UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Thursday, July 31: Radio interview, WINA Charlottesville (AM 1070), 9:00-10:00 a.m.

Thursday, July 31: Barnes & Noble, Charlottesville, VA, 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, August 2: Schuylkill Valley Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA, 9:00-10:30 a.m. nature walk/ 10:30-12:00 reading and signing

Sunday, August 3: Prospect Park Boathouse, Brooklyn, NY, 8:00-10:00 a.m. nature walk/ 10:00-12:00 reading and signing

I just finished the latest book by Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, and I'm going to be thinking about it for a good while.

Krakauer's books do that. You can't read Into the Wild without spending the next few days considering the character of Chris McCandless and puzzling over him; was he a mystic? A ne'er-do-well? A hermit in the making? A suburban dilettante who didn't respect the wilderness enough? All of these and more? My students read the book a few years ago, but I don't think they were ready for it; most ninth-graders wouldn't know a spiritual crisis if it bit them on the nose, and the idea that a guy might give up a life of ease in order to find personal meaning--well, they won't be putting down their GameBoys to look for it anytime soon, I can tell you that.

But an adult reading it can't help but see the same thing Krakauer sees: that there's something appealing, even enviable, about McCandless's relentless certainty. It must be nice to believe something with that kind of clarity, with that freedom from doubt. The more life experience you have, the harder it is to see things in black and white, and we grey-headed (in both senses) thinkers often feel a nostalgia for the days when reality was nothing but a true-false test with no essay; ironically, that's what makes the book tough for ninth-graders. They look at McCandless's life and death and feel compelled to mark him as either prophet or (more often) kook; I look at him and want to ask the examiner if there's an error in the question about him.

And of course, Into Thin Air is a tour de force. The life-or-death decisions made at the top of the world have a great resonance for those of us lower down, where decisions about what kind of sugar-free sweetener to use are often the most important ones we make on a given day. Krakauer's honesty, anguish, and passion for the mountain make the story work, but the story itself is almost unbearably compelling: hubris, teamwork, last-minute rescue attempts, misjudgments, miraculous escapes, and the unforgettable image of Rob Hall, trapped atop Everest, speaking via satellite to the wife in New Zealand he'll never see again... if you can read that and not carry it with you, you're not human.

Based on the above, I went into Under the Banner of Heaven (and just what is it with Krakauer and prepositional phrases?) with pretty high expectations, and I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed. The book's twin narratives concern a true-crime story on one hand and a history on the other. The crime is the 1984 murder of a Utah woman and her infant daughter by two excommunicated Mormon brothers; the history is the often violent account of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded and began splintering into smaller (and often even more violent) sects almost immediately.

It's a stirring pair of stories, and it has me mulling over the nature of human belief systems with a fascination I haven't felt since I read David Kertzer's brilliant The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. Again, there's an element of wistful envy in Krakauer's description of the Lafferty brothers, whose certainty of their own connection to the Divine was complete--but there's also the horrific fact that this fanatical certainty led them to slaughter two innocents because they believed (and still believe) that God had ordered them to do so. And it's that dual character of certainty--beautiful, yet deadly--that Krakauer keeps seeing and showing to us, regardless of whose certainty it is. It rears its head in his account of the lynching of Joseph Smith, Jr., at the hands of an anti-Mormon mob in Carthage, Illinois, as well as in the description of the Mormons who deceived and massacred over a hundred men, women, and children in Mountain Meadows, Utah.

It is a beautiful and tempting fruit, certainty is; what Krakauer makes us realize, over and over, is that it is a fruit which human beings, perhaps, ought to consider forbidden.
9:55 PM

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Weight check: down two more pounds, for a total of eighteen lost. A bit disappointing, given the rapid progress of the first three weeks, but hey, weight loss is weight loss. And it wasn't like I was terribly well-behaved this week; yesterday Kel & I went out to celebrate our 17th anniversary and decided to forgo Atkins for breakfast (sesame seed bagel w/veggie cream cheese for me) and lunch (spinach burrito--gooooooooood, too.) Compared with the earlier weeks, when I was quite rigorous about the diet, two pounds is as much as I deserve.

Book News: the third printing of The Verb 'To Bird' left the printer yesterday, which means that Amazon.com and the various sold-out stores around the country should have the paperbacks they need in a matter of days. I'll admit that seeing the legend "THIS BOOK IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE" next to your paperback on Amazon is pretty much the mother of all mixed emotions. "Aiee! No one can buy my book!" is baked right into the goodness of "Yay! They're sold out!" But the hardback, I'm happy to say, can be had at Amazon at this very moment.

