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Maxi Kniewasser Confronts His Demons On The Stikine River

A trip down the Grand Canyon of the Stikine shows our sport in all its elegance. It is a place so astonishing that every descent represents a new chapter in the life of a soul boater. In my case, the first descent very nearly spelled the end, but the second marked the rebirth of my paddling life.

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“In America the idea is you try to look as young as you can, for as long as you can. And when that stops working you kind of blame yourself and feel like a failure. And the French have this slightly different ideal, which is to be the best version of the age that you are — to be comfortable in your own age. And that was both more calming and a lot more realistic.”

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“A movement to be ‘post-digital’ will emerge in 2020,” Mr. Fogg wrote last month. “We will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low-status behavior, similar to smoking.”

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“I realized how hard it is to be human. All of our fears, preconceived notions, and imagined inadequacies prevent us from experiencing life. This is the deal we make when we get a body. It comes with a boat load of fear and troubles. Death is life without fear.”

-Nathan Sass

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My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on—but that she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old. “Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses.

I have similar feelings myself. A few years ago, I was walking with my niece Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the house in London where I grew up. I stopped at a railway bridge where I had loved leaning over the railings as a child. I watched various electric and diesel trains go by, and after a few minutes Liz, growing impatient, asked, “What are you waiting for?” I said that I was waiting for a steam train. Liz looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Uncle Oliver,” she said. “There haven’t been steam trains for more than forty years.”

I have not adjusted as well as my aunt did to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and so profound. I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade. He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders, “What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . . I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life.”

These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing. I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

February 11, 2019

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.

Much of this, remarkably, was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops,” in which he imagined a future where people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices. In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged—“Beware of first-hand ideas!” people are told. Humanity has been overtaken by “the Machine,” which provides all comforts and meets all needs—except the need for human contact. One young man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via a Skype-like technology, “I want to see you not through the Machine. . . . I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

He says to his mother, who is absorbed in her hectic, meaningless life, “We have lost the sense of space. . . . We have lost a part of ourselves. . . . Cannot you see . . . that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?”

This is how I feel increasingly often about our bewitched, besotted society, too.

As one’s death draws near, one may take comfort in the feeling that life will go on—if not for oneself then for one’s children, or for what one has created. Here, at least, one can invest hope, though there may be no hope for oneself physically and (for those of us who are not believers) no sense of any “spiritual” survival after bodily death.

But it may not be enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished, and to which one has given one’s best in return, is itself threatened. Though I am supported and stimulated by my friends, by readers around the world, by memories of my life, and by the joy that writing gives me, I have, as many of us must have, deep fears about the well-being and even survival of our world.

Such fears have been expressed at the highest intellectual and moral levels. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, is not a man given to apocalyptic thinking, but in 2003 he published a book called “Our Final Hour,” subtitled “A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—on Earth and Beyond.” More recently, Pope Francis published his remarkable encyclical “Laudato Si’, ” a deep consideration not only of human-induced climate change and widespread ecological disaster but of the desperate state of the poor and the growing threats of consumerism and misuse of technology. Traditional wars have now been joined by extremism, terrorism, genocide, and, in some cases, the deliberate destruction of our human heritage, of history and culture itself.

These threats, of course, concern me, but at a distance—I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture. When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

Nonetheless, I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth. While some see art as a bulwark of our collective memory, I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour. ♦

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I have some clothes I want him to wear. In the bottom drawer of my dresser is a stack of T-shirts that are too small for me now. There’s one for Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon, my hometown hot-dog joint, which I maintain is the greatest restaurant in the world. There’s one for St. Paul & the Broken Bones, one of my favorite bands. There’s one for Rapala fishing lures that’s so old, I can’t remember where I got it. It’s an XL—several sizes smaller than what I wear now. If the day comes when I can wear an XL shirt again, I’ll go to my favorite bar—Thomas Street Tavern, in Charlotte—and buy a round for the house.

There’s a ladder I want the man who walks inside me to climb—the pull-down ladder to our attic. It’s rated at 250 pounds. I’ve never been up in the attic, because I’m afraid the ladder won’t hold me. Whenever we need what’s up there—Christmas ornaments, winter clothes, an extension cord—Alix has to go up and get it. I’m embarrassed that there’s an entire part of our house that I’ve never been in. I want to climb that ladder with confidence.

