Free The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

was too much damage to restore, and I was too busy coping with my mother’s emergency. The particulars don’t matter now. There was bitterness but also relief that I was no longer responsible for trying to get him to make better decisions about his life and mine.
    A young man who was transcribing the interviews for the book I was working on turned out to have a mother who was a great expert on Alzheimer’s and a kind woman. She advised me about our mother’s condition in the moment and as it might progress, and recommended the Alzheimer’s residence in which she’d placed her own father, praising it as the best place in the region. I called. We visited. They had openings. A week after the revelations from the man in pain, I was walking my mother around the lake in the city where the residence was, hoping to put her in the best frame of mind for the intake interview, when my phone rang.
    The call was from Reykjavík, and the caller invited me to come to Iceland. I startled her by replying yes without hesitation. At that moment, Iceland, the remote unknown, the back of the north wind, sounded like the right place to go, and the call came like a magical rescue, the most unlikely intervention at the most arduous moment.
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    The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day. Your origin is due to two people come together, by accident, whether wisely or not, by the attractions of similarity and difference, who survive each other’s fears and limits long enough to create the collision of the two cells from which you spring. A million sperm swim at every egg, and somehow the one that makes the journey all the way begets you in combination with that single maternal cell; the faintest rearrangement of that unthinkable coupling and someone else arrives on earth out of that maze inside your mother; or no one comes into being; or your mother neglects one moment in that terrifying vulnerability that is your first few years and you are snuffed out like a candle, drowned in the bath, choked on a button found on the floor.
    Everyone has stories of the small coincidence by which their parents met or their grandmother was saved from fire or their grandfather from the grenade, of the choice made by the most whimsical means that led to everything else, whether you’re blessed or cursed or both. Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The patterns of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers. They come together in those moments that are the coupling of unseen forces, a generative warmth, a secret romance between the unknowns that are also our parents.
    The dei ex machina, the gods in machines used by ancient Greek playwrights to move the plot along or rescue a character, were not well regarded. The ancient critics felt that events should unfold from the acts and character of the central figures, not from outside forces. Perhaps there are people whose lives are as contained as a classical drama, in which the number of characters is set and finite, and nothing much wanders in to augment, disrupt, or rescue, but that’s usually just a formal convention, a literary rule. Trace the lineage of any significant event, and coincidences and strangers appear from beyond the horizon of the calculable, from out of the blue. The other evening my friend Carolina told me about a bull that escaped from a bullfighting arena in her native Bogotá, ran down the street, and, frightened by the urban chaos, dashed