No Boys Allowed: A Book Club to Discuss Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

1.
It’s 4:30pm and I’m at a desk on the nearly windowless fourth floor. I sit surrounded on all sides by shelves I can’t see over and I’m willing myself, I’m determined, not to cry.

When you catalog an archive, you might imagine that there’s a set of strict rules and guidelines that will make it clear how, precisely, to organize, separate, and label materials. You might imagine that there’s a rubric or handbook of some kind that you can wield against the utter chaos of thousands of sheets of paper arranged in no perceptible order. Stacks of paper barely contained by their binder clips and enormous red rubber bands, stacks of paper that weigh a ton, stacks of paper that all look the same. I am the cataloger of David Foster Wallace’s final work, The Pale King, and I’m here to tell you that in cases like these, the rules will only get you so far. It isn’t long before the careful methods of the archivist start to look feeble against the mass of information I’m trying to contain.

The more likely truth is that you’ve never once imagined anything about the cataloger’s job. This job is an invisible one. An archive like the Harry Ransom Center is so viscerally structured that it seems governed by something inhuman. The impression of perfection you get from its rows of gray manuscript boxes filled with numbered manila folders and clean, soft, white sleeves seems impossible, mechanized, sterile. It’s like some kind of hospital, and the patients are sheets of paper in various states of health, but the bed linens are always the same blinding degree of white. There doesn’t, at first glance, appear to be any human involvement in the archiving process. My handwriting on each of the folders of The Pale King materials — small, slanty, usually a hair off center — is the only giveaway.

I’m a graduate intern at the Ransom Center and I had the unexpected opportunity to dive headfirst into the most recent installment of David Foster Wallace’s papers. I also happen to be a reader and a scholar of his work, so this project intrigued me. That’s an understatement. I’ve worked extensively in the collection as a PhD student in the UT English department and I’ve presented papers on marginalia in his book collection. The chance to catalog the Pale King came up while I was writing a master’s thesis on Wallace’s Midwest, and I jumped at it. Everyone warned me that cataloging is an extremely dull, painstaking process, that the cataloger is required to operate as more machine than human. (I expected that it would be especially boring, considering I was cataloging a book about boredom.) And, I’ll be honest, much of it was slow and repetitive. But as I worked my way through the materials, something about this archive hit me right in my most human part. I found myself unable to operate as either cool cataloger or curious scholar. Without my realizing it, reading and sorting the collection took me way deeper into emotional territory than I tend to go. It’s hard for me even to explain.

It seems like I might as well say, here at the outset, that mine is not the voice, the type of voice, most heard in the realm of written commentary on David Foster Wallace and his work. David Foster Wallace is a boys’ club. Ask anyone. Many others will have a lot of things to say about this set of papers. I expect to read comments from the members of the Wallace-l listserv, from certain reporters and bloggers, from the scholars I know, from the writers who always have something to say when it comes to Wallace. Most will be men and some will fit stereotypes that I don’t need to describe. Don’t be surprised if my take sounds a little different.

2.
I begin with a delicacy that is paralyzing. I fear getting anything out of order, out of place. I fear removing the rubber bands, the paper clips, the numbered Post-it notes. I’m distinctly aware that if I mess up, if I lose the order, the order is lost. That if I damage anything, there is no replacement. This is always the tricky, taxing part of archival work. The sense of responsibility is kind of overwhelming. I have to take out all the staples I find, because they make the paper deteriorate faster. Staples take me about five minutes each, using a thin metal wand, hands shaking. The process feels unnecessarily violent.

This collection is more than a decade’s worth of amassed writings — on tablets, notebooks, reused stationary, on floppy discs I recognize from an era long past, on identical pages printed and reprinted — belonging to a writer whose method appears to be mindful anarchy. An elaborate spreadsheet accompanies the cartons when they arrive. It’s the one that Little, Brown editor Michael Pietsch used to compile the wreck of pages into the thing we know of as The Pale King. I study it diligently, but it doesn’t really help to find a way into the chaos. I’ve read the book three times by the time I begin to catalog it, so I feel like I should know my way around. Still, I follow the spreadsheet like a map and I hew to the physical order in which the sheets arrived. One of the itemized lists I read indicates that this is the order in which they were found. There are phrases like “From his desk”; “From his wire basket.” The visual landscape of a workspace emerges. I’m struck by the physicality and the ordinariness these phrases suggest.

