While Edward McPherson does not fully explain his original intent, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View ends up being a work of mixed creative nonfiction modes (personal essay, immersion, travel, speculative CNF), reportage, and warning, all built on the motif of gaining elevation to see beyond our everyday ken—an ambition that comes at a price.
How do we get a home biome? By breathing the petrichor, I suppose, breaking out from poison ivy year after year, tasting the dirt and water on our lips, scraping our skin on scrambles, getting local minerals and bacteria in our bloodstream, leaving our sweat on the rocks. Maybe the cells we leave, and what we take with us, give us quantum pairing with these places.
Of course, living alone has few rules—one of its upsides usually—and nobody said you have to be that quiet.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films always have dark humor, but I have to think he may have felt a greater need to signal satire back then, which plays a little unevenly now.
I looked and looked. It was like looking at another part of myself.
Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich off disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.
In the best of times it is impossible to know other people fully. Even if we wish to act in good faith, it is hard to express to others who we think we are—and we may not know who we are.
It is a redundancy to say heroism must be shown in inopportune times. The current administration recently put 59 million acres of national forestland at greater risk in an opening salvo of a commodity-mindset war against the environment.
One of the reasons I like the term “novelistic” for these sorts of documentaries is that it stresses how they deal in the mysteries of creation, its meaning, and its emotion. Joel has a song from 1977 called “Vienna,” with the refrain, “When will you realize / Vienna waits for you.”
I was used to my makeup and costume, but the one-inch heels, painful toes, and tight uppers of my tanker boots made me walk suspiciously, like a poor guy with a belly full of free eggs and a heart filled with larceny. My overall straps hung down in back like I had forgotten to fasten them after a trip to the outhouse. Yet the staff treated me and everyone else with cheerful professionalism. They knew how to handle an army of amateurs and loose cannons and get the job done.
Roasting different vegetables on a shared baking sheet, for example, requires some sensitivity and planning. How dense, how hydrated, how sweet, how easily burned is each one? Which one has an aggressive nature; which is mild? How much time does each require to become the best version of itself?
It was the kind of area where my incomplete understanding, which should mean comedy, became not tragedy, not emptiness or absence, but presence without meaning.