Still, I was not moved to any kind of follow-up for another four years, and then only by an “act of God.” By this time I had more or less relocated to the mainland, with the intention of selling my house in the Keys. Then, in October 2005, a few weeks after the far more catastrophic Katrina, Hurricane Wilma struck the Keys, generating a storm surge five feet high. When I traveled down a few weeks after the storm to survey the damage, bringing along friends to help with salvage and repair, I discovered that most of the evidence of my existence—the paper traces anyway—had been swept away. My study, located at ground level, was a soggy ruin, already encrusted with mold. This was my Ozymandias moment: Gone were the files containing all the articles I had ever published, financial records, computer disks, along with the books I was using for the research I was doing at the time.
My journal survived only because, in some uncharacteristic act of foresight, probably at the time of the librarian’s visit in 2001, I had moved it to a second-floor storage space, where the flood was not able to find it. When I flew back to where I was living near my daughter and grandchildren in Virginia, the journal came with me in my carry-on bag, and shortly after my return I dismissed the last of my male companions for a number of compelling reasons, topped by my need to be alone, which had become far more urgent than any romantic attraction. Then, in the midst of so many other serious and worldly obligations, I began to transcribe the journal, a few hours a day for a couple of weeks, and eventually coming across the question I had addressed to my older self when I was about sixteen: “What have you learned since you wrote this?”
This is the challenge that comes hurtling out at me from across the decades like a final exam or an exit debriefing: What have I learned? And of course it does not mean what did I learn about protein conformational changes or military history or even about the roots of systematic human cruelty and how we could go about creating kinder social arrangements. It means, What did you learn about all of this? What is going on here? Why is this happening?
Well, I have to admit to my child-self: not enough, not anywhere near enough. To please you I would have had to devote my life to neuroscience and philosophy, possibly also ashrams and spiritual discipline. I would have studied cosmology and math. I would have passed many hours with fellow seekers, perhaps in scenically magnificent settings, debating, sharing, comparing. But I came of age in a time of turmoil and, naturally enough, I took a side. The time I could have spent carrying on the quest went instead into meetings and protests; my research interests turned to wages and poverty, war and the mechanisms of social change. I would not expect my sixteen-year-old self to understand this redirection, she who did not even fully acknowledge the autonomous existence of other human beings. But this is how it turned out: I fell in love with my comrades, my children, my species.
I learned this much, though, which, given the poverty of metaphysical speculation in our time, an atheist admits only at some risk to her public integrity: You first have to revise the question. To ask why is to ask for a motive or a purpose, and a motive has to arise from an apparatus capable of framing an intention, which is what we normally call a mind. Thus the question why is always really the question who.
Since we have long since outgrown the easy answer—God—along with theism of any kind, we have to look for our who within what actually exists. No one is saying that the universe, as an entity, is alive, and certainly not that it has motives or desires. But the closer and more carefully we probe, the more it seethes with what looks like life—runaway processes driven by positive feedback loops, emergent patterns, violent attractions, quantum leaps, and always, as far ahead as we can see, more surprises. There may be no invisible creaturely “beings” afoot, either symbionts, parasites, or predators. But there are uncountable algorithms at work in the physical world, writhing and reaching, pulling matter and energy into their schemes, acting out of what almost seems to be an unquenchable playfulness. Sometimes, out of all this static and confusion, the Other assembles itself and takes form before our very eyes.
In my case, this continues to happen right up to the present, although mercifully in much less cataclysmic form than when I was a teenager. Just a few days ago, for example, I found myself downtown a little after noon in a grassy space lined with food trucks. I wasn’t hungry but I wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere either, so I fell into the line for one of the trucks, attracted by the great flow of people out of their office buildings queuing up patiently as if for the distribution of some sort of blessing. It was the first genuinely springlike day of the season, sunny and disheveled. As I got closer to the truck I had chosen to wait in line for, my eye was caught by something inside it, semicircular and brassy, maybe a knob or a handle, gleaming with its own personal supply of sunlight, and I lost it there for a moment, stunned by the audacity of this object trying to condense the light of a star into its little circumference, stunned by the whole arrangement—buildings, lines, trucks—like some paleoastronomical structure designed to capture the first rays of the solstice sunrise so that the ceremony can begin, the mass inpouring and outpouring of ecstasy from the heavens and back…
Ah, you say, this is all in your mind. And you are right to be skeptical; I expect no less. It is in my mind, which I have acknowledged from the beginning is a less than perfect instrument. But this is what appears to be the purpose of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, its designated function beyond all the mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not out of any intention to “worship” it. But because ultimately we may have no choice in this matter. I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out.
Acknowledgments
I thank the family members who helped fill in historical details—Ben Alexander, Nell Babcock, and especially Diane Alexander, who also commented on an earlier draft. I am grateful to physicist Ron Fox for trying to explain nonlinear dynamics and to anthropologist Janet McIntosh for so many gripping conversations over the years and, in particular, for introducing me to cognitive biology. Along the way, I also had useful exchanges with Howard Bloom, Rosa Brooks, Ben Ehrenreich, Arlie Hochschild, Adam Green, Bernard Schweizer, and George Sciallaba.
My agent Kris Dahl pressed me to turn what was originally conceived as a history of religion into a personal narrative. At first I resisted, but I think that, as usual, she was right. Deb Futter, my ebullient editor at Twelve, provided insightful comments and a level of enthusiasm that pulled me through the usual bouts of writerly despair. Sara Holloway did a challenging, masterful, line-by-line edit. Many other people had a hand in the making of this book and I am particularly grateful to Brian McLendon, Libby Burton, Roland Ottewell, who copyedited it, and Catherine Casalino, who oversaw the cover design.
About the Author
BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She lives in Virginia.
Also by Barbara Ehrenreich
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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women
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The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex
Women in the Global Factory
Complaints and D
isorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers
The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics
Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1: The Situation
Chapter 2: Typing Practice
Chapter 3: The Trees Step Out of the Forest
Chapter 4: A Land without Details
Chapter 5: All, All Alone
Chapter 6: Encounter in Lone Pine
Chapter 7: Breakdown
Chapter 8: Anomalous Oscillations
Chapter 9: Suicide and Guilt
Chapter 10: Joining the Species
Chapter 11: Return to the Quest
Chapter 12: The Nature of the Other
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Barbara Ehrenreich
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Barbara Ehrenreich
Cover design by Alex Robbins
Cover © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-1-4555-0175-5
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