Richard Powers calls it highway hypnosis–the hallucinatory state of mind that descends upon a weary traveler at the end of a long day on the road. In the late 1990s, the novelist was driving alone from Illinois to Arizona when in Nebraska he came upon what he thought was a mirage: thousands of three-foot-tall birds falling from the heavens. Powers was so shocked that he almost drove off the highway. The next day he learned that what he’d seen were sandhill cranes on their annual migration to the Platte River.
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Powers, an Evanston native who lives in Urbana and teaches English at the University of Illinois, studied physics during his undergraduate years and has woven science into the complex narratives of previous novels like The Gold Bug Variations (published a few years after he won a MacArthur genius grant) and Galatea 2.2. He saw a connection between Capgras and the cranes. “Learning about how the human brain can become split between rational and emotional processes–losing the ability to recognize a loved one while finding everyone else perfectly recognizable–I remembered that vision of the cranes and their mysterious mass staging. That’s where my story came together.
“In a way,” he continues, “this book is a return to the neuroscientific themes I had written about before, but it’s also an attempt to bring those themes forward into the landscape of personal empathy while raising this larger question about our connection to other creatures. Can we recognize ourselves in other species?”
I don’t think there’s a single midwestern narrative. I’ve tried different ways in several books to tap into some of those long rhythms that the midwest invites us to hear. But it’s a subtle place that opens up only gradually as you keep looking at it, and keep listening.
The seeds of writing in me–boy, I could narrate that in all kinds of ways. Certainly, leaving Chicago at 11 to live in Bangkok had an enormous impact on me. [His family lived abroad for five years when his father, a high school principal, took a job at the International School of Bangkok.] Being dropped in an extremely different culture on the other side of the globe turned me into an observer. As I grew up, my love of music intersected with my love of science to become an interest in form–pattern making and pattern finding. Those impulses have been at the core of my vocation as a writer. What patterns can I find in people? What patterns can I find in the outside world?
The more simplicity that you can create in your own life, the more freedom you have to travel in your fiction. The fewer intrusions and complications in the real world, the more rich and textured the creative process can become. That simplicity gets harder and harder for me to preserve with every passing year.
The question is the relationship of technology to the user. The really perceptive thinkers about technology have been especially useful in pointing out, in the last several years, how tools are not something external to us or forced upon us, not something that makes us conform intellectually to certain forms of use. Rather, our technologies are prosthetic extensions of ourselves; they represent the congealed collection of our hopes and fears and dreams about the way we would like to extend ourselves into the world.
