidden costs; find out where you have been set down; lobby for a smaller market; get rid of your car and travel as widely as you can (yeah, walk: what the hell); try to say a little more than you mean; carry a pocket encyclopedia (ask for one without packaging) and when the entry on “Diffusion Constant” says, “for more information, see ‘Pastry War,’” see “Pastry War.”
This latter sentiment might at first appear dated in the hindsight of two decades, in the epoch of Wikipedia. But it is actually all the more insightful and urgent today, for the quiet act of resistance at its heart has grown all the harder. What I most rue about the internet is that, for all its riches of readily accessible information, it has altered the texture of human curiosity, vanquishing that wondrous encyclopedic feeling of learning about the thing you hadn’t known you didn’t know but now greatly enjoy knowing. Somewhere along the way of choices being made for us by an insular tribe of technologists, discovery was sacrificed at the altar of search as algorithms perfected the mechanics of giving us more and more of what we already knew we wanted and believed, rendering the mind itself more and more a fixity. Would you be Googling “Pastry War” now had I not made this point about a point Richard Powers made long ago on the pages of a yellowing book I pulled from my bookshelf by some incomputable human impulse this morning?
Those choices matter, Powers reminds us, even at the smallest scale. There is no fulcrum too small for the lever of change to lift from, but the lift must begin with lucidity. He writes:
Take a full look at the worst. Acknowledge the figures: the runaway birthdates, the irreversible extinctions and ruined habitats, the meaningless economies fueled by waste, the exported shooting wars and their cover causes… Then work at whatever comes to hand. Useful or not, it makes no difference. Jumping in is the only calculus that emergency ever allows.
Complement with Rebecca Solnit on rewriting the world’s broken stories with our actions, then revisit What If — a wondrous French picture-book about daring to imagine and build a different world for the children of tomorrow.
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