Book talkin'

Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape is a broad and deep book about the arctic north-- its animals (among them, muskoxen, polar bears, and narwhals), its people, the ever-changing ice, the history of European exploration there, extractive industries attached to the land parasitically, and the complex relationships between creatures, the land and sea, human psychology, and technology in a place often seen by outsiders as a wasteland.

"The monotonic surfaces of the Arctic create frequent problems with scale and depth perception, especially on overcast days. Arctic hare and willow ptarmigan sometimes disappear against the snow when they are only two or three yards away. Even when a contrasting animal like a caribou or a brown bear is visible on snow or ice, it is sometimes hard to determine whether it is a large animal at a distance or a small animal at close range. In My Life with the Eskimo Stefansson recalls spending an hour stalking a tundra grizzly that turned out to be a marmot. A Swedish explorer had all but completed a written description in his notebook of a craggy headland with two unusually symmetrical valley glaciers, the whole of it a part of a large island, when he discovered what he was looking at was a walrus. Johann Miertsching, traveling with M'Clure aboard the Investigator, wrote of a polar bear that 'rose in the air and flew off' as the hunting party approached. A snowy owl. 'These comical deceptions,' wrote Miertsching, 'are a frequent occurrence.'"

John Stilgoe's Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), a wee, odd psaltery in form, pleasant to behold and to be held, bears a wandering essay about the terminology of east coast salt water marshes: skiffs and skegs, bores and guzzles, johnboats and gundalows. Reading it is like sitting in a skiff while Stilgoe rows you through some brackish backwater or negotiates around muddy tidal flats. It reminds me of Noel Peattie and his little book about sea monsters (Hydra & Kraken, Regent Press, 1996).

Martin Murie's Seriously Insistent (Packrat Books, 2003) is a small volume of essays by a self-professed "varmentalist" who wonders about wilderness, weasels, fences, land use, and human nature.

Two of the essays were first published in Anderson Valley Advertiser and Canyon Country Gazette, quintessentially iconoclastic, independent papers where dissent simmers like camp coffee.

I like how each essay is buttressed at the end by several quotations from the likes of Edward Abbey, Linda Hasselstrom,Terry Tempest Williams, and Subcomandante Marcos.

Murie has varmentalism in his blood. His parents Olaus and Mardy, and his uncle Adolph, lived in wild places (Alaska and Wyoming), studied wildlife, and wrote books about animal tracks and northern ecology (including the birds, grizzlies and wolves of Alaska). Murie himself grew up in Wyoming, but now writes from a rural outpost in the Adirondacks.

The Account: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación(Arte Publico Press, 1993) presents a new translation of the work first published in Spain in 1542. Shipwrecked on the Gulf Coast of Florida in 1528, Cabeza de Vaca was one of only a few to survive subsequent illness, starvation, and Indian attacks, in part because of his adaptability -- learning native languages, enduring slavery, becoming known as a healer, then using his newfound acclaim among Indians wisely.

During the years 1528-1536, Cabeza de Vaca made his way from Florida to northwestern Mexico. Here's a description from his time with Indians in what is now Texas:

"Their principle food is roots of two or three kinds, for which they search throughout the land. The roots are very bad and cause people who eat them to swell up. It takes two days to dig them and they are very bitter. On top of this, they are very difficult to dig. Those people are so hungry that they can not do without them [Cabeza de Vaca himself was starving and naked], and go two or three leagues looking for them. Sometimes they kill some deer, and sometimes they catch fish. But this is so little and their hunger so great that they eat spiders, ant eggs, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes and poisonous vipers. They eat dirt and wood and whatever they can get, as well as deer excrement and other things I will not talk about. My observations lead me to believe they would eat stones if there were any in that land. They keep the bones of the fish, snakes, and other things they eat to grind them into a powder which they eat."

About the healings: "We all became healers because so many people insisted."

When Cabeza de Vaca and the three other surviving "Christians" (i.e., Spaniards) with whom he'd been reunited and with whom he was traveling found their way at last to the Sonoran Desert and other Spaniards there, the reverse culture shock must have been immense. "After this we had many great quarrels with the Christians because they wanted to enslave the Indians we had brought with us. We were so angry... We gave the Christians many buffalo-hide blankets and other things we had."

