Geography and Perspective

How strange it is, the extent to which one’s thoughts depend on geography and circumstance.

In theory, one could pause and take stock of one’s life anywhere – while sitting in traffic, while waiting in line to buy lunch, while bored at one’s desk in the afternoon.

But it never seems to work out that way. Most of the time, the small obscures the large.

For me, it only happens when I’m on my own, without a phone or internet connection - with the autumn sunshine streaming down, walking in silence through grassy fields and trees with green leaves starting to dapple to yellow and red, somewhere with only my own thoughts for conversation.

Then I think about my life.

British Travels, Part 2

Sometimes when I travel, the things that are striking are the absences compared with my home (adopted, in this case). America is very much the land of convenience. When one wants something, one wants it immediately, available exactly where one is standing. Anything else is an affront, an imposition from bad design and customer service. If you want to see this, next time you’re in an airport from a different country, take note of how far you have to walk to find a bathroom from the moment that you decide you have to go. In nearly every US airport I’ve been to, it’s rare to have to walk more than 50m, usually more like 20m. In Frankfurt (and in Perth, I recall) it was at least 100m as the median.

The other one is rubbish bins out in public. In most major US cities, they seem to be spaced about 10m apart, so that if one has the urge to get rid of something, the cost to putting it in the bin instead of on the ground is essentially zero. In London, bins in public don’t seem to exist at all. I got handed a ‘certificate of climbing the London monument’ as I exited, and immediately looked for a place to throw it out, but there wasn’t one. Because I viscerally hate the idea of littering, it became the equivalent of a stone in my shoe for the rest of the day, having to be fished out and put back in each time I wanted to get my wallet or phone. For this daily hassle, we can thank the repulsive IRA, under whose bombing campaigns all the bins were removed and never replaced. Just when you thought you’d seen every way that that contemptible organization had managed to make the world a worse place, they find another way to surprise you.

Related to the previous post, the place that is similarly as inspiring as St Paul's Crypt is the National Portrait Gallery. Because this is forced to display parts from different eras, you can see the relative pathetic state of Britain in sharp contrast. The main benefit, however, is that this makes it much better as a museum experience. To wit, the rubes are all in the modern section looking at paintings of Paul McCartney, so you can enjoy the Tudors, Stewarts and Victorians in relative peace and quiet.

I was interested to find that the big driving force behind the museum was the great Thomas Carlyle, the most fascinating of Victorian political philosophers, and the biggest influence behind Mencius Moldbug, the most fascinating of modern ones. It’s always nice to find that your interests and views independently align with people whom you admire, to avoid the conclusion that you like the same stuff as them simply because they told you to like it.

The National Portrait Gallery is my favourite place in all of London. It is one of the very few museums where the subjects of the paintings are of considerably more interest than the artists, making it essentially an art museum dedicated to history. What a splendid idea! Take my advice, start with the Tudors and Stewarts and end with the Victorians to feel inspired for the day.

Notes from Heidelberg

-If you want to see how long-lived civic effects can operate, just compare Mannheim and Heidelberg. Both have quite famous universities. One also has the BASF chemical factory next door, and hence was bombed flat in World War 2. The other one is fairly well preserved. Hence, 70 years later, one is a kind of ugly but functional university town, and the other is chock a block with Japanese tourists. The relative price of old German buildings got a lot higher after WW2.

-Regarding the above, the spectre of the war still hangs heavy over the country, with little reminders like this everywhere you go. I well understand the rationale for why the towns were bombed, brutal though it was. If you don't believe me, read Paul Fussel's arrestingly-titled 'Thank God for the Atom Bomb'. Still, when you see how pretty Heidelberg is and how ugly Mannheim is, it made me sad for how much of German history was lost in WW2. But then I realised how much I was doing exactly what the War Nerd skewered so well in his great column on why Sherman was right to burn Atlanta:

But there does happen to be one demographic—an arguably insane one, indeed—which does not accept that war is cruel: the bitter white Southern neo-Confederate one to which Leigh belongs. For them, war was wonderful when it was just brave Southern gentlemen killing 360,000 loyal American soldiers.