It doesn’t take long for me to feel strangely connected to the things I’m reading, to the drafts and the handwriting, the voices that emerge in the margins. I get emotionally invested very quickly. Even without a clear avenue through the papers, I’m pretty damn sure that you’re not supposed to get your own snot all over the materials. That’s definitely a rule. This is where the willpower comes in. Keep it together, I tell myself. You are a machine. You are processing information. Everything can be reduced to a discrete data point. Yes, I’m a reader and a scholar of this author’s work. But I’m nobody’s fan girl. I didn’t think this would be so hard, so fraught. Just as I’m about to get carried away by a wave of weird sentimentality, I see a familiar phrase from The Pale King smiling up at me as I fit the draft into its folder: “the human heart is a chump.” No kidding. I handle precious, singular objects everyday at my job, to the extent that it risks becoming rote. I don’t see why this should be any different. But it’s the closeness I have to the maelstrom of someone’s writing process, the closeness to the really difficult questions asked again and again, plus the responsibility I feel toward preserving every iota of it — it makes my task seem impossible. There’s too much life here to contain in boxes, folders, and telegraphic lines in a finding aid.

Stephen Cooper, who cataloged the rest of the Wallace collection in 2010, advises me to take notes on what I find. I am supposed to write down pertinent details that need to be included in the finding aid and to flag pages that require repairs by our conservation team. What I do instead is I write down everything I observe about the stack of pages. I find myself writing sheets upon sheets of notes, all in pencil, about every item. I do this without really thinking about how it could be useful. I spend close to an hour on the first rubberbanded batch of materials. Stephen walks by and I hear something to the effect of, “Whoa. That’s a lot of notes.” I look down at what I’ve done and realize that none of it will go into the finding aid, that all this detail is what people come to the archive to find out for themselves. Each of my attempts to do this job flawlessly fails. I renew my efforts at detachment.

Again and again I confront the fact that I am up against a mystery, a labyrinth of pages, and that it’s the puzzle itself we’re trying to preserve. Not solve. Just maintain. Let live on. My job is to organize it all just enough to preserve the wonder of its discovery. The most important thing is not to lose any information; no data can escape in the transaction. It’s the cataloger’s mantra.

This is a tender operation. This is a conundrum wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a cocoon of my own sweltering nostalgia. Some things I find cut me. Some of the notes I read and I can feel my face aging. Do you know what that feels like? This archive is a chronicle of a final work. It is a chronicle of depression. It is the best thing I’ve ever read. These are not the normal cataloger’s problems.

3.
You’re probably wondering what’s in the archive. For the most part, these are handwritten and typed bits and pieces and scenes from the book published as The Pale King. Other titles for the book include Glitterer, Sir John Feelgood, and my personal favorite, What Is Peoria For? There is a mass of material labeled “freewriting.” The same scenes are written and rewritten many times. There are lists upon lists of characters and possible names for them. There are maps. There are printouts of tax returns, pixilated images of enormous offices divided into cubicles, of actual tingle tables used by the IRS, there’s a map of Peoria. (Each of these has about a million tack points in it, or double-sided tape on the back, which suggests he had them posted up on his walls.)

Throughout the margins of the collection there is a conversation between the writer and himself. There are notes that refer to the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996; some of the dates on the floppy discs precede it. There is the underlined word “panic.” And there are encouraging stickers that say, with a ridiculous face, “You did it!” “Good effort!” I make a mental note to acquire some stickers like these for myself. Some of the drafts are printed on Illinois State University letterhead with the convoluted motto “An equal opportunity/affirmative action university encouraging diversity” at the bottom of every page. I develop an intimate relationship with the angle of his staples, his evolving weights of paper, his process of starting over and over and over. The writer that comes through is nervous and uncertain, intimidated by his own harsh judgments. This feels familiar enough to me. This sounds like most writers.

