Yesterday I had lunch with two researchers whose work I’ve been following for several years. They are looking at what the social science community calls “return migration” and what poets call “going home again.”
In the course of our conversation, I learned about a book, Call to Home: African-Americans Reclaim the Rural South, by Carol Stack. This morning, I looked up that book, and I found these words:
“Many millions of Americans lack a place to go home to. Their families are no longer rooted in a particular piece of American ground, or never did put down such roots. Generations of migration have taken their toll.”
I have been reading Wendell Berry and thinking about home. In his essay “A Native Hill,” Berry describes a conversation he had with a New Yorker who tried to convince him to stay in that fair city for the sake of his literary career after Berry announced he was moving home to Kentucky. Berry admits that the literary world mattered to him then (and I suppose it still does), “but the world was more important to me than the literary world; and the world would always be most fully and clearly present to me in the place I was fated by birth to know better than any other.”
The man persisted, politely, that Berry, like Thomas Wolfe, “could not go home again.” The man’s argument, Berry says, “was based on the belief that once one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one’s origins was canceled out; there simply could be nothing worth going back to. What lay behind one had ceased to be a part of life, and had become ‘subject matter.'”
Berry’s point, which he makes so fully and beautifully in this patient, expansive essay, is that he has been more fully alive and conscious in his home place, in Port Henry, Kentucky, than he could have been elsewhere. He knows the people and the place, has walked every square mile of its hollows and ridges, understands and accepts its less than perfect history. And because he has been more fully human living in Port Henry, he has (I extrapolate) been truer to himself as a writer, too.
I could not be Wendell Berry — I am neither as smart nor as stern as he (and I am not a man) — but I admire his thinking and his writing, his economy of word and thought. And I imagine I will be writing about him again. In the meantime, I illustrate this post with a picture of a hill I have come to love. It is not a “native hill” — it is neither in my home state of Kentucky nor my adopted state of Virginia. It is in between. It is a hill I pass on the long drives through West Virginia that keep me tethered to the land I love.
Some books start strong and peter out as they go forward. Others pick up steam in the middle and race you to the finish. The Social Animal, by David Brooks, is neither of these. It’s a strange hybrid of a book, an attempt to explain the latest research on learning and emotion through the stories of two fortunate, happy (fictional) people, Harold and Erica.
Harold and Erica for the most part make their own good fortune, and they are likeable people, or at least Brooks makes you like them. My problem was, I wanted to know them better. The fiction part of the book kept getting in the way of the nonfiction part, at least for me.
But as the book progressed, I got used to its split personality and was uplifted by Harold’s final revelations:
“Harold tried and failed to see into the tangle of connections, the unconscious region, which he came to think of as the Big Shaggy. The only proper attitude toward this region was wonder, gratitude, awe, and humility. Some people think they are the dictators of their own life. Some believe the self is an inert wooden ship to be steered by a captain at the helm. But Harold had come to see that his conscious self — the voice in his head — was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine and deepen the soul within.”
This is a book about depth — and the depth makes all the difference.
Sometimes when the house is very quiet I can sneak in a few hours of reading early in the morning. I’m sharper after a night’s sleep, not dropping off on every page, and what I run my eyes over stays with me longer.
What stays and what doesn’t is the subject of the book I just finished, Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. It’s a book about memory and memorizing, how a journalist covering the U.S. Memory Championship spent a year developing his memory — and became the U.S. Memory Champion himself.
Basically, anyone can improve his or her memory, Foer says. Or anyone with reasonable intelligence willing to spend hours a day practicing. The mnemonic techniques Foer uses were well known hundreds of years ago, before printed books made memorizing less important.
In my favorite chapter, “The End of Remembering,” Foer provides an intellectual history of memory’s steady assault by scroll, codex, silent reading, indexes, the printing press — and more recently by computers, cell phones, Google and Post-It notes. Why bother to hold information in our heads when there are so many other places to put it?
“Our memories make us who we are,” Foer writes. “They are the seat of our values and source of our character. … Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.”
I couldn’t agree more. But just to be sure, I will now write “Joshua Foer, Moonwalking withEinstein” in the back of my journal. It’s where I inscribe the names of all the books I read. If I didn’t, I’d forget I had read them.
Chincoteague is what you call a one-horse town. The one horse is Misty, from the book Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry. The story of a family determined to raise a filly born to a wild horse, the book won the Newbery prize and was made into a movie. I remember seeing the movie as a child, and I read the book to our girls when they were young.
The book put Chincoteague on the map. It popularized the herds of wild ponies that roam the island. It lent its name to dozens of shops, restaurants and tours. The Chincoteague High School team is — you guessed it — the Ponies. Hardly a fearsome name but, as Claire pointed out when we passed the high school yesterday, an artist has tried to make the ponies look fearsome. There is steam coming from their nostrils and they have a tough, no-nonsense gaze.
