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Lopez and Place

Lopez and Place

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I learned earlier this week that the author Barry Lopez died on Christmas Day. I’ve only read one book by Lopez, but it made quite an an impression. 

Lopez’s masterpiece Arctic Dreams is sometimes called a travel book. But as many critics have noted, it’s much more than that. “Arctic Dreams is a book about the Arctic North in the way that Moby Dick is a novel about whales,” the critic Michiko Kakutani wrote.

For me, Arctic Dreams was one of the first books that awakened an appreciation of writing about place. Since then, I’ve come to love the words of Annie Dillard, Henry Beston, John Graves, Aldo Leopold and many more. I’ve come to realize the power of writing about where we are rooted, of paying attention to the trees and animals and vistas that sanctify a city, a seashore, a ranch, a farm, a home. 

Lopez died of complications from prostate cancer, but according to his wife, his ailments intensified after wildfires destroyed his house in Oregon last September. He lost all his original manuscripts and a lifetime of artifacts. Most of all, I thought as I read his obituary … he lost his place. 

(Photo: Brian Schaller/Wikimedia)

Reading for Pleasure

Reading for Pleasure

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For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, my parents gave me The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy when I was about 14 years old. It was a  strange choice for a kid, but it turned out to be a good one for me. I soon discovered a taste for Wessex folk, and for the moors and dales Hardy described so beautifully in his tales. 

Of course, Thomas Hardy novels aren’t always a barrel of laughs, and they probably made a quietly dramatic teenager even more so. But the affinity remained, and now the idea of settling down with The Mayor of Casterbridge or Tess of the D’Urbervilles is almost akin to picking up a book of fairy tales, so closely do I associate them with my youth, when reading was pure pleasure.

I’m recapturing a bit of that pure-pleasure reading this week, dipping into my new holiday books. It’s a feeling Hardy would agree with. “No one can read with profit,” he said, “that which he cannot read with pleasure.”

Rejoice!

Rejoice!

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Yesterday was Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, when the message shifts from one of “beware and prepare” to “rejoice and prepare.” 

I love both Advent messages. For that matter, I love Advent. It’s a season of anticipation — and isn’t anticipating an event usually always better than the event itself? 

More than two decades ago, I happened to read Kathleen Norris’s book The Cloister Walk during Advent. It was a busy time for me as a writer and a parent, and when I’d collapse in bed each night I’d savor a chapter or two of this fine volume and be transported into the silence of the cloister.

The image I have of Advent is one of cold stone and plainsong, of middle-of-the-night awakenings for prayer and devotion. Though Norris spent time in a monastery in Minnesota, it was the old churches of Europe that came to mind as I visualized her progress through the liturgical year. The long centuries of hope condensed into an annual calendar. 

By the reckonings of that calendar, we have already begun a new year. 

The Mirror and the Light

The Mirror and the Light

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I just finished reading The Mirror and the Light, the 750-page conclusion of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant three-part reimagining of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal of England and Henry VIII’s right-hand man … until he wasn’t. 

In the final pages, Cromwell prepares for his execution. He ponders heaven and hell, thinks often of his father, Walter, a blacksmith and a drunk who beat his son and propelled him out from Putney into a life he could not have imagined from his beginnings, a life of service and, more than most, of influencing history. 

Still, when Cromwell confronts his end, he shudders and he trembles, he sees ghosts. He also realizes that life will go on without him, as it will, of course, for us all:

It occurs to him that when he is dead, other people will be getting on with their day; it will be dinner time or nearly, there will be a bubbling of pottages, the clatter of ladles, the swift scoop of meat from spit to platter; a thousand dogs will stir from sleep and wag their tails, napkins will be unfurled and twitched over the shoulder, fingers will be dipped in rosewater, bread broken. And when the crumbs are swept away, the pewter piled for scouring, his body will be broken meat, and the executioner will clean the blade.

Writing Together?

Writing Together?

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As a new grandmother I’m certainly not skimping on the photos or the ink — or what passes as digital ink, the keystrokes that allow me to describe in detail all the glories of my new grandchildren.

But a passage in a book I was re-reading last night brought to mind a time when recording one’s life was near to impossible and led to an odd sort of epistolary cohabitation. 

At the end of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell writes at his desk. “Paper is precious. Its offcuts and remnants are not discarded, but turned over, reused.” As a result, he finds the penmanship of Cardinal Wolsey, his departed friend, “a hasty computation, a discarded draft,” Mantel writes. But Cromwell “had to put down his pen till the spasm of grief passed.”