I’m not interested in some kind of David Foster Wallace myth-creation, some kind of canonization. We’ve arrived at that moment where now everyone has to weigh in and have their say over what type of person this writer was, how he treated others, what we can deduce about his psychology and how that can unlock his writing. Everyone’s running around with a new revealing fact. The way the cult of personality has taken over much of the discussion of Wallace’s work is something I find deeply aggravating. So if you’re waiting for me to construct a narrative for the ten years in which this archive was compiled or to explain something new about this person I never met based on the things he wrote down, well, I’m not going to. I don’t want to tell you any story about any person I never knew. I want to tell you the story of how I got to dive down deep into a mess of papers and how I came up laughing or crying or unable to speak. I want to tell you about connectivity. The secret, best, juiciest, and most exhilarating part of working in archives is the way they reach out and form webs; each thing points you to something else, gives you new things to read and avenues to explore. It’s constantly bewildering.

The network of connections that most captivates me in The Pale King archive is the one that appears in Wallace’s notebooks. Some of them resemble what you might call commonplace books, if we lived in the 1700s. They are archives of Wallace’s reading practices, quotes and clippings, words and their definitions jotted down. They are works of art, in and of themselves. The covers include: blue-eyed Cuddly Cuties kittens; characters from Rugrats; butterflies; and a waterlogged iteration of that omnipresent Klimt print.

Many of the notes in these books describe people or places in the Midwest, Wallace’s home region that appears frequently in his writing. My own research is on place in contemporary literature, and I’m writing this thesis on the Midwest, so needless to say these capture my attention. The notebooks are filled with scraps of Midwestern dialogue that read like overheard bits of conversation, jokes, sayings. The voices that populate these notebooks sound very much like my parents, my grandparents; I’m from Illinois, too. I’m doing that thing here, committing that fallacy where I start to see my own experience, my own identity reflected back at me in someone else’s work. I’m in the middle of reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire right now and my role as cataloger, religiously removing rubberbands, sometimes reminds me of that book’s narrator. Not in a very good way, either. It’s a crazy thing to do, to start seeing your reflection in things that have nothing to do with you. But then, the untold truth about scholarly work, maybe about research of any kind, is that it’s always personal. It’s always about going after the unsolved mysteries of your own existence, your own heart. For as long as I’ve been able to figure, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to grow up in a place that doesn’t seem to know it exists, and Wallace’s writing really helps with that. The Midwest he describes looks an awful lot like the one I know.

Much real estate in the notebooks is devoted not to complex philosophical musings or elaborate plot design (though there’s plenty of both). Instead, I find brief, piercing comments on what it’s like to be alive everyday. There are a lot of notes on all the really basic parts of being a person — dealing with weather, enduring routine, running errands. There is a description of marriage that begins one notebook with the line, “It’s a lie that marriage means the end of romance.” It goes on to connect the theory of boredom that concerns much of Wallace’s later work with the reality of a long-term relationship. Descriptions like these, breakdowns of the most basic and impossible elements of quotidian life, are the things that speak to me. Every reader of his stuff seems to have her own version of what it’s about, and the version that compels me is this highly attuned reflection on the mundane, on lived experience. And then, in between the Midwesternisms and the reflections, there are references to books and articles, generative pieces of research or things come across by accident. This is where the archive really shines. There are quotes from books I’ve read and recognize, and quotes from things I’ve never heard of and write down on post-it notes and stuff in my pockets. I write down so many new words. Each day I get home and empty pockets full of notes.

4.
I find it almost impossible to finish cataloging. I spend days away from the fourth floor, ruminating over things I’ve read and unable to return to my place in the pages. I read things that really piss me off. I read things that frighten me. I read things that delight every bone in my body. When I’m working on it, I feel as though I’ve gone underwater. One day I forget to leave at five. The clock on the fourth floor has stopped at some point while I’ve been working. When I finally get up I find the elevator has been locked.

I linger in full awareness that many other people will have at this archive once it’s open. I’m possessive in a way that makes me uncomfortable. It’s been difficult to sit at the reference desk in the Reading Room over the last year, overseeing hundreds of scholars as they dig through Wallace’s papers. I’m excited to see so much interest, scholarly and personal, in something I care about. I’m thrilled to see serious academic work come out of these collections and, frankly, it’s exciting to see this many young people taking the time to visit an archive. Pilgrims to the archive have an unmistakable glow about them. But still, there’s always that feeling on my side of the desk. Other people will find things I missed, they will write about things I would never disclose. They will be either more or less guilty than I am of a word I find in the butterfly notebook: “Apohenia — seeing connections where none exist.”