There’s a boat I want the man inside me to put in a lake. Daddy’s johnboat lives in our backyard. It’s green aluminum and still has its Georgia registration number on the side. When I was a kid, we hauled a thousand catfish over the side of that boat. Daddy died in 1990, and the boat hasn’t been in the water since way before then. I’ve always been afraid that I’m so big, I’d tip it over. It needs a drain plug and a little love. But it’s still strong enough to hold a normal-sized man, and maybe his beautiful wife.

There’s a bicycle I want the man inside me to ride. Nothing fancy—I’d be fine with one of those old-man bikes with straight handlebars and a cushy seat. Our neighborhood is full of bike riders. There’s a group that rides together every Tuesday night. Sometimes we sit on the porch and wave at them as they glide past our house, a rolling parade. I’m tired of watching parades. I’d like to be in a few.

There’s a game I want the man inside me to play. Damn, I miss basketball. It’s been so long since I boxed out for a rebound or put up a shot with a hand in my face. It doesn’t matter if I’m just the old guy who jacks up threes from the corner. It doesn’t matter if I sprain my ankle for the 18th time. It would feel so good to be back in the game again.

There’s a flight I want the man inside me to take. It doesn’t matter where it goes, as long as I’m in the middle seat. I want to sit there without flooding the banks of the armrests. I want the seat belt to click around my waist with an inch or two to spare. After that, I can bitch about the middle seat like everybody else. But I’d like to sit there and feel good about it. Just once.

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“Under capitalism, we’re forced to enter the market just to live. The libertarian sees the market as synonymous with freedom. But socialists hear “the market” and think of the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn’t cover her child’s appendectomy. Under capitalism, we’re forced to submit to the boss. Terrified of getting on his bad side, we bow and scrape, flatter and flirt, or worse — just to get that raise or make sure we don’t get fired.”

“The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.”

“Listen to today’s socialists, and you’ll hear less the language of poverty than of power. Mr. Sanders invokes the 1 percent. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez speaks to and for the “working class” — not “working people” or “working families,” homey phrases meant to soften and soothe. The 1 percent and the working class are not economic descriptors. They’re political accusations. They split society in two, declaring one side the illegitimate ruler of the other; one side the taker of the other’s freedom, power and promise.”

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Sometimes, there are certain songs that embody purity and beauty in their lyrical and musical expression. This is one of those songs.

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“...the experience of happiness is regulated by the satisfaction of basic psychological needs to feel competent, self-determining, and positively related to other people in the activities of one's life. These are universal needs, observed across all stages of life and in every culture in which studies have been conducted, and they help explain the truth in the ancient ideal of eudaimonia, or human flourishing.”

“According to this ideal, living well involves fulfilling one's human potential in ways that are admirable, sustainable, and personally satisfying.“

“Deci identifies three broad forms of potential — social, intellectual, and productive/creative — the fulfillment of which is enabled by admirable personal qualities and is psychologically linked to the satisfaction of human beings' universal basic needs for positive relatedness, self-determination, and competence.”

“As counterintuitive as it may seem, we could be happier both now and in the future if we could overcome the blind faith in wealth accumulation that shaped the socially, politically and environmentally unstable world with which we must now contend.“

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A Poem on Hope

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old, for hope must not depend on feeling good and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight. You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future, which surely will surprise us, and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering. The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them? Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded, the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work.  Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet. Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot. The world is no better than its places. Its places at last are no better than their people while their people continue in them. When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens.

–Wendell Berry

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You know what? I want to dance through life. I don’t want to scuttle.

Daisy Ridley

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“I kind of roll the dice on humanity not killing me,” Rollins says. “I have never felt like a tough guy. I’m not looking for a fight. I’m not in any way brave. I am insanely curious, and well aware that life is really short, and I am looking to have an extraordinary life. I work at it.”

“My hope—which is a word that I don’t like—is that young people will see the errors of the ways of their parents, and they’ll throw off the chains of homophobia and racism, and they’ll embrace the truth of global climate change and they’ll seek to be the generation that circumvents a total breakdown of how pretty much everything works in the world,” Rollins says.

Henry Rollins

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But people didn't continuously hold themselves hostage to the idea that the grass is somehow greener on the other side — that if I do X and Y, then my life will be measurably improved.

And if your wants are limited, then it's just very easy to meet them.

By contrast, the mantra of modern economics is that of limited scarcity: that we have infinite wants and limited means. And then we work and we do stuff to try and bridge the gap.