I've spent the morning on the phone, attempting to arrange various interviews and appearances for the next few weeks. The "Cheap-Ass Book Tour," as I call it, has essentially two legs left (one heading northeast, one heading south), plus a few scattered appearances. Here's how it looks:

Th 7/31 Radio interview, WINA Charlottesville (AM 1070)
9:00-10:00 a.m.

Th 7/31 Barnes & Noble, Charlottesville, VA
7:00 p.m.

Sat 8/2 Schuylkill Valley Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA
9:00-10:30 nature walk/ 10:30-12:00 reading and signing

Sun 8/3 Prospect Park Boathouse, Brooklyn, NY
Walk: 8-10 a.m./Reading 10-noon

Wed 8/6 Radio interview, WVIK, Bettendorf, IA/Rock Island, IL
6:45 p.m. EDT

Fri 8/8 Barnes & Noble, Lynchburg, VA
7:00 p.m.

Sun 8/17 Barnes & Noble, Cary, NC
3:00-4:00 p.m.

Fri 8/29 Barnes & Noble, Christiansburg, VA,
7:00 p.m.

Tu 9/2 Bull’s Head Bookshop, Chapel Hill, NC
3:30 p.m.

As far as I know, that's it for the tour this summer. Don't say you weren't warned...
10:10 AM

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On Lying in Bed

(Yes, I copped the title of this entry from G.K. Chesterton.)

Last night I spent twelve hours in bed. I was tired from several busy days and disrupted nights, so I crawled in for a nap at about 8:30. Kelly came in after 11:00 and slowly began the process of getting ready for bed while I stumbled in and out of dreams. She finally climbed in with her book and read until about 1:00, at which point I came awake somewhat, and we spent a long time holding each other and talking about the previous seventeen years. (Yesterday was our wedding anniversary, but we're having the actual celebration tomorrow.)

Once the talking was done, we sought sleep, lying side-by-side, as we've done almost every night for years. I was unable to get back to dreamland, however, and instead lay in the dark until 2:30, thinking about sleep and sleepers.

Lying in bed, waiting for sleep, is a faint intimation of mortality; it's not hard to imagine lying in bed and waiting for the sleep from which we never awake. In some ways, falling asleep is a gamble; we're wagering that we'll wake up, but we can never know for sure that we will. Whether by slow steps or a rapid dive, we enter the pool of sleep each night, confident that we'll come back to the surface, but unable to know what will happen to us while we're submerged.

And that, quite naturally, is why there is such comfort in having a partner. Swimming alone is dangerous; at some level, I think we believe that sleeping alone can be, too. We want someone there to look for us when the lifeguard's whistle blows, to help us when we're too tired to make it to the shallows, to offer us a chance at rescue, if necessary to share the gift of breath.

Nonetheless, sleeping in tandem is not always easy. There is always a feeling, when two people are in bed, that the ideal is to fall asleep wrapped in one another's arms, but this ideal is rarely achieved. Anatomically, someone has to have an arm on the bottom, and that stops being comfortable after a while; it's certainly not a position conducive to easy sleep. Instead, we often find ourselves lying face to face, arms withdrawn, feeling each other's breath against our cheeks, or perhaps getting a dim vision of the light in one another's eyes. It can't last, however. The motion of knees and toenails and even hair can cause a collision, a sharp poke, a tickling that rouses one or both sleepers. We can lie flat on our backs, holding hands and perhaps brushing our legs against one another, but the position feels formal and stiff; it speaks less of relaxation than exhaustion. Much better is the position of spooning, both of us curled on the same side, one nuzzling up against the other's back, with a hand perhaps wrapped around the torso of the one in front. But even then, one's nose may be pressed into a ticklish mass of hair; the one behind cannot curl up more than the one in front; the one in front cannot straighten out more than the one behind; and there's still an arm on the bottom, pressed beneath the bodies and the pillows.

So when the lights are out, Kelly and I almost invariably end up on our sides, back to back, our legs gently tangling like the filaments suspended beneath two jellyfish. We drift along in the currents of sleep, softly nudging one another from time to time, floating in the dim marine light, breathing together as long as we can breathe.
8:47 AM

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