April 14, 2022
Mountains Beyond Mountains
“The world is infinitely complicated. You don’t have to catch up to the complexity; it will inevitably catch up with you. It will bury you with considerations, contextualizations, and unintended consequences. But if, in the midst of the rubble, you can resist explaining away your earliest moral instincts, then you will have preserved something good and true. You might make some people’s lives more livable, more beautiful even. You might make some people uncomfortable. You might feel sad in a sad world. You might feel mad in a maddening world. It’s not an easy way to be—especially if you travel between cultures and classes like Farmer did—but there’s succor in the resistance. It’s the best way I know to stay human.” Courtney E. Martin
I’ve been reading a lot lately, and not writing down nearly enough about any of that (which is FINE, really, because the reading is the point) but I wanted to note something about the wonderful experience I had reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, a 2003 biography of Paul Former, a global health pioneer whose untimely death shook his community in February.
I’d first learned about him through Courtney Martin’s newsletter, and then a couple of days later, CBC Ideas replayed their conversation with him while I was driving in the car, and I knew this was somebody I wanted to learn more about.
I am preoccupied these days with learning how to be properly human in the world, but also doing so without assuming political posturing, which had been my strategy in the difficult couple of years before the pandemic, a strategy that seemed less and less effective once things got really complicated and I began to understand that politics is inherently divisive and inadequate to meet the challenges of our current moment, which requires all hands on deck. And of course, this is impossible. So what to do in the face of that? And Paul Farmer’s life is an answer to that question. (Not THE answer. Kidder writes wonderfully about how Farmer is not a model to follow. Just an example that pushing against the impossible is possible.)
I signed up for a reading group Courtney Martin was running and had two days to read this 300 page book before then, which I knew would be challenge, but it turned out not to be, because I couldn’t put it down. Farmer’s origin story, the story of his childhood, is extraordinary—Martin writes a lot about consciously raising our children and Farmer’s story made me think about the unlikely formula for raising a human being into him, which involves a peripatetic childhood living, variously, on a boat and a school bus. And that he died young (he was in his early sixties) made me think about how fortunate it was that he seemed to emerge fully formed, his worldview solid by his early twenties, and he knew what he wanted to do with his life, working as an anthropologist and a physician. (The idea too about Farmer not being THE answer to the question. It makes me think about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez too being posited as THE answer—these are both extraordinarily brilliant individuals. Most people can’t live up these standards. But surely there is something we can learn from them all the same?)
Farmer couldn’t fix it all, he couldn’t heal everyone, but he went out of his way to help a whole bunch of people in his life, determining that every single life was worth trying to save. Which didn’t always make sense to others—what was the point of saving a handful of others when so many others are suffering? And yet. His story a metaphor of the rest of us attesting to the value of keeping going, of keeping trying, even when it seems it doesn’t matter. But it does. The trying and the outcome, all of it.