"The Christians... had their interpreter tell [the Indians] that we were the same kind of people they were, who had gotten lost a long time ago, and that we were people of little luck and valor. They said that they were the lords of the land, and that the Indians should obey and serve them, but the Indians believed very little or nothing of what they were saying. Speaking among themselves, they said instead that the Christians were lying, because we had come from the East and they had come from the West; that we healed the sick and they killed the healthy; that we were naked and barefoot and they were dressed and on horseback, with lances; that we coveted nothing but instead gave away everything that was given to us and kept none of it, while the sole purpose of the others was to steal everything they found, never giving anything to anybody."

Cabeza de Vaca and the other three made their way thence to Mexico City. He alone returned to Spain in 1537.

Danny Gregory's Everyday Matters: A New York Diary (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) is a sketchbook made by a man who took up drawing after his wife was paralyzed from the waist down after falling front of a train.

"My drawing began as a way to count my blessings," Gregory writes. "To study, capture, catalog the things that, despite it all, make my life rich." The practice changed his life profoundly, and what mattered, says Gregory, "was the slow careful gaze."

Here are words about the experience, along with drawings of lightbulbs, shoes, stuffed animals, Christmas ornaments, the New York skyline, the contents of a refrigerator, a dog named Frank, and a woman named Patti.

Gregory is a brother spirit to Moonlight Chronicles' Dan Price (mentioned herein).

Mary Oliver's White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (Harcourt, 1994) is a thin volume focusing largely on birds and other animals: snails, a porcupine, deer, a toad, spiders. I find the prose poems to the most fully realized and satisfactory.

Sometimes I think Oliver overdoes it with repetitious use of certain words in different poems. "Thumb", for example. She's referred to an owl as "God's thumb" and now here she describes "the sticky thumbs of [snails'] bodies" and asserts that "When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive."

At her best here, she is very good. Here's one of my favorites:

William

Now there's William. He comes pecking, like a bird, at my heart. His eyebrows are like the feathers of a wren. His ears are little seashells.

I would keep him always in my mind's eye.

Soon enough he'll be tall, walking and conversing; he'll have ideas, and a capricious will; the passions will unfold in him, liked greased wheels, and he will leap forward upon them.

Who knows, maybe he'll be an athlete, quick and luminous; or a musician, bent like a long-legged pin over the piano's open wing; or maybe he will stand day after day over a draftsman's desk, making something exquisite and useful--a tower or a bridge.

Whatever he does, he'll want the world to do it in. Maybe, who knows, he'll want this very room which, for convenience, I realize, I've been calling mine.

I feel myself begin to wilt, like an old flower, weak in the stem.

But he is irresistible! Whatever he wants of mine--my room, my ideas, my glass of milk, my socks and shirts, my place in line, my portion, my world--he may have it.

Laurie Shepherd's A Dreamer's Log Cabin: A Woman's Walden (Dembner, 1981) is a journal of the author's year spent building a cabin near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. After quitting her jobs as insurance agent and dishwasher, the hardy 28-year-old Shepherd set to work, with the occasional help of women friends, on eight acres of land she'd saved up to purchase, using a hand-made boom to maneuver heavy logs into place.

Early on she writes: "My response [to skeptical acquaintances] is to delve... into Thoreau to find reassurance.... I underline sentences I'd like to point out to people who misunderstand my motivation."

When she finally moved into her cabin, winter was coming fast. For warmth she had her great-grandparents' wood stove, but that didn't even keep the temperature above freezing. "Thoreau's cabin was warm at night, wasn't it?", she asks. (Until she got a more efficient stove, she was rising every two hours throughout the night to stoke the fire.)

For night light: kerosene lamps. For water: a well and pump. For "nature's callings": an outhouse.

"I love being alone, living alone, and working alone, It makes life very special. God is always close because there's none closer, friends are never taken for granted, and an off-the-cuff sentence at the end of a letter can be a treasure."

The best zine I've read in quite a while is Jim Lowe's Time Is the Problem. Its philosophical musings and anecdotes struck responsive chords in me. Many of these relate incidents from New York's Central Park. Lowe writes about a stranger who seemed to know what he was been thinking, a shared experience that transcended words, and a dire moment which was also so "exquisitely vivid" as to negate fear.

Zine creators are often smart, but rarely so wise.

"I got a wonderfully enigmatic message from the local library where I had requested a book of James Galvin: 'Sorry, God's mistress has been discarded.'"

