The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit Page B

making the fruit that is so evanescent last indefinitely. To cook something is to prepare for its disappearance by devouring, the festive funeral at which it will be buried in the eater and thenceforth metamorphose into the next life and the next round of excrement and thence back to earth.
    But to preserve something is to delay that act indefinitely. Maybe preserves are where a historian’s urges meet a cook’s capacities. I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed. My historian’s nature regards with dismay that all these things arise and perish, though there will always be more clouds and more days, if not for me or for you. Photographs preserve a little of this, and I’ve kept tens of thousands of e-mails and letters, but there is no going back.
    In our machines we seek to speed everything up, but in our preserving technologies to slow down the decline of our flesh, the fading of our goods, the crumbling of our buildings, to keep out of the mouth of time all those things that she will chew up and then devour anyway. What does it matter to her hand? Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it. Napoleon had the Marquis de Sade arrested and imprisoned in 1801, and his family had him transferred to an insane asylum in 1803, where he remained for the eleven years until his death and burial in that grove. Napoleon’s administration also offered a reward of 12,000 francs for anyone who could come up with a better way of preserving food on a grand scale.
    Human beings had used drying, fermenting, salting, pickling, and, in cool climates, storing in cold cellars and, in the coldest, freezing food for later, but none of these could adequately provision a vast army. So as he prosecuted his wars against all Europe, Napoleon also sought to fight a war against decay. The confectioner and cook Nicolas Appert won the prize in 1810 after many years of experiments with sealing and boiling glass jars, pretty much the method that is still used, the one that my friend and I were using in my kitchen on an August evening in the twenty-first century.
    I always liked canning, something I learned from the inserts that came with the cases of Ball and Kerr jars and from the worn copy of the
Joy of Cooking
my mother passed along when she got a newer one, the edition old enough to have a diagram on how to skin a squirrel and instructions on cooking possums and muskrats. I used to go to a creek near her house outside the city, spend a good part of a summer day down in the shady depths, and bring gallons of berries back to my home. Landscape is something we usually admire from a distance, but my annual day in the creek was about looking at everything up close, mostly less than the length of my arm.
    I learned to recognize the ripe berries by their gleam, to recognize and skip the dull, soft berries past their prime, spot the sprays of berries that hung in the shadows of the leaves, to reach through the thorny branches with a minimum of scratching, though my hands were always purple and welted by the end, to pull the berries off so that they would not squish in my fingers. Then, after a day of looking at spiderwebs, at the small jewel-like beetles that roamed the blackberries, at minnows in the stream, and at water striders on its surface, a day of wading knee-deep in cool water and picking mint and watercress and red-orange lilies along with berries, I went home with my bounty. I poured the bowls of berries into a pot, added sugar, let the smell and steam fill the room, and made a runny, seedy form of preserves that looked black in the jars but tasted like