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Our Only World

Our Only World

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In his essay collection Our Only World, Wendell Berry writes of the “deserted country” that results from farmers displaced by progress, whether it be Big Coal or industrial machinery and chemicals.

The result is an emptiness most modern people think normal because they’ve never known it any other way. But Berry, who is 85, remembers a richer, fuller, more peopled countryside. A countryside that included farmers who “walk don’t run,” Berry writes.

“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians ‘run.’ Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”

It’s one of the reasons I walk, too, because it is the gait “best suited to paying attention.” And though the remnants of a once-rich countryside lie ruined all around me, suburban neighborhoods named for the farms they’ve displaced, there is a point to walking even here.

Because when we walk, we feel just a little more like we belong. And when we feel just a little more like we belong … we care a lot more about the place we live.

Forward from Here

Forward from Here

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I first began reading Reeve Lindbergh because of her famous mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose Gift from the Sea has always been a favorite of mine. Reeve’s memoirs Under a Wing: A Memoir and No More Words: A Journal of My Mother provide the inside stories of her upbringing and her mother’s final years.

Like her mom, Reeve writes with a friendly, accessible style. And because Reeve grew up with a writer (actually two of them; her famous father wrote books too), she learned early on how writing can help make sense of things.

Reeve is an unabashed journal-keeper, and though she laughs about using her journals as an escape from other writing chores, she also says that much of her material comes straight from them.

“To write as honestly as I can in my journals about my everyday life and the thoughts and feelings I have as I go along is an old, tenacious yearning,” she writes. Writing is “comforting and steadying,” she says. It was so even when she underwent brain surgery, which she did while writing Forward From Here, the book I just read and from which I quote.

In a later chapter, she talks about moments of well-being when she’s “suddenly, acutely conscious of being alive: on a spring morning when the first V of wild geese flies over the farm; any time I see one of my children again after a separation; whenever I look out over the hills and pastures, or up at the stars.

“I’m convinced that what we really need most to sustain us as we grow older, more than any drug on the market, is this kind of appreciative awareness, along with compassion, a sense of humor, and simple common sense.”

To which I can only add … amen!

Ambulatory Romance

Ambulatory Romance

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In Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel City of Girls, a man and woman get to know each other by exploring the streets of New York City.  They walk and talk and fall in love not by touching but by rambling.

There are unique reasons for their unusual relationship, but even putting those aside, they are onto something. Walking frees the soul, and if one soul is strolling with another, confidences are easily shared.

It may be the same process that loosens thoughts in the solitary walker, or it may be that the sheer mechanics of it means you are looking ahead and not at each other. Whatever the explanation, walking invites intimacy, as it did for this couple:

Nobody ever bothered us. … We were often so deep in our conversations that we often didn’t notice our surroundings. Miraculously, the streets kept us safe and the people let us be.  … We were devoted to each other.

Frozen Sea

Frozen Sea

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“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” — Franz Kafka

I came across this quotation a week ago while reading The Second Mountain by David Brooks — and it took my breath away.  In that way that books can seem to be speaking directly to you, I first read these words as a writer, as in, writing a book will free up, if not a frozen sea, then at least a creative block I’ve felt off and on for many years.

I was pretty sure that was not the way Kafka intended his words to be construed, though. Today, I’ve had time to find the larger work of which this is a part. And yes, it is most definitely about the books we read, not the books we write. But it is still powerful, especially when you know it was written by a 20-year-old (!) Kafka, in a letter to a friend. Here it is in context:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? … We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

Farewell, Express

Farewell, Express

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Yesterday I picked up the Express newspaper offered to me by our Vienna hawker Bobbie. I don’t always get this abbreviated, tabloid giveaway version of the Washington Post. But when I don’t have the parent paper or something else to read, I pick it up. And I always take it if Bobbie offers it to me. He’s a kind soul whose feelings might be hurt if I did not.

But sometimes when I do have the parent paper and Bobbie holds out the Express, I pick it up … then gently place it on top of the trash can at the entrance to Metro. I don’t throw it away — no one has read it yet! — but I do put it up for adoption.

That’s what I did yesterday, not even glancing at the headline. Then, on the way home, I saw a copy of Express someone had left behind on the bus. “Hope you enjoy your stinking’ phones” said the headline, which caught my eye, then below, the small print: “Add Express to the list of print publications done in by mobile technology. Sadly, this is our final edition.”

As you can tell, I’m not an everyday Express reader, but I’m a common-enough one to mourn its passing. There was an irreverence about it, and it was informative, too. Now, another print publication bites the dust, 20 journalists lose their jobs, and a community culture goes away (because Express hawkers drew commuters together).

