Джонатан Франзен – The End of the End of the Earth (страница 2)

I quit cigarettes for the second time in 1997. And then, in 2002, for the final time. And then, in 2003, for the last and final time—unless you count the smokeless nicotine that’s coursing through my bloodstream as I write this. Attempting to write an honest essay doesn’t alter the multiplicity of my selves; I’m still simultaneously a reptile-brained addict, a worrier about my health, an eternal teenager, a self-medicating depressive. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance.

One of the mysteries of literature is that personal substance, as perceived by both the writer and the reader, is situated outside the body of either of them, on some kind of page. How can I feel realer to myself in a thing I’m writing than I do inside my body? How can I feel closer to another person when I’m reading her words than I do when I’m sitting next to her? The answer, in part, is that both writing and reading demand full attentiveness. But it surely also has to do with the kind of ordering that is possible only on the page.

Here I might mention two other lessons I learned from Henry Finder. One was Every essay, even a think piece, tells a story. The other was There are only two ways to organize material: “Like goes with like” and “This followed that.” These precepts may seem self-evident, but any grader of high-school or college essays can tell you that they aren’t. To me it was especially not evident that a think piece should follow the rules of drama. And yet: Doesn’t a good argument begin by positing some difficult problem? And doesn’t it then propose an escape from the problem through some bold proposition, and set up obstacles in the form of objections and counterarguments, and finally, through a series of reversals, take us to an unforeseen but satisfying conclusion?

If you accept Henry’s premise that a successful prose piece consists of material arranged in the form of a story, and if you share my own conviction that our identities consist of the stories we tell about ourselves, it makes sense that we should get a strong hit of personal substance from the labor of writing and the pleasure of reading. When I’m alone in the woods or having dinner with a friend, I’m overwhelmed by the quantity of random sensory data coming at me. The act of writing subtracts almost everything, leaving only the alphabet and punctuation marks, and progresses toward nonrandomness. Sometimes, in ordering the elements of a familiar story, you discover that it doesn’t mean what you thought it did. Sometimes, especially with an argument (“This follows from that”), a completely new narrative is called for. The discipline of fashioning a compelling story can crystallize thoughts and feelings you only dimly knew you had in you.

If you’re looking at a mass of material that doesn’t seem to lend itself to storytelling, Henry would say your only other option is to sort it into categories, grouping similar elements together: Like goes with like. This is, at a minimum, a tidy way to write. But patterns also have a way of turning into stories. To make sense of Donald Trump’s victory in an election he was widely expected to lose, it’s tempting to construct a this-followed-that story: Hillary Clinton was careless with her emails, the Justice Department chose not to prosecute her, then Anthony Weiner’s emails came to light, then James Comey reported to Congress that Clinton might still be in trouble, and then Trump won the election. But it may actually be more fruitful to group like with like: Trump’s victory was like the Brexit vote and like the resurgent anti-immigrant nationalism in Europe. Clinton’s imperiously sloppy handling of her emails was like her poorly messaged campaign and like her decision not to campaign harder in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

I was in Ghana on Election Day, birdwatching with my brother and two friends. James Comey’s report to Congress had unsettled the campaign before I left for Africa, but Nate Silver’s authoritative polling website, FiveThirtyEight, was still giving Trump just a thirty percent chance of winning. Having cast an early ballot for Clinton, I’d arrived in Accra feeling only moderately anxious about the election and congratulating myself on my decision to spend the final week of the campaign not checking FiveThirtyEight ten times a day.

I was indulging a different sort of compulsion in Ghana. To my shame, I am what people in the world of birding call a lister. It’s not that I don’t love birds for their own sake. I go birding to experience their beauty and diversity, learn more about their behavior and the ecosystems they belong to, and take long, attentive walks in new places. But I also keep way too many lists. I count not only the bird species I’ve seen worldwide but the ones I’ve seen in every country and every U.S. state I’ve birded in, also at various smaller sites, including my back yard, and in every calendar year since 2003. I can rationalize my compulsive counting as an extra little game I play within the context of my passion. But I really am compulsive. This makes me morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.

It happened that by going to Ghana I’d given myself a chance to break my previous year-list record of 1,286 species. I was already over 800 for 2016, and I knew, from my online research, that trips similar to ours had produced nearly 500 species, only a handful of which are also common in America. If I could see 460 unique year species in Africa, and then use my seven-hour layover in London to pick up twenty easy European birds at a park near Heathrow, 2016 would be my best year ever.

We were seeing great stuff in Ghana, spectacular turacos and bee-eaters found only in West Africa. But the country’s few remaining forests are under intense hunting and logging pressure, and our walks in them were more sweltering than productive. By the evening of Election Day, we’d already missed our only shot at several of my target species. Very early the next morning, when polls were still open on the West Coast of the States, I turned on my phone for the pleasure of confirming that Clinton was winning the election. What I found instead were stricken texts from my friends in California, with pictures of them staring at a TV and looking morose, my girlfriend curled up on a sofa in a fetal position. The Times headline of the moment was “Trump Takes North Carolina, Building Momentum; Clinton’s Path to Victory Narrow.”

There was nothing to be done but go birding. On a road in the Nsuta Forest, dodging timber trucks whose momentum I associated with Trump’s, and yet clinging to the idea that Clinton still had a path to victory, I saw Black Dwarf Hornbills, an African Cuckoo-Hawk, and a Melancholy Woodpecker.¹ It was a sweaty but satisfactory morning that ended, when we re-emerged into network coverage, with the news that the “short-fingered vulgarian” (Spy magazine’s memorable epithet) was my country’s new president. This was the moment when I saw what my mind had been doing with Nate Silver’s figure of thirty percent for Trump’s odds. Somehow I’d taken the figure to mean that the world might be, worst-case, thirty percent shittier after Election Day. What the number actually represented, of course, was a thirty percent chance of the world’s being one hundred percent shittier.

As we traveled up into drier, emptier northern Ghana, we intersected with some birds I’d long dreamed of seeing: Egyptian Plovers, Carmine Bee-eaters, and a male Standard-winged Nightjar, whose outrageous wing streamers gave it the look of a nighthawk being closely pursued by two bats. But we were falling ever farther behind the year-bird pace I needed to maintain. It occurred to me, belatedly, that the trip lists I’d seen online had included species that were only heard, not seen, while I needed to see a bird to count it. Those lists had raised my hopes the way Nate Silver had. Now every target species I missed increased the pressure to see all of the remaining targets, even the wildly unlikely ones, if I wanted to break my record. It was only a stupid year list, ultimately meaningless even to me, but I was haunted by the headline from the morning after Election Day. Instead of 275 electoral votes, I needed 460 species, and my path to victory was becoming very narrow. Finally, four days before the end of the trip, in the spillway of a dam near the Burkina Faso border, where I’d hoped to get half a dozen new grassland birds and saw zero, I had to accept the reality of loss. I was suddenly aware that I should have been at home, trying to console my girlfriend about the election, exercising the one benefit of being a depressive pessimist, which is the propensity to laugh in dark times.

How had the short-fingered vulgarian reached the White House? When Hillary Clinton started speaking in public again, she lent credence to a like-goes-with-like account of her character by advancing a this-followed-that narrative. Never mind that she’d mishandled her emails and uttered the phrase “basket of deplorables.” Never mind that voters might have had legitimate grievances with the liberal elite she represented; might have failed to appreciate the rationality of free trade, open borders, and factory automation when the overall gains in global wealth came at middle-class expense; might have resented the federal imposition of liberal urban values on conservative rural communities. According to Clinton, her loss was the fault of James Comey—maybe also of the Russians.