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members of the group learn to take responsibility for one another and to share burdens. Just as my experiences in the Philippines gave me a second way of thinking and feeling about death, my experience on that hike into Sinai has informed my feelings about all those circumstances in which one part of a community supports another, providing education or welfare or health care. Receiving help can be bitter, a shaming reminder of inadequacy, but that experience taught me that real help does not treat need as the result of irresponsibility or malingering and is generous enough to make it possible to contribute in turn.
    I have often chosen to go into unfamiliar settings in spite of the discomfort involved, gaining a sense of perspective in my life that has a very different kind of value from the production of books and articles. Still, I have wondered how I would have reacted to Martin’s death in Manila or my failure to keep up with my Israeli friends if they had occurred soon after arrival in a strange environment. It is not easy to use the crises of one’s own life as the stimuli for new ethnographic insights, yet we all arrive as strangers at the moments of crisis in our lives, having to improvise responses from previous learning. This must be labor; this is bereavement.
    Arriving in a new place, you start from an acknowledgment of strangeness, a disciplined use of discomfort and surprise. Later, as observations accumulate, the awareness of contrast dwindles and must be replaced with a growing understanding of how observations fit together within a system unique to the other culture. Having made as much use as possible of the sense that everything is totally alien, you begin to experience, through increasing familiarity, the way in which everything makes sense within a new logic. Eventually an ethnographer will hope to develop a description of a whole way of life that will convey this internal consistency, in which the height and placement of a chair, the adult response to a crying baby and to voices raised in dispute, and the rules about when to relax and the rhythms of the day can be integrated, although never perfectly. The final description should deal with the other culture in its own terms. Yet it is contrast that makes learning possible.
    When I first arrived at the MacDowell Colony, I put up a picture in my studio of a row of big brown bats on a calendar Vanni gave me and a clipping from the Sunday Times about crashing amphibian populations, sent by my editor, who recognized another of my concerns, and I set out other mementos around the room. The old verse about what a bride should wear to her wedding is a good rule for all transitions, “Something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue.” At one time, I thought the blue was there only to provide a rhyme. Then I wondered whether it was included as a reminder of the sorrows and failures that lurk within any new commitment. Once the word was set into the tradition, a dozen interpretations would have been invented, in the human habit of seeking for meaning. Today on my worktable the blue and green of the miniature globe stand for the integration necessary for life, waters where the ammonites propelled themselves long ago, the ponds drying up and leaving frogs and salamanders bereft. The rhyme suggests not miscellany but the complex spiral of exchange from generation to generation, replication and recombination.

Double Helix
    T HERE WAS A LOT OF SNOW in New Hampshire during the winter I was at the MacDowell Colony, turning the route to my studio into Heraclitus’s river, different at every passing. As my writing moved along, forage became scarce in the woods, and I often saw deer. Each return over the same ground represented layers of change: in me, in my manuscript, in the landscape.
    Even what appears to be a repetition is often a return at the next level of a spiral or, more mysteriously, the other side of a Möbius strip. Take a narrow