When Junot Díaz walks into his apartment, stacks of books topple over and welcome him like pets. The “to-read” pile just inside the door—several stacks wide and several deep, with the tallest reaching about hip height—has collapsed in one corner. After picking up the books, the author, who has been an omnivorous reader since he was a child, lays the latest addition on top, capping it with a history book on World War II that had been waiting for him in the lobby.



Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year for his debut novel *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*, a multi-lingual, multi-generational story of Dominican *fukú*, a curse with a death grip even after the family of the eponymous Oscar has moved to the United States. His prose demonstrates his love of language and an acute sense of how it works—and how it can be pushed, threading hip hop vernacular and Spanish slang in sentences that spit as they sing. Traveling through a multitude of different milieux, the novel circles its protagonist with a fierce centrifugal force even as it encompasses an enormous number of footnotes. Though his first book, *Drown*, a collection of ten short stories that cohere into a nearly novel-esque whole, was a highly acclaimed best-seller, the release of *Oscar Wao*, his second book, eleven years later has made Díaz one of the world’s most celebrated authors living in the United States.



Sitting in his living room with views of Cambridge rooftops and towers all around, Díaz is clad in a black hoodie, jeans and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. The sweatshirt is embellished with a pin given to him by a student of his at MIT, where he was recently granted tenure. The pin is the size of a quarter, depicting a lion in a top hat. “A Dandy Lion. . . Terrible,” he shook his head as the cashier in the Harvard Book Store asked about it earlier in the day, cheerfully bemoaning the visual pun.



Looking at the books around us in the apartment, Díaz warns readers of *Oscar Wao,* with its allusive qualities and encyclopedic erudition in everything from island politics to B-movies*, *“The book obsessions of the novel have only a little to do with my own obsessions. I think that I read more about falconry when I was in sixth grade than I did science fiction.”



After moving to the United States with his family at the age of six, he learned how to read and began to tear through books. While still wrangling with English (learning to speak the language? “That fucking sucked”), the written word became his ally.



 “I just read everything. I think that for me it was just such a comforting rhythm. Words on a page. Me reading those words on a page.”



Though later on his own writing would be a site where the translated life was confronted in all of its complexity, in the beginning he says,  “I found reading to be such a great respite from the daily pain in the ass process of immigration. It was a place I could live in language without feeling my deficits. There’s nobody in a book that can tell whether you’re pronouncing the words right or not.”



“A typical hyper-lexic kid,” he read compulsively, in particular spending a lot of time with biographies and nature books—“You know, those kid biographies: The Lives of Great Men. And it was *all* men. And they were all white. They should have been more honest: the Lives of Great White Men.”



“I was obsessed with the United States wilderness,” he continues, self-mockingly enumerating their titles, “*The Desert, The Grand Canyon…The Sea Islands of the Carolinas*,” in the faux-soothing tones of advertisements promoting vacation spots.



“I think there was a part of me that was seeking an answer to the question who am I? How did a Dominican kid leave his island and come to New Jersey? And what *is* this place? I think a part of me was reading so compulsively because I thought that maybe there would be some code in one of those books that would explain not only explain this new place but would explain me. What I discovered is that there is no answer. . . It was the process that provided me with what I was looking for. There’s a great quote, which is about Gilgamesh, ‘the quest itself proves the futility of the quest.’”



His two principal linguistic registers (“this kind of crazy Caribbean language and music” and “this sort of African-American-infused American vernacular”) grind against each other along with the many other voices he ventriloquizes in his writing. Much has been made of his ability to stretch languages and idioms by putting them together, an ability that Díaz says is, at its root, the product of a certain shamelessness. “Shame more than anything interrupts your ability to learn. If you feel shame when people mock you or look crazy at you’re less likely to practice it. One of the things that’s helped me is that I have a particular amount of shamelessness around these different idioms that I love. I’ve grown up with hip hop my whole life but I’ve never felt any shame of misusing the language that I grew up with. I feel no shame using this discourse which is basically my English jammed against things that would be anathema in the larger hip hop culture, you know, mashing all the intellectual nonsense that I learned in graduate school with it. . . .



“It takes so much more energy keeping these things apart.”



