(Long-time visitors here will no doubt notice the, um, un-Fridayness of this week’s “whiskey river Friday” post. Chalk it up to the vagaries of life, and all that implies.)

[Video: from 2016, aerial views of night traffic in Los Angeles, on what was apparently the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving Day in the US. Most such “city at night” videos anymore are brief; they’re filmed by drones, and lean heavily on time-lapse and stop-motion effects rather than just showing the movement of lights in real time. They rattle my nerves — hence, this. (P.S. I had to turning the sound off; the video has a very distracting voiceover, which may or may not be in English. Youtube seemed to think it was Dutch.)]

Over the past week, I read a strange novel, both concrete-solid and ethereal, from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro: The Buried Giant. The story, which includes many elements of common legends, takes place in Dark Ages Britain. King Arthur died some uncertain time ago; there are knights, and a dragon, Angles and Saxons, stone fortresses and entire “villages” dug into hillsides. The point of view shifts among several main characters, including a (now elderly) Sir Gawain and a (likewise elderly) couple making their way from one village to another — all on their own quests. Mostly I just read the story, without highlighting passages much at all, but I did single out this brief excerpt towards the end of the book:

Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history. You are in any case part of an ancient procession…

(Kazuo Ishiguro [source])

I liked the idea of monuments being erected not to the conventional “heroes” of so many stories — generals and politicians and 19th-century industrialists — but to the heroes’ victims. (And I have to say, I regard that as a mark of progress in recent decades.) With age, of course, one eventually wonders what it must “be like” to be remembered or forgotten after one’s passing, when one no longer has any sense of memory of one’s own. People talk casually of wishing to be cremated, their ashes scattered as seems appropriate; then I turn to sites like Ancestry, for example, and see how much — more often, how little — of all those people’s lives remains. It’s almost as if, with or without monuments, with or without cremation, their ashes have been blown into a far country inaccessible to us…

A few weeks ago, The Missus and I were driving down an interstate highway, from Columbus, Ohio, to Louisville, Kentucky. All the mapping tools we’d checked estimated the trip duration to be between three and four hours — in other words, typical of our drives from one overnight destination to another.

But other things “happened.” For one, although we knew there’d be a chance of rain along the way, a truly ferocious version of “rain” developed at just about the halfway point. (It would continue until after we arrived in Louisville.) Then it turned out that the highway’s bridge over the Ohio River, in Cincinnati, was completely closed in both directions, requiring a crossing via another bridge — traffic, accordingly, was completely snarled. And finally, a few moments after our car’s GPS detoured us off the interstate into downtown Cincinnati, the GPS completely died: the screen went blank… at which we also discovered that both of our phones had no Internet connectivity…

Some time later, after we’d finally made it across the Ohio River, the rain was still pouring down. And we got none of the hoped-for relief from crossing into (haha) “rural Kentucky”… because there was soooo much traffic, and it was still raining hard, and it was so freaking dark.

But it was fascinating, nonetheless, to sort of step back intellectually from the whole thing to regard what we could see of the world: in both directions on the interstate, three and sometimes four lanes of solid light (red one way, white the other), winding sinuously around that quite hilly portion of northern Kentucky. It looked, in fact, like the video above: a shining, unending river, rain-streaked and slow, at every interchange and every minute losing a dozen or so photons and picking up a dozen or so new ones. All of us on the highway were inarguably, well, doing something… each of us certainly unique in our preoccupations, our reasons for being there, our level of anxiety or tranquility, our anger at or our happiness with or our utter unawareness of one another… but it was still doing the same thing when viewed from that chilly dispassionate vantage. It was remarkable.

So then here came whiskey river, with this tidbit:

No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.

(Sasha Sagan [source])

I don’t know how sincerely and fully I accept the “cause for celebration.” The closer you zoom into any given human scene, the more likely it becomes that you’ll find something really appalling — and it’s hard, if not impossible, not to zoom down to that level; our minds seem made for observation of the near: the micro rather than the macro. The son of a bitch who just cut me off!, right? not The beautiful point of light that just brought all the other points to a sudden standstill. But yeah: if chance or intention gives you the opportunity to regard things from a distance, it really is remarkable, magical even — and maybe worth celebrating.