To order: $3/sample from P.O. Box 152, Elizaville, NY 12523.

I continue to be remiss in noting all my reading here, but lately I've been enjoying Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, a natural history about boreal life: polar bears, narwhals, muskoxen.

Of the latter, Lopez writes: "They are tranquil animals, but their equipoise should not be confused with docility. John Teal once observed a rutting bull leap clear of the ground in an apparent attempt to snag the pontoons of a low-flying aircraft."

"An explorer in Greenland once terrified himself by seeking refuge from a storm in the lee of what he first took to be mounds of snow-covered earth. They were muskoxen, and they began to stand up as he walked over them."

In the past months I've read things without writing about it here. Neruda's Memoirs, Katie Lee's book All My Rivers Are Gone, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, and a volume of Thoreau's journals from 1851 all come to mind. Another is No Horizon Is So Far: Two Women and Their Extraordinary Journey Across Antarctica, by Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft (Da Capo Press).

Arnesen and Bancroft were the first women to cross the frozen land mass of Antarctica. In late 1999 and early 2000 they traveled 2300 miles in 90 days on skis, aided--and sometimes endangered by--sails. During this time they managed to grow a friendship, keep in touch with school children via satellite phone, appreciate the stark beauty of a remote place, and avoid disaster. I found reading about their voyage to be inspirational, even though I aspire to different adventures.

Readers are reminded that the natural world can be vast and harsh. In polar regions where snow crusts may hide icy chasms and blowing snow obscure vision--and where summer temperatures typically run -15 degrees F. and colder--technology will only get you so far. Rather determination, flexibility, courage, ingenuity, and teamwork largely decide whether human endeavors succeed or fail.

Mary Oliver's Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) includes short essays on Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, both of which caused me to reread some of their works. "A sermon," writes Oliver about Leaves of Grass, "a manifesto, a utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change." Calling it "foolishly, childishly, obsessively affirmative," she adds: "Insistence and excess are not naturally virtues, but Whitman makes them virtues." Listing Whitman's various tones, Oliver begins to sound like Walt himself: "Vatic, tender, patriotic, journalistic, impassioned, avuncular, sensual."

Winter Hours includes more aphorisms and notebook gleanings ("Sand Dabs") begun in Blue Pastures (see below) and continued in West Wind (1997). "I am a performing artist," Oliver asserts. "I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say, And do the same." At their best, her poems do speak this way.

O liver!

Mary Oliver's What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems (Da Capo Press, 2002) is a slim volume of forty poems, over half of which explicitly describe communion with animals: dolphins, mockingbird, snake, owl, hummingbird, raven and crows, thrush, turtle, jellyfish, clams, herons, more crows, lark, bats, deceased dog, snow buntings, seals, tree sparrows, loon, another owl, mink. Most of the other poems are also explicitly about the natural world: stones, wind, roses, the sea, rain, oranges, moonlight, snowfall.

In the most effective of these poems a profound connection is made between sensation and human emotion, a crystalline present moment that is now past but that suggests to the reader endless such moments at hand. In others, Oliver walks a fine line between poetry and mere description, making me think one would do just as well to go for a walk oneself and open one's eyes and heart.

I wonder why Oliver so often assigns gender to animals she writes about, a turtle say ("he sees me/and he thrashes") or a snake ("He has cousins..."). It stops me in my reading and makes me ask, "How does she know?"

Jack Loeffler's Adventures With Ed: A Portrait of Abbey (University of New Mexico Press, 2002) supplements James Cahalan's thorough Edward Abbey: A Lifeby relating personal stories and anecdotes from the author's longtime friendship with Abbey, such as a near disastrous camping trip in Mexico with their wives and daughters (they narrowly skirted highway robbery), philosophical conversations the two had while camping in the desert, and intimate details about Abbey's death and outlaw burial. The book also contains some photos and manuscript facsimiles not in previous Abbey biographies, including a beautiful one with daughter Becky.

I counted nine references to Henry David Thoreau, one noting that Abbey's One Life At A Time, Please was titled in reference to Thoreau's deathbed response to Parker Pillsbury who wondered aloud how "the opposite shore" appeared: "One world at a time."

