CHAPTER 16
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control,
and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams,
but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and
controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about
who we are. We do not consciously and deliberately figure
out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. Our tales
are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they
spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood,
is their product, not their source.
DANIEL DENNETT, Consciousness Explained
It takes a long time to understand the language the bean uses
to talk to you.
HENRY PEET
1. Crash
The road journey had been simultaneously an ascent into the
highlands and a descent into hell: Three days of bone-shattering
roads and petrol-laced heat. The worst thing was that despite the
noxious fumes wafting from the deafening and exposed engine, the
Ethiopian passengers refused to open the windows. They chose to
literally cook themselves in stale, poisonous air. Every time Roy tried
to open a window a crack, everyone behind him yowled in protest. It
made no sense and it compounded his misery.
Though the environment inside the bus was appalling, beyond
the smudged window panes lay some of the most outrageously
beautiful scenery he had witnessed in his life. He felt like Tantalus,
beholding objects of desire but unable to embrace or smell or drink
them in as they whizzed by in an endless unfolding of ecstasy.
Somewhere in the middle of the journey the man next to him on
the bus explained why he couldn’t open the window: Ethiopian
peasants maintained that evil spirits in the wind would make them
sick if a breeze was allowed to enter the bus. Instead they chose to
lock themselves in a sealed iron shell full of happy viruses.
Consequently they were all sick and coughing up phlegm—Roy had
never seen so many people with colds in one place before. Of course,
by the time he arrived at Lake Tana, he was sick himself. The two
ABYSSINIA
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