Tightrope over eden: An American flâneur in Brazil

It comes down to this — what's next when all your wishes come true? Imagine a land without hurricanes, earthquakes, or volcanoes. With women who say hello with a kiss and sometimes two. Envision a country where 60 degrees is chilly and the South Atlantic offers temperate waters along 4600 miles of sandy beaches. Every day is festive and if you need coaxing, there's beer at McDonald's. It's an embarrassment of riches, enough to make Eve lose interest in apples.

In Tightrope Over Eden, Michael Rubin discovers what drives a man at age 50 to attempt marriage, retirement, and expat life simultaneously. This is the story of an anxious know-it-all who enjoys staying at home but ends up strapped into a window seat headed for this unlikely trifecta. Living in a foreign country with a foreign woman, a foreign language, and a foreign religion is not as easy as it sounds.

According to Rubin, “It's a glimpse of Brazil through my eyes rather than a picture of the world, in other words, a non-travelogue, non-memoir, non-autofiction book. I think, maybe.”

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are in unknown territory. Fiction has become personal. Guiding spirits enter the realm of our world in magical realism. There is a thin line between what is true and what is imaginary, just as there is a thin line between love and hate.

A personal website is a vain adventure. Not all correspondence is designed to be public, and I have done my best to limit the content to the essentials. As the author of the world's largest handwritten journal (20 million words), I have reveled in the paring down.

While a website is commonplace, it is not undertaken as a foray into popular culture but rather an experiment in embracing the future as now. For the first time in history, technology presents all of us with an opportunity to be heard, and our voices deserve to be revealed.

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing — and keeping the unknown always beyond you.

Georgia O'Keefe

We should ask nothing more from ourselves in these challenging days than self-forgiveness and kindness. Let us embrace the day as a surfer embraces the wave – with respect and courage and gratitude.

. . . the realization at which Dostoyevsky arrived in his stark brush with death: that “life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness,” had it been lived with a sympathetic love of the world.