- The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies, 2007
- The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature – David George Haskell, 2012
- Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter & Organize to Make Room for Happiness – Gretchen Rubin, 2019 – Not much content, but it was pretty good I guess? A little cotton-candy-ish: enjoyable going down but barely remembered afterwards.
- The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy – Tim Pat Coogan, 2012 – quotes pulled, post tbd
- Wanderers – Chuck Wending, 2019 – I’ve followed Wendig on Twitter for a while, to get his nutso morning encouragements (like Lin-Manuel Miranda but 5x), so I saw a lot of promotion of this as a doorstop masterpiece, like The Stand, etc. And yeah, it was good and kept me engrossed! I don’t think I’d re-read when there’s so much else out there, but enjoyable.
- O, Pioneers! – Willa Cather, 1913.
O Pioneers! – Willa Cather, 1913
Great Books selection – we’ve loved every Cather we’ve tried!
I learned about buffalo-pea (Mrs. Bergson tries to make jam of them)
Short quotes
- “Marie was incapable of being lukewarm about anything that pleased her. She simply did not know how to give a half-hearted response. When she was delighted, she was as likely as not to stand on her tip-toes and clap her hands. If people laughed at her, she laughed with them.”
- “There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.”
- Poor Swedish girls marrying men “they are afraid of” because they “think a cross man makes a good manager”
- Alexandra says about Carl understanding her: “I expect that is the only way one person every really can help another.”
- Smart young man “raising the new kind of clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody don’t do.”
- “The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort you are not.” No-fault divorce would change everything!
Long quotes (so many!)
The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away. He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with all the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the tangle to other hands; he thought of his Alexandra’s strong ones.
At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside. You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path broken in the curly grass. But for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof of Ivar’s dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done.
Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out for himself. He disliked the litter of human dwellings: the broken food, the bits of broken china, the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown into the sunflower patch. He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod. He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would be Mrs. Badger. He best expressed his preference for his wild homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant.
You know that my spells come from God, and that I would not harm any living creature. You believe that every one should worship God in the way revealed to him. But that is not the way of this country. The way here is for all to do alike. I am despised because I do not wear shoes, because I do not cut my hair, and because I have visions. At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward. We thought nothing of it, and let them alone. But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in the asylum.
Contrast between brothers and Alexandra:
The Bergson boys, certainly, would have been happier with their uncle Otto, in the bakery shop in Chicago. Like most of their neighbors, they were meant to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new country. A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys. A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
Oscar:
But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same way, regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to do things in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn, he couldn’t bear to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his corn-planting at the same time every year, whether the season were backward or forward. He seemed to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather. When the wheat crop failed, he threshed the straw at a dead loss to demonstrate how little grain there was, and thus prove his case against Providence.
The table was set for company in the dining-room, where highly varnished wood and colored glass and useless pieces of china were conspicuous enough to satisfy the standards of the new prosperity. Alexandra had put herself into the hands of the Hanover furniture dealer, and he had conscientiously done his best to make her dining-room look like his display window. She said frankly that she knew nothing about such things, and she was willing to be governed by the general conviction that the more useless and utterly unusable objects were, the greater their virtue as ornament. That seemed reasonable enough. Since she liked plain things herself, it was all the more necessary to have jars and punchbowls and candlesticks in the company rooms for people who did appreciate them. Her guests liked to see about them these reassuring emblems of prosperity.
Carl:
“Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him.
Remembering Alexandra:
He could remember exactly how she looked when she came over the close-cropped grass, her skirts pinned up, her head bare, a bright tin pail in either hand, and the milky light of the early morning all about her. Even as a boy he used to feel, when he saw her coming with her free step, her upright head and calm shoulders, that she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself. Since then, when he had happened to see the sun come up in the country or on the water, he had often remembered the young Swedish girl and her milking pails.
Alexandra and Emil’s wild duck:
In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck. Emil must have felt about it as she did, for afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes to say, “Sister, you know our duck down there—” Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life. Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.
As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown hole in the earth where Amedee was to lie, and felt no horror. That, too, was beautiful, that simple doorway into forgetfulness. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old and the poor and the maimed who shrink from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young, the passionate, the gallant-hearted.
