“Ordinary Devotions” — Essay # 11 of Anxious Attachments

The sun, a shrunken plum, is visible only near sunset. It shimmers like a mirage of a sun between the tops of the pine trees. When I take the dog for his evening walk, my eyes sting. I hold my hand out. White ash falls like tiny, toxic snowflakes. It’s a hot, dry, thick smoke that settles between the trees and in our lungs. Visibility is less than a mile. Air quality, we are told, is worse than in Shanghai. Like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. This is how they ought to measure air quality — instead of its colors, yellow, orange, red, like terrorist alerts — in terms of disease probability.

— “Cautionary Tales,” Essay # 11 of Anxious Attachments

This is sort of what it feels like in a California summer.

Last summer, smoke billowed over the Santa Cruz Mountains and the strangely colored sky lasted for days.

When We Arrived at the Centauri System . . .

A ship, a kind of ark, leaves Earth carrying a small band of humans looking for an alternative home. Among the passengers, the wife of the grieving father who followed his dead daughter’s footsteps to a scientific station in Siberia. The father, working on a 30,000-year-old mummy found buried in the ice, unwittingly unleashed a plague virus on the world. Now his wife and their 17-year-old granddaughter volunteer to be among the first humans put into cryogenic sleep.

The adolescents and children remain asleep the whole voyage, but the adults who have necessary skills are awakened to get to work:

When we arrived at the Centauri system, we received a decades-old message from Earth, informing us that a cure for the plague had been discovered — the comatose woke up and people began to rebuild their lives. Funerary corporations expanded to focus on climate projects, building seawalls around coastal cities, sponsoring the solar shade project until the end of the century. The message bid us good luck and farewell. You always have a home here, it said. On this world or on your new home, we’ll find each other again one day. Personal letters arrived, along with general messages to the crew, and for more than a week the ship was abuzz with news and condolences and statistics from revived sports teams, a snapshot of life on Earth for the past fifty years. The ship’s doctor organized daily sharing circles for those who wanted to celebrate or needed support or couldn’t quite articulate how they were supposed to feel.

— How High We Go In the Dark, p. 196

How High We Go In the Dark: Self Can’t Even

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

A grieving father volunteers to take his daughter’s place in a research station in Siberia. He’s shown the crater the scientists were exploring when his daughter had the accident that killed her. Then, of all the crappy things to happen, the 30,000-year-old corpse that his daughter stumbled across on her last day alive turns out to be infected with a virus. And it’s the grieving father who’s been dissecting it for study. (Why did you — oh my God — WHAAAAAT?)

This is what self will refer to as the Don’t Look Now moment, after the short story by Daphne du Maurier: in the story, a grieving father chases the memories of his dead daughter, which lead him straight to . . . a serial killer!

In How High We Go In the Dark, the father knows what’s going to happen:

• I put on my daughter’s snow gear, taking the dogu figurine with me, and walk out onto the tundra, picture Clara there beside me beneath the aurora. I don’t take the ATV. I walk the mile to the crater’s edge. I imagine the virus and anything else the ice has kept hidden from us being sucked into the figurine, its stone belly filled with all that can harm us. I tell my daughter I love her and throw the dogu into the crater, waiting for all that has been unburied to be retaken into the earth. I walk back to the outpost. I can barely breathe.

Looking Back: Granta 133, Autumn 2015

Self has apocalypse on the brain.

She’s reading the first novel of the Gone series, by Michael Grant. Because she’s so ornery, she began with Book 4, then worked backwards. She’s now on Book 1. If she’d begun in proper order, she’d have known it was all about a nuclear power plant in the fictional town of Perdido Beach, California. Thank God for this series, which she discovered in June, when she saw a stack of these books sitting on a table in the lower level of the London Review Bookshop.

She’s also decided to arrange all her literary journals by year. She starts with Granta. She pulls out Issue 133, starts reading the Introduction by Sigrid Rausing. And — damn? Here, see for yourself:

There is an apocalyptic feeling in the air. I write the day after the news that the IS have blown up parts of the ancient site of Palmyra. They had already beheaded the eminent archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad and, according to reports, hung his body from the monuments. Refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean and living in makeshift camps at Calais and in Budapest; the Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov has been charged with terrorism offences by the Russian authorities in Crimea and sentenced to twenty years in prison. “Hang on in there, Oleg,” someone writes. It’s not Darkness at Noon but maybe it should be.

Frederick Terman: Brilliance

This book is incredible. It keeps dredging up memories of self’s young adulthood, that season of first-coming-to-the-States and being a grad student at Stanford (two nieces followed in self’s footsteps, hurrah), but it also explains why the big building on *that* side of the Stanford campus is called Terman. That’s what all the students called it: Terman. Not Terman Engineering, not the Terman Building. Just TERMAN.

In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students.

— Steve Jobs, Chapter One: Childhood

Sentence of the Day, Last Saturday of August 2021

Nine of the twelve people who have ever walked on the moon came to Iceland first.

How Iceland Changed the World, p. 185

Favorite Reads, So Far 2021

The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal (science fiction)

High as the Waters Rise, by Anja Kampmann (first novel)

Ice Walker: A Polar Bear’s Journey Through the Fragile Arctic, by James Raffan (environment)

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (environment)

Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943, by Keith Lowe (WWII history)

The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman (mystery)

The Fascination of Simulations

Elizabeth Kolbert is very fascinated by simulations of fragile ecological environments, the ones where scientists test out various doomsday scenarios. Under a White Sky is full of such sims.They cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and maintain.

What must it be like to work in one of those? Self would love it. But Kolbert is a straight arrow: she describes the scientific work in such a way that it appears — by design — dull. Kolbert doesn’t think it’s dull, but the scientists are so self-deprecating.

On p. 109, Kolbert is interviewing Paul Hardity, the Director of SeaSim, a simulation of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

She has him saying this:

• “We come from this planet. Anyway, I’m getting a little philosophical. I’m going to have to go home and watch a hockey game.”

HAR HAR HAR!!!!

Stay cool, dear blog readers. Stay cool.

Save the Pupfish!

With just thirty-five Devils Hole pupfish left on the planet, the National Park Service refused to risk a single breeding pair. It was reluctant even to surrender any eggs. After months of argument and analysis, it finally allowed the Fish and Wildlife Service to gather eggs in the off-season, when the chances of their surviving in the cavern were, in any case, low. The first summer, a single egg was collected; it died. The following winter, forty-two eggs were gathered; twenty-nine of these were successfully reared to adulthood.

— Under a White Sky, p. 81

“This is a good sign,” Gumm said.

Love how phlegmatic the scientist is. In truth, “she tries to spend some part of every day by the edge of the tank, just looking at the fish.”

Stay cool, dear blog readers. Stay cool.

Sentence of the Day: Still Elizabeth Kolbert

Self is on Section 2 of Kolbert’s Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.

The future of life, Kolbert says, is Extinction.

And no one writes Extinction with a capital ‘E’ like Elizabeth Kolbert.

Kolbert is scary good when she writes about soon-to-be-extinct animal species.

In section 2, Into the Wild, she focuses her tremendous laser-like intelligence on pupfish, whose only known habitat is Devils Hole in Death Valley National Park.

She makes passing reference to Edward Abbey, whose Desert Solitaire made quite an impression on self when she read it, decades ago.

p. 78:

• Though the book chronicles Abbey’s stint as a ranger in Arches National Park, in Utah, he wrote most of it sitting at a bar in a brothel just a few miles from Devils Hole.

A brothel? Really?

Stay cool, dear blog readers. Stay cool.