Avoiding hagiography, Loeffler describes incidents that--depending on one's beliefs--might tarnish or burnish one's views of Abbey, from an encounter with Mexican prostitutes (Abbey was mortified and saddened), to drunken and spiteful throwing of beer bottles on the road. It's clear that, like Whitman, Abbey was complex and contained multitudes. He was sensitive and belligerent, lusty and tender, fearful and courageous: Some unusually vibrant recipe of human. Joyful, responsible, playful, irresponsible, steadfast, independent, connected to friends and family, politically engaged: Abbey was anarchistic through and through, and at the same time romantic.

He was not a philosopher whose theories and wonderings were confined to an armchair or campfire, but one whose thinking went hand-in-hand with living, seeing, loving, and singing.

As Abbey wrote in his journal, "There comes a time in the life of every woman, every man, when we must put down our books, leave the library or the kitchen or the shop or the field, and go forth on the road of life to meet enemy face to face. One brave deed is worth a thousand books."

Postscript: Readers of this book will learn which of his novels Abbey thought was his best. (I agree with him).

Nuruddin Farah's Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices From the Somali Diaspora (Cassell, 2000) is an interesting account of people in limbo: refugees from Somalia making their way from camps in Kenya, to Italy, Switzerland, and Sweden. Much of the book stems from conversations with Somalis abroad, such as Asha Haji Mohamoud who asks "[W]hat is a refugee but a person whose space of manoeuvre is no bigger than the space which my Adam's apple moves up and down in? Refugee space is circumscribed even if they have the host nation's benefaction."

"To most Somalis," asserts Abdulqadir Salaad Dhorre in Naples, "the future is a responsibility many appear unmprepared to shoulder, the past a lament they sing, with the refrain of regret 'If only!' The present is a dirge."

Farah's own voice--that of an international contemporary novelist-- is refreshingly clear and at the same time somewhat acerbic and aggrieved.

Francisco X. Alarcón's Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (Chronicle Books, 1992), winner of the Before Columbus Foundation's 1993 American Book Award, is drawn in part from a 17th century manuscript by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, a priest hired by the Spanish inquisition to record the native spells and myths as part of an effort to extinguish them.

More about the poet here: Francisco X. Alarcón.

I especially like the book's original poems such as this one:

Day and Night

I bleed
in silence
all alone

Martín
Mariana
Domingo

in fields
in streets
in cells

my fists
hit
walls

whips
undress
my ribs

from
my mouth
come out

broken teeth
blood
butterflies

Mary Oliver's Blue Pastures (Harcourt, 1995) collects some of the poet's incisive short essays, a handful of which were first published in magazines such as Orion and DoubleTake, on topics ranging from owls, fish, and foxes, to Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and poetry in general.

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time."

"[T]he world's otherness is an antidote to confusion... [S]tanding within this otherness--the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books--can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

"Deep in the woods, I tried walking on all fours. I did it for an hour or so, through thickets, across a field, down to a cranberry bog. I don't think anyone saw me! At the end, I was exhausted and sore, but I had seen the world from the level of the grasses, the first bursting growth of trees, declivities, lumps, slopes, rivulets, gashes, open spaces. I was some slow old fox, wandering, breathing, hitching along, lying down finally at the edge of the bog, under the swirling rack of the trees."

"Poetry ... is the song of our species."

Lynd Ward's God's Man: A Novel in Woodcuts (St. Martin's Press, 1978; first published 1929), a seminal work in a genre continued today by Eric Drooker , is a dark tale of an artist who's sold his soul to the devil.

Here's a short bio of Ward with some graphics.

Frans Masereel (1889-1972) was an influential Belgian artist who produced a huge body of work, including illustration (of books by Villon, Whitman, Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, and others, for example), posters, and some of the first graphic novels ever created. Josef Herman's Frans Masereel: The Radical Imagination (Journeyman Press, 1980) includes some of the artist's brush drawings from French pacifist paper La Feuille, as well as woodcuts excerpted from his "novels without words" The Passion of Man, The Sun, The Idea, The City, and My Book of Hours.

Frans Masereel's The City (Schocken Books, 1988?; first published in Germany as Die Stadt in 1925) is a tour de force in portraying a place of toil, commerce, romance, violence, learning, lechery, loneliness, tragedy, and spectacle, while his Danse Macabre (Pantheon, 1942) is a folio volume presenting 25 brush drawings depicting the horror of war (with a skeleton the only ongoing character).