When Frank took up his gun and walked out of the house, he had not the faintest purpose of doing anything with it. He did not believe that he had any real grievance. But it gratified him to feel like a desperate man. He had got into the habit of seeing himself always in desperate straits. His unhappy temperament was like a cage; he could never get out of it; and he felt that other people, his wife in particular, must have put him there. It had never more than dimly occurred to Frank that he made his own unhappiness. Though he took up his gun with dark projects in his mind, he would have been paralyzed with fright had he known that there was the slightest probability of his ever carrying any of them out.
He knew that he was to blame. For three years he had been trying to break her spirit. She had a way of making the best of things that seemed to him a sentimental affectation. He wanted his wife to resent that he was wasting his best years among these stupid and unappreciative people; but she had seemed to find the people quite good enough. If he ever got rich he meant to buy her pretty clothes and take her to California in a Pullman car, and treat her like a lady; but in the mean time he wanted her to feel that life was as ugly and as unjust as he felt it. He had tried to make her life ugly. He had refused to share any of the little pleasures she was so plucky about making for herself. She could be gay about the least thing in the world; but she must be gay!
The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature – David George Haskell, 2012
Nature and Environment group selection. I recommended it because I’d seen reviews for The Song of Trees, his subsequent book which we will probably read in the next few years, but that title was a little too new and a little too close in topic to The Hidden Life of Trees (our 3/2018 selection, which I kinda hated).
It was a small group this month—just three of us—but we all loved this book. Occasionally it’s a little overwritten or purple, but it’s an amazing overall accomplishment. Haskell visits a specific patch of old-growth forest in Tennessee—a meter-diameter circle he calls the mandala—over the course of a year, in all weathers, and writes short essays on what he notices there. (The chapters are just a bit longer that Ross Gay’s delights, and remind me of them in some ways).
I learned about:
- Lady Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut (not as cool as it sounded because it’s not an actual nut, but still interesting)
- lichens cover 10% of the earth’s surface (!)
- it takes time for plants to prepare for winter, which is why early frosts will damage branches that would survive much worse later
- the hoatzin bird, which I had heard of because the babies have claws, but not that they eat leaves and have a fermentation sack to digest them, like ruminants (and also that makes them slow and lethargic, like sloths and koalas!)
- and in the same chapter how impressive the rumen’s ability to grow microbes is—“A million million individual bacteria of at least two hundred species swim through every milliliter of rumen fluid”
- honey locust and osage orange fruit evolved to be eaten by mastodons
- Jakob Böhme
- “human sweat is made from blood with all the large molecules removed, like soup passed through a sieve”
- egg-laying birds build up a medullary bone from calcium in order to break it down when ready to lay
- pot worms and horsehair or Gordian worms
- what he calls “sunflecks” (beams on a normally-dark patch of forest floor) are problematic for dimness-adjusted plants—“to cope with the arrival of a sunfleck, plants unplug some of their light-harvesting molecules before they can gather too much energy”
- cicada tymbals
- “in most forests [caterpillars] consume more leaves than all other herbivores combined”
- vulture guts kill cholera and anthrax, unlike mammals or insects!
- on our descent from shrew-like creatures: “Our ancestors were shrill and vicious, leading a caffeinated existence in dark corridors”
There were a bunch of longer passages I found interesting or delightful. It’s a sign of how much I liked a book when the post ends up super-long with quotes:
Grooves on the surface of stems wick water from the mosses’ wet interiors to their dry tips, like tissue paper dipped in a spill. The miniature stems are felted with water-hugging curls, and their leaves are studded with bumps that create a large surface area for clinging water. The leaves clasp the stem at just the right angle to hold a crescent of water. These trapped drops are interconnected by water trapped in woolly hairs and surface wrinkles. Moss bodies are swampy river deltas miniaturized and turned vertical. Water creeps from slough to lagoon to rivulet, wrapping its home in moisture. And when the rains stop, the moss has captured five to ten times as much water on its body as it contains within its cells. Moss carries a botanical camel’s hump as it trudges through long stretches of aridity.
A bravura description of observing a snail through a hand lens culminates in this:
I peek over the lens and suddenly it is all gone. The change of scale is a wrench into a different world; the fungus is invisible, the snail is a valueless detail in a world dominated by bigger things. I return to the lens world and rediscover the vivid tentacles, the snail’s black-and-silver grace. The hand lens helps me harvest the world’s beauty, throwing my eyes wide open. Layers of delight are hidden by the limitations of everyday human vision.
This perfectly captures the sonic personality of the red-eyed vireo:
The vireo questions the forest, then answers over and over, lecturing into the midday heat when other birds have retired from the podium. As befits his professorial temperament, the vireo seldom descends from the heights of the canopy and is usually detected only through his bright, repetitious song.