Imagine what our world would be if we had to reuse the scrap paper of our friends and neighbors. Would it help us see the world from another perspective? Would it bring us together?

The answer, I’m afraid, is clear: It certainly didn’t help the 16th century. 

November Question

November Question

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Warm Novembers confront us with a question: Is it the early darkness that makes the month gloomy — or the cold temperatures? Melville would say the latter, I think, at least he would if we take the famous opening lines of Moby Dick with its “damp, drizzly November in my soul” as proof of where the novelist stood on the matter.

For many of us, though, it’s not just the damp drizzle; it’s also the early darkness, the dying of the light. I saw this first hand in the parakeets yesterday. Lulled into autumnal complacency by the mid-70 temps, I brought the birds out onto the deck to share the glass-topped table with me as I worked. 

They were chattering and happy, doing their best to respond to wild bird calls … until the sun began slanting lower and lower in the sky.  Then, as if on cue, they quieted and calmed, began tucking their heads into their wings. 

Even when it’s warm, the early darkness has its way with us. 

Plague Lit

Plague Lit

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Call me strange, but for some reason I’ve gravitated to pandemic fiction these last few months. I re-read The Plague by Camus, tried Jose Saramago’s Blindness but only got a third of the way through it, and just finished the historical novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. 

Though The Plague was more profound, Year of Wonders was more enjoyable. I was pulling for Anna, the protagonist, who suffers loss upon loss but emerges the stronger for them. 

I was whisked away to a 17th-century English village (based on a real place), which decided when faced with the Black Death to keep the disease contained within its boundaries. The citizens voluntarily quarantined themselves, suffering much greater loss of life than if they had run at the first sign of illness. 

Knowing that once, long ago, a group of ordinary folk decided to take this step, to give up their own lives to save others, makes this an especially powerful moral message to contemplate. 

Mind and Body

Mind and Body

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Over the weekend I read an essay about the power of literary analysis in the college classroom — and, because of the unique times in which we live — also not in the college classroom.  Apart from the many excellent points made about education in the humanities — the lessons of the great books have never mattered more, the ability to think and analyze is prized in the workplace — the author, Carlo Rotella, made one that brought a crucial point to mind. 

While teaching via Zoom, Rotella said, he realized how much he uses visual cues in his class, figuring out who he should call on, who’s getting a concept and who is not. I ran this through my own, English-major memory, and sure enough, the same seems true from the student’s point of view. 

What I remember most about college literature classes is not just the ideas that seemed to be exploding in my brain as we discussed The Magic Mountain or The Brothers Karamazov, but the visual impressions my teachers left as well. 

I recall in particular my favorite college professor, Dr. Ferguson, who would curl himself around the podium when he lectured, one knee on the desk, one foot on the floor, while stork-like, he led us through the great books. It’s not that I don’t recall the ideas themselves — I think about them all the time — but until I read this essay I wasn’t aware of how closely they are linked to the physical peculiarities of the professors who introduced them to me. 

This essay triggered a dialogue in my brain, a conversation between the author and me, and the part that I supplied surprised me — as it should, when the “conversations” are deep and good. 

The Summer Book

The Summer Book

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I picked up Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book because it showed up in a list of books that feature grandparents. There are precious few of these, I’ve noticed. 

Jansson’s Grandmother (she’s given no other name) is crotchety and wise and foolish and loving. She smokes cigarettes and breaks into a neighbor’s house. No cookie-baking for this grandma. She’s a renegade. But she also understands her granddaughter Sophia, pushes her and puts her in situations where she is bound to succeed. 

Grandmother also levels with herself and with others (when she’s not lying, that is). Here she is after the break-in: 

“My dear child,” said Grandmother impatiently [to Sophia], “every human being has to make his own mistakes.” … Sometimes people never saw things clearly until it was too late and they no longer had the strength to start again. Or else they forgot their idea along the way and didn’t even realize that they had forgotten.”

That’s the kind of gem Jansson strews about for us through the pages of this slim and lovely book, all of it amidst a natural world (an island in the Gulf of Finland) that is as beautiful as it is dangerous. 

Simplicity

Simplicity

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I learned from the Writer’s Almanac  that today is the birthday of the poet Mary Oliver, who lived from 1935 to 2019. I discovered her only years before her passing, reading her prose before her poetry. But it poetry that she was known for and poetry that won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. 

Today’s entry includes a few words from Oliver about what she needed, which wasn’t much:

“I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but when you can work a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.”

I will hold onto that simplicity today.