When they call up the Pale King materials, many of these visitors will be looking for details to flesh out the persona they’ve been honing for this writer, to enhance the image they’ve been cultivating. And so I guess what I want to suggest is that maybe there’s room for other lines of inquiry here. Maybe, instead of formulating a theory that explains a person’s life or death, we could instead ask the questions that this archive asks of us as readers: what is a person for? How should a person be? What does life look like in all the parts of the world that don’t usually get described in detail? What should we pay attention to? How should we pay attention? How can fiction help us pay attention? Those are the questions that stick with me.

I don’t know what people will find in these folders or how they’ll choose to interpret this new installment to the record of Wallace’s works. What I’m certain they will discover is that within the boxes, numbered 36-41, lies not a single unfinished work but an infinite web of possible works. The Pale King as we know it is, in the end, just one of these, one possible iteration. There are many years of life left in these pages. I hope other readers of the archive experience something like the joy and wonder and despair and unending strangeness I’ve felt, swimming around in another person’s thoughts for a few months.

Image via bill_comstock/Flickr

Illustration by Ellis Rosen
“For reasons of security,” our co-ed party wore vests the color of traffic cones. The silky white and brown Springer Spaniel “gun dogs” were collared with jingle bells. A few people wore berets; one wore a trucker hat. One genteel man wore a fedora, strictly traditional but for the fact it was bright orange mottled with camouflage. “We complement it!” he said to me, gesturing at the French countryside’s greens and browns. Then he tugged on his orange vest. “And…we don’t complement it.”

As the day progressed, I seemed to notice a sartorial preoccupation on the part of the French with this garment. Another man pointed out a boy’s safety vest. “Quelle couleur?” the man asked the small child, who answered orange correctly. But the adult wagged his finger and smirked. “Non, non!” this Frenchman corrected, “C’est orange Hermès.” We were and hour southwest of Paris. Into the pockets of a tweed coat, I slipped ivy and soft feathers pulled from freshly dead pheasants.

Pheasant sound like a cross between a chicken’s cluck and a turkey’s gobble. When they are shot out of the sky, they tend to cartwheel or drop like footballs. There were plenty of partridge and some hare too, but pheasants interest me most, probably because of that hysterical, impressive scene in Disney’s adaptation of Bambi.

“Bambi watched how he flew up, directly between the trees, beating his wings,” Felix Salten wrote in his 1923 early environmental novel. “The dark metallic blue and greenish-brown markings on his body gleamed like gold. His long tail feathers swept proudly behind him. A short crash like thunder sounded sharply. The pheasant suddenly crumpled up in mid-flight.”

Not everyone participating in la chasse shoots. The people without guns are called batteurs. We “beat” the cabbage field and surrounding forest by walking through it, stirring the animals for the shooters to take aim at. Most chasse grounds are groomed with alleys for the shooters and beaters to wade through.

“This is the corridor de VIP,” Brian would say of every alley we found ourselves in that chilly day last November, “you’ll see.” Brian is an American businessman from London. He came with Herve, his friend and the husband of my mentor, American journalist Dana Thomas. Our host was a sharply featured man named Didiere. Didiere had the bugle, so you understand it was Didiere’s show. We were something like two dozen people and one dozen dogs, and he was sometimes obliged to act like a drill sergeant to keep the beaters in line.

Once Didiere’s cell phone rang: “Oui? Oui. C’est possible.” He hung up and looked at our formation. “La belle — up a little. Brian! Up on the line,” he directed us. When Brian moved, a pheasant made a go for it, flying up and out like an Audubon illustration. But no one shot. “Incroyable!” someone muttered. “Incredible” is a word that gets a lot of airtime during a shoot.

As well as:

A voilà! (There it is!)
Allez! (Go ahead!)
D’accord. (Okay.)
Zut! (Heck!)

Eventually Herve hit a pheasant that hit the ground running — and managed to scramble into an extraordinarily barbed patch of shrub. “That’s a bramble,” I said. Herve considered the thorns. “I’m actually going to go,” he resolved, “I’ve got the right pants.” Minutes later he wanted to know why he he’d done that. “We need a dog,” he said. “Merde.” Brian found a small boulder and hurled it in, but the bird was unmoved, so Didiere brought over two excited spaniels. “Advance in. Advance in!” he commanded the dogs. “Please, bring it to me!” I wandered off, passing a man in a red beret and paisley silk scarf, who calmly said, “We’re waiting for birds.”