That was the good war, as far as they were concerned. War became “intrinsically cruel” for them when that dastardly Sherman started visiting its consequences on rural Georgia, burning or destroying all supplies that could be used by the Confederate armies which had been slaughtering American troops for several years. Oh, that bad, bad Sherman!

You know what’s worse than a little girl asking “Mister Soldier” not to burn her house? Getting your leg sawed off by a drunken corpsman after a Minie ball fired by traitors turned your femur into bone shards. Or getting a letter that your son died of gangrene in one of those field hospitals where the screaming never stopped, and the stench endured weeks after the army had moved on. 

Of course, this is all lost on the Phil Leighs of the world, who—for reasons that cut deep into the ideology of the American right wing—always take burnt houses too seriously, and dead people far too lightly. To them, burning a house is a crime, while shooting a Yankee soldier in the eye is just part of war’s rich tapestry. So their horror of messing with private property joins their sense of emasculation, and their total ignorance of what war on one’s home ground actually means, to form a sediment that could never have been cured, even temporarily, except by the river of armed humanity Sherman sent pouring south and east from Atlanta on November 15, 1864. That cold shower woke them for a little while, at least—long enough to quicken the end of the war and save thousands of lives.

He's right, of course. In the context of the horror and atrocity of World War 2's 50-odd million dead, it is obscene to be worrying about lost buildings. The lost buildings, however, are salient and visible. The mountains of corpses, by contrast, are long gone.

 -I was talking to a German man, age early 30s or so. He was saying how his grandfather lived in Leipzig, which was also heavily bombed by the incendiary fire-bomb method. But the thing that his grandfather figured out is that the way these bombs worked is that they were just a flammable gel dropped into the house - the effects came because they set other stuff on fire, but only once they'd had a chance to get the blaze going. Of course, this always happened, because people hide in their basements during bombing raids. But the guy's grandfather decided instead to keep large piles of sand and buckets of water on all floors of his house. He put his family in the basement, and when a bomb went through the roof, he extinguished it. When the bombing raid was over, every other house on the street had been burnt to the ground, except his.

-Walking up the steep hill to the castle in Heidelberg, it gives one a strong sense of the wisdom of Sun Tzu's observation that 'it is a military axiom not to advance uphill against the enemy, nor to oppose him when he comes downhill'. I would not like to advance up that road while fighting hand-to-hand combat with swords and getting showered with arrows.

-For a reactionary like me, there is something quite stirring in seeing a castle with statues of kings from hundreds of years in the past. The tradition hangs thick in the air, in a way that is hard to describe. We indeed live in a kingless age.

-From the castle, I watched the sun set for the first time in quite a while. Because of the fog/smog/haze, the sun was a deep red while still relatively high in the sky, and actually faded into nothing before reaching the horizon. The last time I remember seeing this, incidentally, was 15 years ago in Munich. Perhaps there's something about German sunsets.

Thoughts from Frankfurt

-I never tire while in foreign countries of seeing the subtle differences in appearance of people. German men often have a certain demeanor about them that always seems very recognisable - soft-spoken, small wry smile, horn-rimmed glasses, well-dressed with clothes that are cut a little tighter than American or Australian fashion. I actually was reminded of it just by the clerk at the front desk of the hotel when I arrived. It's a different look from, say, the Danes, where I've spent a bit of time. Of course, a good part of this is probably just the power of suggestion - recognising Germanness once you know the nationality is a lot easier than being able to guess German heritage based on appearance alone. Based on the number of questions I've received in German while walking through the streets, apparently I don't look sufficiently Australian (or American, as some might argue is more relevant these days) for me to be identifiable as a foreigner.

