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Out of the Woods

Out of the Woods

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I just finished reading Lynn Darling’s Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding, a book about discovering a sense of direction in midlife.

When her daughter left for college, Darling moved to an off-the-grid house near Woodstock, Vermont. The woods were cool and inviting, a place to sort herself out. But Darling always became lost in them. So she took a survival course, learned to use a compass, acquired a topographical map. She found landmarks, charted distances from her house to a neighbor’s. Gradually she learned the nuances of wayfinding, when to trust herself and when to trust the map:

“Maps, I know now, are not static. Walk in a place long enough and you see all the mistakes that have yet to be corrected, the disconnect between the three-dimensional reality on which you walk and its two-dimensional representation. Walk in a place long enough and even the most accurate maps fail to represent what is actually there.”

As I read her book — on my Kindle — I pondered my own wanderings, the paths I’m following and the ones I am not. I thought about how important it is to stay limber as we grow older, to keep pushing ourselves in directions we have not gone before.

It took three-quarters of the book, but I finally performed my own little bit of technological wayfinding: I learned how to highlight the passages I enjoyed so I could find them later. A small achievement, but an achievement just the same. So, courtesy of Kindle’s “highlight” feature, here’s Darling again:

“Getting older is largely a matter of getting over yourself, of stepping out of your own way, the better to see the world through a wider lens than the narrow preoccupations of self had ever provided.

I wasn’t any of the things I had strived to be, or tried to escape. I was just a walker in the woods, who had learned a thing or two perhaps about finding her way, one who would get lost again and again.”

Body in Motion

Body in Motion

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Here is a brief hymn to the body in motion, a passage from the memoir Winter Journal by Paul Auster. I read the book a few weeks ago and marked this page:

Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs …

leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up on desks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunching over typewriters, walking through snowstorms without a hat …

feeling the different sensations of putting your feet on sand, dirt, and grass, but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities.

To which I will add … and along woodland trails, suburban lanes, the paved paths that run beside busy roads, the strips of sidewalk that show up unannounced when I least expect them — and across streams on cylinders of concrete, the water rushing beneath my feet.

Virtual Recall

Virtual Recall

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I’ve now read half a dozen or so books on my Kindle and the verdict (for me, at least) is in. While my book recall is poor enough with ink-on-paper tomes, it is almost nonexistent with the electronic product.

Night before last, at my book group’s annual book-picking, my friend Gwen proposed The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Oh, that’s lovely, I said. And it was. I remember that much.

“What’s it about?” Marianne asked.

I pondered, I reached way back into the dim recesses of memory (nine months?) and … came up with nothing. Only that it was lovely and I enjoyed it.

Luckily, my book group friends totally understood. They have also experienced “Kindle Brain.” In fact, just a few minutes later, someone would propose a book we already read — and it would take us half an hour to notice it.

Thank God it was a book I’d read in hard copy. Had it been electronic I would be re-reading it now.

Walkable City

Walkable City

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“Walking is a simple and a useful thing, and such a pleasure,
too. It is what brings planeloads of Americans to Europe on holiday, including even some of the traffic engineers who make our own cities so inhospitable.”  — Jeff Speck, Walkable City
 It would take far more than a single post to describe all the ideas in this book, thoughts about walkability from one of the nation’s foremost experts on it, the city planner Jeff Speck. For now here are Speck’s “Ten Steps of Walkability”:
 Put cars in their place
Mix uses
Get parking right
Let transit work
Protect the pedestrian
Welcome bikes
Shape the spaces
Plant trees
Make friendly and unique spaces
Pick your winners
Speck mentions European cities throughout the book. Here are places where pedestrians rule, where public transit safely transports people to and from their destinations, where bikes are welcome and buildings create human-scaled places.
What all these features combine to create is a walkable environment, one people want to stroll through and be part of.  We need to value “moving under one’s own power at a relaxed pace through a public sphere that
continually rewards the senses,” Speck says. “We need a new normal in America, one that
rewards walking.”