Emphasizing the difference between the daily multilingual practice of a community and its reconstruction on a page, he maintains, “One lives in English organically and then one has to represent it artificially.



“The artifact of the fiction requires an enormous amount of work. There’s stuff that exists perfectly normal life in conversation—no one cares if you fuck something up, it’s felicitous, people enjoy it—it doesn’t have to be necessarily literary, but, yes,  [writing is] an enormous amount of work, an enormous kind of stupid work, which means that there’s a lot of just the basic experiment of adding a drop, tasting, nope, adding a drop tasting it, nope. That’s a pain in the ass, you know; my students know all about that, my students run through a million models to get to the right thing.”



The translation of the book from Spanish-speckled English into English-inflected Spanish required its own experiments (though, he argues, “If you think about it, it’s a piece of cake”): “What’s really driving the book is code switching. I can’t control all the other languages but I can certainly control English and Spanish, so that all I needed to find with the Spanish translation was find an entirely different code to switch. So what we did was we translated the entire book into Spanish and then went through the entire book matching English and Spanish looking for a set of codes in English that worked really, really well in Spanish to preserve that sort of multilingual madness. For example, the word ‘feeling’ is an English word that’s very, very common in Spanish and it means something completely different. If you say someone came at you with feeling it speaks of a deep sincerity, but it has a very particular cool resonance in Spanish.” He adds that you can never go wrong with a word like “cool.”



As for those translations into languages which he can’t control, he says simply, “In translation signal noise is a given.” He gestures towards the bookshelves to our left, “If you look up here, at least 10% of these books are in translation. . . In the U.S. we have the lowest rate of reading in translation of any country in the industrialized world. And yet there’s more complaints, or more reservations around translations than anywhere else.”



Ultimately, “I think the more that you actually spend a translated life, the more you realize that it’s a minimal charge to be able to engage yourself in another world.”



And, in fact, though Díaz began reading as soon as he came to the U.S., attempting to find some sort of life logic in the pages of books, it wasn’t until he was much older that he began to write. When he was growing up, his brother came down with a brutal form of Leukemia (“It was a big part of my childhood,” he says. “He’s fine, he’s in remission, but he spent ten years in chemo. That’s a fucking long time, man.)



In an attempt to communicate his world to his brother, he wrote twenty to thirty page letters to him during his long stays in the hospital.



“A part of the way I stayed connected to my brother was writing these enormous, ridiculous letters about what was going on about our lives, about the neighborhood, and in some ways my complete love of reading had prepared me for the moment that my brother’s illness provided, which was an excuse to now participate in the form I loved so much. So that’s how I started actually, writing letters to someone in a hospital.”



(He no longer maintains his art by writing letters, though, “I’m as much a traitor as the next person, I’ve given up the form…You should see I have boxes of the letters I wrote and the letters I received when I was in college. My god! I can tell the loves because of the stacks of letters. We wrote each other like crazy.”)



His family continues to be a strong presence in his writing. The fantastical elements of magic realism have been one of the most widely recognized aspects of Latin American literary canon, evolving in more recent years into the Macondo vs. McOndo debate. Seemingly counter-intuitively, the moment in which magic realism is most present in *Oscar Wao* is also the part most derived from real life; towards the end of the novel, a mystical mongoose comes to Oscar’s aid, a creature which Díaz explains comes directly from family lore.



“My mother got lost when she was young in a coffee plantation (my father used to grow coffee) and she was lost for like three days and everyone thought she died and by the third day they just went and bought fucking—I mean, it shows you the difference, if a child were lost for three days today, we would still have hope, we would still be looking, but in the DR they were like ‘Three days? ’That kid’s fucking dead man’—they went out and bought funeral clothes, they were going to bury this little outfit and then my mother shows up. And my mother tells this story and she was like I had gotten lost and was just desperate and this mongoose came up and was like ‘you lost?’ ‘Well, I’m tired right now but I’ll come back tomorrow and lead you out.’ So he did and my mother arrived home the next day.”



Given the presence of magical mongoose in *Oscar Wao*, one might think that they are some sort of national animal, a kind of mascot, in the Dominican Republic, yet Díaz says, “Most Dominicans don’t even know we have mongooses. . . . If I can claim any fame, it’s singlehandedly reminding the *pueblo dominicano* that we have mongooses.”