-Another contrast between Frankfurt and Copenhagen is the nature of the public squares. Both cities share the same narrow, walkable streets common to cities designed before the automobile. But in central Copenhagen, huge swathes are filled with gorgeous old architecture from centuries in the past. Frankfurt, by contrast, had the misfortune of being bombed flat in 1944. No, really:



This, as it turns out was doubly unfortunate. Firstly, being bombed flat is bad news at the best of times. But the mid-1940's was far from the best of times aesthetically, because it meant that the city was being rebuilt just as the west was getting into some of the most ghastly forms of architecture in history. Hence even in the Frankfurt squares with old-looking buildings, not only are they noticeably of recent vintage, but they're next to horrible 50's and 60's looking square concrete and glass monstrosities. A shame, really. Wars have consequences, that's for sure. At least things improved with the modern skyscrapers, which are much nicer. I got to see the Commerzbank Tower up close, which I remember from a desktop photo on my old computer years ago, where the shape made it look like it was only half finished with bits sticking up off the top.



-I wrote last time from Copenhagen about the pleasures of walking idly through foreign cities. I can't improve much on those notes, except that since then I learned that the French have a term for this kind of activity - Flânerie, with me taking the role of the Flâneur.

-For a recovering introvert who occasionally enjoys relapsing into his natural state, it is glorious to be a monolingual English speaker in Germany. Nearly all the service staff here speak English, so you can order whatever you want (when you're trying to spend money, most people will find a way to figure out what you want). In addition, the museums are courteous enough to put nearly all their explanations in English and German (there was even a public statue of Goethe that had a translation of the plaque in English too - not sure what Goethe would have thought of that). But more than that, it is an active pleasure to not speak German. Especially in museums, most people's conversations are inane and distracting. When they're in a language you understand, you can't help but listen, even when it's annoying. But when it's just unintelligible German, you observe the people at a pleasant sociological distance, and their conversation is just the linguistic curiosity of different sound combinations than what you're used to.

-I went to an Impressionist exhibit at the art museum here, helpfully titled 'Monet' in huge letters. Of course, at least half the paintings weren't actually by Monet, but the museum folks know what sells. Just show the rubes some paintings and call them all Monet, they won't know the difference! I imagine Cezanne and Degas are spinning in their graves, but hey, what are you going to do?

-There was one aspect of the Monet exhibit that was really striking. In some of the side rooms, they displayed some contemporaneous black and white photographs of some of the areas being depicted in the paintings - men in row boats on rivers with cypresses next to them, Parisian street scenes with horses and carts. The effect was really quite shocking. The photographs looked incredibly drab and mundane. All these glorious scenes that one had simply imagined to be like the beautiful paintings instead looked like everyday stuff that you would walk past. Of course, they looked old, but in a vaguely dirty and primitive way, not in a romantic way. The effect was rather similar to when one sees photos of famous celebrities without their makeup on, and they look ugly and ordinary. It struck me that Impressionist painting does a similar job to makeup and a soft focus lens - brushing out the details that make the world imperfect and familiar. No wonder people like it, especially when they have very little sense of what the original source material was.

-In the Paulskirche church, they have a fascinating history of German politics during the 19th century. The building was the house of the first German Parliament, after the Germanic states started to unite once Napoleon no longer ran the place. The stories of the politicians really emphasise the Moldbug point about how much the world has moved left over time. Back then, the 'radical far left' believed that there should be democracy under universal (male) suffrage. The far right wanted the restoration of rule by hereditory aristocrats. Worth bearing mind next time someone talks about how 'extreme' the modern Republican party has become. What was also remarkable reading the stories is seeing right wing movements actually win for once. And decisively, too - the German parliament was shuttered. Take that, modernity! Of course, seeing where this increased nationalism ended up puts a bit of a dampener on the whole thing. But it depends where you finish the line - if you chart things up to World War I, the Allies hardly come off looking more civilised or just in their cause than the Axis powers. If you see German politics as a continual line from the mid-1800s to the Nazi party (which I suspect most modern Germans do), then it's a lot more problematic. Then again, the continuation from socialism to Communist atrocities is hardly edifying either, but somehow the left never seems to lose much sleep over that one. Cthulu swims left, after all, except for a hundred odd years in Germany.

