The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit Page A

only for the four or five days it took to do something about them? I culled the decaying fruits until my friend found a free evening, and we began to address the fruit together. It constituted a race against time, and time was winning. Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.
    For this mountain of stone fruit, though, not much more delay was possible. My apricots were being eaten by what I later read up on and found was brown rot, a common fruit fungus that arrives even on blossoms, though immature fruit generally resists it, unless that fruit suffers hail damage, insect feeding, or another injury. Ripe fruit is far more susceptible, and the fungus can appear as soft spots whose brown spreads rapidly. Some fruit undergoes a process that turns it into a wrinkled mummy, though my apricots seemed to head straight to soft brown mush, their liquid released as their cell walls broke down. Rot suggests something decaying, but the process is as much about something growing, something digesting its immediate surroundings and preparing to disintegrate it into its larger environment.
    I wrote in a letter that week, “It felt so much like my life, this pile of what might be abundance in other circumstances requiring scrutiny, weeding, becoming slightly disgusting as the pile began to seep juices onto my floor and to smell a little. It felt like a living organism, a slime mold, an occupying army of apricots, as though it might multiply, as though it might move of its own accord, and it was impossible to pick it free of rot.”
    The Marquis de Sade himself left instructions that he was to be buried without ceremony in a grove on his country estate and that the grave was to be sown with acorns so it might disappear and the trees themselves might consume him. The earth in the form of bacteria, fungi, insects, and the other minute hordes within the soil undoubtedly devoured him, and maybe his corpse metamorphosed into oaks, though de Sade’s books continued to devour trees as they kept memory of his furious, destructive, productive life from disappearing.
    In those days, before corpses were injected with the poisonous preservatives that now contaminate whole cemeteries and the water tables beneath, bodies just disappeared, though dust to dust is not quite the right description for the most common sort of damp transmigration, and sometimes the bones remained. There’s a legend that, when apples were planted over the grave of a seventeenth-century New England patriarch buried in his own garden, one of the trees sent down a root that devoured his body while assuming its form. The forked root is still on display in a Rhode Island museum, but metamorphosis is generally more creative than that, not echoing but erasing forms and inventing other ones from the material, a kaleidoscope of atoms and molecules tumbling into new formations over and over.
    Cooking is likewise a mode of transformation and a pleasure to which I often repair, and it sometimes seems so pleasurable because it is the opposite of writing; it engages all the senses; it’s immediate and unreproduceable and then it’s complete and eaten and over. The tasks are simple, messy, fragrant, and brief, and success and failure are easy to determine. Perhaps it’s that cooking operates in the realm of biology, of things arising and falling away, sustaining bodies, while writing tries to shore up something against time and in the course of doing so appears only slowly and takes you away from the here and now.
    A pie might be eaten warm from the oven by the cook and her companions but a book is read many months or years after it’s written, out of sight of the writer, who never knows quite what she’s done.
Ars longa, vita brevis
—art is long, life is short—used to be a popular saying, and cooking is usually on the side of life, but making preserves is an art of stalling time, of