Inspired by books and stories, Zora Neale Hurston eventually found a way to stretch her limbs:
“In that box were Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but they did. I seemed to remember seeing Thor swing his mighty short-handled hammer as he spread across the sky in rumbling thunder, lightning flashing from the tread of his steeds and the wheels of his chariot….That held majesty for me….
In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and early adolescence. My soul was with the gods and my body in the village. People just would not act like gods. Stew beef, fried fat-back and morning grits were no ambrosia from Valhalla. Raking back yards and carrying out chamber pots were not the tasks of Thor. I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle.”
Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Zora Neale Hurston.
When we read Galway Kinnell’s poetry, we often come back to one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ odd phrases: There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. Both poets live in a “world charged“, and both find great joy in the sensuous feel of words. Here’s Galway Kinnell at his most sensuous — and seemingly having enormous fun:
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched or broughamed,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry eating in late September.
Galway Kinnell, from A New Selected Poems
For more on Galway Kinnell (& Gerard Manley Hopkins), here’s a few volumes from the Land Library’s poetry shelves!
A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, Strong is Your Hold by Galway Kinnell, Mortal Beauty, God’s Grace: Major Poems and Spiritual Writings by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
The New York Times just reported some truly exciting and unexpected news. The New Yorker‘s next issue will feature a new essay by the legendary author Joseph Mitchell. The newly discovered “Street Life” is the first published work by Mitchell since 1964.
Joseph Mitchell, who died in 1996, was the great wandering and listening soul of New York City. True, you won’t find any of his titles at local Nature Centers, but his sketches of the urban scene shows us a writer immersed in his home landscape. From Fulton Fish Market to McSorley’s Saloon, Joseph Mitchell observed his given plot of land keenly and compassionately, like the ideal naturalist that he was. Back in 1992, his work, long out of print, was resurrected in a wonderful anthology, Up in the Old Hotel.
There are too many to choose from, but here’s one of our favorite passages from that collection:
The Rivermen, from Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor
I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running — a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide — and I like to look at it when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls as long as a half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream.
The success of Up in the Old Hotel led many publishers to reprint Mitchell’s earlier books:
My Ears Are Bent, a collection of Joseph Mitchell’s earliest (pre-New Yorker) pieces, mostly from the 1930′s. Old Mr. Flood, a slim volume centered on the comings and goings of Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market.
And two of his all-time classic collections: The Bottom of the Harbor, and McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.
The Rocky Mountain Land Library will always have these books on our shelves, for the simple fact that Joseph Mitchell is one of the greatest writers of people and place that we know!
In the last few days, New Yorker editor David Remnick commented on the exciting find of new writings from Mitchell’s pen: “What’s so poignant about [the excerpts] is the sadness of the incompletion but the brilliance of the voice. There’s an ambition in the voice; the voice is becoming more Joycean. He’s looking outward, but all of these pieces are very interior. He’s at the center of it.“
“When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.” the opening passage of the classic Mr. Hunter’s Grave, from The Bottom of the Harbor.
Shivering at the bus stop this morning put us in mind of a memorable passage from Bill Streever’s Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places (a past favorite of the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s Book Club):
“The world warms, awash in greenhouse gases, but forty below remains forty below. Thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways is still thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways. Cold is a part of day-to-day life, but we often isolate ourselves from it, hiding in overheated houses and retreating to overheated climates, all without understanding what we so eagerly avoid.
We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force. Cold freezes the nostrils and assaults the lungs. Its presence shapes landscapes. It sculpts forests and herds animals along migration routes or forces them to dig in for the winter or evolve fur and heat-conserving networks of veins….
Imagine July water temperatures of thirty-five degrees. Imagine Frederic Tudor of Boston shipping ice from Walden Pond to India on sailing ships in 1833. Imagine Apsley Cherry-Garrard on his search for penguin eggs at seventy below zero in 1911. Imagine a dahurian larch forest that looks like a stand of Christmas trees on Russia’s Taymyr Peninsula at sixty below or a ground squirrel hibernating until its blood starts to freeze and then shivering itself back to life.