On Being Sensible

There comes a point in one’s life where one surrenders to the lure of the practical, rather than the romantic. Bit by bit, the arguments for whimsical and aesthetic considerations make way for the fact that it is generally better to simply have one’s affairs in order. I suppose this is part of what maturity means – the extension of one’s planning horizon, so that the present value of sensible choices outweigh the desire to do things merely for the je ne sais quois of seeing something new.

For those of us of a mostly sensible bent, the appeal of solid, practical decisions doesn’t need much extra boosting. But even among such as I, there is still romance, in the broad sense. It just shows up in unexpected places.

While I don’t know exactly when this shift towards sensibility occurred (or even if it had a particular turning point), I do know one of the marks of its arrival.

The clearest indicator, at least to me, is the choice of which seat to choose on the aeroplane.

At some point, the desire to be able to easily get to and from the bathroom becomes the thing one values in this microcosm of life’s choices. Stepping over people is a pain, not being able to pee when one wants to is a pain, waking up people who fell asleep at inopportune times is definitely a pain, especially for the introverted. Life is just easier when you don’t have to worry about these things.

And yet, sometimes an overbooked flight forces you into a window seat, and you remember when you used to pick the window to watch the world beneath. You gaze out into the silvery moonlight, with wisps of clouds floating below you. Tiny patches of criss-crossing light mark the small towns far distant, defying the sea of darkness. The steady glow appear as lichen, growing in odd patterns along the grooves of a rock in an otherwise barren desert.

How many generations of your ancestors lived and died without seeing a sight so glorious?

How many would trade this for slightly more convenient bathroom access?

It is worth noting that this tradeoff does not need to be explained to small children. They instinctively get what’s amazing about watching the world below at takeoff and landing.

Particularly for those of us whose affairs are mostly in order, it is worth being occasionally reminded of the lesson.

(related)

On Memory and Imagination

It recently occurred to me that I have a very poor memory, but not in the standard way that people suspect.

By most metrics, I remember a lot of things. I have entire parts of my brain devoted to song lyrics, which is exactly the kind of odd thing that strikes people as notable precisely because of its triviality. I remember books I've read for a long time, and can usually talk usefully about them to people who've only recently read them. I remember ideas even better, and details of useful examples that illustrate the things I believe.

So for the most part, this qualifies me as having a reasonable memory. But nearly all the things I remember well are to do with words and concepts. This isn't universal – I’m bad at names and birthdays, for instance, but that’s about the only thing that might give it away.

The part I lack, however, is the ability to form mental pictures of what things look like. Yvain wrote about this in the context of imagination.

There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?

Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.

The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question.

There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.

Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.

This holds true both for the parts of memory I have, as well as those I lack. My relatively strong ability to remember the written word has a ton of variation. A smart friend of mine remarked years ago that he found it almost impossible to remember much from the novels he's read. I remember thinking at the time that this seemed very tragic. 

For my part, I would score quite low on the ability to form mental images. It's not non-existent - there are images, but they’re hazy, and the details tend to shrink away when you try focus in on them. When I read books, I have only a vague vision of what the people involved look like, or the places where the action is taking place. I would find it very hard to do the job of a writer and keep in my head a consistently detailed image of the physical features of a person’s appearance or the scenery. If I thought hard I could add in enough detail to make it convincing, but no amount of detail would cause me to actually have a clear picture of it myself.

I once saw a fascinating hint of how you might kludge things if you lacked a strong ability to form images and had to write about them anyway. This was when I saw the study of a friend’s mother who writes fiction. Up on a pinboard, she had pictures of the faces of a number of famous people from various angles. It was very much an ‘of course!’ moment. To make sure an image is credible if you can’t form one yourself, describe something in front of you that actually exists. This is the equivalent of painting from a photograph instead of painting a scene entirely in your head. It seems overwhelmingly likely that any painter who can create a detailed imaginary scene is an eidetic imager or close to.

