Only because of that can we say
   all men are our brothers,

   superior, because of that,
   to the social exoskeletons

   -- W.H. Auden, "Sext"

1. The day itself has passed. I was with my friends Erik and Mike in Portland, where the sky stays lit until after 10 on midsummer’s night, and twilight runs on forever. Oh how beautiful it is in summer there. There is no green so green, not even the paradisio that visited Mt. Diablo this April or Sunol this March. There is no green so complete and multifoliate, from grass and moss to tree top, from just-born deciduous maple green to dark entrenched Douglas fir green. And the mountains (Jer and I drove up to Mt. Adams to go spelunking) bring forth in secret meadows their whimsical crops of wildflowers, whose names are the only symbols for their impossible colors.

2. There is something tragic in the fact that summer only begins when the wheel of the year has already reached its high point and turns to hasten toward winter. Hans Castorp notices this, too, in The Magic Mountain, which I finished on my trip north. I find I can’t say if I got an answer to my question of whether it’s possible, or right, to be a perpetual tourist.

3. Indeed, I find that I can remember little at all to tell of the book, except a smattering of recollected thoughts or sensations, and these were all Hans Castorp’s, strictly speaking. The general sense of having loved a strange Russian woman for a time, of having wrestled with time, of having decided to let death have no mastery over my thoughts or actions: faint, but strong enough that it is more proper to speak as though these memories were mine, for I have done all those things.

4. There is something not altogether canny about travel. You get into a plane, close your eyes, and wake up in a place that has only the most tenuous and theoretical connection to the place you left. When returning from Peru I tried and found myself incapable of imagining that my physical body was in fact being hurtled at hundreds of miles per hour toward the physical bodies of people I longed to see, or toward the physical space of my room. Berkeley existed in abstractio until the moment I landed, crossed the Bay, and emerged from the BART station.

5. How many people would ride a train under the bay if the weight of all that water were accessible to their senses?

6. How many people would recognize love if it did not present itself to them in the guise of a thumping and trembling heart? How can the human organism be so exquisitely sensitive to something as insubstantial as a glance, and so recalcitrantly oblivious to what, so we are taught, are immutable physical realities? The biological explanation is obvious, but does not explain how my brain can make the gauzy substance of love something so entirely mine that it becomes something I suffer, while turning the rest of the world into a bloodless abstraction.

7. How much of the world the brain represents as Self! In a guise less visceral than love, perhaps, but no less real. Time turns the levers and sensors of social existence into instruments of action and perception as real and useful as an arm or leg. Travel strips away this exoskeleton, and makes a man powerless and irresponsible, which is perhaps how it can be at once so delightful and so frightening.

8. Like so many other things partaking of that terrible gift, the will.

9. On Saturday I was the best man in a wedding: held the ring, delivered it over, etc. And saw at close hand the otherworldly expression faces wear when making promises they know to be far, far larger than their abilities. I had to look away. There is something terrible and holy about marriage. There is something terrible and holy in how mere words can change reality. The reality that changed is not physical at all. The new living and sleeping arrangements, even the bearing of children, will all follow from how my friends perceive themselves. No longer alone and independent, but belonging to each other.

(cdm | FirstDayOfSummer)