Philosophers and theologians love paradoxes, regarding them as honorable signposts to important truths. Scientists take a dimmer view, having learned from experience that “paradox” is a polite way of saying that we are missing something obvious. The resolution of the paradox will likely show one of our “self-evident” assumptions to be embarrassingly false. Perhaps this is not so far removed from a philosophical paradox. The difference lies in the depth of the false assumption: relatively shallow and easily uprooted in science, deep and hard to dislodge in philosophy.
The tree’s answer to the wind’s force echoes the Taoism of the lichens: don’t fight back, don’t resist; bend and roll, let your adversary exhaust herself against your yielding. The analogy is reversed, for the Taoists drew their inspiration from nature, so “the Tao is Tree-ist” is more accurate.
Dehydration is the ticks’ main foe during their quests. Ticks sit in exposed locations for days, even weeks, waiting for their hosts. The wind whisks away moisture, and the sun bakes their small leathery bodies. Wandering off in search of a drink would interrupt the quest and, in many habitats, there is no water to be found. So, ticks have evolved the ability to drink water from air. They secrete a special saliva into a groove near the mouth and, like the silica gel that we use to dry our electronic gadgets, their saliva draws water out of the air.
Boy, those are some tough little organisms! Plus, they have to get rid of all the excess water they get in their gigantic blood meals, so they spit it back into their host, which explains why they can transmit so many diseases… yuck but wow.
When mushroom spores germinate, they produce baby filaments that grow through the dead leaves, seeking mates. Filaments exist not as male or female but as different “mating types.” These mating types all look the same to us, but fungi use chemical signals to sense the differences and will reproduce only with a mating type that differs from their own. Some fungus species have just two mating types, but others have thousands.
When two filaments meet, they begin an elaborate pas de deux, coordinating their dance with alternating chemical whispers. The opening sequence involves one filament’s sending out a chemical that is unique to its own mating type. If its partner is of the same type, the dance ends and the filaments ignore each other.
Terrestrial vertebrates whose lives require speed have reworked the fishes’ ancient architecture at least three separate times. The ancestors of mammals and two lines of dinosaurs each came up with modifications to the sprawling inefficiency of the fish-on-land. Legs moved in and under, putting the animal’s weight directly over its feet. This made it easier to balance and, therefore, to run without toppling over. The spine’s side-sway was replaced with an up-and-down flex. Mammals are masters of this flex and can reach forward with both forelegs while pushing off with the combined power of both hind legs, then curve the spine down and stuff their forelegs back while swinging the hind legs forward to plant them ready for the next push-off. No salamander can match the bounding gait of a mouse, let alone the enormous leaps of a running cheetah. This newfangled spine has, ironically, returned to the ocean to compete with the old fishy spine. Whales move their tails up and down, rather than side to side, revealing their terrestrial ancestry.
The mandala’s community emerges from the give-and-take of thousands of species; a golf course’s ecological community is a monoculture of alien grass that emerged from the mind of just one species. The mandala’s visual field is dominated by sex and death: dead leaves, pollen, birdsong. The golf course has been sanitized by the puritan life-police. The golf green is fed and trimmed to keep it in perpetual childhood: no dead stems, no flowers or seed heads. Sex and death are erased.
Feeding birds learn to associate ragged holes in leaves with the presence of caterpillars. Because leaves remain damaged long after caterpillars have moved on, birds continually update their feeding patterns based on their recent experience of feeding in particular tree species. Caterpillars that excise obvious holes in leaves, then linger next to these holes, will quickly attract the attention of these smart birds. Therefore, only well-defended caterpillars can afford to be messy eaters. Caterpillars that are more vulnerable to birds, such as those with few hairs, fastidiously pare leaves down from the edges, leaving no telltale holes, maintaining the silhouette of an entire leaf.
The wear of vegetation, grit, and wind will grind the feathers down, and by midsummer feathers will be ragged-edged and slim. Hooded warblers turn this aging process to their advantage, however. The birds abrade themselves into their breeding costume. Their crowns and throats are muted yellow now, but as the outer edges of these feathers wear away, the black of the breeding plumage is revealed below. This is a thrifty strategy; most other bird species acquire their breeding colors by growing new feathers, each one of which is made from costly protein.
