The Faraway Nearby

Also by Rebecca Solnit

Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era

Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West

A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland

Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
(with Susan Schwartzenberg)

As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers
(with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe)

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

VIKING

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Copyright © Rebecca Solnit, 2013

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Solnit, Rebecca.

The faraway nearby / Rebecca Solnit.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-101-62277-3

1. Solnit, Rebecca. 2. Autobiography—Authorship. 3. Storytelling. 4. Narration (Rhetoric)—Psychological aspects. I. Title.

PS3569.O585Z46 2013

814'.54—dc23

[B] 2013001563

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's alone.

for the mothers

and the wolves

Also by Rebecca Solnit

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

 

1. Apricots

2. Mirrors

3. Ice

4. Flight

5. Breath

6. Wound

7. Knot

8. Unwound

9. Breath

10. Flight

11. Ice

12. Mirrors

13. Apricots

Moths

 

Thanks

W
hat's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. What is it like to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the roller coaster, the person you've only read about, or the one next to you in bed?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we've been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

In
The Thousand and One Nights,
known in English as
The Arabian Nights,
Scheherazade tells stories in order to keep the sultan in suspense from night to night so he will not kill her. The backstory is that the sultan caught his queen in the embrace of a slave and decided to sleep with a virgin every night and slay her every morning so that he could not be cuckolded again. Scheherazade volunteered to try to end the massacre and did so by telling him stories that carried over from one night to the next for nights that stretched into years.

She spun stories around him that kept him in a cocoon of anticipation from which he eventually emerged a less murderous man. In the course of all this telling she bore three sons and delivered a labyrinth of stories within stories, stories of desire and deception and magic, of transformation and testing, stories in which the action in one freezes as another storyteller opens his mouth, pregnant stories, stories to stop death.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller. Those ex-virgins who died were inside the sultan's story; Scheherazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production and talked her way out.

•   •   •

Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about a hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine. They came in three big boxes, and to keep them from crushing one another under their weight or from rotting in close quarters, I spread them out on a sheet on the plank floor of my bedroom. There they presided for some days, a story waiting to be told, a riddle to be solved, and a harvest to be processed. They were an impressive sight, a mountain of apricots in every stage from hard and green to soft and browning, though most of them were that range of shades we call apricot: pale orange with blushes of rose and yellow-gold zones, upholstered in a fine velvet, not as fuzzy as peaches, not as smooth as plums. The ripe ones had the faint sweet perfume particular to that fruit.

I had expected them to look like abundance itself and they looked instead like anxiety, because every time I came back there was another rotten one or two or three or dozen to cull, and so I fell to inspecting the pile every time I passed by instead of admiring it. The reasons why I came to have a heap of apricots on my bedroom floor are complicated. They came from my mother's tree, from the home she no longer lived in, in the summer when a new round of trouble began.

Two summers before the apricots, my mother had begun to get confused, to get lost, to lock herself out of her own house, to have serial emergencies that often prompted her to call me for a rescue or a solution. She had memorized my phone number decades before; my three brothers lived no farther away, but they had other area codes and newer numbers, and she had always hidden her troubles from them. They were the audience for her best self, for whom she wished to be seen as, and I was stationed backstage, where things were messier.

I told my middle and younger brothers that we needed to make it a group effort, because if this chaos remained my mother's and my secret, as most of her illnesses and complaints had been before, it could consume me. These brothers did a lot for her in other ways; they stepped up, and the burden was shared, but all her emergency calls still came to me. One day I asked her why she always called me and not them. “Well, you're the girl,” she said, then added, “and you're just sitting around the house all day doing nothing anyway.” That was one way to describe the life of a writer.

She lost her car, and I went over and drove her around until we found it; we crossed our fingers until she lost her driver's license for good; she lost her purse and I turned her house upside down until it showed up on the seat of a chair pushed into a desk days after we'd given up; she lost her keys or her wallet, and we came over and unlocked the door with our keys and made more keys and left one with her nearby friend, and hid one on the premises, and then a replacement, and then one after that. I never knew when the phone would ring with an emergency, and when the phone didn't ring, I worried about whether she was in such dire straits that she didn't even have access to a phone or the capacity to use it. I was constantly on edge, waiting for the next crisis.

We kept trying to prop her up at home. I put a hook behind the front door to hang her purse on so she'd know where it was, but she wouldn't use it, and she took my proposal to reduce her nine or so purses to one badly; she liked the big red luggage tag I put on the key to the front door until she lost it, and then a series of highly visible successors, and appreciated the list of essential phone numbers I pinned to the wall, but she called up and cursed me the day I borrowed her address book so I could make a large copy bound in red with a ribbon on it to tether to furniture or dangle out of piles.

The copy got lost too, but not as often, and I had another photocopy to back up the backup, in the day when she still read and used phones and kept up with friends. I bought a corded telephone that wouldn't get lost or drained of power the way the cordless ones did, but couldn't ensure it would be hung up in between calls, and, because she couldn't learn how to punch in the time on modern microwave keypads, I found an old dial-operated microwave, like the one she'd burned out by setting it to heat something for hours instead of minutes. I found a pretty chain for her eyeglasses and then another one and helped her get more pairs of glasses.

