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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.

Leaning Tower of Books

Leaning Tower of Books

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Thinking about the books and magazines I grew up with — and the ones my children did, too. Bookcases stuffed full,  nightstands spilling over, newspapers strewn across the kitchen table. My grandfather had a reading stand so he could prop up the paper and scan it as he had breakfast.

Reading is a solitary act with social potential — especially, I think, when the written word is on paper and more easily shared. When kids see their parents reading they are more likely to read themselves. But what happens when the words are on a device, ephemeral and inconstant?

I guess it makes the kids want the device, and this is undeniably true. But how do we measure the effect of the device itself, and the fact that it can be everything — book, magazine, newspaper? How does this change the reading equation?

There are answers here — and one day we will know them.

The Fiber of our Lives

The Fiber of our Lives

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How Life Unfolds is the name of a new ad campaign waged by the paper industry. I read about it in the newspaper (printed on newsprint — key point) a couple weeks ago.

It’s no secret that I’m a big believer in paper. I write about it occasionally (albeit in electronic posts on this blog!) and use it everyday. I scribble in an unlined paper journal, read actual books, make lists on scratch pads and send mail that requires stamps.

At the office I must periodically make a case to keep the magazine I edit in print. I have a list of arguments. For one thing, people aren’t likely to look for their alumni magazine online, so why go to the trouble of putting it together if no one sees it. Second, ink-on-paper is a durable emissary. It hangs around for years spreading the university’s good will — and sometimes inspiring alumni to write checks and mail them off in the paper envelopes provided for just such a purpose.

All of which may explain why I cringe at the paper industry’s website. “How paper helps you learn.” “Letters from camp are still a treasured tradition.” “Back to school report: How paper gives you a leg up on learning.”

If the paper industry needs a press campaign it must be worse off than I think. And in fact, a Washington Post article tells me that the copy- and writing-paper market has dropped by more than a third.

Maybe paper will go the way of cotton (“the fiber of our lives”) and become an exclusive commodity. This is what I hope for. It’s better than extinction.

Frontier Learning

Frontier Learning

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I’m just starting Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening to the West and am captivated by Stegner’s observation of the haphazardness of learning on the frontier.

I knew books were scarce; teachers, too. But Stegner riffs on this “homemade learning” and how boys (and they were mostly boys then, of course) were often captivated and bent by the first man of learning (and they were mostly men then, too) they encountered.

The closest books Abraham Lincoln could borrow were 20 miles away — and they belonged to a lawyer. The closest books John Wesley Powell could borrow belonged to George Crookham, a farmer, abolitionist and self-taught man of science. Crookham collected science books, Indian relics and natural history specimens.

So “[w]hen Wes Powell began to develop grown-up interests, they were by and large Crookham’s interests,” Stegner writes. Powell went on to explore the Grand Canyon and to champion the preservation of the West — all of this with one arm; he lost the other in the Civil War’s Battle of Shiloh. (Powell was a major with the Union forces.)

I think of us now with more influences than we know what do to with. Libraries at our fingertips. Information bombarding us day and night. Would we climb on a raft and venture down uncharted waters? Well, I know what I would (not) do. How about you?

Emerson in the Morning

Emerson in the Morning

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One of the most delicious parts of reading — and liking — a new book (Theroux’s The Journal Keeper, which I mentioned on Saturday) is discovering — or in this case remembering — other wonderful books to read.

Theroux mentions Emerson several times in The Journal Keeper so I spent some time last weekend scouring the house for a collection of his essays. One was nowhere to be found. Only a copy of “The American Scholar” in the Norton Anthology.

But this morning I realize that I don’t need a hard copy; I can go online. And there they are, familiar words a balm to my flagging spirit:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society
of your contemporaries, the connection of events.  …

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s
cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an
extemporaneous, half possession.  

 Ah yes, I feel better now. Ready to take on the day.