The palo verde trees are blossoming and covering the ground around them with golden flowers. It’s an incredible sight to behold as the sun rises over the mountain range. I have been in Tucson for only a few days and I want the Sonora Desert to keep me here, dazzling me year-round with its vast sky and enchanting light. The trail I have chosen runs along the Santa Cruz River, which is currently dry, but the air all around it is clear and crisp. And just as I’m about to throw my arms out in a theatrical display of complete freedom and ecstasy, I meet runners holding photographs and rosaries. I recognize the child in the pictures. She’s Jakelín Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who died in Border Control custody in December. Most likely, they’re headed to the Santa Cruz Catholic Church down the road. I stop, leaving my arms at rest, and bow my head.
It’s the only respectful gesture I can think of at the moment.
It is natural to try to find resemblances in family photos: grandma’s nose here, Uncle Jim’s hairline there. When considering the family of English words, it is tempting to look for the same sort of likenesses. Often they are real; for instance, regal and royal derive from the same source, which was imported into English twice, from both Grandpa Latin and Aunt French.
But often they are not. In the human world, people sometimes find out to their shock that they are adopted, or take a DNA test and discover a surprising parentage. At this point, resemblances that they thought were genetic turn out to be illusory. Similarly, two words can look so alike that it seems they simply must be siblings—yet they aren’t.
Chiang is, among other things, a short story specialist. A man who has never bothered to write a novel because, you know, why bother? He takes an idea (sometimes big, sometimes small, most often somewhere nebulously in-between) and gives it exactly the number of words it needs. His voice and style are so beautifully trim it makes you think that, like one of his characters, he has a magical looking-box hidden in his basement that shows him nothing except the final texts of stories he has already written — just so he'll know exactly how to write them well in the first place.
Wherever they walk, people tend to look up, ignoring the world beneath their feet. For that world is dark. When it is cut open, for city drain-work or open-cast mining, the raw, muddy scar seems repellent. Few want to venture into it, let alone go deeper, where the light gradually diminishes and the bedrock closes in.
Yet as Robert Macfarlane points out, in his best and most lyrical book of nature-writing since “The Wild Places”, humanity’s relationship with this underland is complex and contradictory. It is a place to hide both what is precious and what is revolting—including objects that excite both feelings, such as the bodies of the dead. The underland is rifled for treasure, oil, gold, rare earths; it is visited by heroes and shamans to retrieve memories, discover mysteries, consort with ghosts (Aeneas) or rescue love (Orpheus). At one point Mr Macfarlane combines these enterprises, rattling in a truck for miles through the tunnels of a giant potash mine under the North Sea. He debouches in a laboratory where, in the necessary pitch-dark and silence, a young scientist sits watching deep space to catch, if he can, the invisible tremor of dark matter on the last, least particles that humans can observe.
Spices were currency once.
Rent paid in peppercorns.
Can my dishes, so curried they amber the plates
with stains after, ensure the guests I serve stay?