On a Tuesday in August, at three in the afternoon in Manhattan and two in the valley, a telephone went to speaker and a family in Nebraska began to read a week to me. The call carried a death and a storm in the same breath, which is how the plains have always carried them, the funeral hour and the rain total riding the same wire. Trees down across the county. The town’s grain silo wrecked the week before the crop came in. A hundred utility poles down, thirty-four of them consecutive on one county road, snapped at ground level and thrown across into the lines and trees on the other side. Four inches of rain that day at North Loup, and still raining. The festival, Popcorn Days, running since 1901, had gone on among the ruins anyway, because a town that cancels its celebration has lost something the storm cannot carry off.
The argument, stated once: before humanity read letters, it read the world, and it survived by the quality of its reading. A read is a prediction from partial signal under time pressure. It differs from a guess because its priors were trained by consequence, and from superstition because its priors get corrected. The color of the sky, the grain of the wind, the temper of the season: that was the first literacy, and reading by convention, letters and instruments and readouts and books, arrived second and annexed the name. The book you are reading right now is an instrument of the second literacy, and the book says so about itself, because the second literacy is not the villain of the piece. The villain, if the piece has one, is forgetting.
I have some standing in the first literacy, and I will date it. The child at the porch in the first chapter, being handed an alphabet nobody called an alphabet, is the author. The letters were color. Rain reads green across the horizon. Hail reads grey with streaks of blue. A thunderstorm reads a wicked, flashing black. The prediction was spoken aloud, and then the weather arrived to grade the child in front of everyone. That is the whole pedagogy: exposure, prediction, verdict, thousands of times, on real ground. I did not know the scholarship’s name for any of it until I was grown and gone from the valley. The scholarship exists, it is deep, and the book stands on it. What the scholarship calls perceptual learning and recognition-primed decision, the porch called paying attention.
One settlement makes the gallery possible, and it deserves its own paragraph because it is, to my knowledge, the only one of its kind in the field. In 2009, Daniel Kahneman, the century’s great skeptic of intuition, and Gary Klein, its great defender, sat down to an adversarial collaboration, an exercise in which two opponents write the paper together, and they produced a settlement the book calls the treaty. Intuition earns trust only in high-validity environments: regular worlds with fast, honest feedback and enough exposure to learn them. One sentence of the treaty prints verbatim in the book, because the book’s method stands on its exact words. The surf line passes the treaty’s terms. The fireground passes. The doorway passes. The cloud, the market, and the interview room fail them, and the failures are the third movement’s work. Kahneman is gone now, and the book’s acknowledgments carry the debt by name, his and Klein’s both, because the settlement they printed is the license under which everything the gallery claims is claimed.
Here is what the middle of the book does, and it is the part I am proudest of, because it is the part that could have failed. The gallery: seven chapters, seven rooms, seven masters. A lifeguard reading the four signs of a rip current on a crowded July beach, working from the book’s central inversion, which is that the calmest water is the dangerous water, the smooth gap between the breaking waves being the outflow lane, the mouth. A fire lieutenant at an ordinary house fire who feels the wrongness before he can name it, pulls his crew into the street, and watches the floor collapse into the basement where they had been standing. A tracker on a dirt cutline at dawn reading last night’s newspaper off the ground. A stockman’s two-letter alphabet, the flight zone and the point of balance, and a wood in Tennessee where the golden-winged warblers left a day or two before the sirens, tracked by the light recorders on their backs, for reasons nobody in the wood could have felt. A wheel-tapper walking the length of a train at evening, reading the ring of the wheels, in a chapter that begins with the Versailles disaster of 1842, the locked carriages, and the birth of fatigue science. A nurse passing a doorway at three in the morning and then not passing it. A bouncer who has been furniture for an hour getting down off his stool and crossing the floor before the swing.
Each of those chapters concedes its catastrophe, because the pattern is the receipt. Mann Gulch is in the fire chapter, thirteen crosses on the hillside and Wag Dodge standing alive in the ring of his own escape fire while his crew lies up the slope, because the crew could not read the fire he laid down in front of them in flame. Failure to rescue is in the ward chapter, the discovery, measured and dated 1992, that the difference between hospitals is the reading. The lifeguard chapter prints the drowning that the calm water invites, and the swim-guidance dispute as a live dispute, because the record corrected the old confidence and the book’s rule is that the record wins.
And then the book turns, because it has to. We have built machines that read the world on our behalf, and they are good. The third movement says so in a full voice, once, plainly, and means it: the forecast app is nearly always right, the backup camera sees the low child the shoulder check misses, the monitor watches all night without fatigue. I refuse the Luddite tract, and the book refuses it with me, on the page, by name. A book that itemizes the trade without conceding the gain is a costume, and there are enough costumes.
The cost is the retirement. Every readout retires a literacy, and the retirement is always silent, because the readout never tells you what it cost. The shoulders of the evidence here are, to my knowledge, unimpeached. In 1983, an engineer named Lisanne Bainbridge published a paper called Ironies of Automation, given at a man-machine conference the year before, and the book carries it at its pages because the pages are short and the argument has not aged in forty years. The designer treats the human operator as the unreliable part of the system and automates what can be automated. What remains for the human is the watching of the automated system, which is precisely the work a deskilled watcher can no longer do. The system automates the readable work, deskills the watcher, and hands its worst moments, cold, to the person it has been deskilling all along. If that sentence reads like a description of your job, your industry, your morning, it is because Bainbridge wrote your morning down forty-three years ago.