The brutalities of the thirty-year tyranny of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, which pervade the action and atmosphere of the novel are another outgrowth of Díaz’s family life. “I was deeply allergic to the kind of insane fascistic militaristic craziness that was present in my family through my father’s military ethos that came directly from the Trujillo regime.



“It was nothing personal. It doesn’t make a difference what your opinion is if the house is on fire, the house is on fire. Probably the only thing we’re [Junot and his siblings] all completely in agreement on is that that family structure was just toxic. And everyone had very different reactions to it. My older sister ran away. My brother checked out. My little brother went and idolized the absent man and he joined the military. The effects are everywhere. And even my sister who ran away married a military guy; she spent years in a military base in Berlin.”



The extremities of evil in the novel, in particular those presented by the dictatorial regime, are at times distilled and allegorized according to science fiction and comic book archetypes as Trujillo is put in apposition with Sauron in *Lord of the Rings*, for one*.* Originally, Díaz wanted to include actual images from comic books in *Oscar Wao*, making these ties and the narrator’s interdisciplinary wanderings all the more palpable. But in execution, the postmodern project failed: “It was not working. It was just garbage. It was like eight or nine kinds of bad. It felt forced; it felt pretentious. And your mind is like, dude what you’re trying to build is like a jet engine, but what we have here is like a go-cart. It’s a go-cart.”



He describes a plan for the first page that was meant to the open with an image of the apocalypse from Katsuhiro Otomo’s famous manga *Akira*, rays of destruction extending to the leaf’s limit and folding over to the next side to point to the Dominican Republic. I ask if the comic book panels  he had in mind were all found or if he had drawn some by hand.  “Darling,” he says, “if I could draw, I wouldn’t be in this business.”



It is in large part the social function of visual art, he explains, that appeals to him. “I’m sorry, but look at that painting someone sent me,” he says, gesturing to a painting, sitting across the room unhung. Red, beige, blue, it demands attention with its bright hues and dynamic, cartoon-like shapes—brown bald stylized figures with triangle teeth, a grey creature with blue on its head, a blue line through the middle to the painting.



“Somebody saw me at a reading in Seattle and just fucking sent to me. And, I’m sorry, but that’s kind of a cool painting. . . The thing is that for me writing is so personal and so deep and so private. This is so social, you know.”



Díaz describes the immediacy with which visual art can be shared in contrast to the delayed reaction time engendered by writing. If you give a book to someone, they walk away with it alone and then come back later, sometimes delaying weeks. “There’s something pre-modern about writing. It’s not so much that I’m waiting for a response as I want to be involved with that person and have my art form some sort of community with them. With this, someone walks in: instantaneous. I love that we’re in a community there.”



 As if to prove the point, he logs onto Facebook, where we watch a video a friend posted on his wall. In fact, of the favored artists he mentions—Tony Capellan, Jacob Holdt, Pipilotti Rist, Piero Manzoni—many work with video. Perhaps given the cinematic preoccupations evident in the novel this comes as no surprise, even with Díaz’s warning  of the differences between Oscar’s taste and his own.



I ask about film and look over at the DVDs beside the television. Some of the DVD boxes are still shrinked-wrapped because “I keep losing them, so then I have to keep buying them,” which is to say he keeps lending them to friends, so then he has to keep buying them. While the selection is not all about the apocalypse—he recommends the Japanese film *Ping Pong, *calling it* *“One of the greatest fucking movies I’ve ever seen,” the presence is strong, as is further evidence of his love of the social nature of art. Above the TV set is a cartoon, marker on paper, that his friend Petey just rolled in and put up one day; it has hung there ever since.



In the DVD pile there is an old British miniseries called *UFO*; *Threads*, a BBC documentary from the 80s about the atomic destruction of England (“fucking terrifying even today”); *Planet Terror*;*The Last Days; Appleseed; The Last Blood*.



 “This is just a *small* selection,” he reminds me as a lists them. A central theme in his work, made clear by his description of layout from *Akira* with which he had wanted to begin *Oscar Wao *and the reverberations of the now invisible image of destruction extent in the text of the novel itself, is manifested here as well: dude’s obsessed with the apocalypse.



