“Well we know where we’re going/But we don’t know where we’ve been”

When I was almost 20 I nudged a buddy from my old hometown into taking a shot at winter camping. Over the past three years we’d each talked a big game about being woodsmen. It seemed time to give it an honest try. It probably goes without saying we were both recovering from failed romances.

"It'll be bucolic, trust me."

In January we drove off to the Sandilands, tied on the snowshoes and hiked to a remote spot by a frozen lake. We built a quinzee, then a fire, warmed up some tinned stew and finally retired to our snowy dome. Four hours later I shook him awake and said we were done. It was minus 40 outside and not much warmer in the dome.

The next summer he called me down again. “There’s some new places outside of town you need to see.” I drove down on a Friday evening, picked him up and took direction.

We went up one gravel road and down another. “Over here,” he said. “On the right.”

In a thicket of ever-present poplar trees was a large log-based dwelling, looking surprisingly modern — sehr schmaak. The sun was just setting, the Evening Star was out. A woman came to the front door, cradling a baby.

“What are you boys doing here?”

“I just wanted to show my friend your place. You’ve done amazing work.”

“Well, thank you. But I’d feel better if you left. Now.”

We quickly climbed back in my car and backed out the driveway.

“Any other bright ideas?” I asked.

“You should meet my friends,” he said. “Not so fancy a place, but they’re really good people.”

More gravel roads, more poplar. It was now dark.

The drive through the wood was surprisingly smooth. We arrived at the house — a three-storey affair with unusual angles — and got out of the car. This time a man came out the front door. He couldn’t have been more than three or four years older than we were. My friend greeted him.

“Oh, it’s you! Come in, come in!”

We met his lovely wife. The kitchen was large. The floor was strictly plywood subflooring — the house was clearly a work in progress. She gestured toward the circular pine table.

“You boys want some orange tea?” She set the kettle to boiling while he retrieved a cookie tin from over the fridge, pulled a handful of dried orange rinds from within, then dropped them in a tea pot and bade us sit while we waited for the water.

“Boys, how about some iess-schmaunt? Come!”

With cereal bowls full of ice-cream and steaming cups of rind-steeped water before us, we began to talk.

It was mostly my friend’s affair. He and his friends talked about prayer, searching and longing and the inscrutable ways of God. When the tea and ice-cream were gone, and people’s energies were on the wane, his friends reached for his hands — the fellow his left, the woman his right — and assured him his was a true heart, that he was a valued servant of Christ, doing God’s work, and more than that they loved him.

Back in the car, my friend said, “I needed that.”

I did not know these people. And at that moment I realized there was a great deal about my friend I did not know, either — depths unavailable to me. I did not know what to say to my friend. In a weird way, I needed that late-night encounter also.

Three years later I was back in the big city, and that winding drive through the struck was a memory fading into a twilight of its own.

I had no shortage of friends, from a wider array of ethnic backgrounds. We’d all been born Canadian, but our lineage was not that far removed from the boats that brought us.

One — the college guy with the music — was Dutch, his mother a survivor of the Nazi occupation. Another, a co-worker, was Ukrainian, two were Greek (“We’re the real oppressed minority here!”), two more were Czech. Two other buddies from that Bible college were of Scottish stock. A fellow somewhat smitten with me had a Portuguese pop and British mother. And so on.

If anything, the conversations were more feverish. But there was a HEFTY layer of irony applied, at all times. The days of someone reaching for my hand and assuring me I was precious to God were over. And to be truthful, I was no longer responding well to such entreaties.

Be that as it may, irony was shit — we were in more desperate straits than we’d anticipated. We figured we’d changed in ways our parents were incapable of recognizing, but could not quantify those changes in any meaningful way ourselves.

The changes around us, on the other hand, were another matter. No litany from me — the common challenge was discerning which buggy-whip job might outlast the one being left behind.

Anyway, here we are. Stephenson’s dialogue cannot be legitimately compared to Dostoevsky, even at the Russian bard’s most rambling and incoherent. But the yack-fests between Hiro and Da5id and Y.T. and the Librarian were quite similar in tone and content to the conversations we kids were having amongst ourselves between evenings of wrestling with javascript (which gave me a skillset on par with those I now bring to the job of church custodian).

Re-reading Snow Crash I was struck by the depth of Hiro’s ignorance of the socio-ethno-religio-philosophical history that brought forth the gibbering present he inhabits and is scrambling to understand. Just one example, his glib assumption about the Biblical account of the early church — “The Jews ... were still running the country, right?” — reveals not only Hiro’s galling ignorance of the biblical narrative (his frame of reference is Andrew Lloyd Webber), but also the subtle anti-Semitism that takes root in rapidly shifting neo-tribal landscapes like the one Stephenson describes (when you’re struggling with the exigencies of ad hoc tribalism, the features of an honest-to-God actual tribe start looking very enviable indeed — they’ve succeeded as a tribe for 3000 years; they must be doing something sneaky). To gain any worthwhile purchase on the roiling present, Stephenson-via-the-Librarian has to drag the digitally proficient but otherwise utterly abject Hiro all the way back to civilization’s Sumerian origins.

Re: the wiki: I’d forgotten Richard Rorty’s dis-ease with the book. People who read his criticism as if it were a book review scorned him for the proscriptive thrust of his concerns. But Rorty was too subtle a reader to be that reductive — it seems to me he recognized Stephenson was not describing (let alone endorsing) some crackling “future” in which a beleaguered individualist maneuvers into a position of relative safety, but rather an overwhelming present from which little could be expected. Rorty rightly recognized the horror of this situation and called for some authorial engagement, with others, with hope. It could be argued, I think, that Stephenson’s body of work since Snow Crash has grown, possibly unconsciously but I doubt it, into an articulate response to Rorty’s concerns.

Alright, nuffadat. Hey, look — CBC’s Ideas is connecting with the bearers of Rorty’s flame. Podcast available here. Neal Stephenson is still an interesting guy, but his current interviews are muted affairs compared to days of yore. It happens to the best of us, sir.