Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.” These men will ignore weight regulations on their loads, and safety inspections on their brakes. They will text someone at home in their own dialect or language, listen to pop music in English, and get their needs met locally, in empty lots on mountain passes.

had seen many of the films he cared about, talked about. This was important, because cinephiles like Lucien draw for their confidence to make films from their knowledge of film history, without understanding that the essential spark elevating a movie to art never derives from the low domain of “expertise.” Cinephiles are accountants, but I could speak their language.

They think, I’ll be the clever one, the one who survives mass death. But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

They never imagine that if language is a tree, they must look not at its trunk, but at its roots, which, like a tree’s roots, might form an upside-down chandelier of extravagant complexity, reaching and spreading deep into the dark beyond.

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.

mark. These mysterious ancestors were called “ghost populations.” We’ve found their genes in our genes, Bruno said, but we don’t yet know who these people were. We have not found traces of them in dig sites, neither their own bones nor the bones of what they ate. What this means, Bruno said, is that we haven’t found their trash, and we will not name them and define them, they will stay “ghost,” until we do stumble upon their trash. But their trash might never be found. Don’t underestimate the power of time to erase, he said. Much of life, and what matters most to a culture, consists of what a visual artist would deem “fragile materials”: Wood, say, and wax. Feathers, flowers, fish bones. Plants and unstable pigments. Ice. Emotions, and their transmission from one person to another. Blood, tears, tenderness, joy. Very little of what comprises culture can be found at a dig site.

To live in a cave and renounce technology, renounce everything, that’s like”—he laughed—“about the most modern thing a person could ever do.”

What Jean envisions, Bruno said, is the same old dreary world, which Jean believes people should struggle toward with unions and strikes and collective bargaining—a fight they will lose. Deep down, Jean, too, knows they will lose.

Whether Christian or communist, the real goal of believing, falsely, in a better world, was to energize people to keep going, to keep on trucking

Understand that you can never leave purely, he said. We want to escape what ails us, into some idyll, but know that when you go, you travel with cargo, stowaways, souvenirs from the old world. Don’t be afraid of them.