“I’ve been fucking fucked in the head by the apocalyptic eighties.



“Look, I was fucking generation bomb. It’s the most hidden thing. what separates me from my students is not the fact that they’re eighteen and even their cells are new—you guys just fucking glow with your newness—and the fact that I don’t know any of your music or any of your culture, part of it is that the apocalypse was fucking real, man. I mean part of why *The Watchmen* the movie the doesn’t work is that Alan Moore in the comic book didn’t have to do anything to convince people that the end of the world was this far away.” He illustrates the extreme proximity of the end that he felt with the inflection of his voice and two almost touching fingers.



“We’re deeply apocalyptic now but it’s not on the skin in the same way.”



As a self-described sensitive eleven-year-old, watching the news at night outline where the atomic blasts would hit—and seeing his town in New Jersey in the black—it’s no surprise that with every movie, every TV show, every*thing* touching on the apocalypse, it started to eat at him. “The whole world was tearing itself to pieces; South Africa was in place; the entire economy was dumping. And that really fucking fucked me up, so I’ve been trying to write something about the end of the world.



“I’ve got to do something to channel this apocalyptic madness of mine.”



Díaz is currently doing just that, reviving work on a book he has described as his Black Akira novel. He began work on it before *Oscar,* which rose from its ashes in the wake of 9/11.



For the moment, though, he is off to see some friends, who have been calling him over the course of the past hour, taking advantage of the little time he has in Cambridge these days.



And so, with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, the door closes.

Even at forty years old, Leo indulged his younger brother. He stood at the kitchen counter and loaded a Hi8 tape into the Handycam that he and Charlie had found when they were packing up the basement. Leo pressed the cassette compartment back into the camera, and the metal frame set the black tape into place. Charlie clutched a candlestick and stared into the lens with the expectant attention of a newscaster. “Do you have to do that?” asked Leo.

Charlie grinned. “Is it on?”

Leo scrutinized the miniature of the room cast in realtime on the small, flipped-out screen. It looked unfamiliar, like it belonged in the pages of a catalogue. He pressed the red button with his thumb, and REC appeared in red digital letters. “Alright, you can start whenever.”

“Hello! For the purposes of posterity, I am Charlie, Leo is filming, and this is the kitchen. Mom will not be happy that it’s a mess, but that’s probably more accurate in any case.”

The kitchen was in disarray, although it was not familiar daily clutter. Nearly everything had been pulled from the cabinets. Cans were stacked on the counter to the left of the stove and perishable items were placed on the right. On the table were plastic bins, which held pots and pans with newspaper stuffed into the gaps. A box labelled “Very Fragile” in permanent marker held stacks of plates. The refrigerator was bare except for a bottle of milk, a mostly empty carton of eggs, and a container of lo mein from the night before.

“The style is French Country—very rustique. Note the hanging pots and pans.” Charlie gestured towards the ceiling. Although his hairline had receded slightly, his face was still boyish, and on the small screen he could pass for as young as twenty-five. “What else to say. The oven runs hot. Take five or ten minutes off of all cooking times. Maybe give a quick three-sixty, Leo.”

Leo panned obligingly around the room, sweeping along the cabinets, stove and sink. The appliances had all been packed up.

“I’ll be glad someone will be cooking for mom now. Little old lady with a gas stove was starting to make me nervous. And next up we’ll make our way into the dining room.”

Leo backed out of the kitchen and turned to the swinging door, the camera coming right up to the slatted wood until the peach room burst suddenly into the frame. The dining room was a formal space, used more around holidays than any other time of the year. For the most part it lay dormant, though it took up nearly a quarter of the downstairs. It was almost completely empty, with the lacquered table and chairs sitting in the center of the room on the decarpeted floor, and the wall where the sideboard had been slightly darker.

“This is probably the least exciting room of the house. The most exciting part of it is the door to the basement, and only because the basement is a horrible place.” Leo zoomed into the stairway door as Charlie spoke. “Why don’t you give this one a three-sixty, too?”

“I did when we came in.”

As they passed the bathroom, Leo flashed the camera inside, quickly focusing on the sink knobs, which had the hot and cold reversed.

