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Educated

Educated

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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.”

Ancient Manuscripts

Ancient Manuscripts

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Dublin has treated us well so far. Apart from a few showers last night (conveniently timed for our walk home from the pub), we’ve had blue skies and reasonable temps for our first day in Ireland’s capital.

It’s a compact place, with history everywhere, even when you don’t expect it. We were having a bite to eat before visiting the Book of Kells, the ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the Gospels. Turns out, the bite to eat was at the Chester Beatty Library, which I read about as I ate a yummy salad plate of carrots, hummus, grape leaves, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Chester Beatty was an American collector and expat who donated his remarkable library to Ireland. It contains treasures that rival if not exceed the Book of Kells, including fragments of papyrus on which is written some of the earliest known copies of the Epistles of St. Paul.

To see the Book of Kells requires standing in several queues and jostling with others to even catch a quick glimpse of the manuscript. But at the Chester Beatty collection I stood alone, almost in tears, in front of the Letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians.

Had I been able to decipher the Greek, this is what I would have read:

“Love is patient,
love is kind,
it does not envy,
it does not boast…
Love does not delight
in evil but rejoices in the truth.
It always protects,
always hopes, and
always perseveres.”

(Top photo, a map of the world from the first modern atlas, 1570, from the Chester Beatty collection. Above, books in the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin.)

Double Booked

Double Booked

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It was the standard answer every time one of the kids needed a book for class. “We have that book … somewhere.” At which point the search would begin.

Was it in the office, where there are two floor-to-ceiling book shelves? In the living room’s built-in bookcase (one of the two reasons we bought the house, the other being the big backyard)? Was it the alcove bookshelf at the top of the stairs? Or in the new bookshelves by the bathroom? In Suzanne’s room, or Claire’s or Celia’s? Or maybe in the basement. There are bookshelves under the window there (mostly children’s classics) or by the door to the laundry room (a hodgepodge).

Chances are, though, that the book was somewhere I hadn’t thought to look — behind another row of books.

While I remembered double-shelving some books that way, there were rows of others I just recently found.

It was like discovering a hidden kingdom, realizing there were 40, 50 or 60 books I’d completely forgotten we had. Or maybe not… Maybe those were the books I was looking for all along!

Walking to Listen

Walking to Listen

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A book group friend recommended this book, the tale of a young man who walked across America and listened to the voices of vagabonds and preachers, beauticians and firefighters.

Andrew Forsthoefel was newly graduated from Middlebury College when he decided to make the journey. “Everyone of us has an extraordinary story worth hearing, and I’m walking the country to listen,” he wrote on his travel blog at the beginning of the trip.

Admitting it might sound contrived, but resolved to do it anyway, Forsthoefel quickly gained my trust when he told the story of his leave-taking. His mother was worried but brave. She acts like I hope I would if one of my children announced she was walking across the country. The picture she snaps of her son walking down the train tracks behind their house in Pennsylvania is priceless. It’s the picture of a young adult doing his own thing, back turned to the camera, arms outstretched as if to say, enough, I’m done, catch ‘ya later.

Needless to say, he survives the trip — and gets a book contract, to boot. He only just reached Georgia, so I imagine I’ll have more to say about Walking to Listen.

Let me close for today with a passage about walking:


The walking itself was slowly become my home, or something like it. It was the only constant, the connective thread that tied everything together. 

(Photo: Courtesy Bloomsbury Press)

Mischief Managed

Mischief Managed

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This is what you say to close the Marauders Map, also handy for concluding any project, in Harry Potterese. And the project I’m concluding is reading the seven J.K. Rowling books.

This was urged on my by youngest and most Harry Potter-familiar daughter. She was my guide for this endeavor, finding each new book in the series wherever it was hiding in the house, keeping remarkably mum about certain things that I will also not disclose (which means there are no spoiler alerts in this post!).

What there is, is an appreciation for these modern classics, for their presence in this world, for the fact that my daughters grew up with them. They do what books for young people ought to do, which is to give them a taste of the world, its joys and sorrows, treacheries and sanctuaries.

Yes, there is plenty of evil and danger, they say, but you can handle it if you work hard, trust your instincts and seek the counsel of good friends. And what saves the day, always, is love.

Writer’s Writer’s Writer

Writer’s Writer’s Writer

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James Salter, I read recently, is not just a writer’s writer. He is a writer’s writer’s writer.

I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I like the sound of it. And I agree with it. Here’s why:

I had three lives, one during the day, one at night, and the
last in a drawer in my room in a small book of notes. There were wonderful things in that book, things that I am
unable to write or even imagine again. That they were wonderful was not my
doing—I merely took the trouble to put them down.    

The poets, writers, the sages and voices of their time, they
are a chorus, the anthem they share is the same: the great and small are
joined, the beautiful lives, the other dies, and all is foolish except honor,
love, and what little is known by the heart.

