A peripatetic list of words I've looked up #3.

quisling — traitor who collaborates with an occupying force

Heard on the radio outside a bar in Barstow, California. Looked up in a dictionary in a public library in Los Angeles.

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appurtenance — 1. something subordinate to another, more important thing; adjunct; accessory. 2. Law. A right, privilege, or improvement belonging to and passing with a principal property. 3. appurtenances, apparatus; instruments.

This is a good word, found (I believe) somewhere in the thickets of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, which I read on the subway just after I moved to New York. In those first days when I was there, when I knew nobody and hadn’t started work or school yet, I had a lot of time on my hands and no idea how to spend it. I suppose I could have gone and done all the tourist things I would later have no time for — Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, so forth — but it either didn’t occur or didn’t appeal to me. (Still doesn’t, for that matter.)

It was the end of a period that New Yorkers were calling “the year without a summer”, because the temperature never once broke 90, and every day was drizzly and sticky and generally too gross to go out in for more than a few minutes at a time. I was squatting in a dirty, dank, itchy sublet in the East Village, waiting for the apartment I’d signed a lease on to come open, and generally bored. So I took to riding the subway. From where I was staying, one could walk over to Astor Place and board the 6, which would take a person as far as the Bronx to the north (scary) and as far as the Brooklyn Bridge to the south (touristy). Alternately, one could walk down to the Lower East Side stop on Houston Street and get on the F train — not the proverbial F train, but the actual F train — bound for the deepest reaches of Queens (Jamaica! Who knew?) or the very bottom of Brooklyn (Coney Island, where I would later go on a really bad date with the most boring person from my program).

I took to riding these trains, back and forth, reading Inherent Vice, which was my third (and very possibly last) Pynchon novel. Often I would ride until after dark, and emerge into a breezy, subtropical stink in Manhattan, and then go back to my sublet to watch a Mets game on TV, scratch the spots where I was getting bit by fleas, and wonder what my life was going to be like.

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favonian — 1. of or pertaining to a west wind; 2. mild or favorable; propitious.

Not long after those subway rides, I started my program at CUNY, where — among other things — I discovered that there were way more places to be from than I had previously imagined. Growing up on the West Coast, I was well acquainted with people from Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, and an array of southern and eastern places. But in New York, the vectors were different. Many of my classmates came from Caribbean islands I had faintly heard of — St Vincent, Trinidad, Grenada — but which had always seemed to be of nebulous sovereignty and largely empty when I heard about them. It was an education. The people turned out to be much more interesting than my course of study.

Being who I am, I sought insight into my classmates in books, and ultimately fell into a complicated, love-hate relationship with the shattered Trinidadian genius V.S. Naipaul. Favonian, I am fairly certain, comes from A House for Mr Biswas, his heartbreaking roman a clef about a buffoonish journalist who is clearly based on his father. That the real senior Naipaul was both serious and respected, while Mr Biswas is silly and constantly at the mercy of his wife and her harpie-like sisters, says something about the profound fuckupedness of Naipaul the younger that analysis of the troubling misogyny and thinly-cloaked racism of his novels never will. Anyway.

The winds turned out to be favonian for me, too, as it was in New York where I finally began to feel like I was putting together a coherent quasi-adult life for myself. My twenties were spent in a haze of booze and bad relationships (and, often, no relationships), floundering at real jobs and growing deeply bored at piddling ones, failing to make the kind of real and lasting friends I had left behind when I burned my bridges after college. I started performing onstage for the first time since school, and through that actually made some real friends. I had a couple of relationships that were functional, if not profoundly dedicated in the way I was hoping one might be.

Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning, “repair of the world”, or roughly that, anyway; medieval rabbis took it from a prayer written by Joshua and expanded it in their midrash so that ultimately they defined it as a sort of extra-Talmudic commandment, a way to prevent social chaos and make the world a better place. It can also mean “perfection of the world”, but I prefer the “repair” sense, because I feel like I have been performing this sort of tikkun olam on myself and the world around me for the last three years. I did a lot of damage — to my liver, to my psyche, to other people — when I was younger, and something happened in New York that allowed me to start fixing that, at least to some degree. I can’t make up to everyone I’ve hurt the pain I inflicted on them; but I can endeavor to be better to all who come after — I can attempt to repair the world, if I cannot repair a single person.