Happy Thursday!
I read a book called Yellow River Odyssey. It’s the travel log of a guy, Bill Porter, who travelled from the Yellow River’s mouth to its source in 1991. It took him about 2 months, and he stopped along the way to drink beer and look at really old temples.
It turns out that the Yellow River, which is over a million years old, does not like to stay in one place. It’s got loads of silt, it floods, and it often changes course. The Yellow River’s habit of flooding allowed it to become one of the birthplaces of agriculture, and by proxy, a “cradle of civilization.” Simultaneously, however, the river’s perpetual flooding has posed an existential threat to its inhabitants.
In some ways, the history of the Yellow River is a series of disastrous encounters between people and their ever-changing life source. Some, like Yu the Great, have been successful at taming the Yellow River. King Yu lived 4,200 years ago and managed to stop the rivers’ flooding by dredging its silt (the Yellow River has the highest silt content of any river in the world by a factor of six). The track record of Modernity, on the other hand, is less promising.
In 1938, Chiang Kai-shek dynamited the river’s dikes to stop the advance of the Japanese Army by flooding the area through which it was marching. Porter writes: “The only thing Chiang succeeded in doing was to kill a million of his own people and to leave another twelve million homeless. The Japanese simply detoured around the inundated areas and proceeded to drive Chiang out of Central China.”
Thanks to our Postwar Enlightenment, however, military artillery is a quintessential tool even in times of peace: a foreman Porter encountered told him that, “during the winter, the air force has to bomb sections of the river to keep ice from blocking the river’s flow.”
The foreman was in charge of a team that used high-pressure hoses and pumps 24/7/365 to turn “mud into muddy water” and pump it back up the river, lest it silt shut and flood the countryside.
And so on, through his journey from mouth to source. The river is a source of life, beauty, and history. But it also rusts, beam by beam, the steel march of human progress. Enlightened People respond with increasing loads of concrete and rebar, the foundation of any civilized society. Imagine our shock and awe to find that our natural environments are not perfectly stable all, or even most, of the time. Good thing we have explosives come winter.
Anyway, I am beginning to suspect that my knowledge of the world, and my expectations of it, are about as sound as concrete poured on the Yellow River. Though from what I gather, graduating college is a rather typical time to feel like years of carefully poured bridges are turning into chunks of hunk with rebar poking out. The discarded remains of an imagined future.
A fitting passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:
“Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made… He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”
What happens when we painstakingly create a world that takes the form of our desire, only to find that our desire has changed? To build a bridge takes time, and labor; concrete and rebar. Maybe it’s not surprising that when we can finally stand at one end and look across to the other, our desire—the impetus for the bridge’s construction—is not the same as when we built it.
I wonder how many other people have felt like that when they graduated college.
Or maybe your bridge is perfectly intact, only the river’s course is changing, and before you know it, you’ve got a bridge from nowhere to nowhere. The River is indomitable, and it does not care about your bridge blueprints, or how many jobs will be created pouring its concrete.
***
My good Chilean friend told me, “They always prepare you for culture shock when you leave, but they never prepare you for the shock of coming back.” When I was in Argentina, I imagined a Back Home that took the form of what I wanted Home to be. The shock of reintegration is the shock of realizing that Home is not as you remember because you are not as you remember.
Until next time,
Lucas