Month: May 2024

Lines Written One Year Ago

It is a hell of a thing to watch someone you love slowly die.
To watch them dissolve before your eyes in the house that you share.
It is a sad, strange privilege.
There is an exaltation to it.
This is the edge of all we know, all we can know.
We spend so much time avoiding the edge, shrinking from it.
But I have been dragged here, and I will not shrink. I must not shrink.
The void is so close. Silent and vast.
It is reflected in her eyes, her yellowing upturned eyes that no longer fully close.
She drowses, pale and thin and full of everything that a life can hold.
It’s all still there, coiled up inside her, even now.
Where will it go?
What will remain?
She is leaving, slowly leaving me even as I watch
She is going
She goes
And I cannot point where.
Somehow it seems as though I should.

Image by Midjourney

Mount Everest Trivia

It’s May, which means it’s summiting season on Mount Everest. If you haven’t already booked your trip to Nepal, I’m afraid it’s probably too late for you to reach the top this year. On the plus side, it’s never too late to learn some pedantic facts about Mount Everest so you can irritate people at your next cocktail party. Also, this way you don’t have to risk losing toes and fingers to frostbite.

Here’s your first fun fact: you’ve been saying it wrong. You may know that the famous peak was named after Sir George Everest, the first Surveyor General of India. But as with poor old Edmond Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame), his namesake is not pronounced the way his name would have been said during his lifetime. Halley rhymed with “valley,” not “daily.” And the first syllable of Everest sounded like “eave.”

But why was Mount Everest named after a British citizen, anyway? All the other big peaks in Nepal have local names (repeat after me: Lhotse, Nuptse, Annapurna II; Jannu, Kabru, Thamserku). More to the point, the peak wasn’t even inside of British-controlled India at the time. The government of Nepal was suspicious of the British, so they didn’t allow the survey team inside their borders. The surveyors had to work out how tall Everest was by means of telescopic transnational peak-peeking. But then they were stymied by the fact that there was no obvious and unambiguous local contender for the name. Depending on where you stand, it is Chomolangma or Sagarmatha or maybe Devadhunga. This gets us to the real reason a British name prevailed: it was Britain was making the maps. To be a little more specific, the office that Sir George Everest built was making the maps. In fairness, Everest didn’t name the mountain after himself. Andrew Scott Waugh, his successor as Surveyor General, did that part.

But here, at last, is my favorite fun fact about Mount Everest: it was discovered by a computer. Stop for a second and consider that “the tallest mountain in the world” is remarkably abstract concept. Tallest compared to what? The ocean? The ocean is 440 miles away from Mount Everest! How would you even begin to compare a mountain in Asia to a mountain in South America? In a very real sense, the tallest mountain in the world didn’t even exist until the Royal Geographical Society declared that it had been found. Working out the world’s tallest mountain meant reducing huge amounts of data with extravagant trigonometric calculations. In the nineteenth century, the people who did these calculations were called “computers.” The chief computer for the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was a man named Radhanath Sikdar. Sikdar was a talented mathematician who would have been overseeing the construction of the distance and altitude tables. And after more than ten years of work, he would have been one of the first people to know. Many people saw the mountain, but who saw exactly how tall it was? A computer, that’s who. A computer named Radhanath Sikdar.