Tom and Celia chanced upon Misty herself the other day; she is stuffed and on display at a local museum. Ghoulish and over the top, to be sure. (Even in Kentucky, where horses are king, we bury our famous ones.)
But the hype is gentle as hype goes. It makes me feel tender about this place and, above all, glad to know that a book still has the power to change a place.
I just finished reading Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life. His prose rolled over me like a big wave and left me dizzy in the way a wave makes you dizzy as it recedes and leaves you teetering behind on the sand.
“I’ve built a city from the books I’ve read,” he writes. “There are thousands of books that go with me everywhere I go. A good book sings a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts and balconies and theaters that thrive within the secret city inside me.”
Say what you will about Conroy’s writing — that his prose tends to purple, for instance — but I have never doubted that he is the real thing, and this book proves it.
“Here is what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer’s heart.”
Today I heard on the radio that a Cambridge University scientist has declared April 11, 1954 the most boring day since 1900. This is based on a computer analysis of 300 million facts, according to an NPR interview with William Tunstall-Pedoe, the scientist who invented the search engine that sifted through the facts and arrived at this oddly compelling conclusion.
Listeners who’ve commented on the story have mostly offered personal evidence to refute it — usually their own birthdays or those of their loved ones. None of the comments convinced me that this day shouldn’t be one of those most boring in history.
If April 11, 1954 was so ho-hum and ordinary, then wasn’t it also the most wonderful day, too? No great people were born, but neither were there explosions, battles or mass murders. And aren’t the simple, uneventful days the most special?
In Abraham Vergehese’s book Cutting for Stone, the character Ghosh tells his son, Marion, “You know what’s given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It’s been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work. My classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife.” Ghosh, the overworked doctor at a poor hospital in Ethiopia, falls asleep every night with these words on his lips: “Another day in paradise.”
I hope that April 11, 2011 — like April 11, 1954 — is just another day in paradise.
Since we hoard books in our house, it is often likely that when a particular classic is called for in a high school English class, we already have it. Of course it is not a pristine copy; it is usually adorned with such “English majorisms” as “illustrates dichotomy between life in city and life in country” or “example of bildungsroman.” While our children initially balked at taking such tomes to school, they began to see their advantage. There were answers in those margins!
Turns out that other people appreciate marginalia, too. I learned this several years ago when I wrote an article about the rare old books in the Georgetown Law library. And a new exhibit at Chicago’s Newberry Library celebrates “Other People’s Books” with marginal notes by the likes of Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson.
A recent article about the exhibit in the New York Times points out that while it’s possible to annotate electronically, it is not so easy to preserve those digital annotations. So add marginalia to the list of What We Have Lost with E-Books (along with, perhaps, paper cuts and Borders?).
Life on the margins: It may be better than we think.
It’s a gray, rainy day, perfect for endless cups of tea and a good book (or books). I have a pile of tomes beside me now: a memoir, a biography, a book of poetry and a novel. I keep checking books out of the library even though I already have a pile of unread volumes at home. And not just one library, either — I borrow from several.
All of this has brought to mind something my parents said to us when we were kids. Whenever we went out to eat, especially to cafeterias (those monuments to overeating that I still sometimes hanker for), the rule was you could take as much as you wanted from the line but you had to eat it all. Groans of “I can’t eat another bite” were met with the adage, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”
I stare at my pile of books. I’d like to inhale them, to have an immediate transfusion of their knowledge and inspiration into my starving brain. At the same time I don’t want to forgo the pleasure of savoring each page. I am sated but unbowed. My eyes are bigger than my stomach.
In a few days this blog will be a year old, so the other day I picked up my copy of A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. The name of my blog was a conscious tip of the hat to this title, but I hadn’t read the book in a while and I had forgotten that it begins with Kazin’s walk through the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he grew up. “Every time I go to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away,” he says in the first line,echoing a feeling so many of us have when we return to our hometowns. He admits that he has not moved far from home. “Actually I did not go very far; it was enough that I could leave Brownsville.”
As he walks through his old neighborhood, he recounts the sour smells, the shapeless old women sitting on stoops, the “dry rattle of old newspaper,” the end of the line. Brownsville is a place to leave, and even though it’s no more than an hour from Manhattan, it seemed like the middle of nowhere to the young Kazin. He describes the tiring subway ride back home after a day in the city. “When I was a child I thought we lived at the end of the world.” He knows every station, “Grand Army Plaza, with its great empty caverns smoky with dust and chewing gum wrappers,” Hoyt, with its windows of ladies’ clothes, then “Saratoga, Rockaway, then home.” Kazin is lucky in that his new life and his old one lie so close together — they are miles yet worlds apart.
Re-reading A Walker in the City surprised and encouraged me. Writing about place, in particular those places we call home and those we call hometowns, is something I plan to do more of in this blog. Kazin has set my mind to spinning.
