The Lord, No Flies

 Last  year my sister gave me a copy of Society of the Snow, a book about the Uruguayan college rugby team whose plane went down in the Andes in 1972, leaving the players, friends, and family who survived the crash to try to survive on a glacier. Which they did, by among other things eating the bodies of the dead, for 72 days until at last (recue efforts having long ago given up) several of the survivors hiked out ten days to Chile to let the outside world know that the survivors on the mountain needed rescue.

Let's leave aside the question of why my sister ran into a book about survival and cannibalism and immediately thought, "present for my brother."  All I can say is: family know each other best.

My time reading things in print (as opposed to audio which I can listen to while commuting or washing dishes) is limited, but I started it over Thanksgiving and finished it just before Christmas.

First of all, the prose is fascinating: Written by one of the school friends of the survivors, the book has a very written-in-Spanish voice.  I suppose it's an interesting question whether this is a good or bad thing in a translation, but I thought it gave a strong sense of the type of young men who spent two and a half months trying to survive in this frigid and barren landscape.

And really, it's the story of how and why these guys survived that is interesting.

I think the basic cultural expectation about a situation like this is that there would immediately be a great deal of conflict among the survivors. The 2021 prestige drama Yellowjackets (which I haven't seen, but several friends are fans) featured a girls soccer team from the US which is on a plane which goes down in the far north of Canada, leaving the survivors to try to survive in the wilderness.  This leads to rivalries and conflict among the survivors which continue to reverberate twenty years later in their adult lives.

What really struck me in this story is the way in which their desperate situation immediately drew the surviving young men together. They describe their time in the Andes as having created a sense of unity and purpose which they call the Society of the Snow (from which the title of the book is drawn) in which life is reduced to its most essential elements and all rivalries are set aside as they try to help every person survive long enough to be rescued.

The structure of the book is only roughly linear, because each chapter is based upon the story of a different survivor.  While early chapters focus more on the wreck and initial days, and later ones focus more on the trek out and recuse, you hear the full story repeatedly from different points of view.

One thing several survivors talk about is the solidarity of the mountain. Several talk about how they expected to be resented because between shock and injury, they were able to do almost nothing other than live day to day, while others did large amounts of work for the group. And yet, because everyone was focused on helping everyone survive, they each accepted the efforts or each person as what they could do.

I don't know how much of this is cultural. A number of the survivors talk about how their Catholic faith helped them survive, and about the group rosaries they would say at night while trying to avoid falling asleep when it was so cold that full sleep was likely to result in death by hypothermia.

But the survivors themselves, talking about their experience, say repeatedly that the unity and lack of hierarchy they experienced on the mountain was something they considered unique and surprising, both compared to their lives before and after. So at least in their own minds, it was the extremity of their situation which pulled them together and cause them to care for each other above all other things.

Definitely an interesting read and one of my recommendations out of my 2024 reading.

It's The Most Magical Time of the Year

 Saturday was the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Here in Columbus, OH that meant 9 hours and 19 minutes of daylight.  Now the days are getting longer.  Today there will be a whole 10 seconds more daylight than on the solstice, and by the day after Christmas we'll be up to one whole minute more sunlight.

Early advent calendar?

This is also the time of year when we see recurring articles about how Christmas is actually a thinly veiled refresh of pagan holidays.  Such articles inevitably point to the fact that Christmas is set right around the solstice, and that various pagan holidays also fell at the time of the solstice.

However, this kind of thinking arguably gets the causality wrong.  It's not that Christmas falls near the solstice because it is based on pagan solstice holidays, but rather that both pagan holidays and Christmas fall at that time in the year because it is the solstice.

When everyone's life depended far more on the agricultural cycle of the seasons that it does today, the point at which the days stopped getting shorter and the year began its slow progression towards spring was far more significant. The solstice as the point at which light began to return to the world.

It's not a surprise that ancient pagans celebrated this time, and at times did so with feasting and gift giving.  The solstice was a time to reflect on the promise of the coming year with the return of the sun.

It's also not a surprise that Christians would celebrate at this time as well.  

There are two ways to think about the timing of Christmas.  One is that Christ really was born in late December, at which point it would seem that God truly chose to send the Son into the world with the promise of eternal life at precisely the time of year when the increase in daylight promised new life in the natural world.  

The other is that Christians did not know the precise date of Christ's birth, and so they chose to celebrate it at the time of year in which the natural cycle of the seasons promised new life with the return of the sun.

Either way, this doesn't mean that Christmas was "based on" pagan holidays that fell at the same time in the calendar, but rather that this is a time of year when it is natural for people to celebrate.

I myself am taking off from the day-job until the new calendar year, so in addition to celebrating Christmas with the family I hope to write a bit more in these (virtual) pages which have been so badly neglected of late.

I've also got some business stuff to do.  I continue to post new articles about pricing at Pricing Evolution every week.  If you're at all interested in those, drop by and consider subscribing (it's free!)  And I'm working on a business site related to that project, which hopefully will be up by the new year.

Best wishes for a blessed Christmas to all of you from the Darwins.

Hanging on by my Fingernails!

 It is the eve of my 46th birthday, and I want to tell you about possibly the most astonishing, unexpected thing that has happened to me in my more-than-four-and-a-half decades:

The scab is from the kitten. I have almost the exact scratch in my wedding photos 23 years ago, when the old deceased cat was a kitten.

After almost forty years, I have stopped biting my nails.

I have bitten my nails since I was seven years old, when someone told me that the piano teacher would cut your nails if they were too long. (That, at least, is the reason I remember. Who knows why we do what we do?) I'm almost afraid to say it out loud lest I jinx it, but the more I analyze that thought, the more I realize that it's a fear of accountability. So let me say it again:

I have stopped biting my nails.

I do not understand it, but from the timing, I guess that it has something to do with protein. Since I started  eating a metric ton of protein, both to support my daughter who needs it, and at the hest of the dietitian, food has become very dull. The fact that I can find and consume protein with a minimum of effort makes this a very first-world problem, and yet I grow weary of it, you know? I have lost almost ten pounds, some portion of which I can instantly regain if I increase my portion sizes of anything or decrease my protein intake. Currently I'm in a rut, waiting to break out of a plateau.

But I've stopped biting my nails.

"I will believe it's true," I said, hedging my bets, "if I make it through the show without biting my nails off." And my nails survived through tech week, through performance, through strike, through the week-and-a-half of postshow stress dreams. They survived Thanksgiving. They survived yesterday, when I microplaned my thumb while grating cheese and shaved off the top layer of my thumb nail. But I didn't shave my thumb! Because it was protected by a fingernail! 

(It turns out that fingernails won't protect you if you microplane your knuckle, however. At that point I decided we had enough cheese.)

I look down at my hands multiple times a day, to make sure that my nails are still there and still growing. And sometimes I just look in astonishment at my nails! on my own hands! I'm considering getting a manicure, because I can! 

Often, as I approach my birthday, I find myself fighting a malaise, as I consider how many things I have not done over the past year, and whether they would have mattered anyway. But this year, through no real action of my own, a thing has been done to and for me. My nails have grown, on their own, without my agency, without my doing anything except not biting them, which I didn't do on purpose. If I had felt the urge to bite, I certainly would have done so. I don't understand it. But it's the very definition of gift, unsought, unexpected, unhoped for because impossible. 

I have stopped biting my nails! Happy birthday to me!