Free The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit Page A

into an elevator, where he gored the man within to death.
    Whether the man was at the height of his happiness, desperate for life to change, or just persevering day by day, the bull interrupted all that. Every day some bull gets on the elevator; or a shark eats the other person trying to bring back the first sooty tern egg; or the phone rings and invites you to jump ship for the unknown. The innumerable gods have all sorts of machines at their disposal. Illness is one, and a sudden onset of serious illness changes the landscape profoundly, and not because of character or fate, unless that fate includes postclassical details like genetic predisposition or the odysseys of viruses.
    As a young man, Saint Francis turned back from a military adventure because of malaria, and while convalescing settled into his spiritual destiny. A mosquito had spiritual consequence. The dirty hands of the doctor who attended Mary Wollstonecraft probably imparted the puerperal fever that killed her and left her newborn daughter to a cold fate. The gods in machines are just outside forces, and they are only outside the tight knot of fate and character that classical drama deems its only ingredients. Pull back, see farther, and they are inside the patterns of which our lives are made. They are bulls, are terns, are mosquitoes, are germs, among the myriad forms.
    Two years later when the women who brought me to Iceland were sitting with me in my kitchen eating apricot halves from that harvest direct from the jar, I came to understand how I’d gotten there. The invitation came at that difficult moment like a key thrown into a prison, a raft in a shipwreck. But in a sense I made the raft myself, and the gods turned it into their machine. I sailed to Iceland on a raft made out of a book I had written. I had been sailing away on books all my life and in my childhood had built walls and towers of books all around me to protect myself from an unfriendly world.
    That people were walking out of my books and pulling me into their world was a recent development. My story intersected with the story of a young man I never met, a man who was dying as I was embarked upon my crises, but whose life would not be entirely over, because the consequences of his acts, a stone thrown in others’ waters, would ripple out for years, for lifetimes. He’s here with you now in some way, because without him this book would not exist.
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    Once upon a time there was a wolf, or a young man of that name, Úlfur, which means wolf in Icelandic, a very Icelandic young man, though his father was African American. The young wolf was stricken with leukemia when he reached adulthood. Neither the hero nor the villain of this tale, he is instead the match to the tinder, though his own flame was almost out and his own story of which I know so little must be worth telling at greater length.
    He had been the first love of a young Icelandic woman named Elín, and then they parted ways but stayed close. She went on to become an artist who made installations of sounds and shadows and small nuances and large environments, experiments in the phenomena and pleasures of the perceived world. He came to see her in her new home in Berlin for what turned out to be their last time together, on his way to treatment in Sweden, the kind of treatment that is a last resort, that can kill you or save you.
    We associate skeletons with death, but bones generate life, abundantly, prolifically. The femurs, the ribs, the sternum, and other bones we see dry and white after death, in life harbor the marrow that produces billions of new blood cells daily, a bright red river gushing forth from bone. The process is called “hematopoiesis,” from the ancient Greek words for blood and for making. Poetry comes from the same word,
poiesis,
and it belies Plato’s argument that art is only imitation. Our word for poetry is their word for all the making in the