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea is a slender book of elegant philosophical ruminations about solitude, simplicity, and middle-aged growth, engendered by a solo vacation on a tropical island. Lindbergh uses seashells as metaphors to help understand her own over-busy suburban life and her roles as mother, wife, and socially engaged human. The 20th anniversary edition I read (Pantheon, 1975) included a new afterword by the author.

Lindbergh writes clearly and--at times--aphoristically:

"Woman's life today is tending more and more toward the state William James describes in the German word 'Zerrissenheit-- torn-to-pieces-hood.'"

"With our pitchers we attempt sometimes to water a field, not a garden."

"Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected with others."

"Intermittency--an impossible lesson for human beings to learn. How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one's existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave? ... Perhaps this is the most important thing. .... Simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of relationship is valid."

"The world today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone. ... Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement, or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it--like a secret vice!"

Henry David Thoreau's The Maine Woods, the first of his books to be published posthumously, describes three camping sojourns Thoreau made into the northern Maine wilderness in 1846, 1853, and 1857. It's a very moose-y, watery, buggy book that reminded me of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

How can one not like someone who writes "I was in just the frame of mind to see something wonderful", who complains so unabashedly about being "seriously molested" by black flies (Simulium molestum), and who writes in such clear detail about everything from how a canoe was rigged so that it could be carried over a portage ("If you know of a better way, I should like to hear of it") to a discovery of phosphorescent wood? It's a book full of curiosity and joy--from Thoreau's interrogations and observations of Penobscot guide Joe Polis, to his frequent pun-making-- but also complex and full of tension, epitomized in passages about a moose kill and how he ultimately felt about having been a party to that.

Thoreau wrote that he and his fellow travelers were "seriously molested by the black-fly (Simulium molestum), complains about "mosquitoey" campgrounds, and describes a bug juice that didn't work so well:

"[R]emembering that I had a wash in my knapsack, prepared by a thoughtful hand in Bangor, I made haste to apply it to my face and hands, and was glad to find it effectual, as long as it was fresh, or for twenty minutes, not only against black-flies, but all the insects that molested us. They would not alight on the part thus defended. It was composed of sweet-oil and oil of turpentine, with a little oil of spearmint, and camphor. However, I finally concluded that the remedy was worse than the disease. It was so disagreeable and inconvenient to have your face and hands covered with such a mixture."

And I think he's right about this:

"Some are nearer the frontiers on feather-beds in the towns than others on fir-twigs in the backwoods."

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (Villard, 1996) cites Henry David Thoreau ten times in investigating the story of Chris McCandless, a young man who drifted around the U.S. in the mid 90s after graduating from college, then hiked into the Alaskan outback where he survived off the fruit of the land for 3 1/2 months and then died.

Amusingly, Krakauer quotes one of many people he tracked down, a person who'd encountered McCandless on his journeys, a McDonald's "second assistant manager" in Bullhead, Arizona, where McCandless worked for a short time: "I don't think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work or anything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature and weird stuff like that...."

Krakauer's chapter epigraphs are provocative. Here's part of one from Paul Shephard's book Man in the landscape: "To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality."

One thing the book conveys about McCandless, without explicitly commenting on it, is how happy he was to be out of doors, living ruggedly. If one can but shake one's head at his cutting ties with family who loved him (and hurting them immensely), one can understand his exuberant pure joy in following his own star. McCandless wrote in his journal, "It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which the real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you." The tragedy is that he is no longer alive to convey this gratitude to his parents.

Feeling cooped up, craving the out of doors, out of city, out of mind, I've been reading Stephen Graham's The Gentle Art of tramping (D. Appleton, 1936), from which:

"The richest people are the good listeners."

"I am inclined to measure a tramp by the time taken rather than by the miles. If a hundred miles is covered in a week it is a longer tramp than if it is rushed in three days. There is great happiness in taking a month over it."

"The best companions are those who make you the freest, They teach you the art of life by their readiness to accommodate themselves. After freedom, I enjoy in a companion a well stocked mind, or observant eyes, or wood lore of any kind. It is nice sometimes to tramp with a living book."

"Tramping is the grammar of living. Few people learn the grammar--but it is worth while."

Community newspapers, trade journals, uncensored correspondence, books that have stood the test of time, magazines from other countries, scraps of paper picked up off the ground, and poems salvaged by friends from recycling bins, that's what I've been reading. And will continue to read.