Writing is filled with uncertainty and much of what one does
turns out bad, but this time, very early there was a startling glimpse, like
that of a body beneath the water, pale, terrifying, the glimpse that says: it
is there.

 In the darkness the soft hum of the tires on the empty road
was like a cooling hand. The city had sunk to mere glowing sky. My own book was
not yet published but would be. It had no dimensions, no limit to the heights
it might reach. It was deep in my pocket, like an inheritance.

(These passages are from Salter’s memoir, Burning the Days. Photo: detail of wall mural from Mission San Xavier del Bac, Tucson, Arizona)

Morning of Words

Morning of Words

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It’s a quiet morning, the stock market is tanking, the government open again after a five-hour shutdown during the night, and I sit here perfectly content with my books, journal and laptop. Not that I’m living in a bubble or anything!

But truly, what can you do? We live in concentric circles, do we not? And when the outer orbits are caustic or frayed, we pull inward, to what makes us happy, what makes us whole.

What’s making me happy now is reading Ursula Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017). I was going to say it was her last book, but am glad I checked. Looks like there’s at least another one coming out.

Here is a passage I marked to copy later:

I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them.
I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.
And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are build and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.
Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.

Time Travel

Time Travel

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Pale Blue Dot (Earth from Voyager 1, 1990) Courtesy NASA

As mentioned below, yesterday I posted in the past. Though it was strange for me, for time travelers it was just another day in the space-time continuum. That would be those who zip to ancient Babylon in a wormhole, or who believe in the Many Worlds theory, which posits that everything that ever could happen actually has — in another universe.

“We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked,” writes James Gleick in Time Travel, a book he penned in his past, my (then) future. “No one bothered with the future in 1516.” In fact, time awareness was dim until the 19th century, and the phrase “turn of the century” wasn’t used until the 20th.

But once we had temporal sentience we could have time travel: H.G. Well’s Time Machine and Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life — and scads of other books and films, including “Dr. Who,” the original of which debuted shortly after Time Machine was made into a movie.

What was most fascinating (but difficult to understand) was the physics behind the yarns, the fact that time travel, though it remains science fiction, cannot be totally ruled out according to some interpretations of the universe. Or, as Einstein said, “People like us who believe in physics known that the
distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

One might wonder why we need time travel in an age of cyberspace.  “All answers come down to one,” says Gleick. “To elude death.”

(This entry was posted in … the future.)

What Unites Us

What Unites Us

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“We’re talking about the country, folks. What kind of country are we becoming?” Dan Rather, November 9, 2017.

Dan Rather turned 86 on Halloween and just published a new book called What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism (written with Elliot Kirschner). He spoke with columnist Jonathan Capehart last night at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, seeking to bring perspective to a world where fake news vies with the real thing.

Rather’s 44-year real news career at CBS News came to an end not long after papers he used to report a story on former President George W. Bush’s National Guard record were questioned as fraudulent. But that was more than a decade ago, and Rather has moved on. His News and Guts Facebook site has almost one and a half million followers. He’s embraced by millennials.

“I’m just a lucky reporter,” Rather said, not a philosopher. But he spoke about ideas and ideals, about the difference between patriotism, rooted in humility, and nationalism, rooted in arrogance. “Our nation suffers from a dearth of empathy,” he said, and in answer to one young woman who asked what she could do every day to counter the nation’s negative tone, said “help others.”

Some of Rather’s most pointed comments came when he talked about the state of journalism today. “A free press is the red beating heart of democracy,” he said. And, “the news is what the public needs to know that some powerful person doesn’t want them to know.”

What moved me most was hearing Capehart and Rather read from What Unites Us, in particular a passage about the importance of books:

“Our nation was born in a spirit of fierce debate. Our Founding Fathers had sharp political differences, but they were almost all deep readers, writers, and thinkers. When they set about to create a modern republic, they went into their libraries and pulled out the works of philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. They consulted the Greeks, the Romans, the philosophers of Europe, and the Bible. They revered the power of the written word and how it enabled a nation free from the whims of a king. As John Adams wrote, a republic “is a government of laws, and not of men.” A government of laws is a government of reason, and a government of books. That was true at our founding, and we must ensure that it remains a hallmark of our future.”

Book Notes

Book Notes

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Several years ago I began the practice of typing up notes on the books I read. An exercise in futility? An earnest attempt to bolster failing memory? Yes and yes … but more.

I like to think they are a written record of what every good book becomes — a conversation between author and reader. After all, these passages are personal, and they are a snapshot in time. Because what may strike me as important about a book I read in 2014 may not make a similar impression today.

But sometimes they hold steady. This morning I looked at notes for a book I read months ago, one that opened my mind and broadened my attitudes. The notes reminded me of why I liked the book in the first place, how rich it is in ideas. So much so that I printed off the notes and tucked them inside the book. I’m reading it again.