The Bibliophiles Have Spoken

The Bibliophiles Have Spoken

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I’d first heard the news from a friend a few weeks ago, someone who works in the Fairfax County Library system. Books were being tossed and librarians were being let go, she said. A new plan was in the offing, one with fewer librarians and fewer books, a plan later hailed as the transition “from a print environment to a digital environment,” according to a Washington Post article that broke the news last week.

When a county supervisor heard the news about the banished books, she rescued scores of good volumes from a dumpster and deposited them on the desk of a county official. The discarded books became a call to arms.

Since the news was made public, the Fairfax County Library has been told to put its new library plan on hold.

The books are safe. For a while, at least.

Big Sky

Big Sky

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It is a day of clarity and blue sky, a day that makes me dream of the West with its forever-faraway views. What would it be like to live in the open, to give up the canopy we Easterners hide beneath?

In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner has some answers:

Over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent. The horizon a dozen miles away is as clean a line as the nearest fence. …

The drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and as revived memory, is a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it.

Books at Hand

Books at Hand

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They’re piled on the bedside table, scattered on the coffee table, wedged two deep on bookshelves.

At least one commutes on Metro with me, often two, fiction and nonfiction. And always, of course, my own little black book, my journal, along for the ride.

Why must I have books around me? More books than I can possibly read?

Same reason I’ve always loved bookstores and libraries, I guess, which has something to do with the special calm that comes over me when I’m in them.

Here within reach this Friday morning are two memoirs, a novel, a book on mindfulness and another on grace, two books on place and some historical fiction.

Will I read all of these within the next hour? Unlikely. I’m reading page proofs today. But having books at hand, knowing I can dip into them at any moment, is a way of being. Books are as essential as air.

Place, Unexpected

Place, Unexpected

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So I’m reading along in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, a re-telling of the last months of Thomas Cromwell’s life, riveted by her story of intrigue in the court of King Henry VIII, not expecting a discussion of place, when I find this:

He [Cromwell] is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish rising to the hook; these vineyards, flower dens, arbours and walks, remain to him flat, each one a paper construct, a set of figures on a page of accounts: not sheep-nibbled margins, nor meadows where kine stand knee-deep in grass, not coppices nor groves where a white doe shivers, a hoof poised; but parchment domains, leases and freeholds delimited by inky clauses, not by ancient hedges, or boundary stones.

 Here is a longing for place that is ancient but real, the pull of the city-dweller toward the bucolic retreat, the dream of land when land is owned but not possessed.

How many of us moderns feel the same?

Journey Without Maps

Journey Without Maps

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I just started reading a book by this title. It’s written by Graham Greene, whose work I usually enjoy, although not sure about this one. Still, you can’t beat the title.

In fact, the title itself has me thinking. “Journey without maps” sounds so exotic, so adventurous — traveling to a place beyond civilization, where rivers have not been charted, roads not cleared. How many places can we go now that are unexplored, mysterious, limitless in possibility? How many of those places would we want to visit?

Like many titles, this one doesn’t work anymore. Now we would call it “Journey Without A Phone.”

As the map — like the land line, the address book (heck, the book itself) — joins the slide rule and the 8-track player on the road to oblivion, we who remember and cherish these items are embarking on our own journey. And it, too, is a journey without maps.

Small Favors

Small Favors

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I read in today’s Writer’s Almanac that July 11 is the birthday of E. B. White, essayist, journalist and the author of the beloved children’s books Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Here’s what White said about the genesis of Stuart Little:

“I took a train to Virginia, got out, walked up and down in the
Shenandoah Valley in the beautiful springtime, then returned to New York
by rail. While asleep in an upper berth, I dreamed of a small character
who had
the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.
When I woke up, being a journalist and thankful for small favors, I made
a few notes about this mouse-child — the only fictional figure ever to
have honored and disturbed my sleep.”

 What caught my eye is the phrase “being a journalist and thankful for small favors.” As usual, White  nails it in a few words. When one makes a living asking other people questions, one is grateful for information. And inspiration.

It took 15 years after the mouse-child appeared in his dream for White to complete the manuscript for Stuart Little. Talk about inspiration. I’m grateful for small favors.


First Edition Cover from Wikipedia