A Walker in the Suburbs

I remember these from college. They were Cramming Days, more like it, days before exams when normal class schedules were paused so that intense studying could begin. The nomenclature perplexed me: It’s the day before the exam and you’re just now reading?

This is not the kind of reading day I’m envisioning for today. Instead, I’m dreaming of a healthy sick day, a day spent entirely in bed if that’s what suits me. Or maybe on the couch or the beanbag chair or even while striding (gliding?) on the elliptical. The point is not the posture. The point is that I will spend the day reading.

In childhood I would think nothing of this. I could lie on my canopy bed with a book of fairytales, or in my aunt and uncle’s attic with a Mary Stewart novel, and be lost for hours.

This is what I want for today. A no-guilt reading day. A day when I don’t squeeze reading into Metro or bus rides or the last few minutes before sleep.

There are seasons in a reading life, and I have just pulled out of a fallow period into a gloriously abundant one. There are not one but two Patricia Hampl books, a memoir by Thomas Lynch, essays by Wendell Berry, Storm Lake by Art Cullen, subtitled A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper and, speaking of heartland, a book by that name subtitled A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. 

Most of these are library books, which gives my reading day some urgency. As does the pile on my bedside table, which has become precarious enough that drastic remedies are called for. All of which is to say that a Reading Day will be good for my health — in more ways than one.

First I started listing them, now I take notes on them, too.

In the continual struggle to hold onto and make sense of what I read, I have for years now typed up notes on the books I want to remember.

From yesterday’s on Origin Story:

Luca is our “last universal common ancestor”— a hypothetical creature, sort of alive but not fully alive, a porous rock that lived at the edge of alkaline oceanic vents. From Luca (and there were many Lucas) all earthly life flows. But it took three billion years to move from Luca to the multicellular organisms that ultimately gave rise to big life.

Or this: the progress of evolution, much like the life of a soldier, consisted of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. In this case, though, the terror came from mass extinctions, the greatest of which occurred 248 million years ago when 80 percent of all life vanished from the planet probably as the result of massive volcanic eruptions.

The older I get, the more I wish I’d learned when I was younger. But in the case of this book, I console myself with the knowledge that many of these facts weren’t even discovered when I was younger!

After reading Sapiens a few months ago, I was looking for another “big” book. I’ve found one in Origin Story by David Christian.

The book is what is called “big history,” that is, not just the history of our country or of the world, but of the universe itself. It’s a story that could only recently have been told, due to discoveries about the universe and its beginnings made within the last few decades.

The spooky thing about life is that, though the inside of each cell looks like pandemonium—a sort of mud-wrestling contest involving a million molecules—whole cells give the impression of acting with purpose. Something inside each cell seems to drive it, as if it were working its way through a to-do list. The to-do list is simple: (1) stay alive despite entropy and unpredictable surroundings; and (2) make copies of myself that can do the same thing. And so on from cell to cell, and generation to generation. Here, in the seeking out of some outcomes and the avoidance of others, are the origins of desire, caring, purpose, ethics, even love. 

I’m not much of a mystery reader, but a few years ago I heard about Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti series and decided to give it a try.

The books are set in Venice, a city I loved from the first moment I saw it (in my “Europe on $10 a Day” backpacking years).  Police detective Brunetti travels the city on foot or by vaporetti, savoring the sights of his native place and taking the reader with him each step of the way. Each story features a new bridge, square or quiet corner of “La Serenissima,” the “Most Serene Republic of Venice.”

Brunetti quotes the classics, adores his wife (the brainy and beautiful Paolo) and three-quarters of the way through every story, becomes discouraged and confused. He works his way out of every jam by using his smarts, often colluding with his boss’s assistant, Signorina Elettra, a clever young woman who finds a way (sometimes not quite legal) through every dilemma.

I often pick up a Leon mystery when I need distraction. But the books have a funny way of returning me right back to Real Life. This isn’t a bad thing, though, because I’m always a little lightened and calmed when I get back.

I only started reading this book a few days ago, but I’m already marveling at the knowledge it holds and the broad sweep of history it’s providing. Sapiens is about Homo sapiens, our species, and the first chapter describes some of our earliest cousins:

There was Homo floresiensis, a dwarf species from the Indonesian island of Flores that grew to only three and a half feet tall; Homo denisova, a species just discovered eight years ago in Denisova Cave in Siberia;  Homo erectus, from East Asia, the most durable species ever, which survived for close to two million years. “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now,” writes the author, Yuval Noah Harari, “so two million years is really out of our league.”

Now there’s a line (the italics are mine) that caught my attention.  A thousand years is only 12 generations from now, give or take. And Harari, whose erudition is such that he doesn’t need fancy language, casually drops in the fact that he doesn’t think we’ll be around that long.

The most fascinating cousin is Homo neanderthalensis, aka Neanderthals. As you might notice, we are the only Homo species on the planet now. Which raises the question, what happened to the others?  At first, Harari explains, it was assumed Sapiens just killed everyone else off. But there was also the theory that some interbreeding went on, especially with Neanderthals.

And indeed, that seems to be the case. DNA research has shown that 1 to 4 percent of human DNA in the modern populations of the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.

Still, we mostly killed off these and all our cousins. Tolerance is not one of Sapiens strong suits, Harari says, and Neanderthals were “too familiar to ignore, too difficult to tolerate.”

Tune in for later posts as my feeble Sapiens brain makes it way through this fascinating book.

When I picked up Tara Westover’s memoir Educated, I knew I was in for a good read. The book had been recommended by others I trust, so I bought it for my Kindle (a sure sign I want to read a book badly enough to pay for it).

I knew the basic story — a young woman raised in a strict Mormon family, not schooled at all until she got herself to university.

What I wasn’t expecting was the nuance, the side story, which maybe was the main story, and that is how her desire for education wars with her desire to belong, to be part of a family and a place.

“The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is close as anyone gets to seeing wind.”

This passage is from the beginning of the book, when Tara introduces her young self and her family: the unbending patriarchal father, the resourceful but ultimately weak mother, the seven children, Tara the youngest. She and the brothers and sister closest to her in age didn’t have birth certificates until they were half-grown.

As Tara teaches herself enough math, grammar, history and science to receive a high score on the ACT (which guarantees her admission to Brigham Young University), she begins to pull away from her family. She has to. And the more educated she becomes (ultimately receiving a Ph.D. from Cambridge), the more threatened her family is by her.

It’s one of the oldest and saddest stories, the need to choose between family and accomplishment. But it plays out in lesser forms all the time.

“All my studying, reading, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?” she wonders.

What ultimately brings her back to family — not her parents or some of her siblings, who disowned her, but to aunts and uncles and cousins — is place. “I was of that mountain (she says of Buck’s Peak in Idaho, where she was raised), the mountain had made me.”

Before her formal education, there was education of another kind:

“I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning,  swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. … I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.”