My reading this spring was eclectic, to put it mildly. I read a couple of contemporary novels that are very much in the vein I usually read, two stellar oldies, a poetry collection that left me both invigorated and annoyed, Mary Oliver’s essay collection “Upstream”, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s book-length essay “Nature.”
“Upstream” is a somewhat peculiar collection. While there are the usual Oliver through currents of nature, spirituality and time, it’s apparent that this set of essays were not necessarily created to hang together. There’s a reason one reviewer called it a “sporadic spiritual autobiography.”
Sporadic as it might be, what is consistent throughout the collection is the quality of Oliver’s attention. Whether turned on the woodlands of her childhood, the lives and work of her literary heroes, or Provincetown, where she spent much of her adult life, Oliver’s attention transforms mere observation into something like love. And the unassuming prowess of her language leaves the reader no choice but to join in.
Oliver’s glowing review of Emerson as both a writer and a human led me to consider reading something of his, despite my usual preference for contemporary writing and women authors. Perhaps because I recently had the opportunity to spend a day in historic Concord hobnobbing with the relics of Emerson and his cadre, I gave in.
“Nature” is a funny piece of writing. Clearly structured as an academic work, the prose itself is far less academic than it is poetic. The transcendentalists, including Emerson, are typically characterized as proponents of self-sufficiency. But while solitude figures prominently in “Nature”, it’s clear that Emerson believes the real magic happens not completely within one’s own spirit but in the association of man and his landscape, the gift lifeless without the attention of the receiver and the receiver an insufficient vessel for experience without receipt of the gift.
My favorite thing about Emerson now is his apparently helpless hopefulness in nature’s good. He is certainly not blind to the practical realities of the natural world, but he is nevertheless profoundly confident in the sufficiency of delight to keep us alive. “We are never tired,” he writes, “so long as we can see far enough.”
There’s a clarity to philosophy written by poets that I have rarely found in philosophy written by philosophers. Emerson is not particularly interested in the logical details of a philosophical system (i.e. “Is there a God?”, “How do we know we exist?”, “Is anything real?”).
“What difference does it make whether Orion is up there in heaven or some God paints the image in the firmament of the soul?”
In Emerson’s world, the answer to all those logical philosophical questions is something like “Who cares? – Look!”
Although I didn’t consciously intend it, most of my reading this spring could be characterized by an interest in attention. “Maurice” is the story of a man who spends his life in pursuit of another man’s withheld attention; “Euphoria”, a novel about early-20th-century anthropologists, explores the boundary between attention and possession; and Eliza Barry’s “The Hearing Test” is a quirky little novel about a woman whose attention becomes fixed on sound as she slowly loses her hearing.
If it’s true that attention is a kind of love, then “A Separate Peace” is a love story. I’ve found that many people have a love-hate relationship with “A Separate Peace,” which I suspect is because it was forced upon them by some high school English teacher who mistakenly assumed that a book about youth is also a book for youth. I feel lucky that I didn’t encounter this book until I was far enough removed from my own high school experience to appreciate it.
Knowles insight about the experience of youth might be outdated and in some ways the product of immense privileged, but his insights about the end of youth are, in my view, timeless. Doesn’t every young adult look back on the end of their youth with a certain amount of guilt? Don’t we all, in a way, feel responsible for its demise? And aren’t we all still afraid, deep down, of those horrible impulses we discovered within ourselves and others that drove us from the breezy self-confidence of youth to the cusp of a terrifying adulthood?
[Spoilers ahead … but come on, the book’s been out since 1958].
The narrator loves Phinny, but he’s a bit of a Peter Pan: whimsical, childish, perfect. He’s not the kind of person one has ever been allowed to love forever. When he dies, it seems inevitable, because the end of youth always arrives, no matter how hard we cling to innocence.
This is all great stuff, but what really pushed this book onto my list of all-time favorites was the skill with which it interwove the personal and the universal. The narrator’s personal turmoil over his loss of innocence, which is both his fault and not his fault, mirrors the global conflict unfolding in the background of the novel. In the background is this violence on a scale never seen before by mankind, made possible by technology more sophisticated than ever before, the maturation of generations of human development … violence at once an inevitable consequence of a species “coming of age” and completely, fully preventable – that is, our fault.
I’ll end this tangent about “A Separate Peace” on this thought: if you hated this book in high school, maybe it’s time to give it another shot.
Finally, I have to explain myself about “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.” I think of poetry as being composed of two forces, craft and content, which at their best balance and uplift each other and at their worst drag each other down. I’ve read many poems that “out-craft” their content – that is, they are works of art in terms of structure and composition but unfortunately have nothing much to say. If I’m honest, I tend to like those kinds of poem pretty well despite their ultimate flatness. “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard” swings the other way. Wright has so much to say in each poem, and every insight offered is fresh and stunning and profound, but at times I had to wonder if it was really poetry or just a series of meaningful thoughts written out with extra spacing. The walls are up but there’s no rebar to hold them. Nevertheless, there were moments when his insights alone left me simply astounded. Thus, after reading the collection through twice, I still can’t decide whether I loved it or found it deeply frustrating. Possibly both.
Novels
- Shelley Read, “Go As a River”
- John Knowles, “A Separate Peace”
- E.M. Forster, “Maurice”
- Lily King, “Euphoria”
- Eliza Barry, “The Hearing Test”
Poetry / Nonfiction
- Franz Wright, “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard”
- Mary Oliver, “Upstream”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”
Abbie Ham 