crystallize!

My friend Myles sure knew how to turn a phrase—and also, in this particular case, how to align his expectations for what kind of experience his new computer might bring. Sadly for both of us, one thing the new computer ended up bringing was an end to our years of voluminous email correspondence. He and I became prolific penpals when he served as my grad thesis advisor at Buffalo (c.1993), a friendship that helped carry us each through some very rough times. But somehow the new laptop brought him too many new challenges at once, and he let his inbox overflow ignored until it would accept no more messages. We fell back on non-email connections, which neither of us managed nearly as fluently—until eventually I grew so accustomed to the new silence that I switched over into wondering how he was doing without even trying to pick up the phone, and thus managed not to learn of his death until recently,  months after the fact.

Myles Slatin   .:.   March 3, 1924 – May 9, 2010
beloved mentor, confidant, teacher, scholar, artist

Myles drawing on Cape Cod, 9/03

Myles & lydia, 12/08

Strangely, I was not only thinking actively of Myles for much of that silent time, I was even launching a new project inspired directly by him, and by my grandfather whose situation is similar. I’ve been looking for a way to help prevent that same kind of disconnect from befalling the elders who are geographically nearer to me, within easier reach. It seems profoundly wrong that comfortable computer users, early adopters even, just suddenly hit a wall when their systems are upgraded under them one notch too far, and almost overnight the technology that’s supposed to help far-flung friends keep in touch becomes a mystifying and bothersome mess. Surely I can invent a way to help bridge this gap for others.

Two Coots in a Canoe: An Unusual Story of Friendship, by David E. Morine

The New North: An Account of a Woman's 1908 Journey through Canada to the Artic, by Agnes Deans Cameron

Two recent favorite reads, forming an interesting study in contrasts:

• The new North: an account of a woman’s 1908 journey through Canada to the Arctic, by Agnes Deans Cameron
• Two coots in a canoe: an unusual story of friendship, by David E. Morine

Cameron was a remarkable character. After a 20-year career as a schoolteacher in Vancouver, ended abruptly as a result of her flouting a rule she deemed unfair — she allowed a student to use a straight-edge to draw a straight line, in order that his otherwise promising academic career not be jeopardized by such a trivial requirement, and her superiors could not condone such misbehavior — she moved to Chicago, became a journalist, and thence undertook her impressive voyage, with her niece as traveling companion. She documents her nearly-six-month trip in crisp and vivid language, providing enough detail to paint an interesting story without ever becoming bogged down in minutiae. Her descriptions of the people who host her, the towns she passes through and their agricultural outputs, the culture of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the local flora and fauna, the river, the scenery, her fellow travelers — all are engagingly presented. Her discussion of the Eskimos she meets, especially, is a fascinating study, since they are quite unlike what she had expected: a tall, regal people, for whom she expresses great admiration.

Morine’s book documents a modern adventure, a trip down the Connecticut River from source to sea. Before he retired, Morine served as head of land acquisition for the Nature Conservancy; his traveling companion was an old friend from grad school whom he hadn’t seen in years. The gimmick for the trip was that instead of camping, they stayed each night with different hosts, “relying on the kindness of strangers.” Since I live right next to the Connecticut myself, midway along their route, many of the places he describes are familiar to me, so it was especially interesting to read about who he met along the way.

I wonder what Cameron’s journey would be like in this century, or what Morine’s would have been like in hers.

Pleased by this pair of recent articles, both about how to bring the experience of travel closer to home.

5 Ways To Travel More With Less at zenhabits suggests looking for nearby adventures, specific ideas traveling frugally (all tactics I can personally recommend as well), and remembering to relax (I’m still working on that one).

Rolf Potts writes at Tim Ferris’s blog about 5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home, “key ways in which the lessons you learn on the road can be used to enrich the life you lead when you return home.” These ring deeply true for me, and indeed reminded me that a large part of what I love about travel is that it really enforces living in the moment and stretching outside your comfort zone.

These are good challenges for me for right now.

Interesting recent NYTimes column by Nicholas Kristof: What Could You Do Without?, profiles a family’s startling adventures. They took the “crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring” step of “selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.” Their forthcoming book, The Power of Half, chronicles their story.

Also interestingly, they are evidently getting negative reactions from folks who consider them “sanctimonious showoffs,” when their actual goal in sharing their story is to demonstrate that an initially selfless gesture turned out to be of at least as much benefit to themselves.

Lots more about the project, the book, and an encouragement to find your own “half”: thepowerofhalf.com.

“There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.”
—Sogyal Rinpiche, Tibetan Dzogchen Lama (1947- )

(via swiss miss)

Payback, by Margaret Atwood

I’ve long admired Margaret Atwood’s writing, but this was my first foray into her nonfiction. The chapters of this book were first presented as a series of lectures on CBC radio in November 2008, so although they are of a decidedly literary-scholar bent, they also spin together an engaging series of stories, much as you might expect from Atwood as professional storyteller.

From this book I learned many interesting things, including:

• Capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees have a very clear sense of what constitutes fairness.
• In Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), the word for “debt” is the same as the word for “sin” — hence, among other things, the disparate versions of “forgive us our trespasses.”
• How Dickens’s A Christmas Carol can be read as a direct reversal of Marlowe’s (or Gounod’s) Faust.
• Why mills and millers carry a stigma in folklore.

I enjoyed this tour through religious, literary, and social history, and its insightful exploration of how humans have thought about debt from ancient times until today. Don’t miss the final chapter’s reworking of Scrooge into a contemporary setting, featuring Scrooge Nouveau and his alternate possible futures involving hemp suits and a giant cockroach.