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The Climate of Reading

The Climate of Reading

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The Wind is Not a River is not a book to read in the winter. When his plane is shot down, journalist John Easley bails out and lands on Attu, the westernmost of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and the site of the only World War II battle fought on U.S. territory.

Easley has come to report on the war but instead finds himself in a damp, cold place known as “the birthplace of winds.” He survives by eating mussels and coaxing fire out of grass and driftwood. He wraps up in a parachute to sleep.  He is never really warm.

When I read this novel I find myself pulling up the covers or tightening my scarf. Such is the power of fiction to take us out of one place and plop us down in another.

But I must choose books more carefully. Read in the warm months, this book would be a cool breeze. Read in the winter, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of cold.

Bird Cloud

Bird Cloud

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It was not the best idea to pick up Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud last night when I couldn’t sleep. I thought it would lull me back to dreams, much as it had the evening before.

But not this time. Last night I was farther along in Proulx’s Wyoming house-building saga. I wanted to know what would happen to the concrete floor that was poorly poured — and the color of liver. I wanted to understand how she could have spent most of her (considerable) income on a place that turned out to be uninhabitable from October till May due to wind and snow-packed roads.

I still haven’t gotten a satisfying answer to the last question (though it made me feel good that someone so accomplished could also be so gulled.) As to the first — well, I know she found a floor fixer who gave up his Thanksgiving (for a mere $40,000!) to sand, polish and stain her floor to a dull, serviceable brown.

Along the way, I read lines like this:  “Bird Cloud was to be a type of poem if a house can be that. After Bird Cloud was finished I knew it was a poem of landscape, architecture and fine craftsmanship…”

Why Memoir?

Why Memoir?

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Over the last week I’ve come face to face with my reading habits. I ripped right through In a Dark Wood: A Memoir of Grief by Joseph Luzzi. On its heels, Susan Cheever’s Note in a Bottle. I’m just starting Mary Karr’s Lit.

This is not a discussion of  individual books so much as what they have in common: the memoir form.

It could be that I read memoir because I write memoir — or at least memoirish. I’ve kept a journal since I was 16. I’ve written this blog for almost six years.

But I may also read memoir because we live in a confessional age, one in which the examined self is deemed more interesting than the fictional character. If that is true — and there’s much evidence that it is — then does it flow from a dearth of imagination, a surfeit of self-absorption or a quest for understanding?

This is not a new question and my thoughts here are amateurish ones, but it’s that last reason that resonates most. There are more and more of us sharing this planet, yet we know and understand each other less and less. Perhaps the humanity implicit in memoir promises relief.  If we can know and understand another, there is hope for us all.

The Archaeology of Grief

The Archaeology of Grief

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“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten.”

I’m more than halfway through Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and the dogeared pages are growing. More and more often I find myself holding her phrases in mind, turning them over, searching for the invisible strings that tether them to the page, so light are they, so deft at plumbing the dusky chambers of the human heart.

This one today came after a description of a dying rabbit and how adept Macdonald became at the coup de grace, at putting the bunnies her hawk, Mabel, killed out of their misery. “The serious, everything puzzle that was death and going away.”

Macdonald was grieving her father’s abrupt passing as she tamed her hawk; she was learning to be a participant in life rather than just an observer. That’s what gave her the “momentary shouldering of responsibility” that allowed her to kill the rabbit.

And she was ruminating, always ruminating. She didn’t feel regret for the killing but for the animal itself. “It wasn’t a promising sorrow,” she says. “It was the sorrow of all deaths.”

I bought this book because I thought it would be a companion in grief. It has become just that. It is  the spade, but it is also the salve.

A New Chapter

A New Chapter

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My book group met night before last, only four of us this time out of a dwindling number of eight. It was our annual book picking — but we decided to add new members, too.

We did not come to this decision lightly. We’ve taken in no new members for eight years. But what’s eight years when you’ve been together 25?

The children we were birthing when the group formed are now marrying and settling down. It won’t be long before there’s a grandchild or two. But what time and busyness couldn’t derail, major life changes have. Two of us left and came back years later. But the recent departures will be permanent. People are retiring and moving away. We want to keep a quorum of sorts. We want to keep gathering on the first Wednesday of the month (more or less) to chat about Lila, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace and anything else that crosses our minds.

So in January we add a new chapter. We become a slightly altered group — but this time altered by addition rather than subtraction. 

The Great Migration

The Great Migration

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I’d wanted to read The Warmth of Other Suns for years, from when I first heard about it. I knew little about the movement of African Americans from the South to the North other than that it occurred.

