Clarity

clarity: n. 1. the quality of being easy to see or hear; sharpness of image or sound. 2.  the quality of of coherence and intelligibility

For seven weeks now, we’ve been socked in by smoke from wildfires.

The eerie, orange-white light is surreal, intensifying my sense that modern life has become a science fiction novel. Not a dystopian novel; we have food and our antibiotics still work. Yet truly, since September 11th, when reality caught up with cinema, we’ve been living in a Godzilla flick.

One need look no further than air travel for further evidence. That airport automated voice, forever listing names, no matter what city or concourse. The moving walkways and indoor carts. The bizarre cluster of humanoids gathered around charging stations.

Surely the cell phone age itself suggests we’re walking around in a Neal Stephenson novel. It is now socially acceptable, for example, to spend the entirety of a family gathering in a formal living room not making eye contact, not participating in conversation, but staring intently at the flat rectangular device in your lap. Such behavior is not considered rude. In fact, if you’re offended you’re considered old. Or worse, conservative.

How about the drone of the interstate? I can hear it from my backyard, early in the morning or late at night. What began as a series of overland wagon tracks has become a complex system of paved arteries. Inorganic rivers, always flowing. It’s so much easier to put stuff in the world than to take it out, a simple fact that is consistently ignored.

The ever-present smell of burning wood and the morning smattering of ash on windshields and windowsills have created a truly alternate reality. From afar, our town appears hazy and undefined, as if viewed through a piece of bone-colored tissue paper. Normally our visibility range is ten to twenty miles, sometimes more. These days it’s six, on a good day. Near Missoula, visibility is one mile. Denver, even less.

Some mornings the sky lifts a little, as if somebody poked the tissue paper with a pencil. We get a glimpse of the longer horizon we’re used to. But by afternoon the hero gets tired; his pencil slips and the paper resettles.

An irony of smoke season in the west is that it runs counter to the region’s most defining feature: clarity. The west is a place that knows no shadows. You can’t hide out here, and ninety days out of a hundred, you know what kind of storm is headed your way.

More than twenty years ago I recognized in this atmosphere, or lack thereof, an absence of bullshit. People spoke their minds. There wasn’t a lot of phony self-aggrandizement. Typically people shut up unless they have something significant to say, and “something significant” is rarely about yourself. Conversations are often about animals seen on back country adventures. It is not considered dull to tell someone about the snow storm that came up on you while you were skiing, or how big the snowflakes were, or even how long it lasted. What is considered dull is to hear about how great your kid is, or what school he’s going to, or why you adore your house and how great your neighborhood is.

We don’t care.

The smoke affects everything. It’s like walking through a spider web. I constantly feel the need to make that spastic hand-fluttering motion in front of my face, a panicked attempt to untangle myself from the invisible silk.

The existential fog has affected my reading life. Generally summer means stacks of books hauled out of the library every week. Towers on my bedside table. Using pine needles for bookmarks. But this year I’ve committed all kinds of reading atrocities. Giving up, for instance. For years I refused to close a book before I reached the final page. I never looked ahead, either. I owed it to the author to read every single word. I suppose I’ve reached that age I think of as the reader’s tipping point, the moment you understand that in your lifetime, it won’t be possible to read even most of the books.

Permission to close an unloved book is suddenly granted.

I abandoned one novel this summer that was quite literary and “important,” according to its back cover. I read well over fifty pages, my usual litmus test. I must be missing something, I thought. Yet each night I’d fall asleep holding it on my chest. Another novel I only picked up because I had queried the author’s agent, hoping she’d represent my novel, currently making the rounds. She requested my full manuscript, a big deal in the process. But her client’s novel was weird: London at night, sexual predation: not my thing. She didn’t want my book, either, so I guess the feeling was mutual.

The next one I read I actually finished, but I did so through a cheap technique: I skimmed. The story was about a rich guy who discovers he’s no longer rich. It was kind of fun, so I stayed with it, but when I got to the predictable parts, my eyes slid over the words–all those agonizing decisions!!–like a water skier.

Then something happened. Wandering through this smoky, white-orange daze, I ran smack into Ruth Ozeki. To be precise, her novel,  A Tale for the Time Being. I did not see it coming, this big, engaging story written by a Buddhist priest. As soon as I started it, I knew I’d hit on one of those rare Bible-reading experiences. By that I mean the book becomes holy. You’re reading a novel and suddenly you understand it’s about you. It was meant for you, the author somehow knew you’d pick it up. She wrote it for you. Needless to say, you read the book like your life depended upon on it, and maybe it does. You stay up too late. You read during the day. You’re holding your own personal bible. The stars have aligned; the book is speaking to you and you know that once you finish, you will not be the same.

A Tale for the Time Being switches between Ruth, a middle-aged writer, and the diary of Nao, a suicidal Japanese girl. Ruth is Japanese-Canadian and lives on a remote island off Vancouver; she has published several novels but now she’s writing a memoir, a project she can’t get off the ground. For ten years she’s been stuck with this manuscript:

Letter by letter, page by page, she had built this edifice, but now every time she contemplated the memoir, her mind contracted and she felt inexplicably sleepy. It had been months, possibly even a year, since she’d added anything to it. New words just refused to come, and she could barely remember the old ones she’d written. And she was afraid to look. . . . The world inside the pages was as dim as a dream.

She worries about slippage. She remembers her former working self, “when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool” fed by an “underground spring . . .  creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up.”

One of the best descriptions of inspired writing I’ve come across, made more significant by the fact that for Ruth, this feeling is in the past. This scares her; she blames aging hormones, the internet, ADHD, mental illness. She fears Alzheimer’s, to which her mother succumbed.

Ruth becomes distracted, even obsessed with Nao’s journal, which she finds in a plastic bag on the beach. Ruth wants to save Nao from her suicidal tendencies; she scours the internet, looking for signs of the real-life girl. Her husband reminds her that if this journal is, as they suspect, part of the flotsam from Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Nao is either already dead, or in her late twenties by now. The events Ruth is reading about are in the past. Adding to the complexity is that the journal, indeed, the novel itself, is an exploration of time.

A “time being” is any person, creature, or concept that exists in time. The idea comes from ancient Japanese Zen master, Dogen Zenji’s book, Shobo Genzo, or The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. Trees are time beings, according to Nao’s diary; so are memories. At one point the diary goes blank, suggesting that Ruth is not ready to read the rest. When the words reappear after a prophetic dream, the reader understands that there is magic at work here. Perhaps the journal didn’t come from the tsunami; maybe somebody, somewhere sent it because Ruth needed to read it. If you can be clear on what you need, the novel suggests, and patient, the earth will provide.

Just thinking about this makes my hair stand on end. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how mysterious I think reading is, the act of sitting still, taking in symbols that express meaning, sometimes profound, life-altering meaning. Sometimes the meaning isn’t clear; the reader has to think about it, dream about it, mull it over, write about the characters and what happened to them, remember things they said to each other, copy passages into her journal. Someone I don’t know, and will most likely never meet, has altered my worldview.

Maybe clarity isn’t dependent on the atmosphere at all. It’s possible, is it not, to cut through bullshit even when you’re surrounded. We do it all the time, those of us committed to connecting with other people, no matter how absurd modern life becomes. Surely this goal is worth the effort. Eventually, the weather will turn. The smoke will clear.

For the time being, we keep reading.