The living room was a mottle of things. The corner by the dusty-brown upright piano was crowded with cardboard boxes in various states of closure, with two packing tape dispensers and shreds of pink and clear bubble wrap littered on top. The big floral sofa was noticeably absent, replaced by a cream showpiece that the real estate agent had selected so potential buyers could better impose their own imagined rooms onto the space. The low shelves had been cleared of the frayed gardening paperbacks and their father’s old French textbooks to make way for a Complete Works of Shakespeare and a jar of polished stones.

The camera swung up to Charlie’s face, which still had the makeshift candlestick microphone at his lips.

“Here,” Charlie arced his free hand outwards, as though to a large audience, “we have the living room. Home of our mother’s failed attempts to make me a piano player. Successful for you, at least. But ...” He held a finger up to the camera. His audience waited. “I still remember this gem.” He set the candlestick on the piano as Leo stepped back to fit the scene into the frame. Charlie sat at the bench and swept imaginary coattails out from under himself. With dramatic wrists, he began an ungainly rendition of “The Entertainer,” furrowing his brows like a maestro. His hands leapt up between the octaves and dropped heavily onto the keys, eliding the ragtime rhythm as though stumbling and drunk. 

Charlie swayed back and forth, favoring the left hand, then the right, and as he slowed the piece almost to a stop he turned to the camera and grinned. Leo, half watching over the camera and half watching through the screen, was struck. For a moment, the Charlie on the screen was a boy; maybe twelve, maybe fifteen. It drove their mother crazy the way during recitals, Charlie would turn to the camera and grin, getting up from the bench even as his hands finished the piece, like he wanted to play for the audience and be in it all at once. Though his face had aged and rounded, the geometry of his smile had remained indelible, twenty years later.

“You’re up, Rubinstein.” Charlie approached and reached for the camera. His chest filled the frame.

Leo shook his head and withdrew the camera. “I’m alright.”

“Come on, Leo. We’re making memories.” Charlie thought for a second. “Well, we made memories. Now we’re keeping them.” Leo snickered. “I don’t remember anything well enough, anyway.”

“That’s bullshit. You were always a thousand times better at this than me. Now give.” Charlie pulled the camcorder from where it was strapped around Leo’s hand and hefted it to his own eye. He gave Leo a small slap on the back as he approached the piano.

Leo eased himself onto the bench as though it would break and brushed his fingers lightly across the keys as if they, too, were fragile. When the first chord sounded into the room, the faint mistunings lingered in the air beside the notes. After probingly pressing the first few bars, his fingers grew reaccustomed to the keys and he began to play in earnest. He leaned into the instrument, restraining notes that seemed always on the verge of collapsing into one another. It was a complex piece, technically challenging, although Leo had always insisted that it was easier than it sounded. He stumbled twice but recovered quickly. His face and posture were labored, but the notes themselves were light and effortless.

As Leo finished the piece, the tones grew higher and faded away as if floating off the edge of the keyboard altogether. The final hammer hit the string so lightly that it was difficult to tell whether the final moment was silence or another soft resonance. He placed his hands on his thighs and looked at the piano like he could see inside it, to the action and tuning pins behind the frontboard.



“Jesus. When Mar and I have kids I hope they’re more like you than me,” said Charlie. His applause was muffled by the hand strap, and the camera filmed an erratic swing across the floor. “Take a bow.” But Leo waved his hand and retrieved the camera from his brother.

They made their way upstairs. To the left, the hall led to the master bedroom. To the right, the bedroom they had shared for their twelve overlapping years. Charlie turned left and opened the door, although both brothers remained in the doorway.

“This is our parents’ room. I probably slept here more than my own bed for the first six years of my life.”

“Eight,” corrected Leo.

“Let’s just say seven, shall we? Anyway, one time I found a condom on the nightstand.” Charlie made a wry face. “Maybe we’ll erase that part of the tape. I don’t think we need to record that particular memory in the

annals. We should get a shot of this and a shot of our room, and maybe a shot of the shed, too.”

