https://jerrywbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/And-of-Clay-We-Are-Created-Allende-Isabel.pdf

I cheated a little bit on this one. I had a PDF of this story open in my browser, but not the same we domain. The original seems to have disappeared. So I googled the name of the story that I pulled from the original URL and found “And of Clay Are We Created” by Isabel Allande.

I can’t remember why I was interested in this. If I had more time, I’d read it. It’s pretty short. But, I don’t have time. Maybe I’ll come back to this. The first paragraph is pretty intriguing:

They discovered the girl’s head protruding from the mud pit, eyes wide open, calling soundlessly. She had a First Communion name, Azucena. Lily. In that vast cemetery where the odor of death was already attracting vultures from far away, and where the weeping of orphans and wails of the injured filled the air, the little girl obstinately clinging to life became the symbol of the tragedy. The television cameras transmitted so often the unbearable image of the head budding like a black squash from the clay that there was no one who did not recognize her and know her name. And every time we saw her on the screen, right behind her was Rolf Carlé, who had gone there on assignment, never suspecting that he would find a fragment of his past, lost thirty years before.

Update (7-4-2026) I read the story. I’m glad I saved this tab. I can’t recall at all why I looked up this story in the first place; I’m sure I didn’t read it because I was busy doing something else at the time.

Why do we have personal surveillance devices but not flying cars? This story provides an answer to that unrelated question. Written by Isabel Allende, a political exile and cousin of the Chilean president overthrown in the 1973 coup, it tells that story of a journalist whose life is altered by an encounter with a dying girl trapped by an avalanche. For three days he stays by her side as the story is broadcast across the globe. The news of the girl can go anywhere instantly, but what the girl desperately needs (or the journalist attempting to rescue her, rather) is a pump to free her from the quicksand, which despite all material wealth of the world around them, can’t be delivered.

What I took away from the story is that there are only two things in the world that are both real and immediate: Connection with another person, and the work you do with your own hands. Talk, news, any sort of information, is always immediate, especially now, but it doesn’t have any power on its own to do any good. Everything else will never be there when you need it. We don’t have flying cars because they would violate that principle of physical immediacy, because actually changing the world can’t be scaled up the way spreading and processing information can be; but when we do scale up we lose things in the process.

This is more work than I intended to put into any single entry in this project. But I think this is a special entry. I think from now on I’m going to try to read the story when I find it.