The April 24 issue of Garfield County News reports on the attempted suicide of a young British man who drove his car off a cliff between Escalante and Boulder, Utah. Thanks to the deployment of an airbag, the sturdy construction of a Chevy Impala rental vehicle, and fate, the guy walked away with scratches, leaving an unusually difficult job-- the removal the wreck from a precipitous spot. Thanks to this article I learned about several trade publications to whom a story and photos have been submitted. How many people read Tow Times and American Towman? I don't know, but I want to be one of them.

I've been reading widely, but evidence of this hasn't been showing up here for a while.

Mohandas Gandhi's Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Dover, 1983; first published in 1948 by Public Affairs Press as Gandhi's Autobiography): I've been reading several short chapters at a time. Three-fourths of the way through, it's largely covered Gandhi's years in South Africa. My eyes have been opened to a man who seems strangely joyless, harsh, self-righteous, and demanding in his own words, leading me to be curious for others' views of him. That said, there certainly is wisdom here, along with medical quackery.

"The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust." Amen.

"Where is there a wretch so wicked and loathesome as I?" (Compare Thoreau, from "Economy" in Walden: "I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.")

"Truth is like a vast tree, which yields more and more fruit, the more you nurture it."

"I was a cruelly kind husband."

"All self-denial is good for the soul."

As a young lawyer, Gandhi learned that the "true practice of law [is] to unite parties riven asunder," and says he spent twenty years in practice "bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases." But in his own beliefs and practices-- medical and dietary, to name two examples that Gandhi covers heavily--he not only followed a hard line, but demanded this of his family.

"Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe.... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe." (from "Intricacy")

"The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name... I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam." (from "Seeing")

"The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end." (from "The Present")

The same might be said of Holy the Firm which has its lucid moments, such as these words:

"There is no such thing as a freak accident.... We are most deeply asleep at the wheel when we fancy we control any switches at all."

Mary Oliver's The Leaf and the Cloud (Da Capo Press, 2000) is a poem in seven parts, some of which I'd read before. (The first two parts were anthologized in The Best American Poetry 1999 and The Best American Poetry 2000.)

I could say, "I wish I'd written that," or that it mostly succeeds in conveying what I've tried o convey. Or that it's a new testament, a gospel to the real wonder of the world. The beauty and the never-ending mystery of insects, shoulders, and "the rosy comma of the radish."

Oliver writes, counter-intuitively,

"Can you imagine a world without certainty?
The wind rises the wind falls.

        The gravels of the world,
        the stones of the world
        are in their proper places.

        The vast, writhing
        worms of the sea
        are in their places.

        The white gulls
        on the wet rocks
        are in their places.

        All is certainty."

Edward Abbey's Abbey's Road (E.O. Dutton, 1979) is a collection of travel essays, political rants, and personal recollections, more journalistic than literary. Notably, about a third of the book is devoted to four pieces about traveling in Australia -- comparable to Thoreau writing about Maine or Cape Cod instead of the Walden Woods. Generally not at his most profound here, Abbey sometimes closes these pieces inartistically. (For example: "End of journey.") In a few, the more deeply philosophical Abbey-- the careful and caring Abbey-- comes out of hibernation at the end.

On the Escalante canyons, from "Down There in the Rocks":

"... Back at the canyon's head, the sun blazes down on the shallow pool.... One thousand feet beneath, the spring continues to flow and the little stream to snake its shining way through canyon jungle toward the hidden river. The hawk soars, the ravens quarrel. And no man sees. And no woman hears. No one is there. Everything is there."

From "Science With a Human Face":

"Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

...Last night I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy, giant Douglas fir. I stopped to look. And what I saw was the moon-- the moon itself, nothing else; and the tree, alive and conscious in its own spiral of time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky. We were there. We *are*. That is what we know. This is all we can know. And each such moment holds more magic and miracle and mystery than we--so long as we are less than gods--shall ever be able to understand. Holds all that we could possibly need--if only we can see. There are no further worlds."

From "The Sorrows of Travel":

"Aliens on this planet? Us? Who said so? Not me. And if I did, that was yesterday. Tonight I know better. We are not foreigners; we were born and we belong here. We are not aliens, but rather like children, barely beginning here and now in the childhood of the race to discover the marvel, the magic, the mystery of this gracious planet that is our inheritance."

Sometimes I don't so much read as glean. Lately I've been collecting Thoreau citations in contemporary literature and learning the vastness of his influence. These citations--from passing mentions to full articles and whole chapters of books-- represent a range of works about everything from architecture to animal rights, and from the micro-histories of salt and water, to books of essays, philosophy, travel, politics, and biography.

