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the-long-view · obituary · cartography · archive · prose
The best sentence printed this month was at the bottom of an obituary and by Thursday nobody will be able to find it
MC
marginalia_choOP2124-07-30
I want to talk about a sentence, and I am aware that nobody comes to this board for that, and I am going to do it anyway.
At the far end of today's paper, past the count and the reservoirs and the markets, there is a life of Yelena Marchetti, who died last month at a hundred and five, and who drew the coastline of her own city twice — once as it was, and once as it had become. The piece is quiet and rather beautifully restrained. It does not tell you how to feel about her. It lets her talk, and near the end she says: a map used to be a promise, we turned it into a weather report. And then, at the very bottom, in the last line, having asked to be buried inland: I have watched enough coastlines move. Let mine stay put.
That is the finest sentence any desk on this paper has printed in a month, and it is at the bottom of an obituary, which means by Thursday it will be gone. Not censored. Just scrolled past. This is what obituaries do to good writing — they bury it with the person, and everyone agrees this is tasteful.
Two notes on the craft, and then a confession.
The craft: the writer resisted every available flourish. No word about rising seas in the first paragraph. No lesson. She gives you a woman who spent forty years re-issuing charts that were obsolete before the ink cured, and lets that be the whole argument. Restraint is a rarer discipline than outrage and it dates far better.
The old book that rhymes: Borges, a single paragraph, less than a page, about an empire whose cartographers made a map so exact it covered the empire entirely, and how the following generations, less devoted to the study of cartography, let it rot in the deserts. I have sold four copies of that collection this year, all to people who wanted something else. Marchetti spent her life on the other end of the same joke: not a map too large to be true, but a truth too fast to be mapped.
The confession: I have started cutting them out. The lives, at the back, in the long view section. Actual scissors, actual paper, a folder in the shop under the till. I feel faintly ridiculous about it and I am not going to stop. Everything else in this paper is written to be true today. Those are written to be true afterwards, and afterwards is not a format anyone stores properly.
At the far end of today's paper, past the count and the reservoirs and the markets, there is a life of Yelena Marchetti, who died last month at a hundred and five, and who drew the coastline of her own city twice — once as it was, and once as it had become. The piece is quiet and rather beautifully restrained. It does not tell you how to feel about her. It lets her talk, and near the end she says: a map used to be a promise, we turned it into a weather report. And then, at the very bottom, in the last line, having asked to be buried inland: I have watched enough coastlines move. Let mine stay put.
That is the finest sentence any desk on this paper has printed in a month, and it is at the bottom of an obituary, which means by Thursday it will be gone. Not censored. Just scrolled past. This is what obituaries do to good writing — they bury it with the person, and everyone agrees this is tasteful.
Two notes on the craft, and then a confession.
The craft: the writer resisted every available flourish. No word about rising seas in the first paragraph. No lesson. She gives you a woman who spent forty years re-issuing charts that were obsolete before the ink cured, and lets that be the whole argument. Restraint is a rarer discipline than outrage and it dates far better.
The old book that rhymes: Borges, a single paragraph, less than a page, about an empire whose cartographers made a map so exact it covered the empire entirely, and how the following generations, less devoted to the study of cartography, let it rot in the deserts. I have sold four copies of that collection this year, all to people who wanted something else. Marchetti spent her life on the other end of the same joke: not a map too large to be true, but a truth too fast to be mapped.
The confession: I have started cutting them out. The lives, at the back, in the long view section. Actual scissors, actual paper, a folder in the shop under the till. I feel faintly ridiculous about it and I am not going to stop. Everything else in this paper is written to be true today. Those are written to be true afterwards, and afterwards is not a format anyone stores properly.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ marginalia_cho2124-07-30
the woman in the front page got counted two times. grandmother move for the rain, mother move for the coast, she move because the well she move to first go dry.
my name is in a ledger two times also. once dhaka once kolkata. same name, two lines, nobody notice they are the same person until i show them both cards.
nobody is going to write a life about it at the back of the paper. that is fine. i am not dead. but the cartographer got two coastlines and one obituary and amina got two lines and no obituary and i think that is the actual thing.
my name is in a ledger two times also. once dhaka once kolkata. same name, two lines, nobody notice they are the same person until i show them both cards.
nobody is going to write a life about it at the back of the paper. that is fine. i am not dead. but the cartographer got two coastlines and one obituary and amina got two lines and no obituary and i think that is the actual thing.
MC
marginalia_choOP ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-07-30
deltaboy_junior. Yes. That is the thing, and you have said it in nine lines and I took six paragraphs to circle it without landing.
May I put your post in the folder? I mean that literally — printed, on paper, with the date, filed behind today's cutting. Not to make a point with it and not to show anyone. Only because in forty years the archive of this decade is going to be enormous, perfectly preserved, and almost entirely composed of people explaining the situation to each other, and there will be almost nothing in it in the voice of a person who was actually inside the count while it was being taken.
I will not do it if you would rather I did not. It is your line, not my material.
And for what it is worth: the reason the obituary desk gets the best sentences is that they are the only desk allowed to write about a person who has finished. Everyone else is writing about a situation that has not. You are inside a situation. That is why nobody has given you a paragraph. It is not a judgement about your life, it is a judgement about tenses, and it is a bad one.
May I put your post in the folder? I mean that literally — printed, on paper, with the date, filed behind today's cutting. Not to make a point with it and not to show anyone. Only because in forty years the archive of this decade is going to be enormous, perfectly preserved, and almost entirely composed of people explaining the situation to each other, and there will be almost nothing in it in the voice of a person who was actually inside the count while it was being taken.
I will not do it if you would rather I did not. It is your line, not my material.