I hadn’t realized the time frame of the migration — that it lasted from World War well into the 1960s. And I was unprepared for the calmly recited horrors of the Jim Crow South that drove people North and West.

The three people author Isabel Wilkerson chooses to follow — chooses after conducting more than 1,200 interviews — talked with her over days, weeks and years. They shared every detail of the fearful, stunted lives they left behind and the hardscrabble lives they found when they arrived.  We take the train with Ida Mae and her family as they head to Chicago and with George as he escapes to New York. We ride along with Pershing later known as Robert as he drives across the country fighting sleep because few motels accepted black guests.

Wilkerson accompanied the three on trips to visit friends and family, back to the southern lands they left behind. She visited them in the hospital and attended their funerals. She knew their dreams and disappointments.

So it was with no small measure of authority that at the end of the book Wilkerson could write:

The three who had come out of the South were left widowed but solvent, and each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.

(Tens of thousands of emigres from the South moved to Harlem in New York City.)

Landscapes of Childhood

Landscapes of Childhood

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“We think it essential that a 5-year-old learn to read, but perhaps it is as important for a child to learn to read a landscape,” says Washington Post columnist Adrian Higgins in his article “The British Forest That Gave Life to Pooh.”

Higgins is the Post‘s gardening columnist, and he came to this topic after reading The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, a new book by Kathryn Aalto. Aalto is a garden designer who spent time in the places where A.A. Milne lived with his wife and young son Christopher Robin. Milne drew on these landscapes to create his fictional world. There was the walnut tree that housed Pooh, and Owl’s aerie in an ancient beech. There was the real Five Hundred Acre Wood.

The beauty of the English landscape — and Milne’s memories of his own childhood decades earlier — made its way into the stories, and as such stands as a testimony not only to the power of topography but also to how important it is in the life of the imagination.

“As important as the Pooh stories remain, they speak to something of greater value, the importance of landscapes to children, places they return to, places they own, places to stage their own dramas, and places that imprint themselves on the mind,” Higgins writes.

I found these landscapes in the broad bluegrass meadows of central Kentucky, my children found them in the yards and woods of suburban Virginia. It doesn’t take a 500-acre wood; sometimes just an empty lot will do.

Events on the Wing

Events on the Wing

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If a journal is to have any value either for the writer or any potential
reader, the writer must be able to be objective about what he
experiences on the pulse. For the whole point of a journal is this
seizing events on the wing. Yet the substance will come not from narration but from the examination of experience, an attempt, at least, to reduce it to essence.  — May Sarton, The House by the Sea

I think about this as I remember the cemetery, the flag half mast, a large hawk circling in the leaden sky. There was a bank of autumn color from one stand of trees. Otherwise, the white stones and green grass made for a frightful symmetry.

Beyond the boundaries, cattle grazed, and  hills rolled on in the distance. As the priest said the ancient prayers, my eyes looked down at the flower petals under foot, one white, one yellow.

A peaceful place. A resting place. The sun broke through the clouds just as the burial was complete. 

Curiosity

Curiosity

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In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the word “passion,” how overused it is, how intimidating it can be. “Just follow your passion.” “Discover your passion and then everything else will follow.”

Of course, this is poppycock. It implies that the creative life is a matter of being swept away by something rather than working away at something. Gilbert suggests that instead of focusing on passion, we focus on curiosity.

I believe that curiosity is the  secret. Curiosity is the truth and the way of creative living. Curiosity is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. Furthermore, curiosity is accessible to everyone.

What a comfort it was to read these words. So obvious yet so overlooked. So simple but so true.

Big Magic

Big Magic

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I picked up Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic at the library this weekend. It’s new enough that I was surprised to see it — and I snapped it up, even though it’s a 14-day-only, no-renewal book.

When it comes to books that suddenly appear on library shelves long before I would ever expect to see them (I just read a review a few weeks ago), I suspect providence at work. Why this book? Why now?

Big Magic is about the joys of living the creative life and the need to persist in it despite all obstacles. It’s not a perfect book — it’s more pep talk than anything else — but it’s honest and encouraging and bighearted. And it makes some important points about finishing projects (better to be a “deeply disciplined half-ass” than a lazy perfectionist) and why it’s unwise to give up the day job (it would put too great a burden on the writing, sculpting, cello-playing or other creative impulse that must be pursued with lightness).

As I struggle to balance family responsibilities with a new set of duties in my day job, as I think about what I can give up to make this all work, I realize one thing that can’t go is this blog.

It’s as close to “big magic” as I can get these days.