Their own room was mostly unrecognizable. The two beds had been cleared for the night, but the room was otherwise cluttered with junk: board games, two trunks of clothes, ironing supplies, beach chairs and other accumulated artifacts of the elderly. The right bed was Leo’s, the left was Charlie’s. Both claimed to have lost their virginity in the room, though Charlie was rounding up. The shared desk, which had once held a boxy computer, was covered in sewing supplies, and a Singer sewing machine sat where the monitor had once been. The only constant was the steel blue color of the walls and the view out of the windows. The one by Charlie’s bed looked over the driveway, and the one by Leo’s looked into the garden in the backyard. Leo filmed out of his window and followed Charlie back down the stairs.

He stepped after his brother through the screen door onto the patio and surveyed the yard through the viewfinder. The tape whirred gently as it took in the garden. Petunias leaned clumsily against the shadowbox fence and the side of the shed, which Charlie was prying open. He spoke to the camera over his shoulder.

“This is our dad’s shed. No one really uses it anymore.” After a few seconds, the screen adjusted to theshadow inside. There was just room for the two men.

“Everything was packed up a long time ago,” Charlie continued, “but you can tell where things used to be.” He indicated the pegboard above the workbench, where thick black marker made swollen tool outlines. Under some pegs, the varnish of the board had been sanded away to erase the outline of a discarded implement, and a new shape had been drawn on the pale matte surface. Leo’s throat tightened with dust and he turned from the camera to cough.

“Our mom tells a story that she knew he was going to die after he waterproofed the house, because he left his tools in the wheelbarrow outside overnight.”

Leo spoke over his hand, “Not that he should have been doing that in the first place. He wasn’t even supposed to go jogging.”

Charlie smiled and shrugged, the combination of gestures familiar to the story. He went on. “This also happens to be the site of my first kiss.”

“I thought your first kiss was with Anna at Jack Feld’s house.”

“That was my first kiss on the mouth. Lisa Campbell gave me a peck on the cheek here when she was waiting for her mom to pick her up after the safari party. The minx.” Charlie held his face coy until it fell once again into a grin. He looked around the small space. “Unless our cameraman has anything to add, I think that might conclude the tour.”

Leo said he would take a shot of the facade and stepped back into the light.

He turned the camera on the house itself, tracing the white clapboard and pausing on the windows. Pulling the zoom lever to the right, he looked at the screen, seeing what was visible from the outside. The whitebacked curtains of his parents’ bedroom hung at the edges of their glass. He panned over to his own room, where the corner of the closet appeared in the bottom left pane. Each waver of the hand was amplified, and the windows rocked in and out of the frame. He couldn’t tell whether the clothes in the closet were really discernible or if he were inventing collared shirts in the pixels. He panned to the kitchen window, bright and orange, through to the window on the opposite wall that faced outwards to the street. Charlie went into the house, his body appearing in the kitchen window onscreen and disappearing again. The living room light clicked on, faint against the bright day, and the muffled, awkward tones of the piano sounded into the yard.

The camcorder showed little. Just beyond the siding were the rooms Leo and Charlie had toured, larger than the painted wood belied from the outside. He tried to place the contents of the rooms, imagining what the screen would show in the absence of the exterior walls. In the cutaway, there would be his parents’ bed, its back to the camera. His and Charlie’s beds sat across a thin dividing wall, the furniture placed as in a massive dollhouse. Removing the walls altogether, the three beds alone would sit straight in a row, the leftmost one doubled in size, ludicrously suspended above the grass. If he included the sofa bed that they pulled out for guests, that would appear on the ground below, perpendicular to the three.

Next he tried just the doors, placing them as he panned from left to right and then up. The doors between the living and dining room, the bathroom and the hall, and the one from the kitchen to the driveway were perpendicular to Leo. The others faced flatly towards him. The upstairs doors had all the same brass knobs, although the ones to the bathrooms would be brighter with use.

The three toilets of the house, one on the first floor, two on the second, sat on their pipes like stems. The sinks and showerheads did, too. He began to populate the space with the furniture as it was inside: the desks and dressers, the clothes hampers, rugs lying remarkably flat in the air, framed pictures and shelves fixed to invisible walls. He tried just the knicknacks, sitting against the blue sky like black stars, but it was too unfeasible to place them all and he went back to the bigger furniture. He continued until everything was there except the walls and the floors, though it was difficult to hold the full image in his mind. As he built one room, another would slip into abstraction. 