Just now thumbing through Joseph A. Amato's Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History (University of California Press, 2002) I found a chapter, "Writing History Through the Senses" (pp.60-76), that focuses on ambient sounds: nature sounds, farm sounds, train sounds, automotive sounds, radio. This interested me for a number of reasons, one of which was recent engagement with the book Here-ings (see below). I also found therein two paragraphs about Thoreau and trains, quoting from "Sounds" (in Walden), and saying that Thoreau ("the premier nineteenth-century Northeastern localist and regionalist") speculated that "everywhere on the Massachusetts landscape the train's whistle had joined the acoustic landscape of hooting owls, baying dogs, trumping bullfrogs, and rumbling carts."

Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod was first published in 1865, three years after his death. It's a rollicking, punful account that synthesizes Thoreau's several walking tours of the Cape, full of musings about the sea and beach, careful descriptions of what he sees there, and accounts of natural and human history, the latter quoting liberally from Thoreau's wide reading as well as relating stories of people living there in Barnstable County in the mid-19th century.

The Penguin edition I read (1987; introduction by Paul Theroux) contains no notes, so you've got to figure out for yourself at times whose poetry is being quoted (Shakespeare, for example), and who Thoreau means when he saw "we".

From "Provincetown" chapter:

"The cod in this fish-house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly. Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It reminded me of the figs of Smyrna. 'How long does it take to cure these fish?' I asked.

'Two good drying days, sir,' was the answer.

I walked across the street again into the hotel to breakfast, and mine host inquired if I would take 'hashed fish or beans.' I took beans, though they never were a favorite dish of mine. I found next summer that this was still the only alternative proposed here, and the landlord was still ringing the changes on these two words. In the former dish there was a remarkable proportion of fish. As you travel inland the potato predominates. It chanced that I did not taste fresh fish of any kind on the Cape, and I was assured that they were not so much used there as in the country. That is where they are cured, and where, sometimes, travellers are cured of eating them...."

Steve Peters' Here-ings: A Sonic Geohistory (La Alameda Press) presents ambient sound from rural New Mexico, transcribed into words and recorded on CD, over intervals making up a day. Nighthawk swooshes, train whistles, and the rush of wind through trees make up a soundscape sometimes augmented intrusively by human "playing" of juniper branches and cactus spines. ($20 + shipping from 9636 Guadalupe Trail NW, Albuquerque, NM 87114; for more info: 505-224-9483)

Two consecutive books by guys named Walter. Hmm.

Walter Mosley's What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace (Black Classic Press, 2003) is an extended essay on "what it means for African Americans... to stand for world peace." I'd first read an adaptation from the book published in the January 27 issue of The Nation.

"Just one voice of support is succor against a thousand enemies."

"I do not believe we can change the will of our government without first coming together in smaller organizations... Grassroots organizing is the only route for real democracy in our lives."

"We are isolated from each other by... the all-too-human trait of concentrating on the immediacy of our lives while ignoring the experiences of the larger world.... We somehow manage to live guilt-free lives, even though we have intellectual awareness of suffering around the globe."

"We... need to nourish those who seek peace."

"We should protest every unwarranted act of war-- every embargo, every refusal to help enhance the quality of life... Protest should be our language and our creed."

"We don’t vote for worldwide oppression. We pay for it."

"Most Americans have a jelly jar or a coffee can somewhere that’s about halfway filled with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. There are billions of dollars laying fallow at any moment in dark closets and bottom drawers. Once we have set up a mechanism for dealing with this money, we can... begin to collect this vast national treasure to fund a world peace movement."

"A powerful obstacle to world peace is American cynicism."

"I say this to Black America. We know how to live in a world where a violent end is a good possibility. We know when we walk out on the street that there’s a chance that we might not only be profiled but actually arrested, tried, and convicted for something we did not do. This doesn’t take away our ability to dance or sing or make love. This doesn’t keep us from planning for a better tomorrow."

"African Americans know how to live with hatred. We’ve been stopped for walking in the wrong neighborhood, lynched for looking up the wrong skirt. We never liked the mistreatment, but we never gave up the dream, either. We know in our hearts that people are equal and essentially good. We hold that truth to our breasts and move ahead without hesitation. Let’s keep that up..."

