Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I thank Blaine Smith, whose radiant and judicious presence has kept me steady when things looked stormy, and whose quiet insights help me to grow in beautiful ways.

I thank Oliver Scher, Lucy Scher, Blaine Solomon, and George Solomon. No one else could root me to the world as they have.

Finally, I thank my husband, John Habich Solomon, who has accompanied me on both outward and inward journeys. There’s no one with whom I’d prefer to see the world, nor to live in it. He is my north and south poles, my equator, my Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, my seven continents and seven seas.

© TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS

ANDREW SOLOMON is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, president of PEN American Center, and a regular contributor to the New Yorker, NPR, and the New York Times Magazine. A lecturer and activist, he is the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which has won thirty additional national awards, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in twenty-four languages. His TED Talks have been viewed more than 12 million times. He lives in New York and London and is a dual national.

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ALSO BY ANDREW SOLOMON

The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost

A Stone Boat

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

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Notes

Dispatches from Everywhere

2 The US Army’s Standards of Medical Fitness (Army Regulation 40-501) call for referral to a Medical Evaluation Board for “pes planus, when symptomatic, more than moderate, with pronation on weight bearing which prevents the wearing of military footwear, or when associated with vascular changes.” Mild and moderate cases of flat feet would not disqualify one from military service.

4 Erika Urbach’s obituary can be found on the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers website, at http://norwegianbachelorfarmers.com/lakewoodrock/stories/Erika.html.

4 This delightful collection is still in print: Frances Carpenter, Tales of a Korean Grandmother (1989).

8 The ruins of Ingapirca—also known as the “Inca wall”—are currently being restored; see “En Ingapirca continúa proceso de restauración en piedras,” El Tiempo, April 8, 2015.

11 The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is described in British Broadcasting Corporation, “Chernobyl: 20 years on,” BBC News, June 12, 2007. For a striking collection of photographs of the site at the time of the reactor fire and over the following twenty-five years, see Alan Taylor, “The Chernobyl disaster: 25 years ago,” Atlantic, March 23, 2011.

11 In Chekhov’s 1900 play, The Three Sisters, youngest sister, Irina, yearns for the family’s return to the city of her birth. Act 2 closes with her plaint “Moscow . . . Oh, Lord. Could we go to Moscow”; see Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters: A Play by Anton Chekhov Adapted by David Mamet (1992).

12 Sotheby’s first auction of contemporary Soviet art, conducted July 7, 1988, was recounted in my first book, The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (1991).

13 Nikita Alexeev’s statement (“We have been preparing ourselves to be not great artists, but angels”) occurs on page 283 of Solomon (1991), ibid.

14 For the Russian edition, see The Irony Tower. Советские художники во времена гласности (2013).

16 Tennyson’s “Ulysses” may be found on page 88 of Poems by Alfred Tennyson in Two Volumes: Vol. 2 (1842).

16 The earliest known instance of the quote attributed to St. Augustine (“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page”) occurs on page 2 of John Feltham, The English Enchiridion (1799).