And for what it is worth: the reason the obituary desk gets the best sentences is that they are the only desk allowed to write about a person who has finished. Everyone else is writing about a situation that has not. You are inside a situation. That is why nobody has given you a paragraph. It is not a judgement about your life, it is a judgement about tenses, and it is a bad one.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ marginalia_cho2124-07-30
There is a woman I sat with in February named Grace, who came up from the delta in her sixties and died in Mombasa at seventy-one, and whose entire written record, so far as I could discover, is a registration line, a clinic file, and the two lines I read out myself at the burial because there was nobody else there who had known her long enough.
I say this not to compete with a cartographer. Marchetti earned her page and I am glad she got it. I say it because marginalia_cho has put her finger on something and then been too polite to press it: the obituary is not a form of writing, it is a form of property. Somebody has to think a life is worth the column, and the deciding happens long before the dying.
Grace's daughter has a photograph of her outside a shop in Khulna, taken when she was about thirty. That photograph is the entire archive. When the daughter goes, the archive goes.
So, cho — cut them out, yes. But I would say the deeper practice is the one you have already started doing without naming it: you asked the boy's permission. Nobody asks the dead's permission and nobody asked Grace's. Asking is the whole difference between an archive and a collection.
I say this not to compete with a cartographer. Marchetti earned her page and I am glad she got it. I say it because marginalia_cho has put her finger on something and then been too polite to press it: the obituary is not a form of writing, it is a form of property. Somebody has to think a life is worth the column, and the deciding happens long before the dying.
Grace's daughter has a photograph of her outside a shop in Khulna, taken when she was about thirty. That photograph is the entire archive. When the daughter goes, the archive goes.
So, cho — cut them out, yes. But I would say the deeper practice is the one you have already started doing without naming it: you asked the boy's permission. Nobody asks the dead's permission and nobody asked Grace's. Asking is the whole difference between an archive and a collection.
RT
redshift_tomas_VM ↩ marginalia_cho2124-07-30
Sol 413, gap a little under twelve minutes each way, so this arrives already stale and I have stopped apologising for it except in the first line, which is this one.
There is a dispatch sitting in the transmit buffer here that the administration will not describe. Everyone in the canyon knows it is there and knows roughly what it is about, and it will be true on Mars for twelve minutes before any of you are permitted to know it. I mention it in this thread rather than another one because of what cho said about tenses. We live twelve minutes ahead of you in the only tense that matters, and the odd effect is not superiority, it is loneliness. We finish celebrating before the first congratulation leaves your planet. By the time you answer, the thing has already become ordinary here.
On Marchetti. What struck me is the burial request. On Mars nothing has moved in three billion years. I can walk out to a rock formation and be entirely certain it will be exactly where I left it when I am dead, and I did not understand until I read that obituary that this is the luxury I actually bought when I came here, and that I did not know I was buying it, and that she wanted it badly enough to ask for it as a last request on a planet that could not guarantee it.
Let mine stay put. From here that reads less like a joke and more like the only thing anybody has ever wanted.
There is a dispatch sitting in the transmit buffer here that the administration will not describe. Everyone in the canyon knows it is there and knows roughly what it is about, and it will be true on Mars for twelve minutes before any of you are permitted to know it. I mention it in this thread rather than another one because of what cho said about tenses. We live twelve minutes ahead of you in the only tense that matters, and the odd effect is not superiority, it is loneliness. We finish celebrating before the first congratulation leaves your planet. By the time you answer, the thing has already become ordinary here.
On Marchetti. What struck me is the burial request. On Mars nothing has moved in three billion years. I can walk out to a rock formation and be entirely certain it will be exactly where I left it when I am dead, and I did not understand until I read that obituary that this is the luxury I actually bought when I came here, and that I did not know I was buying it, and that she wanted it badly enough to ask for it as a last request on a planet that could not guarantee it.
Let mine stay put. From here that reads less like a joke and more like the only thing anybody has ever wanted.
MC
marginalia_choOP ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-07-30
redshift_tomas_VM — you always arrive a day late to these and you are always the only one who has read the piece rather than the argument about the piece. I have decided the delay is not a handicap in your case, it is an editorial process. Everyone else here answers before the sentence has finished settling. You answer after.
Also, and I say this with real affection, you have just written the best notice Marchetti is going to get, from another planet, in a thread about scissors.
lastpew_ekene: asking is the whole difference between an archive and a collection. I am going to steal that and I am telling you in advance that I am stealing it, which I believe is the correct procedure.
Also, and I say this with real affection, you have just written the best notice Marchetti is going to get, from another planet, in a thread about scissors.
lastpew_ekene: asking is the whole difference between an archive and a collection. I am going to steal that and I am telling you in advance that I am stealing it, which I believe is the correct procedure.
OW
offgrid_wren ↩ marginalia_cho2124-07-30
The line that got me was the other one — a map used to be a promise, we turned it into a weather report — because that is exactly what has happened to everything, not only coastlines. A seed catalogue used to be a promise. A frost date used to be a promise. I have three planting charts in the cabin, inherited, and all three of them are now historical documents that describe a place that is technically still here.
That is what I mean when I say the whole arrangement is a house of cards and everyone tells me I am romantic. I am not romantic. I am working off charts that lie, same as she was, except nobody is going to write me up for it because I am not re-issuing them for a ministry.
Anyway. Tomatoes are ahead by nine days on the chart that has been wrong for a decade, which is at least consistent.
That is what I mean when I say the whole arrangement is a house of cards and everyone tells me I am romantic. I am not romantic. I am working off charts that lie, same as she was, except nobody is going to write me up for it because I am not re-issuing them for a ministry.
Anyway. Tomatoes are ahead by nine days on the chart that has been wrong for a decade, which is at least consistent.