For a “blood sport,” la chasse is peaceful. “This is all so civilized,” a foreign policy advisor originally from Montana once remarked to me (even though gunfire blasted around us). We were batteurs at an old world château in Châlons-en-Champagne, trudging through forest that had recently dropped its red and yellow burden. Generally shooters are taking aim at birds that were released into the habitat as chicks and provided for in the meantime. “It’s like a five-star hotel for pheasants,” you hear. The argument is there, though. Chasse kills are free-range and sustainable; traditionally they’re characterized by respect. One does not take a shot one does not believe he or she can make. One never shoots a bird on the ground. And one will probably spend an hour or more looking for an animal he or she worries is wounded. In all, how could it be worse than buying anonymous meat from the grocery?

Still, last October saw criticism of Pippa Middleton for “pos[ing] with 50 dead birds on shooting trip in Scotland.” A member of her party Instagrammed the women in wellies with their haul of pheasants, partridge, and woodcock. Social media aside, that is what you do at the end of a shoot. The French call it le tableau de chasse, when the animals are laid out on display, counted, and admired. Cock pheasant, for example, have caramel bodies; long, houndstooth-print tails; and British racing green heads masked with the red color of lingonberries. Sometimes Herve comes back from a shoot and puts the game in the refrigerator, unbagged. Whole birds with dead-canary talons. Dana rolls her eyes — “Birds aren’t carrots!” — but I have been known to take their bodies out just to look at them.

Unlike its English school, the French chasse is not so fixed in aristocracy. “The butcher is un chasseur,” Dana explains. “It’s one of the occasions where the farmers meet up with the gentlemen.” But there is variation. Not long ago, Herve went shooting with a friend who actively tries to hide the amount of time he spends on chasses from his wife. The problem was he wanted to go to a place far from Paris — from where it would be difficult to arrive back home at a normal hour. So Herve’s friend rang a second bon ami; he had a helicopter. “Would you like to join? Yes? Good— — because you’re driving!” Some châteaux rent themselves out for chasses for the day. The break for lunch generally overflows with meat, cream, vegetables, cheese, bread, and wine. Maybe this happens at a rough picnic table, or maybe at a grand banquet table with silver knife rests in the shape of tiny, robust hares.

That evening, when a younger shooter named Étienne asked to see what I was writing, I handed over my notepad. He studied it for a moment.“We call this pattes de mouche,” he diagnosed. “‘Unreadable letters.’” “We call it chicken scratch,” I countered. “Okay,” Étienne said, assuming an air of diplomacy. “Can we agree on pheasant scratch, then?”

The sun was setting. Our party walked out of the darkening forest and back to the house. It was nippy, but the single partridge I carried was still warm and doubled as a muff. A woman named Henrietta appeared holding a mushroom with a head the diameter of a basketball. Brian held pheasant and partridge at his side. “Bravo!” Henrietta playfully congratulated, toasting Brian with the mushroom as if with a champagne flute. “Oui,” she cooed. “C’est un joli bouquet.”

If you ever find yourself boarding a train to New York City, with all its promise and premonition, I advise that you first fortify with a sandwich from that snug little kiosk at the Amtrak station in Saratoga Springs.

The proprietor’s name is Rich, and she shows me a picture of herself, before the colon cancer, when she had this headful of black, kinked curls. Quite a pretty lady, running the kind of store you’d never find in the security state of an airport or the dungeon of a bus station, Rich toasts for me a whole wheat bun, then announces she’s been to nearly all of the countries in Africa, that she’s heading to Guyana on the 15th of August. In her little store, she shows me homemade things for sale that line various wooden hutches. She says her late husband was the prime minister of Dominica, before he was killed, that she’s giving it all she’s got. Plucked from a half-size fridge, which is covered in lace, the cheese on my sandwich is of a kind of that comes pre-wrapped in a plastic sleeve, the orange more bright than I imagined, or recalled.

With time to eat, I kill my sandwich, which is really not that bad, and then I enjoy a seat warmed by the sun, and mourn the fact there’s no one to play the black piano in the middle of the room, so I ask one of the women sitting nearby if she can play. Oh, I suppose I could, she says, adjusting her hair. But it’s been years. I head outside, wishing I could play, reminded of my own games, wondering what it would take for me to stop, or to know when I’ve done enough. Then the humidity puts a bit of a sheen on my forehead.

