The shard that becomes a mirror

On Robert Macfarlane, discomfort, parenthood, and finding the right question

I keep reading books by a man who’s father to school-aged children, where the story hinges on the man’s travel-research—walking, sailing, climbing mountains, venturing into caves—and I don’t know what to do with how it makes me feel.

He encounters artists on the way, the artists are his friends. They make wild, strange art—articulated skeletons, small amulets and talismans, massive earthworks—and I wonder how they pay their bills. The author meets a child somewhere in the Alps and thinks of his own children, and how he hasn’t seen them in two weeks.

The first book was The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. (If I’d been writing this newsletter with any regularity, I would’ve already written about how I fell in love with that book this spring—have I somehow not??—how it gave me a new true north for my writing, how now what I have to do is figure out how to write science books like a nature writer, like this nature writer in particular. I’m sure the fact that I’m so in love with his writing and want to model all of mine on it from now on has something, perhaps much, to do with how trying to draw parallels between our lives snaps the tip off my pencil every time.) The book opens with Macfarlane leaving his home (in somewhere idyllic, rural England) to walk. I think his children are still asleep in the early morning. The book is built around the walking of old paths—walking, hiking, sailing, climbing. It’s a beautiful book that, like I said, changed how I think about writing and what I want to write. But every so often, Macfarlane would be out on a days-long walk, thinking with us about all sorts of things like space, nature, culture, art, animals, war, and poetry, and I’d find myself thinking, “Who’s watching the kids?”

Who’s watching the kids? How are those artists paying the bills? Is a cottage in middle-of-nowhere Scotland cheap enough that there aren’t bills, really? Would I even want to live out there if there’s no wifi?

In some ways, this comes back to the central, very stupid question of much of my life: What could I accomplish if I didn’t look at my phone? Would I be, like Macfarlane, writing books and making music, on faculty at a university, co-authoring a graphic novel adaptation of Gilgamesh? (Or like the artists he spends time with in The Old Ways, would I be living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, making beautiful and sometimes very spooky art, art that verges on magic?)

But who’s watching the kids? Are the artists very poor, or very wealthy? (Are their parents, in one way or another, paying their rent.) I heard someone observe recently that we see the children of the rich and famous very often become artists, and maybe it’s just that most all of us would become artists if we didn’t have to worry about money. Maybe artists is what human beings fundamentally are.

But then, in my second book of his, which I’m reading right now, Underland, Macfarlane spends three days in the tunnel city beneath Paris, squirreling through fissures between caverns that just reading about them made me claustrophobic. (He did mention that one of the criteria for cave obsession is claustrophilia.) Maybe it was then or maybe it was when he climbed a glacier in northern Norway, solo and in avalanche conditions, that I thought not just “who’s watching the kids” but “what does the person who’s watching the kids think about all this?”

I am too risk-averse for even the at-home position. I think “who’s watching the kids” with the same jealousy that I feel at Macfarlane’s claustrophilia, his freezing cold outdoor adventures, the risks that bring his writing wonder. I could not do this caving. I’m probably too fat to fit through the narrowest passages, and either way I’d have a small panic attack before I got there. (My worst claustrophobia episode was aboveground, not below, in the staircase entombed in the walls of the Duomo in Florence, the narrow access path to the majestic view from the dome. In fact, it was imagining that I was in a cave, in the passage between caverns, that evoked a sense of cool air and open space enough for me to keep going. I don’t remember the view from the dome, though, just how tight my winter scarf was around my neck.) But no. I am not an explorer. I dislike being uncomfortable too much, before we even get to the lifetime of skills a person like Macfarlane has that I don’t.

I dislike being uncomfortable. It means even more. I look at instagram at night instead of reading Gilgamesh, instead of making art or looking at the stars or meditating or whatever it is these mostly imagined artists whom I imagine are better people than I am do. (I thought when I wrote about this a few years ago I had exorcised these anxieties, but to that hope the universe says “lol.”)

I look at instagram at night instead of those other things, of course, because I am one of the people watching the kid, and I am TIRED.

I don’t know where the line is between “If you want it so much, work harder” and “Who’s watching the kids.” I don’t know how old Macfarlane’s kids are, what kind of money his family has for childcare, what kind of extended family support. I don’t know what his wife thinks about all this. Maybe she’s an adventurer, too. Maybe they take turns. Maybe they don’t need to.

I don’t even want to climb a mountain, to slither into a cave. I’d walk across England like in The Old Ways, but honestly a lot of that sounded more like hiking than walking; I wonder what gets lost in translation, English-to-English.

I’m turning three lines across two books into a mirror of my own anxieties, I know. Or, to give us all more credit: Three lines across two books revealed to me what my anxieties are. What is the version of my life that has space for my version of two weeks hiking and caving in the Alps? What is my version of those two weeks?

What is my version of those two weeks?

I don’t often sit in mental silence as I’m writing, staring at the cursor, but right there, I did. The question that matters isn’t “who’s watching the kids” after all.