He added the frame like a ribcage, the bones of the house. His father, who read blueprints the way some men read the newspaper, would have known the exact placement of the studs. The house had looked identical to the others on the block before his parents had moved in, but no one would guess that anymore.

When Leo looked up from the camera, the clapboard seemed unnaturally opaque and hard. He turned the camera towards his face and waved at the lens, though he was not sure his fingers made it into the frame. He pressed the red button and the REC disappeared, though the screen still played the view through the lens.



 

Sometime last spring, I was driving through northern Minnesota when the road I was on passed over a small waterway. It was an unremarkable little brook lazily worming through the forest, but a sign on the shoulder identified it as the “Mississippi River.” I pulled over and reversed back to the bridge in an extended double-take. There it was, though. The mightiest vein of the continent. From here it would grow dramatically as it moved southward and its tributaries flooded in from across the country, giving life to Minneapolis, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and countless settlements in between. But up here in Paul Bunyan country, it was just an unmajestic trickle. It was oddly thrilling to see so mighty a river in such an undeveloped and vulnerable state, almost like walking in on a head of state without his clothes on. Without much further reflection I drove on, inflated by a sense of having been granted a window into the inner life of the Mississippi River, a feeling that I knew it better than most because I had seen it like this.



I grew up in central New England and have no great ties to the Mississippi, so several months later it seemed like it might be a meaningful pilgrimage to visit the headwaters of my region’s primary river. I would travel up to the border of New Hampshire and Quebec, where rain- and melt-water collect in the four Connecticut Lakes before taking the form of the Connecticut River and flowing 407 miles south to the ocean, plummeting a total of 2,660 vertical feet toward the center of the earth in the process.



The four lakes are numbered in what has always seemed to me a reverse of the logical order. The true headwaters of the river are at the tiny Fourth Connecticut Lake, at the very tip of New Hampshire. When water overflows its banks, it collects just below in the Third Connecticut Lake, then the Second Connecticut Lake, then finally the First Connecticut Lake. I drove up to the Third on New Years Day of this year. It was brilliantly sunny and bitterly cold. The tops of the lakes were frozen solid and covered in a foot or so of powder. I looked west across the lake from the road, towards the small inlet where water from the Fourth must have been trickling in beneath the ice.



One day all this water would be compelled from this stillness, by something as banal as gravity, to roll and tumble over itself for hundreds of miles, over dams and under bridges, gathering in places and racing violently in others. It would be joined by the White and the Chicopee and become mighty indeed by the time it passed under I-95. Little by little, all of it would fall away, cleaving Vermont from New Hampshire before bisecting Massachusetts, then Connecticut, to empty into and become part of Long Island Sound.



I was struck, however, by the realization that the water in front of me now had nothing to do with any of that yet. It could tell me nothing of New England, or even of the Connecticut River. It didn’t know anything. It wasn’t “waiting” to go somewhere. It was just water. I felt strangely disappointed and more than a little ridiculous.



We tend to ascribe a lot of metaphysical significance to waterways. Not only do they make possible our settlements and show us the easiest paths from point to point, but there’s also something about the idea of one unbroken chain of water unifying a whole region that feels important to us. We read ourselves into places, we retrofit them with our personalities, we make something of them that they perhaps are not. This alone is what makes them places and not just geography. The Connecticut, like the Mississippi, after all, is just water, helplessly doing what gravity demands of it. We are the ones who make it anything else. I knew, just as anyone with a map might know, the path it would all take. I knew the rivers it would meet, I knew the towns that had been made possible by the very predictfability of its route. The water, obviously, could not know or care about any of this.



 I was sorry to lose the feeling that I had seen these great rivers at their purest and most naked. I wanted to think that I would be able to see something elemental here, not only the germ at the core of the idea of the Connecticut River, but maybe even at the core of the idea of New England. The fact is that the Fourth Connecticut Lake will stop mattering to the fate of the river the instant the water moves down to the Third Lake. It will fall millimeters south, and then it’s not part of the lake anymore. It’s only water, and it will wander dumbly for hundreds of miles until at last it meets the ocean.