Reading Der Mensch Erscheint im Holozän, Section 9
pp. 131-143
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How shall I explain my desire to insert a photo from my wedding day here? I don't suppose I would have to explain; you and I both read the same book.
I got married in western Nebraska during the wettest May that part of the world had seen in a very long time. Usually yellow and lip-cracking dry, the Panhandle that spring was multiple shades of green and a deep, rich brown. The skies were gray and low. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere. Old-timers talked about how the last time they saw the waters meet (that is, that the moisture from above would meet the moisture always hidden deep within the earth) was when they were children. It did not feel like the place where I had spent my adolescence. But the landslide was still a long time coming.
One writes a sentence like that, and one is ashamed. One feels as though perhaps one should be expelled from the party. And yet, the world is built on sentences like that. Look, there's another.
Here's a third: The clouds I stood under the day I got married never really lifted.
The landslide was always going to be personal. The landslide was always going to be internal. The landslide is always both. One does not always consciously notice the cracks, but one is aware of them anyway and attempts to cover them with something—perhaps a small piece of paper and some tape, a kiss on a scraped knee.
One always thinks one does not want to lose what one has, but one is always losing what one has. Erosion.1
- My first typed draft of this was exactly 268 words long. That was a coincidence. In my head, the last word was first just a last word, then a whole sentence, but then, finally, just that one typed word. The two-hundred-sixty-eighth word. I have edited in such a way that this section is still exactly 268 words long.