Page 28 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

And at that moment, the city’s silence burst apart. A tremendous roar erupted all around us. People poured out of every doorway—out of homes and stores and bars, and into the streets. They were screaming in exaltation, all of them, yelling, “YYYAAAAAAAAAA!” Many of them had their faces painted in the colors of the Icelandic flag, and quite a lot of them were openly weeping. A tall fellow around my age picked me up and held me up to the sky like I was Simba in The Lion King and then embraced me as he wept. Someone draped a scarf around Ryan’s neck.

“What the hell is happening?” Sarah asked, with her trademark precision.

Beers were handed around. We took some. The initial chaos of screaming soon organized itself into song, songs that were apparently very emotional, because everyone except for us was crying as they sang in the streets. Some people had to sit down on the curbs in order to sob properly. The crowd continued to swell. There are 120,000 people in Reykjavík, and they were all on the streets, all seemingly on this street. Making it to our hotel was an impossibility now. We were in the throng, amidst some great wave of human experience, and all we could hope for was to hold on to our suitcases. As one song ended and everyone began to shout again, I decided to try it myself. I lifted my unopened can of beer into the air and shouted “YAAAAAAA!” Although I did not know what we were celebrating, I felt exultant. I loved Iceland. I loved Reykjavík. I loved these people, whose tears and sweat smudged their red, white, and blue face paint.

Eventually, we were able to ascertain that Iceland had just secured its first-ever team Olympic medal, in the sport of men’s handball. I found myself wondering what event in my home country might lead to such shared celebrations. Cities celebrate when their teams win the World Series or the Super Bowl, but the only time I’d seen any public celebrations of a national event was in 1999, when the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team won the World Cup. I was living in the small town of Moose Pass, Alaska, that summer, working at a cafe. My colleagues and I were watching the game on a tiny TV in the corner of the shop, and after Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty kick, I heard horns honking, and then a couple of minutes later, a single voice from somewhere in Moose Pass shouted, “FUCK YES AMERICA!”

I didn’t know much about men’s team handball,* but I am willing to get excited about almost anything in sports, and by the time we got to the hotel a couple of hours later, I considered myself a die-hard fan of Icelandic men’s team handball. I wanted to rest in the hotel and perhaps watch some highlights—the excitement of my beloved team winning an Olympic medal had exhausted me—but my compatriots insisted that we go out and soak in some Icelandic culture.

The crowd had thinned considerably, and it was still early in the day, so we visited a museum where we learned that because the Icelandic language has changed so little over the centuries, their classic sagas read like contemporary literature. We saw the chess table where Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in 1972. Later, we took a tour bus trip to the island’s interior, where endless plains of volcanic rock make it feel like you’re on another planet. Our tour guide extolled Iceland’s many virtues. “In Greenland it is always icy,” she said, “but here in Iceland the weather is quite mild. They should call Iceland Greenland and Greenland Iceland.” Then we all got out of the bus to observe a waterfall. It was fifty degrees Fahrenheit in August, and a cold rain was blowing at us horizontally, rendering umbrellas utterly useless.

Shouting to be heard over the wind, the tour guide said, “ICELAND HAS MANY NATURAL WONDERS AS YOU CAN SEE THIS WATERFALL IS VERY HISTORIC.” Even now, I cannot look at a waterfall without thinking, “Very historic.”

When we returned to the hotel around six, sopping wet and bone cold, I begged my friends for a quiet night in. We’d done so much. Couldn’t we just order room service and watch some handball highlights and go to bed? But no. The marrow had to be sucked out of life, and so I reluctantly followed my wife and friends out into what would’ve been the evening, except that in summertime Reykjavík, the sun doesn’t set until after ten.

We walked to Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, that hot dog stand Julie recommended, and stood in a surprisingly short line outside a small building decorated with an anthropomorphic frankfurter wearing a chef’s hat. I’d been told to order “one with everything,” and I did—a hot dog with remoulade, sweet mustard, and bits of fried onion. The hot dogs at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur are famous—they are featured in travel guides and TV shows. Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur has been rated on a five-star scale by thousands of Google users, and like anything that has become exceedingly popular, there is widespread backlash. Many reviews point out that this is, after all, just a hot dog. “Nothing too special,” one wrote. “Not that good had better at a gas station,” reported a visitor named Doug.

