The tree stands behind me, leaning. As I dig, a single phrase repeats in my head: “Canted vertiginously over the tailrace.” It’s from Joan Didion’s essay about Hoover Dam, where a man from the Bureau of Reclamation takes her deep into the machinery of the dam to see a turbine and then says, “Touch it.” It’s an essay about power, I once told my students, in all its valences. “One cannot serve both beauty and power,” Connolly writes, quoting Flaubert: “Le pouvoir est essentiellement stupide.” Power is essentially stupid.
