Life Is What Happens In-Between
For more and more Americans, stability exists mostly in memory
The book I brought with me on my first book tour seven years ago was Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. This was less-than-ideal travel reading in that it was a 600-page hardback that weighed as much as a canned ham. But it was thematically apt, its characters incessantly in transit, living in the vacuum between radically different worlds and lives.
That book tour felt to me like beaming down to a different planet each week — a house full of transgender performance artists and sex workers in the Mission District one day, a hippie co-op in downtown Seattle the next, then on to a backyard barbecue with six-year-olds in the suburbs. Robinson calls these intervals between stable periods “the time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world.” He notes how malleable we are at these times, how desperate to throw ourselves into a fresh rut: it takes only a few repetitions of any action to form a new habit. On that tour I clung fiercely to the ritual of my morning coffee, becoming an instant habitué at a new café in every city, establishing a customary table and forming a hasty crush on the prettiest barista. Our cherished habits act as a kind of incantation against the frightening blank of existence. Most people are acutely uncomfortable with formlessness (one way to…