Our living on land further distances us from the rest of the animal kingdom, augmenting the handicap of gigantism. Nine-tenths of the animal kingdom’s main branches are found in water—in the sea, in freshwater streams and lakes, in watery crevices within the soil, or in the moist interiors of other animals. The desiccated exceptions include the terrestrial arthropods (mostly insects) and the minority of vertebrates that have hauled themselves onto land (most vertebrate species are fish, so terrestrial life is unusual even for a vertebrate). Evolution has plucked us out of our wet burrows, leaving our kin behind. Our world is therefore populated by extremists, giving us a distorted view of life’s true diversity.
It is with this help that I have explored the forest mandala. I hope this book will encourage others to start their own explorations. I was fortunate to be able to watch a small patch of old-growth forest. This is a rare privilege; old growth covers less than one-half of a percent of the land in the eastern United States. But old forests are not the only windows into the ecology of the world. Indeed, one outcome of my watch at the mandala has been to realize that we create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding “pristine” places that will bring wonder to us. Gardens, urban trees, the sky, fields, young forests, a flock of suburban sparrows: these are all mandalas. Watching them closely is as fruitful as watching an ancient woodland.
We wished there had been photos in the book, but here they are!
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch, 1970
Irish Writers selection, but alas I missed the discussion. Once again didn’t have post-it flags with me for most of it, and it’s a long book—too long by half and soap-opera-ish, but I loved the beginning. What struck me the most was Charles Arrowby’s love of food and focus on his little meals and treats, which I 90% identify with (not 100% because I get synergistic pleasure from reading while eating):
I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.
It was early evident to me that my uncle was more loved and fortunate than my father. How does a child perceive such things, or rather how is it that they are so perceptible, so obvious, to a child, who perhaps, like a dog, reads signs which have become invisible amid the conventions of the grown-up world, and are thus overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit?
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
I also took up acting … because I wanted to have fun myself and to procure some for my father. I doubt if he possessed the concept, or ever managed to acquire it later under my eager guidance. In having fun myself I have throughout my life been fairly consistently successful.
This interesting Paris Review essay comments that Arrowby’s food is not as good as it sounds to him, indicative of his self-deception about his character, but also that Iris Murdoch herself loved and ate similar dishes.
The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies, 2007
Second Monday book group selection. I didn’t care for it particularly—pedestrian writing, tired WWII setting, ill-fitting parts, female protagonist who’s entirely wrapped up in the men around her—but others very much did.
Things I looked up: bartender “sets the shaker out for those who want to salt their drinks to melt the foam” (adding salt increases the head on a flat beer, according to what I’m seeing, but there are lots of other interesting reasons for this old tradition); the Ladies of Llangollen (although again, the context seems slightly off, describing them as having popularized hiking, when they just liked walking near their home); the expressions, as quoted in the book, “nargois” and “uckavie,” which are both kinda wrong; raddle, sheep paint to see which ewes have been bred, from the same root (red ochre/rouge) as “raddled.”
The most interesting theme of the book to me is connection to place and thoughts about nationalism, and now I see that almost all the quotes I pulled relate to it. A Welsh word, cynefin, comes up again and again. It’s defined as “the flock’s sense of place, of territory,” but it turns out it’s also now a framework for decision making, covering five “domains” of problems (disorder, obvious, complicated, complex and chaotic)—I’m interested in following that up. First, short quote: “she sees his nationalism for what it is, selfishness, and more than that, a kind of licensed misanthropy.”
It comes to her now that cynefin is the essential nationalism, not her father’s windy brand, but this secret bond between mothers and daughters, described by a word the English have no equivalent for.
And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism. That’s what he had glimpsed at the pub, what had sent him into that fit of laughter [he thought he was being treated rudely because he was Jewish, but it was because the Welsh bartender read him as English]. The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.
And one more quote I found interesting, but which to me also reveals a trace of sexism or gender essentialism that bothered me throughout:
Their dishonor, men’s dishonor, can always be redeemed, defeat followed by victory, capture by escape, escape by capture. Up hill and down dale. But women are dishonored once and for all. Their only hope is to hide it. To keep it to themselves.
No longer about the book but about my process: this post took about an hour to write, about 3/4 the pleasurable research and transcription and 1/4 the more laborious and active ordering and writing context. The quotes give me the most benefit as the primary reader of my own blog, but the shaping of the post (even though I don’t do it as thoroughly as I could, partially because it’s not really for an audience) is better for me as a writer. I’m dwelling on this because I have such a huge backlog and I’m trying to figure out if catching up is a realistic goal. I think I’ll focus on doing this month’s books quasi real-time first…