The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

He has found it a loud, tiresome city, excessively pleased with itself, and far too keen to empty an innocent man’s pockets.

The very rich do not only buy estates and fine trinkets, thinks Marya, they buy certainty. They buy the conviction that this journey holds no danger for them. She envies them their confidence.

“Fanciful thoughts lead to dangerous thoughts,” they are told on the train.

“Glass is alchemy made solid. It is sand and heat and patience,” her father would say, when he was feeling poetic. “Glass can trap light, use it, shatter it.”

But more scientifically rigorous data was simply not available. Of course there had been expeditions, in the early days of the changes, far into the interior. It was human nature, after all—the desire to map, to collect, to understand.

Isn’t that what everyone wanted? To not be forgotten. To be more than a line in a ledger, the sum total of your life adding up to little more than the strength you wasted to make other men rich.

Why must we think that an absence of order equates to an absence of meaning? Is it not meaning enough that we should wonder? Is that not what God demands of us?”

You ask, young man, whether beauty and danger can be seen to cancel each other out. Why do they need to? They give us meaning upon meaning which we may read, study, wonder at.”

She can feel the release, the relief of giving in, like dropping the precious object you have always been so afraid of smashing.

It is this reliance on others that is unbearable; this helplessness in the face of incompetence and idleness.

This is why we have our rituals, she thinks. This is why they are needed—so that we can lose ourselves for a while.

“It was built to be strong, not to be beautiful,” says Suzuki. The implacable face of the Russian Empire, grimly defending its territory.

Crows. Yes, an apt name, though the crow is a much maligned bird—a creature cannot be good or evil, not like man, who is born good and pure, who must learn evil. Names matter.

We leave you to find ways to live alongside it, to make the choice that faces us all—whether to turn away from the changes, to fight, to flee; or whether to welcome them in.