Old Man Stops Riding Bicycle

He had been peddling with resigned determination when I saw him, as if he'd always peddled, and always would be peddling. I saw him out on the road several times a week, and then I didn't.

What was that sappy novella I read for a highschool class? I remember it for the beautiful image at the end, an old man dancing away his own mortality. But in that book, the author, mitch alborn?, alboom?, wastes the opportunity and misses the whole point. He turns the reader's head away from mortally and ends on transitory triumph without addressing our own human conflicts. In Tuesday's with Morrie, the character of Death stays home. We are given happy music and uplifting stories meshing into a sort of Sunday school lesson of sentimental existentialism. An old man, was it with cancer?, dancing. Dancing! And what does Mitch do? Waste it on a sentiment! He draws us from heartbreaking truth and leaves us with a silly picture of an person flailing in irrelevancy. That's not very helpful.

This old man here on the bicycle in the arctic reminded me of that book and that old man, but only for a moment as he rod toward the silly, oblivious dancer, and then peddled through dissolving apparition and on through the remote streets of an arctic town.

I found here that the arctic summer is a place of remembering. We go there, and so are taken out of lives of forgetting. We or gently set down into a mild, endless day, where it’s impossible to avoid remembering. And with the slowness of the imperceptible movement toward the end of life, the arctic's endless night slowly shrouds the endless day. Because of this, the arctic is also place of forgetting, as one has to get right down to the business of forgetting again. 

My simple forgettings are pedestrian. Alaska itself speaks to the original grand american forgetting event, the original early American pettifogging! Here the imposition of the imperial minority of whites has not become an historical abstraction, as it is for most of us Southerners. Here it is still a measurable penetration.

"Now we know in part," reads the beautiful passage before sputtering into false wishes. What does one know in the arctic? It is where the Southern world — now swarming with the work and days of hands — once formed, from where came glaciers and new animals, and it is alien and strange and but hauntingly familiar, like a womb. The arctic is where you learn that we will only ever know in part.