Like Doug, I am often disappointed by much-hyped culinary experiences, perhaps because of the weight of expectation, and perhaps because I just don’t like food that much. And yet, I found the hot dog at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur not just worthy of the hype but, if anything, underappreciated. I don’t even particularly like hot dogs, but that hot dog was among the most joyous culinary experiences of my life.

A few months later, in the fall of 2008, an economic recession would sweep the globe, and Iceland would be among the nations hardest hit, with its currency declining in value by 35 percent in just a few months. As the recession took hold and credit markets froze, experts said we were experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction, although as it happened, the next once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction was only twelve years away. We should get out of the habit of saying that anything is once-in-a-lifetime. We should stop pretending we have any idea how long a lifetime is, or what might happen in one.

And yet, I strongly suspect that our long day in Iceland really was once-in-a-lifetime. On the chilly summer day Iceland secured their first-ever summer Olympics team medal, I ate a hot dog while huddled with my friends. It was the greatest hot dog I’ve ever eaten. It cured my multiday hangover and cleared the film from my eyes and sent me out into the Reykjavík twilight feeling the kind of close-to-the-chest joy that can’t last—but also doesn’t need to.

I give Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur five stars.

THE NOTES APP

THE IOS NOTES APP DEBUTED with the first iPhone in 2007. Back then, the app’s default font looked vaguely like handwriting, and had a yellow background with horizontal lines between each row of text, an attempt to call to mind the yellow legal pads of yore. Even now, the Notes app has a slightly textured background that mimics paper, an example of what’s called skeuomorphic design, where a derivative object—say, an app—retains now-obsolete elements of the original object’s design. Casino slot machines, for instance, no longer need a pullable arm, but most still have one. Many mobile device apps use skeuomorphic design—our calculator apps are calculator-shaped; our digital watches have minute and hour hands, and so on. Perhaps all of this is done in the hopes that we won’t notice just how quickly everything is changing.

For most of my life, I took notes in the margins of whatever book I happened to be reading. I’ve never been the kind of person to carry a notebook. I want to be a person who journals, who sits on park benches and has wonderful thoughts that must be immediately captured. But I usually found that my thoughts could wait, and if for some reason I needed to scribble something down, I always had a book with me, and a pen in my pocket.

There is a grocery list in my copy of Song of Solomon, and directions to my great-aunt’s house in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. On page 241 of All the King’s Men, I wrote at the bottom of the page, “It rains for two days straight,” an idea I had for the plot of my first novel, Looking for Alaska. There are many other references to my stories in books I was reading. Sometimes it’s only a few words: FERAL HOG HUNT, scrawled in the margins of Our Southern Highlanders, became part of the climactic scene in my book An Abundance of Katherines.

Usually, though, my marginalia just baffles me. On page 84 of my copy of Jane Eyre, why did I write, “You have never been so lonely”? Was I even the you of that sentence? The note depends on a context I now lack. When I think back to reading Jane Eyre for the first time in college, I don’t remember being lonely or whatever else was happening in my daily life. I mostly remember Jane herself, how Rochester called her “my sympathy,” how Jane said the way to avoid hell was “to keep in good health and not die.”

I first got an iPhone in 2008, but I was slow to abandon my book-margin note-taking. I didn’t write in the Notes app until 2010. But not long after, I found that I was often leaving home without a pen in my pocket, and eventually I’d often leave home without a physical book in my hand. The problem of having neither pen nor paper was both caused and solved by the iPhone.*

Having a digital library and a note-taking device in my pocket at all times did not make my notes-to-self any more comprehensible. Why, for instance, did I write in 2011, “They’re painting the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum”? Were they painting the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum? Or did I think that was a good line for a story? I have no idea. But I can still parse some of the notes, and taken together they do form a strange kind of autobiography, a way into knowing myself through the lens of what I cared about. Beginning in 2020, I adopted a different note-taking app, leaving Apple’s Notes behind. The Notes app is now, like the marginalia in that old copy of Jane Eyre, a series of relics. Here is one note I wrote for each year of my life with the Notes app.

