A Walker in the Suburbs

I’m an avid reader but a timid book buyer. These days I’m as likely to be reading a Kindle as a physical book. This is not because I’m digitally advanced. It’s because this practice holds down the accumulation of printed matter in my house.

Still, when the book piles on my floor reach tipping height, the time has come to invest in a new bookshelf. But what happens next? I’ve almost filled this new one, and wall space is limited.

I’m thinking that shelves are to books as roads are to cars. Just as additional highways worsen traffic, new bookshelves invite filling. Which is why, before I re-shelved books yesterday, I culled a few for resale and donation. Not even a shelf’s worth, but enough to leave a little wiggle room. Let’s see how long it takes me to fill it.

I’ve broken through a reluctance to write in my books, scribbling happily in review copies and textbooks. But last night I felt similarly compelled to mark up a magazine article. There were just too many passages I wanted to ponder, so I pulled out a pen.

The article was “The Anti-Social Century” in the February Atlantic, which discusses how Americans are spending more time alone than ever before. Riffing on the famous “Bowling Alone” work of Robert Putnam, the article explores the effect of social media, ordering takeout and the lingering effects of the pandemic, among other causes of isolation.

Like any writing that offers aha moments, this article hits on truths I’ve experienced in my own life. For instance, when I enrolled in a graduate program I wanted only to meet in person. But many classes met online. At first I actively avoided them, but now I seek them out. I choose what’s easiest in the short-term rather than what’s better in the long-term. (Though I may complain about the traffic, I enjoy in-person classes the most.)

But it’s the way author Derek Thompson explores the topic that made me highlight sentences and paragraphs. What we’re missing, he says, is not the inner ring of companionship — we are in closer touch with family and friends than ever before, given our technological tethers — or the outer ring of social media contacts —which connect us to our tribe. What’s missing is the middle zone, the village, our neighbors and acquaintances. “Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance.”

Social isolation has a price, and we are paying it, as Thompson explains. According to one analysis a “five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income.”

With journalism like this it’s no wonder that the Atlantic has returned to 12-month-a-year print circulation after 20 years of a reduced schedule. It’s the rare print success story, and good news for “printophiles” like me. Now I have two more issues a year to mark and underline.

I read an essay the other day about Aldo Leopold, which got me thinking about the great conservationist and some writing I did about him a few years ago.

At first glance Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac (1949) seemed to be like other evocative writing about place — books by Annie Dillard or Henry David Thoreau, for example, books that shed light not only on cities or rivers but also on the author or the human condition, books in which the landscape is a vehicle to the self.

What I got was much more. It was not just a book about the transformation Leopold and his family underwent as they fixed up an old chicken coop in Wisconsin and lived there on weekends. It was in this place that Leopold wrote the essays that became his masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, a book that encapsulates the philosophy of place that makes him one of our earliest prophets of ecology and wilderness preservation. This book, like the twisted little apples of Winesburg, Ohio, is the hard-won fruit of the deep thinking Leopold brought to the land on which he chose to live.

“There are those who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot,” writes Leopold in his introduction. But from such big pronouncements the work quickly becomes more specific: the winter awakening of a skunk, the trail of a meadow mouse, the fate of the passenger pigeon, the life of a downed tree, the difference between a shovel (which makes us givers) and the axe (which makes us takers).

To Leopold, place is much more than a vehicle for self-discovery. It is essential to the health and welfare of our planet. The landscape is not here for our amusement or to further our self-awareness; we are working parts of it. Leopold sings of the wilderness, the wild creatures, the original grasses and grizzlies and wolves and weevils that are born and nurtured by a particular soil and rainfall. Here is the moral work of place, the ecology of belonging.

(Fox cubs frolic in a clearing.)

The question of the day is this one: Is it easier to skim books while reading them electronically? My answer would be yes.

It’s easier to tap a page than to turn one, and I’ve been tapping plenty while reading The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble.

It’s not that I’m not enjoying the book; I am. I’ve always liked Drabble’s novels. I would follow her voice anywhere, even into a 344-page book on jigsaw puzzles. In fact, it’s about much more than that, dipping into games, mosaics and children’s books.

Still, the book has much more puzzle than it does personal history. There’s a remedy for that, though: tap, tap, tap.

I hadn’t intended it as a stress reliever, but when I stepped into the stacks at Georgetown’s Lauinger Library this morning, my shoulders relaxed, my fists unclenched, and my breathing slowed. The books took me to a cool, calm place, a place I needed to be.

I was there to pick up The Postsecular Imagination, but I wanted to make the most of the trip, so I browsed a bit. I found nature writing and place writing. I found solace.

All the words and all the wisdom. All the folly, too. The human condition writ large. The human condition writ, period. But the human condition between covers. Which is where I’d prefer to find it right now.