...i am content to have finished this book, which arrived through my door a couple of months ago; an unexpected gift from a friend who, despite the limited contact we were having at the time, wanted - i think - to leave their mark in my world and remind me of the tiny components of this vast and ineffable universe which make being alive and being in it a fairly spectacular state of affairs. you know... friendship, clouds, intimacy, china, god, sand, encounters. things like that. what i love about dillard is her unflinching capacity to serve up the shit with the stupendous. there is no attempt to deny or conceal the injustices and disasters that befall humanity, indeed all living organisms, on a minute by minute basis. in fact dillard makes a point, repeatedly, of bringing the reader into contact with truths which render comprehension, never mind an articulate or sensible response, almost impossible.
the book begins, "BIRTH. I have in my hands the standard manual of human birth defects."
how are we to respond to the "bird-headed dwarfs" of which we read? what do we say on reading of the 138,000 Bangladeshi drowned in typhoon waves on 30th april 1991? dillard doesn't try to tell us. she weaves anthropology, theology, biography, travelogue, history and her many cigarette breaks together in a hymn to life... beautiful, outrageous, glorious, complex, dazzling, horrifying, endlessly surprising.
one page i loved:
"what, here in the West, if the numerical limit to our working idea of "the individual"? as recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 million people in asia - the same plague that killed 25 million europeans five and a half centuries earlier. have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? can our prizing of each human life weaken with the square of the distance, as gravity does?
do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? my children and your children and your children and their children? of course. the 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in thailand? your grandfather? the family of men, women and childten who live in central asia as people called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats and Bashliks? the people your address book tracks? any other groups you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?
there are about a billion more people living now that there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. i cannot make sense of this." (59)
