The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

to the airport as we talked about art, about books, about our parents with dementia, about light and seasons and weather. I told her that I’d always wanted to visit Iceland, but thought nothing of it until the other end of the month, when I was walking my mother around that lake, and the phone rang and Fríða asked if I’d like to be the first international resident at the Library of Water in Iceland, and I said yes.
    Never turn down an invitation without a good reason, and I had every reason to seize this one with both hands. It was as though the book had become a door; people were entering the book and then stepping into my life and drawing me into theirs. And it was my ticket out of deep trouble. Iceland would for the seven months it took me to actually get there serve as an amulet, a window onto another world, a thought that there was some place far away from all my troubles, and that I would myself be far away from them there soon enough.
    There was even a webcam on the roof of the Library of Water I would log on to sometimes, with a view of the other world that would relieve me of this one. It showed a harbor near a great rock to which a causeway had been built, the town of square separate buildings like children’s blocks, and beyond it the fjord full of islands and a sky sometimes full of clouds, sometimes of darkness. I watched it as snow arrived, as the days grew short and the webcam mostly showed harbor lights shining in blackness and headlights sweeping across snow. It was like a snow globe on my desk to shake in idle moments, but the world in it was real and awaited me. Like Wu Daozi I was going to step into the picture, through a door I had made myself, out of words.

5 • Breath

A sentence by the Marquis de Sade I read when I was young sometimes returns to me: “Ah, what does it matter to her hand, which is always at work creating, that this or that mass of flesh which today constitutes an individual biped may be reproduced tomorrow in the form of a thousand insects?” It matters to the individual biped, but the exclamation in the form of a question points out that what is ordinarily imagined as disintegration is also, or instead, metamorphosis.
    Even decay is a form of transformation into other living things, part of the great rampage of becoming that is also unbecoming. It is cruel, it is death, and it is also life, degeneration and regeneration, for nearly all things live by the death of other things. Even a harvest of wheat annihilates mice and insects unless poisons have sterilized the field beforehand; even the large animals we call herbivorous eat the small creatures on the grass as they graze. Even the earth and the very grass that grows out of that earth are carnivorous. The Marquis de Sade spoke with scorn for fear and attachment; the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi was once asked by a sheepish student if he could sum up Zen in a sentence, and gave another version of the same answer: “Everything changes.”
    All stories are really fragments of one story, the metamorphoses, a fate sometimes as eagerly embraced as Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s embrace, sometimes resisted as frantically as the affluent arranging for their remains to be cryogenically frozen, but embracing or resisting are optional, and metamorphosis inevitable. You can rescue someone from danger, but not from change and death; the soldier who survives the battle becomes someone else, something else, somewhere else. His war subsides; his memory fades; his nation ceases to exist; all but the elemental structures decay away; the very atoms that were once warring sides are now soil, trees, lovers, birds; all the medals are playthings for strangers; the cannons have been melted down and turned back into church bells that will become cannons again for another war.
    Have they been decaying for the length of four chapters, that horde or hoard of apricots on my bedroom floor, or