Like many elderly people, she was convinced that, rather than her losing things, others were stealing them—irons, purses, keys, laundry, money—and she lost more things by hiding them from these fictitious characters who helped conceal her real problems. The world of her imagination filled up with thieves and prowlers, though she'd never actually been the victim of a crime in that nice neighborhood twenty miles north of the city. She was afraid of people peering in the window and had most of them entirely covered, so that she would live by lamplight on a blazing blue and gold July day.

She tried to take the bus to see a friend who was having a birthday and got off at the wrong stop and took, so far as I could tell, a long hike across the shoulder of the small mountain between two towns and then got rides from passersby, none of whom bothered to take her all the way, and ended up home. She reported on it blithely, as an adventure, but a few years before, two elderly sisters she knew had gotten lost on a hike in her county. I can't remember if one or both died of exposure before they were located. My middle brother ordered a medical alert bracelet with contact information on it and put it on her like a dog tag in those days when we were propping her up with devices and systems that would mostly fail anyway.

I composed an essay in my head somewhere in the midst of all these crises called “Shipwrecked on the Dark Continent” but never found time to write it. Taking care of the elderly comes without the vast literature of advice and encouragement that accompanies other kinds of commitments, notably romantic love and childbearing. It sneaks up on you as something that is not supposed to happen, or rather you crash into this condition that you have not been warned about, a rocky coast not on the map. In the preferred stories the last years of life are golden and the old all ripen into wisdom, not decay into diseases that mimic mental illness and roll backward into chaotic childhood and beyond. My mother had always wanted me to take care of her, but she pictured this as a manifestation of her ascendancy, not her decline.

We took her to doctors who treated us like delinquent parents for letting her live alone, though it wasn't up to us and we were trying to change the situation. They offered prescriptions but no advice on how to get her to take a pill twice a day when she didn't know what day it was and what she'd done ten minutes ago. I tried a wall calendar with crack baggies containing the day's prescriptions stapled to each day, but she never looked at the calendar. That was the era of patching and bailing the sinking boat.

We floundered through a few grueling years of these crises while I mounted a low-key campaign to convince her that leaving her suburban home of thirty years would be a boon. I'd point out that if she lived in a building with a manager, she would never have to wait for someone to drive out from another county to unlock her door, and that it would be more sociable. She was lonely too, with her driver's license taken away, her old friends dying or distancing themselves or at the other end of a lost or dead telephone, with the necessary phone numbers in the missing phone book.

Finally, at the beginning of the apricot summer, we moved her to a charming independent-living senior apartment complex near my two relevant brothers and still a bridge away from me, and things began falling apart in earnest. When we'd moved her from her dark, disheveled home we'd pried her loose from a map of familiar routines and layouts, within which she had been able to cope by habit. Or perhaps we hadn't realized the extent to which she had not been coping.

When we packed her home up, I found fruit decomposing in dark cupboards, a trivet for hot dishes in her sock drawer, family photographs and her wedding pictures in the other clothing drawers, and wads of bills cached in all kinds of hiding places and fallen behind bureaus, and chaotic piles and tangles everywhere. The new place was just a studio apartment, and it justified simplifying her possessions down to essentials. She saw this as taking her things away, when she wasn't regarding the new place as a temporary lodging, a hotel, from which she'd return to her old territory.

She never got a new map into her head, never learned the way to the grocery store half a block away on the other side of the street or the layout of the building or even her own apartment. She couldn't. Even crossing the street was dangerous, both because she wasn't looking for cars and because once she got to the other side she'd have no idea how she got there or where she was. My younger brother believed ardently in protecting her dignity and autonomy, but being hit by a car is undignified. We arrived at a new level of crisis that required one of us to be with her during all waking hours. Then we hired aides to supplement us until we moved her to the residential care facility with the bucolic name where she was supposed to be fully cared for and safe.

They misled us about their capacity to cope and took a lot of money they weren't going to return, and whenever things didn't go smoothly they passed the burden to us. We went back to spending long chunks of time with her and hiring one-on-one caregivers. She became a geriatric delinquent, prone to lashing out and running away. We tried to forestall her solo expeditions by taking her on a long walk every morning through the pleasant residential streets with their burgeoning flower gardens. Since the rest of my conversations with her were chaotic or perilous, I talked to her mostly about the colors of the houses and about irises, honeysuckle, nasturtiums, passionflowers, sunflowers, morning glories, and the other plants we passed on those walks.

•   •   •

In Alzheimer's disease the hippocampus is among the areas affected first, that little coil in the central core of the brain that shares a Latin name with sea horses. Shaped like a sea horse, it forms memories. As the hippocampus erodes, the sufferer loses the ability to form new memories but hangs on to existing ones at first. Then the neocortex, that overmantle of the brain that hosts much of our intellectual functioning, begins to deteriorate. The neocortexes of many animals are comparatively smooth and simple, but the human neocortex is intricately crenelated to create a huge amount of surface area within the confines of the skull.

Think of the brain as an intricate landscape of canyons, arroyos, inlets, bays, tunnels, and escarpments surrounding a buried sea horse, with the neurons that relay information scattered all through—scientists call this the “neuron forest.” In the disease that was in my mother's brain, these nerve cells become tangles, as though the forest has been overtaken by the kind of vines you sometimes see creeping up a tree to strangle it. Other parts go blank; the trees die off, and the ventricles that run through the brain enlarge like streams becoming canals. The landscape in which character and capacity are grounded is metamorphosing profoundly, irrevocably. Eventually it erodes; the brain actually shrinks.