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Fighting Fire

Fighting Fire

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Fahrenheit 451. The temperature at which paper burns; a novel by that name by writer Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday.

Fahrenheit 451 was one of those novels I read as a kid and could never forget. It wasn’t just the frightening dystopia of a future without printed books. That future is becoming more real for us everyday.

It was something about the heart of the story, the way the characters cared for each other and for ideas. It was the elegant and practical and timeless solution they arranged to keep books alive — they memorized them. They learned them by heart. They became the books.

As we’ve all learned recently, painfully, book burnings are alive and well. And Fahrenheit 451 was often under assault for the vigor of its ideas. “The real threat is not from Big Brother, but from little sister [and] all those groups, men and women, who want to impose their views from below,” Bradbury told a Times of London interviewer (as reported in today’s Washington Post).

The way to fight fire is not with fire. Or with water. The way to fight fire is to believe,  hold fast and, ultimately, to become the solution. 


(Photo: Firepictures.net)

Independence Day

Independence Day

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Even when I’m not looking for them, I find exhortations and excoriations about place. I picked up Richard Ford’s Independence Day, for example, because I read a review of his new novel, Canada, which raved also about his earlier works. I had no idea that Independence Day would be laced with thoughts on houses and towns and their promises and deceptions, nor that the narrator, writer-turned-realtor Frank Bascombe, would muse often about real estate and belonging.

Here Frank compares his current residence in suburban Haddam, New Jersey, to his southern birthplace. “(Of course, having come first to life in a true place, and one as monotonously, lankly itself as the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I couldn’t be truly surprised that a simple setting such as Haddam — willing to be so little itself — would seem, on second look, a great relief and damned easy to cozy up to.)”

Later in the novel Frank totes up what he’s learned about belonging from “a patent lesson of the realty profession, to cease sanctifying places — houses, beaches, hometowns, a street corner where you once kissed a girl, a parade ground where you marched in line, a courthouse where you secured a divorce on a cloudy day in July but where there is now no sign of you, no mention in the air’s breath that you were there or that you were ever, importantly you, or that you even were. We may feel they ought to, should confer something— sanction, again — because of events that transpired there once; light a warming fire to animate us when we’re well nigh inanimate and sunk. But they don’t. Places never cooperate by revering you back when you need it. In fact, they almost always let you down. … Place means nothing.”

Frank doesn’t waver in his opinion at the end of the novel, either. No sentimental backtracking for him: “It’s worth asking again: is there any cause to think a place — any place — within its plaster and joists, its trees and plantings, in its putative essence ever shelters some spirit ghost of us as proof of its significance and ours? No! Not one bit! Only other humans do that, and then only under special circumstances…”

I don’t completely agree with Ford, but he makes a persuasive case.

Rain in Isolation

Rain in Isolation

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One aspect of living here that I’ve never minded is our sunny climate.  I don’t know the statistics, but the D.C. area is the brightest place I’ve ever lived. Which means I appreciate the rainy days when they come.

Today’s patter sounds like the rain in white noise machines. It has the same rhythm and pitch, the same levels of splatter. It is, then, a model spring shower. Made to order for the annuals I just settled in the ground yesterday.

I enjoy today’s rain only because it is the exception not the rule, though. There are places in this world I could never live because rain is the rule, not the exception. I’m thinking of Ireland.

Here is Heinrich Boll in his slender 1967 volume “Irish Journal,” writing about the weather of the country to which he says he is “too attached”:

“The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather. You can call this rain bad weather, but it is not. It is simply weather. …”

Rain in isolation does not drain the spirit. It excuses one from outside labors. It opens up the book, turns the page, settles the pen in the hand. Sometimes it even inspires.

The Library Place

The Library Place

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The book group met at my house last night. Two people sat on our sagging blue couch, the other two in the faded wing chairs, the ones that belonged to Tom’s parents so many years ago. I pulled the rocking chair over to the far end of the coffee table, which gave me an unaccustomed vantage point — staring straight at the built-in bookshelves, our pride and joy.

I think about the part books have played in the life of our home, the schoolbooks and novels, the histories and poetry, our old college books and now our children’s, too.

And then there’s the “library place,” the shelf of a hutch so named because it’s where we put library books that need to be returned. In the enchanting shorthand of family conversation, the library place has become a repository for anything that needs to be protected or preserved: retainers, driver’s licenses, a pile of  downy parakeet feathers.

It still serves as family safe — a spot once meant for books that now holds other precious cargo.

I can’t find a picture of the library place. This shot of my bedside table will have to do. There’s always danger of an avalanche.

The Poetry of Pittsburgh

The Poetry of Pittsburgh

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When I began this blog more than two years ago, I didn’t think long about the quotation I would use across the top. I knew it would come from Annie Dillard’s book An American Childhood.

“When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

A few years ago, on our way back from visiting Tom’s family in Indiana, we stopped in Pittsburgh, where Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945. It was a literary pilgrimage for me. Our first view of the city (where I had lived as a toddler, pre-memory), came at dusk, as we drove into a tunnel and out and suddenly there were the three rivers and the bridges crossing them all lit up with white lights and it seemed magical to me, this old city of groaning steel and trestles.