But the bit that goes less noticed is that imagining pictures isn't important just for wholly made up scenery, but for memories too. The source material is still there, but you still need to recreate the scene.

And I find I’m fairly bad at forming mental images even of people I know well. I can remember particular scenes they were in, and certain facial expressions that seem familiar. But I don’t immediately have a crystal clear picture of them in my head. I’ll remember a particular still image, or a collage of them. But I can’t make the picture do arbitrary things like talk, or perform some action. I can’t imagine a different version of them, I can only remember a particular image of them that stuck for some reason.

Part of the reason that this deficit goes almost completely unnoticed is that it doesn't show up in the one situation where you might expect it, namely being bad at recognising people. I’m actually okay at that, even if I can’t always remember their name. When presented with an actual person in front of me, it’s enough to stir up recollections of what they were like, and to fill in the blanks of their appearance. Since I had only a hazy memory of what they looked like anyway, it’s less jarring to see how they've changed, which might cause me to think they were someone else.

So I can remember the faces in front of me, but not the faces that aren't. They’re stored in there, because I know them when I see them. But I can’t recall them at will.

You’d think that this would cause me to anticipate this by taking a lot of photos to preserve the memories. Sometimes it does, but often I’m content to remember the event in terms of events and stories, even if the scene isn't always precise. This is a reasonable tradition in the Holmes household. My parents took long trips around Europe and Asia in their youth, but I think I've seen precisely one photo from the entire time, affectionately referred to as 'the Cat Stevens photo'. But the stories from that time have been recounted many times, particularly among the people who were there. As Papa Holmes put it, when describing his relative lack of photos of his trips – ‘you go places, and you take in the scenery at the time. And you remember it, for a while. And then … you forget’.

In other words, the forgetting is okay, and is actually an important part of the process, the way death is to life. The world you remember was always impermanent anyway. Eventually, even the memory is too.

Random observations from a tandem skydiving trip

-Similar to when I went bungee jumping, the first sensation of jumping and free-falling was somewhat overwhelming, in the sense that my brain didn't quite register what was going on. I'd heard previously that schools often don't like letting people operate the parachute themselves the first time they jump (even with training beforehand) because it's easy to lose track of how long you've been falling, and hence when you should open the chute. As a result, when I jumped I was deliberately trying to pay attention to what was going on, the view of the ground, and the process of falling. Generally speaking I felt I'd done pretty well. Then I remembered something the instructors had said on the way up when describing the process, which was that we'd do a few flips first and then start the freefall. I didn't remember that happening, so had to check the video (this was in fact the main ex-post value in getting said video). Sure enough, we did a front flip on the way out of the plane. You'd think this would be the kind of thing one would ordinarily remember, but apparently not. So it's fair to say that the base hypothesis that you probably won't be fully aware of what's going on is in fact confirmed.

-Related to the above, the scary part was not actually freefall. More scary parts included:
a) Seeing the girl and instructor who jumped before me rush off away from the plane horizontally as soon as they left the plane from the force of the wind
b) Stepping out on to the ledge, which my legs were somewhat disinclined to do, but manly pride saw me through
c) After the parachute opened, when the instructor turned the parachute into a tight turn. When I saw the parachute below what seemed to be the line of the horizon, my thought process was 'I'm sure this is actually totally safe because the instructor wouldn't do it otherwise, but GOD DAMN IT IT FEELS LIKE WE ARE ABOUT TO TIP OVER'. It was a classic example of a the difference between a belief and an alief.

-I am still in two minds about the tandem component. On the one hand, it doesn't feel like I've really been skydiving properly until I've done it myself. On the other hand, this seems like a process where prudence might dictate that it is well-suited to being left to the professionals.

-Similar to the prospect of why it always makes sense to write people insurance policies for the end of the world, it always pays to have enormous braggadocio about jumping out of a plane. Sure, there's a small chance those statements will come to be seen as rather foolhardy and ironic. But if that's the case, you won't be around to hear people's mockery! So while it might make sense to avoid needless risks that would prove catastrophic if the wrong event occurred, conditional on taking said risks it makes sense to boast about them as much as possible.