The movement has a spine, and I will only point at it, because pointing is what the book itself does. The night of July 16, 1999, a Piper Saratoga over the Atlantic off Martha’s Vineyard, in haze, the horizon erased. The body’s instruments, the vestibular system built for ground truth, compose confident fictions in a world with no ground. The panel is telling the truth. The flight’s last minutes stand at the official record, a radar study, minute by minute, and the book prints the finding verbatim, because the quoted-language ruling of this house is that safety boards’ findings are the record and the record prints at record width. The ruling of the chapter is the ruling of the movement: calibration, never nostalgia. The book is not against the gauge. It is against not knowing which room you are standing in, the room where the body reads true or the room where the body lies.
And the question has a present tense, which is why the book is out this week and not in some quieter year. The machines have lately been assigned to read authorship itself: the detectors ruling on whose hand held the pen, finding against the writers whose second language is English at rates the literature has now measured, while the actual hand goes unexamined. The book prints that finding, dates it, and leaves its trial to another book of mine, taking only the shape of the lesson. But note the shape, because it is the same shape as the Saratoga’s night and the ward’s alarm stack: an instrument handed a verdict to read, a watcher deskilled in the watching, the worst moments handed back, cold, to the person the system has been deskilling all along. The readout economy does not announce itself as an economy. It arrives as convenience, and it invoices later.
I want to be honest about what writing this cost, because the celebration genre has a habit of skipping the ledger. The book opens on a death in my family, delivered to me on a speakerphone with a storm inventory, and the dead are never named in it, and the book says near its close why: the death kept its privacy to the end of the book, the way the family kept it in the call. The week of the storms was also the week of the funeral, and the valley did both at once. Writing the first chapter meant setting my own family’s testimony, undated as the teller left it, beside the dated federal chronology of the same week, and refusing to correct the two into each other. The layering is the honesty. I did not understand, when I began, that the book I was describing to people as being about weather and work was a book about my family’s way of carrying its dead. The prose knew before I did. That is not a mystical claim. It is the ordinary experience of a writer whose method is evidence: you assemble the record, and the record tells you what the book is about.
The recovery movement is short, two chapters, and it is the reason the book is not a lament. The kitchen window is the oldest classroom, and the lesson is one sentence long: look up, and say what you see out loud. A child, an adult, the horizon. The adult in the chapter is out of practice, the priors of a lifetime spent indoors, and the child is ahead of her, which is the point: the literacy is not a birthright of the old. It is trainable, at any age, by anyone, on any ground, because the ground still grades every call. The scholarship of learning arrives in the chapter to grade the recipe, and the book prints the ceiling on promises along with the promise, because the perceptual-gifts literature has limits and the limits are part of the evidence. What the window promises is not mastery by weekend. What it promises is that the window is there.
The final chapter puts the whole method on trial for its hardest case: reading people. The rule the book licenses is in its title: conduct, never kind. A read of conduct is a sequence in context, checkable against what happens next, correctable when wrong, indifferent to who performs the conduct. A read of kind, the verdict on what a person is, survives every disconfirmation, and the book licenses none of it. Terry v. Ohio and Floyd v. City of New York stand where the record stands, and the pre-assault sequence of the bar chapter is re-run under the license, because a method that cannot survive its hardest case is a method that should not survive. I will leave the trial to the book. The verdict is three clauses long.
Some practical matters, since this is a celebration and a celebration may carry logistics. The book is out now as a Kindle eBook and as a Kindle paperback, cream paper, five and a half by eight and a half inches, three hundred and nineteen pages. The index is a real one: two hundred and two entries, mapped to the actual pages, with the paperback’s page locators and the eBook’s chapter locators each true to their edition. The audiobook is in preparation, and with it a narrator’s companion, a pronunciation guide and a chapter-by-chapter briefing, because a voice carrying a book deserves to know where the ground is under each scene. Everything is at bolesbooks.com.
I have been writing and publishing since 1975, when I was paid for my first byline, and people who have read this site for a while will recognize the machinery: the record first, the layers printed, the corrections standing in the open, the banned words banned. What is different here, and I will say it once and plainly, is the ground. Most of my books argue with the century. This one argues with the weather, and the weather was my family. The man in the alley watching the sky assemble is real. The boy at the porch learning the letters is real. The four inches of rain at North Loup, still falling while the phone sat on the desk in New York, are real, and so is the festival that went on anyway.
The sky over your town is doing something right now. The book’s last instruction to itself is that it does not recap and it does not preview, because the world goes on writing, and the first word of the next sentence is already on the page. Go to the window. Look up. Say what you see out loud. The grading begins immediately, and it has been waiting for you your whole life.
David Boles is the author of First the Sky Turns Green: Reading the World Before It Strikes, out now from David Boles Books Writing & Publishing. He also tends to write a lot here, at BolesBlogs.com.
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