Was it the place itself that exerted this magic, or was it because I was primed to love it by Dillard’s words? “I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding.”

It was both, I think. The place of poetry. The poetry of place.

 Photo by Peter Tooker 2010 All Rights Reserved. From the blog Open Windows.

Third Place

Third Place

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This is Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, a place to meet friends, to picnic, to hang out. It is neither home nor work. It is what Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place.” But there are few such places in modern cities. “Our urban topography presently favors those who prefer to be alone, to stay in their homes, or to restrict their outings to relatively exclusive settings,” Oldenburg says in his book The Great Good Place.

I would say this design flaw applies most of all to suburban topography, to the design of subdivisions without center and without stores and without a pleasant place to congregate for an hour or two.  I know of nowhere in my neighborhood where people can gather with a regular crowd for a beverage and some conversation; and there certainly are no Central Parks. The closest tavern is a sports bar with a dozen or more conversation-killing TV screens on the walls. The one local coffee shop closes at 2 p.m. We buy our goods at anonymous malls and shopping centers.

“The problem of place in America manifests itself in a sorely deficient informal public life,” Oldenburg says. “The structure of shared experience beyond that offered by family, job and passive consumerism is small and dwindling. The essential group experience is being replaced by the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals. American lifestyles … are plagued by boredom, loneliness, alienation and a high price tag. America can point to many areas where she has made progress, but in the area of informal public life she has lost ground and continues to lose it.”

I finished Oldenburg’s book with a stunning takeaway point: that what we think are individual and family failings are actually deficits of community and place. That we have only just begun to plumb what placelessness has done to us.

Serendipity

Serendipity

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Before there was Amazon one-click ordering, there was the serendipitous joy of finding a book that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time on a dark dusty shelf in the nether regions of the library.

Though it could be any book, this time it’s Wallace Stegner’s When the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. I can already tell that it will be a keeper, that I’ll probably end up buying a copy of my own through — yes — Amazon one-click ordering.

But back to serendipity, to the way it feels to look up a book in the library catalog (and in the old days those wooden boxes ), scribble the number on a card and then go in search of it. This might take a while, especially if it’s a Dewey Decimal system; those numbers always give me headaches. But soon I have zeroed in on the row, then the shelf and then (miracle of miracles) the book is actually there, where it is supposed to be.

What’s captivating about the library find is the book’s tangibility, its placedness, it’s being there. But what fuels the joy of discovering it? It’s the plain simple (but intangible) fact that good books, in some way, become a part of us. More us than our bones and breath.

Wild Places

Wild Places

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A few days ago I wrote about Robert Macfarlane’s book The Wild Places, how the author sought remote mountaintops and bogs as comfort and as challenge. I’m almost finished with the book now, and Macfarlane has learned something.
–>He talks about the wildness that is all around us, the simple views of field and fern that may be recorded in a journal or a letter or may not be recorded at all but simply held in mind.
Most of these places, he says, “were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along — these might be enough.”

A few paragraphs later, Macfarlane says this: “It seemed to me that these nameless places might in fact be more important than the grander wild lands that for so many years had gripped my imagination.”

To take Macfarlane’s idea one step further: These nameless places are what attach us to a place, what make us feel bound to the land around us. This morning, I think about my own “wild places.”


Marquez and Memory

Marquez and Memory

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When I read this morning that today is the birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in 1927 and still living, I thought of his best book. Not 100 Years of Solitude, which took me almost 100 years to read (though I did eventually finish it). But Love in the Time of Cholera.

It has been several years since I read this novel, but I still remember the transcendent last chapter, when the beautiful but aged Fermina and Florentino, the man who has waited 50 years to be with her, take a steamboat voyage down a river bloated with corpses.

Love triumphs over death is the theme, but I can remember little else of that last chapter, only that I held my breath from the beauty of the language and the depth of the thoughts. This morning I’ve looked for quotations that might give a hint of this book’s grandeur and I found this one by Florentino: “Love becomes nobler and greater in calamity.”

But I’ll leave the last words to Thomas Pynchon and a review of the book he wrote for the New York Times in April, 1988:

There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance — at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.

Book Nook

Book Nook

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On the same weekend that I finally dipped my toes into the Kindle, I also bought two new bookcases. Tall, skinny ones that slip nicely into an oddly shaped alcove that we’ve been trying to make the best of — design-wise — since we bought the house.

So while I’m willing to try the electronic book, I’m making room for more of the real articles. Today I’ll read a library book on Metro. I’m racing to finish it so that I can dig into the latest Ann Patchett novel that Suzanne is lending me (and which someone else has lent her).

And so goes the community of book readers — trading, discussing, and yes, even hording. I imagine that soon my Kindle will be as full to bursting as our book shelves.

Meanwhile, we’ve created a little book nook in our bedroom: a rocking chair, a pouf (soft ottoman), a reading light and lots and lots of the the real things, just waiting to be plucked from the shelves onto our laps.

Not exactly this but something like it…