2019: “Send Manguso quote to Sarah.” More than a dozen of my notes are reminders to send Sarah something—a Donald Hall essay, the catalog for MOCA’s Kerry James Marshall exhibition, or a joke Henry James wrote about adverbs (“the only qualification I really much respect”). I don’t know how much of this stuff I ever actually shared with her, because things in the Notes app had a way of not getting done. I also don’t know which Sarah Manguso quote I was referring to, but it may have been a passage about life in a psychiatric hospital from Manguso’s book Two Kinds of Decay: “The ward was the only true community of equals I have ever lived in. What I mean is that we all knew we had already lived through hell, that our lives were already over, and all we had was the final descent. The only thing to do on the way down was to radiate mercy.”

2018: “Discontinuity of tense and perspective hallmark of your time.” I have no idea what those words mean, but there they are, typed by me in March of 2018 with no further context.

2017: “Driving alone at night is heartbreak without the agony.” I had this thought while driving alone at night, and then I pulled over to write it down, which ruined the feeling.

2016: “No bright line between imagination and memory.” According to my Google calendar, when I wrote this I was at the home of my best friends, Chris and Marina Waters. I suspect Sarah probably said a version of that line in conversation, and then I stole it. At any rate, it ended up in my book Turtles All the Way Down, which is about a kid who is constantly remembering what she imagined and imagining what she remembers.

2015: “This bar has lights everywhere but you can’t see anybody’s face.” I sometimes feel like I can’t properly participate in conversation, because everything I say and hear has to drip through the sieve of my anxiety, and so by the time I understand what someone has just said to me and how I ought to respond, my laughter or whatever seems weirdly delayed. Knowing this will happen makes my anxiety worse, which in turn makes the problem worse. I sometimes deal with it by imagining myself not as part of great conversations but instead as a chronicler of them, so I pull out my phone and take some notes. “This bar has lights everywhere but you can’t see anybody’s face” is something a movie star’s publicist said to my colleague Elyse Marshall when we were all at a hotel bar in Cleveland, Ohio. I liked the line a lot and I’ll probably try to use it in a novel someday.

2014: “Strawberry Hill is not the luxury alcohol experience I remember it being.” I wrote this after I’d had a bottle of Strawberry Hill, a four-dollar, bright pink, wine-like beverage made by Boone’s Farm. I often drank Strawberry Hill in high school, and loved it then, but in the intervening years, either it has changed or I have.*

2013: “Fire fights fire.” This phrase must have mattered to me, because I wrote it three separate times in the Notes app in 2013, but I have absolutely no idea what it meant. It’s a small reminder now that memory is not so much a camera as a filter. The particulates it holds on to are nothing compared to what leaks through.

2012: “Only line meant literally.” One day I was at church, and the gospel reading included Matthew 19:24, which goes, “Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” The minister said that people take every line of the Bible literally except for that one, when it is the only line that is meant literally.

2011: “It was kind of a beautiful day—only saveable sentence.” This one I remember quite vividly. I’d spent almost a year working on a novel about six high school students who end up stranded on a desert island. I was stuck with the story so I decided to take a couple weeks away from it and then reread it. When I returned to it with clear eyes, I found absolutely nothing—no heart, no wit, no joy. It had to be scrapped, except for that one sentence, “It was kind of a beautiful day.” I still like that sentence, though. It ended up in The Fault in Our Stars.

2010: “Her eyes on His eyes on.” According to my phone, this was the first note I made in the app. I assume it was written when I first noticed the pun inside a lyric from my favorite band, the Mountain Goats. Their song “Jenny” is about a girl who has just acquired a yellow-and-black Kawasaki motorcycle, and the narrator who loves her. One of the song’s couplets goes, “And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon / We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have His eyes on.” That line always reminds me of being in eleventh grade, lying in the middle of an open field with three friends I loved ferociously, drinking warm malt liquor, and staring up at the night sky.