Labels and Libations

Sunday February 13, 2022

It’s been a little over a week since a winter storm wrapped every twig and branch with a quarter inch of clear ice. Birches bent, maples dropped boughs, and honey locusts’ long limbs were torn from their trunks. Woodstock made the national news for the number of households without power. My wife and her church friends assembled hundreds of sandwiches for the local ‘warming center’.

The next morning under blue skies the world sparkled. Sunlight striking ice-covered twigs refracted prism-like, causing the maple in our yard to wink with sapphire, ruby, and emerald sparks of fire.

I tried in vain to capture this with my Pixel 5. Try as I might, shifting angle and proximity, different modes, each digital snapshot returned a bland sunny scene, clear ice, blue sky, all magic removed.

In any case, I was cold and eager to escape indoors to return to A Gentleman in Moscow and my new friend Count Rostov.

The Count is a vestige of Tsarist Russia, marooned by circumstance under house arrest at the Metropol Hotel. He watches the creeping influence of the Bolsheviks slowly transform the hotel while he himself also transitions from patron to head waiter — forming a subversive triumvirate with the chef and maître d’ dedicated to quality in the kitchen, friendship, and good food and drink.

In a particularly poignant scene, the count has arrived at the hotel restaurant on his day off. An avid sommelier, he has in mind a particular pairing for his stew, only to be told by the waiter that the People’s Hotel now only serves Red and White wine. The maître d’ takes him to the cellar to see 10,000 bottles of wine, stripped of their labels and reduced to anonymity.

There is of course a lot of complexity, layered meanings, metaphor and magic in an Amor Towles novel which I can’t hope to convey in a few paragraphs, and in any case my intent is not to write a book report. My preference in reading is for texture and my enjoyment relates more to the savoring of language rather than analysis.

My amateur appreciation of good writing, simplistic and subjective as it may be, exceeds my knowledge of wine. Without google lens I couldn’t tell a Bordeaux from a Barolo.

Still, I’m haunted by the image of all those anonymous bottles. All that carefully catalogued terroir. Gone. The people have spoken.

There’s apparently a company working on the technology to upload your brain — all your memories, thoughts, biases and beliefs — to the cloud.

In theory, this brain dump could be rebooted in an artificial neural network, and your mind could go on buzzing indefinitely as long as there was someone willing to pay the electric bill.

Joe Rogan’s digital doppelganger could keep generating podcasts, Neil Young’s activist avatar could take offense, the rest of the blogosphere could opine, all of this cacophony reverberating in a digital echo chamber where none would know or hear but bots and their descendants.

Or what about this? Upload your brain and sell it as an NFT.

Future collectors could buy and sell vintage memories. Immersive eye-witness experiences of Woodstock, replay-able on standard VR devises. Mud, mosquitos the works.

A single summer day. My friends and I sit on sun-warmed stone, immersed in the pound and sound of water spraying and plunging into a tree-shaded pool. It is too loud for conversation. Later we will dive for beer cans cached under a rock in the blue-green depths, surfacing with an explosion of exhaled breath to sprint, skin tingling for shore.

For now, we are content to sit. Soothed and stilled by the endless tumbling and bubbling, rolling and rippling.

There is no internet. There are no PCs. No mobile phones.

A tiny shard of pre-digital life.

You know what? I’m not going to sell. I am who I am, I know what I know. Don’t put me in a bottle with a label: White Male, Kingston High School class of 1983.

Outside, winter is giving way to spring. The ice of last week has melted. Buckets hang on maple trees, sap is rising.

The memories in my fickle analog brain are morphing and melting as well. When I die, pour me out as a libation. Don’t let me linger.