It’s all aboard, and I enjoy the ease, as well as the generous overhead compartment. The conductor punches my ticket with a silver clicker, and it’s like I’m the millionth clicked, with a knot of loosened chads falling like confetti. We gain speed — don’t get too excited; this takes longer than you’d think, or perhaps you might hope — but on the Amtrak, following the Hudson on the Ethan Allen Express, we all bide our time, certain to emerge on the other end, like it or not, so until then, for a few hours at least, we rock in the stiff arms of an iron mother, as if the train, beyond wanting us to arrive, obliges we arrive well, rested, realistic.

Meanwhile, speaking of this dual nature of life, of dreams and disappointment, you’re all of sudden no longer aspiring, but instead — because the train was this place where your only real job was to sit still — you’re studying the backs of houses, an act that can be unsettling, because we spend so much time putting our best face forward, hoping, forgetting what we look like from behind, when, for instance, a train glides by, and then you have no choice but to wonder: Who are we, actually? How hard would it be to put some paint on those shutters? Is someone dying in that upper room, the one with the yellowed curtains? That El Camino will never run again. Unless you try hard enough.

Also, birds of prey: One sits in a treetop, with tree branches stripped bare, and the bird is waiting, a note of menace in its patience, because we all know the train is almost always late, and yet we are all hungry for something we don’t yet have, and hope, perhaps, to find in a place like New York City, even if we’re late, even if we’ve been pretending we don’t need New York anymore, and yet we also know birds will stop at nothing to find and rip to pieces a living thing, leaving blood and bones. We do what we do, pretending it’s possible that the world does not require violence, that death and disappointment are not the close friends of success. How slow is a train going that I can see the slight but perceptible footsteps of a turtle, which yanks itself into sunning position on a black log, most of it submerged under dark water and behind green grass? The turtle is small. I am big. I am grateful for what I can see on a train.

There is Internet on the train. A guy I know from the Internet posts this image of people showing their rear ends to a passing train. I do a little bit of reading and determine that I am reading the train on “Moon Amtrak Day,” when people drop their pants to salute passing trains. I look out the window, but instead of bare butts all I see are trees and bushes with red berries. I read more, realizing that only in southern California is it Moon Amtrak Day. So I’m feeling left out, like the good life is elsewhere, like I’ve been doing it all wrong, that I should have focused my energies on another coast, a different way of pretending New York isn’t everything, and then I see, on a weed-choked lake, what looks like some kind of tiki hut: Grey wooden pylons, a deck of two-by-fours, a jaunty spray of palm fronds. But it’s not a festive hut, it’s a hunter’s blind. Ducks must be very foolish.

But we’re all quite capable of ignoring even the very obvious. If you look closely, even in California, you can probably see the faint white globes of pollen floating on the summer air. You can see how likely or unlikely that any of it will work out. The lake is dusted with green, and in this green you track the frantic movements of water bugs, which have drawn accidental maps to themselves in the floating fuzz, and then I wonder if fish are smart enough to follow the trail, eat the bug, have some lunch. Who will follow?

Wow, there’s a freaking mountain out there. I keep forgetting New York is more than Yonkers, New Roc, and the Lower East Side. Then I see a great blue heron, flying north, and as we pass each other, I stifle an urge to say, Turn around, bird, New York City — where anything is possible, where it’s cruel but magical and big things can still happen — that place is SOUTH.

Summer’s pretty much over. It’s been hot, with too little rain and fearsome words like drought and disaster. At the beginning, I had some goals and I still do but I suppose I am also okay with coming to terms with what I have accomplished and what I am unlikely yet to complete. Ambling down the aisle, stretching my legs before it’s time, I see most everyone is typing or listening or reading or checking their makeup. Through the window, the last glimpse of a world that isn’t mostly covered in concrete, I see a lake where the water is low. Rocks usually buried are instead visible, and they bake in the sun.

They say anything is possible. That rain will come, oceans may rise, you might in the end become exactly who you wanted to be, or not. In New York’s Penn Station, the signs are so confusing you worry you might never begin. Then you find your way, and walk into a blazing afternoon, and there are hours and hours until sunset, when things become both easier to imagine and harder to see — and then it’s dark and we wait for a new day to come.

Image Credit: Flickr/Bernt Rostad