"Our collective freedom... depends on our ability to defend the rights of others."

"Every day that we wake up is a good day. Every breath that we take is filled with hope for a better day. Every word that we speak is a chance to change what is bad into something good. We aren't slaves... This nation is at least a potential democracy. We need to wake up from this walking nightmare and realize that the sun is shining..."

There are many Henry David Thoreaus. The Thoreau with the ability to pay attention carefully and patiently for long periods of time without hurry. The Thoreau loved by children. The Thoreau with a rollicking sense of humor. The wordsmith Thoreau. The reader--and quoter-- of literature, from many languages. The Thoreau with a fierce sense of social justice.

No one --no one I’ve ever read-- has written such detailed, precise descriptions about natural phenomenon: ice, sand, snow, clouds, ponds, sunsets, squirrels, the colors of oak leaves in winter. And none so lively or irreverently reverent.

Harding’s book is thorough. It’s indexed, footnoted, illustrated, and even includes an updated afterword about Thoreau’s homoerotic impulses, something that Harding decided to downplay in earlier editions.

A good choice if you want to read just one biography of Thoreau. My copy is now marked with about a dozen Post-It notes.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson's eulogy of Thoreau (which praises Thoreau's talents without sparing criticism of his poetry and tactless didacticism in social relations):

"He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief..."

"He interrogated every custom, and wished to settle all his practice on an ideal foundation.... Few lives contain so many renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance..."

"He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation..."

"He was a speaker and actor of the truth, born such, and was ever running into dramatic situations from this cause. In any circumstance it interested all bystanders to know what part Henry would take, and what he would say; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an original judgment on each emergency..."

"I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where [one] stands..."

"His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph-wire..."

"His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a disgust at crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He detected paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him 'that terrible Thoreau,' as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society..."

"A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings,—a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. 'It was so dry, that you might call it wet.'..."

"I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not only as records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and literary excellence:

    'Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.'

    'The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.'

    'The youth gets together ... materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length the middle-aged [person] concludes to build a wood-shed with them.'

    'I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. Dead trees love the fire.'

    'The bluebird carries the sky on his back.'

    'The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves.'

    'Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line.'

    'How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?'

    'Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God...'

    'How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?'"

Henry David Thoreau's Walden is, justifiably, itself the subject of books. Drawn from Thoreau's journals of living for two years in a small house he built in the woods beside Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, it combines limnology, ornithology, and other natural studies with philosophy, the latter springing from within-- but also stemming in part from Thoreau's deep and wide reading of Confucious, Mencious, and the Bhagavad Gita, among others.

Frequently aphoristic, Walden is a veritable Bible of quotations. ("Oh, it was Thoreau who wrote that...") "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." I've posted a few quotations here.

At his worst, Thoreau was arrogant, presumptuous, hyperbolic and cynical. He sometimes idealized farmers and laborers, sometimes genuinely seemd to understand and love them, sometimes looked down his nose at all those who hadn't read great books. At his best --frequently -- he knew and conveyed great truths, observed carefully, lived authentically, and his words ring clearly, sometimes even chillingly today. At any time, the bell of truth can be shocking-- and rereshing.

I want to read more old books that have stood the test of time. Peter Kropotkin’s An Appeal to the Young was first published in his paper La Révolté in 1880. An English language translation by H.M. Hyndman was published by Charles H. Kerr in 1899 and several times subsequently. The edition I have-- a 28-page booklet --came out in 1984.

In "An Appeal" Kropotkin addresses scholars and artisans "about eighteen or twenty years of age" -- people on the road to becoming doctors, lawyers, scientists, and artists; assumes they’ve dreamed about using their education "to help on the enfranchisement of those who today grovel in misery"; lays out some specific unhappy realities they’ll face; asks "What is to be done?" -- and then answers his own question.

"If you are one of those miserable natures who adapt themselves to anything, who at the sight of the most revolting spectacles console themselves with a gentle sigh and a glass of sherry, then you will become used to [savage inequality], and ... lift yourself into the ranks of the pleasure-seekers, so that you may never again find yourself among the wretched." But, to those who say "This is injust; this must not go on any longer," the answer to "What is to be done?" is easy, says Kropotkin. First "leave this environment in which you are placed and where where it is the fashion to say that the people are nothing but a lot of brutes; come among the people and the answer will come of itself."

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