-Related to the above, the instructors said while we were in the plane that they would explain the landing part once the parachute had opened. At first this seemed disconcerting, but then it reminded me that a) this process is so bog standard that I'm not actually expected to be able to do anything at all, and b) for the purposes of what difference it made to the actual skydive, I may as well have been a sack of potatoes.

8/10 would jump again.

Blagh

You know how sometimes you just don't seem to have any anything to contribute? I mean, I'd seen these billboards about 'No Kill Los Angeles', trying to eliminate animals being killed in shelters. The name and the billboard made it sound like one of those magic lefty schemes whereby people just mandate that some action can't happen any more without any idea how to make that happen or who's going to pay for it. Killing shelter animals is now illegal! That means that shelter animals won't be put down, but will just be fed endlessly and housed indefinitely with all of the money that we don't have. So... they'll starve to death but won't be killed? They'll be left on the streets?

But no, it turns out that, despite their name, No Kill Los Angeles actually seems jolly reasonable and are just trying to encourage people to donate money and adopt out shelter animals and spay and neuter pets. Don't you want that to happen, you monster? And then I started to feel mean and cynical for wanting to hack on them just to write a blog post about lefty naivete. Lord knows there's enough of that going around, but none of it seems interesting enough to write about. Government spends $160m to make a website that doesn't work! Nobody saw that coming!

Meanwhile, as I started to write this post I began to feel vaguely guilty that all I thought of when I saw their poster was leftist politics, but the actual fact of animals dying didn't rouse me at all. So then I felt I owed NKLA ten bucks as a cosmic apology, but they very cleverly set the minimum suggested donation button at 25, and now I'd feel too cheap if I checked the 'other' radio button and put in 10. Well played, NKLA. It's a classic Paul Newman in the Hustler maneuvre - act clueless until they've raised the stakes, then BAM!, they're getting taken for all they're worth. So now this has turned into a $25 blog post, and when you divide this by my five readers, each one of you had damn well better be getting $5 of enjoyment right now or this morning is going to turn into a total writeoff.

So, yeah, that's me. In the mean time, here's some great stuff taken from Morlock Publishing's twitter feed 

-The two types of Grad School Barbie

and

-Wondermark on who can punch harder

Only a hobo, but one more is gone

The massive fire engine drove past me down the narrow street, sirens wailing, and turned down towards the parking lot next to the beach. 'Typical', I thought to myself. 'This city is massively oversupplied with emergency fire services, so they get dispatched for every little nothing. Perhaps the sand is on fire?' As I walked towards the beach, I saw a lifeguard 4WD racing across the sand to the site of the conflagration, where a few other emergency vehicles were already gathered.

It soon became apparent that, oversupplied though they may be, this was no false alarm. A crowd was gathered around at a distance of perhaps 10m, circling a crowd of several lifeguards and a couple of fire department paramedics. The emergency services workers appeared to be huddled over a figure, partly concealed by a small concrete wall.

The first sign that something was seriously awry was the bobbing motion of one of the lifeguards as he performed CPR. I stood and watched for a minute or two, and the CPR continued. I'm no medical expert, but I know enough to know than when they have to perform CPR on you for several minutes straight, this is a Very Bad Sign. We were far enough from the water that this didn't look like a drowning situation. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, and I sidled around until I could get a look at unfortunate subject of everyone's attention. Was it an old person, perhaps, having a heart attack? As I got closer, eventually I saw that it was a youngish man, perhaps in his 30s, with shaggy hair and short beard. His shirt had been removed, and he looked somewhat haggard - I thought I could see the outline of his rib cage, and he was wearing some shapeless khaki pants. I got embarrassed from staring too intently, and I shied away to a greater distance.