But none of this is imaginary. Our world warms, but cold remains.“
And whether you’re burrowed inside your warm house, or tucked away underground, here’s two excellent books from the Land Library’s shelves to help you appreciate the cold winter days!
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich, This Cold House: The Simple Science of Energy Efficiency by Colin Smith
One of the most moving parts of Ken Burns’ recent PBS series on the National Parks, focused on the Japanese-American artist Chiura Obata, and his life long devotion to Yosemite and the High Sierra. Obata’s first trip to Yosemite in 1927 marked the rest of his life’s work. If you have five minutes to spare please take a look at the PBS clip posted below. It swept us up with feelings of hope and a real admiration for people who fall head-over-heels for a particular landscape.
Seeing Ken Burns’ sensitive portrait had us reaching for a few books off the Land Library’s shelves. For more on Chiura Obata, an excellent volume (full of his sumi ink paintings, watercolors, and woodblock prints) is Obata’s Yosemite: The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata from his trip to the High Sierra in 1927.
In some ways, perhaps even more remarkable is the following book, which tells the story of the Obata family’s internment during World War II. Not to be undone, Obata organized Art Schools in each camp he was sent to, and personally produced a remarkable body of work:
Evening Glow of Yosemite Falls, 1930, Nature Art with Chiura Obata by Michael Elsohn Ross, Death’s Grave Pass & Tenaya Peak, 1930
Obata teaching a children’s art class, Tanforan Detention Center, California, August 1942.
Upper Lyell Fork, near Lyell Glacier, Lake Basin in the High Sierra.
Chiura Obata sketching in the High Sierra, along with untitled painting.
It’s hard not to be inspired by Obata’s life story, and the work he produced. We also love what he wrote in 1965: “You must always see with a big vision, and if you keep your mind calm there will be a way, there will be a light.“
What a treat! We just spent the past weekend reading through the latest book from one of the Land Library’s all-time favorite authors! Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing draws on his years of being a writer, and being a teacher of writing. His prose is simple, concise, and crystal clear. He also makes you look at reading and writing in fresh new ways: “There’s no gospel here, no orthodoxy, no dogma. Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is. If that means arguing with me as you read this book, so be it.”
Richard Ford has described Verlyn Klinkenborg’s new book as “Modest. Learned. Good-natured. Direct and sympathetic to its readers. You don’t even have to read it from front to back….You can just open it anywhere — as I did — and take away something useful.” Ford is so right about the inherent good-nature of this book. It’s very enjoyable to read. But it’s also hard to pick just one passage to share. Here’s our pick:
“In school, we’re taught — or we absorb the idea — that
writing
Flows out of the creative writer like lava down the
slope of a volcano.
An uninterruptible stream.
And yet we study the work itself as if its molten fire
had hardened into rock.
But the work isn’t an eruption from the author’s brain,
It doesn’t merely flow.
And it remains more dynamic, as written — on the
page — than we let ourselves imagine.
We forget something fundamental as we read:
Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.
We can’t see all the decisions that led to the final shape
of the sentence.
But we can see the residue of those decisions.
If you look at the manuscripts of writers –
Handwritten drafts preserved in museums and
libraries –
You can often see the changes they made scribbled
between the lines.
What you can’t see are the changes they made in their
heads before those sentences were ever inscribed.
If you could look through the spaces between the
sentences,
Through the door into the writing room, into that
writer’s head,
You’d see that every word was different once
And that the writer was contemplating
An incalculable number of differences,
Feeling her way among the alternatives that presented
themselves,
Until settling upon words that were finally written
down,
Then revised over and over again –
Before they were printed, published, reprinted in
anthologies,
And treated as though they were carved in stone.