I’ll let Express have the last word here. This is from a small item on its inside front cover:

Nation Shocked! Shocked!
Traditional print news product abruptly goes out of business
In news that scandalized a nation, The Washington Post Express abruptly shut down Thursday, citing falling readership and insufficient revenue. Apparently, everyone riding the D.C. Metro now looks at their phones instead of reading print newspapers. Express editors will miss the newspaper and its readers very much. It has been a pleasure and an honor to provide commuters with this daily dose of this odd news.

Silence

Silence

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I just finished reading Jane Brox’s lovely new book Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives. Brox plumbs her topic by comparing the silence of solitary confinement with the silence of the cloister, an interesting approach that gives her a chance to examine the trials of silence as well as its gifts.

She draws often from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived much of his life in the cloistered Abbey of Gethsemani but whose writings gave him a worldwide audience. Here she quotes from Merton’s Asian Journal: “Our real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever-greater surrender to the creative action of grace and love in our hearts.”

Brox notes the creative power of silence, and its necessity. She concludes with this thought:

Silence can seem like a luxury. Or the fraught world has labeled it that way. But from what I know of it, I would argue that silence is as necessary as the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, which we so carefully guard and endlessly ponder, for it affirms the meaning of speech even as it provides a path to inner life, to beauty, observation and appreciation. It presents the opportunity for a true reckoning with the self, with external obligation, and with power.

Walking in Pace

Walking in Pace

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The tiger does it, in his cage. Weary parents do it, up and down a hall, hoping that the baby in their arms will soon nod off to sleep.

Pacing is to walking as the treadmill is to the sidewalk. It is walking on adrenaline, super-charged with nervous energy that must be let out, even if there’s nowhere to put it.

While I’m lucky enough to have a strip of asphalt on which to pound out my anxieties, there have been times when nothing made me feel better than walking the circuit through my house: living room, hall, office, kitchen … living room, hall, office, kitchen.

I’ve never thought this a failing, only a useful habit. But reading A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, has given me second thoughts:

…[I]t had been the Count’s experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively. For while the men who pace are being whipped along by logic, it is a multifaceted sort of logic, which brings them no closer to a clear understanding, or even a state of conviction. Rather it leaves them at such a loss that they end up exposed to the influence of the merest whim, to the seduction of the rash or reckless act—almost as if they had never considered the matter at all.

I’ll never look at pacing the same way again.

(It’s not pacing if you do it in a portico.)

Soporific

Soporific

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Last November, I took the National Novel Writing Month challenge and produced 54,000 or so words of fiction in 30 days. The idea is to punch out a draft, and punch it out I did. But at the end of the month I tucked it away on my computer hard drive and barely looked at it again.

Until my recent getaway, that is. Curious to see just how bad this thing was, I opened it up, held my breath and started reading. And I learned that, well, it wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.  Which is not to say that it’s ready for the New York Times bestseller list — or for any eyes other than my own.  But it has a couple of likable characters.

This morning, I discovered that the novel, which I call For Sale, has another attribute.  I’d been trying to read myself back to sleep for almost two hours without success. But after 10 minutes of For Sale I was out like a light.

Perhaps this could be a marketing tool. Watch out, Ambien, here I come!

The Contemplative Life

The Contemplative Life

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Shortly before leaving the house on Saturday, I panicked about what books to bring.  I jettisoned the hefty library book, a novel scheduled for September book group. There will be plenty of time for it, and it hadn’t grabbed me yet.

I thought about packing a book I’d already read, a security blanket of sorts. But that seemed too unadventurous.

I ended up with Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, by Patricia Hampl. It is part travelogue, part memoir and part spiritual exploration.

The contemplative life is what Hampl is after, but to get to it she takes a walking tour to Assisi, home of St. Francis.  The walking feeds the contemplation, and provides authentic moments like the one when a woman in a kerchief runs out to offer the pilgrims two bottles of her homemade wine, a gesture “a million years old, far beyond courtesy, rooted in ancient communion.”

“Walking allowed such timeless moments, making us slow-moving parts of the landscape we passed through. Maybe the world isn’t, at its daily heart, as modern as we tend to think. As we walked, it kept reverting to an ancient, abiding self.”

And it is in that “ancient, abiding self” that Hampl discovers — and perhaps all of us could find — the lives we are looking for.

A Diller A Dollar

A Diller A Dollar

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I miss reading Mother Goose rhymes to little people, but this morning it was almost like I was reading one to myself.

Into my mind, unprompted, came these words:

A diller, a dollar, a 10 o’clock scholar
What makes you come so soon?
You used to come at 10 o’clock,
But now you come at noon.

I know why this nursery rhyme suddenly came to mind.  It’s the first day of my vacation, and I slept from 11 p.m. till 9 a.m.

The feeling, like the nursery rhyme, is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. And, like both, it is much fun.