I started going through the possibilities in my head, and they looked grim. No obvious friends or relatives around, as the only people close by were the emergency services guys. Add in the disheveled clothes and the fact that he was getting CPR while looking young, and it seemed very likely he was homeless. Possibly overdosed, possibly drank himself comatose. Given they were administering CPR, he obviously had no pulse now, and probably had none when they arrived. To make matters worse, a homeless guy on his own lying on the sidewalk without a pulse could lie there for quite a long time without attracting attention. People would likely just presume he was sleeping, or drunk, or passed out.

Minutes passed, and the CPR continued. By this point, I was beginning to suspect that the man was simply dead, and the CPR was mostly a hail mary, a vain prayer to deaf heaven. The main ambulance arrived, and the paramedics brought the stretcher. My worries were supported by the fact that, even though the lifeguards were still performing CPR, the ambulance workers didn't seem to be showing a sense of urgency in their motions. I kept watch to see if they were going to get a defibrillator out, but they didn't. I remember reading once that, contrary to how it's often portrayed in the movies, CPR doesn't generally restart your heart. It's just a stopgap measure to prevent brain death from lack of oxygen until they can get a defibrillator. Perhaps they were going to do it in the ambulance. But it didn't look good.

Eventually, they placed the man onto the wheeled stretcher, and rolled him to the ambulance. The lifeguard was still performing CPR, but it looked to me more and more like defiant optimism against the rapidly diminishing odds. Those with the most experience of death, the fire paramedics and ambulance paramedics, moved slowly and somberly. It was only the lifeguards still working feverishly.

More power to them, of course. If you stop it, he's dead for sure, and the ambulance is surely better supplied with things to revive pulseless patients. But it seemed like the CPR was partly for the crowd. It was the physical manifestation of the vain hope that his heart might somehow restart. It let all but the more medically minded folks believe that what they were witnessing was merely a medical emergency, rather than a death scene.

I have lived over three decades on this planet, and had never seen a dead body before today. This kind of situation is inconceivable in almost any other period of human history. You leave in an ambulance as a man with a medical condition. You arrive in the hospital as a corpse, taken in the back entrance. Death is shielded from our sight altogether, unless you happen to be there at the end for a loved one. Otherwise, the acknowledgement of how we all end might be the ghost haunting the feast. Hence the charade. Exeunt, pursued by an ambulance. Even when you suspect that the person is dead, the flurry of last ditch treatment serves to maintain the fig leaf that maybe the person wasn't really dead - that maybe death can be warded off indefinitely, and our days will always be in the sun.

The ambulance pulled away up the hill, sirens blaring but driving carefully, and the crowd started to disperse. The show was over. I wandered down to the beach, and bodysurfed in the waves with my thoughts as company. I walked back up the hill, and passed the spot where the scene had occurred. Nothing beside remained. The bustle of the boardwalk continued, as if the man had never been there at all.

Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down
To look up on the world from a hole in the ground
To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame
To lie in the gutter and die with no name?

Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone

Shining, flickering into that good night

From 30,000 feet in the air, the early evening displays a curious inversion of light. The ground beneath me is a dark purplish grey. I sometimes strain my eyes to try to make out any possible distinct shapes, but the earth does not divulge its secrets. If not for my trust in where the plane is taking me, it would be difficult to tell if I were even above ground or water. But the sky is still clinging to light, as the plane chases the dying embers of the sunset all the way towards the Pacific. The cloud bank that hugs the horizon is rimmed in a thin atmosphere of orange, which slowly leaks to pale blue, then dark blue, then black. Jupiter beckons above.

And then, every so often, the inky  void below is disturbed. A tiny defiant outpost of light appears, absurdly huddled against the black satin all around. Like some strange lichen pattern, a few lines can be made out against the indistinct mass of faint illumination. The edges are fuzzy, and a few single points of light have ventured out further, like scouts into the unknown.

Not yet, the lights call out. The universe may not care whether we are snuffed out or not. But for today, here lives Man. Today, generations rise and fall, struggling to subdue this rock of ours. But our children’s children may one day conquer the stars.

"It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."