It was all change until the very last second.
Every work of literature is the result of thousands and
thousands of decisions.
Intricate, minute decisions — this word or that, here or
where, now of later, again and again.
It’s the living tissue of a writer’s choices,
Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race.
Interrogate those choices.
Imagine the reason behind each sentence.
Why is it shaped just this way and not some other
way?
Why that choice of words?
Why that phrasing?
Why that rhythm?”
And here’s a few other favorites from the Land Library’s shelves:
The Rural Life, drawn from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s column in The New York Times, and Making Hay, an earlier book that beautifully describes the everyday life of farms in the upper midwest, and Montana.
Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile — a novel told through the words of a real-life tortoise made famous in Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789) The Land Library Book Club read this book a few years back, and we still refer back to it. In fact, it will no doubt be the first book we read and discuss a second time!
Recently, we highlighted naturalist David Lindo, author of The Urban Birder, in our post See the World as a Bird Would See it. Here’s one of our favorite passages in David’s new book. You never know what will inspire a young mind!
“When I was a youngster, the first naturalist I came into contact with was Gerald Durrell. I have already mentioned that Gerald inspired me to write notes, and gave me a romantic dream of being an explorer, traveling across the world in search of weird and wonderful animals. It’s a romanticism that many of us carry in our hearts but very few of us ever actually realize. I guess what I learned from reading his books was that having an interest in nature need not mean that it has to be boring and technical. It was all about fun and adventure. It felt as though anyone could get out there and do what he did. Reading My Family and Other Animals I identified with his account of being a child in Corfu, as he was of a similar age to me and had a great inquisitiveness for wildlife. The fact that I could not relate to his middle-class background, his lifestyle on Corfu and the whole slew of pets he had did not matter; it was his love of wildlife that shone through for me. Reading his books stoked the fires of my interest and kept me going…. — David Lindo, from The Urban Birder
We’re always looking out for accounts of early impressionable contact with the printed word. Here’s some of our favorites from past posts!
“While reading Cheryl Strayed’s stunning book about her arduous solo journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, I kept asking myself, What would I do if I were stripped bare of everything — money, job, community, even family and love? Thoreau once siad, ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’ For Strayed, it is clear that in wildness was the preservation of her soul. She reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.” — Mira Bartok, author of The Memory Palace.
In the wake of her mother’s death, and the further tumult of a life suddenly adrift, Cheryl Strayed challenged herself to hike eleven-hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to Washington State. And to hike that route alone.
Here’s one of our favorite passages from Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. In the middle of the night, two trails cross, somewhere along the Pacific Crest Trail:
“I woke two hours later with the vaguely pleasant sensation that tiny cool hands were gently patting me. They were on my bare legs and arms and face and in my hair, on my feet and throat and hands. I could feel their cool weight through my T-shirt on my chest and belly. ‘Hmm.’ I moaned, turning slightly before I opened my eyes and a series of facts came to me in slow motion.
There was the fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the open on my tarp.
There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands were gently patting me.
And then there was the final fact of all, which was a fact more monumental than even the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands, but hundreds of small cool black frogs.
Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me.
Each one was the approximate size of a potato chip. They were an amphibious army, a damp smooth-skinned militia, a great web-footed migration, and I was in their path as they hopped, scrambled, leapt, and hurled their tiny, pudgy, bent-legged bodies from the reservoir and onto the scrim of dirt that they no doubt considered their private beach.”
Unexpected encounters are the mileposts of all the trails we hike. Here’s three more trailside readers — excellent companions for Cheryl Strayed’s Wild:
In the Sierra: Mountain Writings by Kenneth Rexroth. Kim Stanley Robinson has edited this fine collection of Rexroth’s (1905-1982) prose and poetry, set in the High Sierra. Robinson describes Rexroth’s tumultous San Francisco life: “Rexroth always had an enduring island of calm, located on the other side of the state: the Sierra Nevada of California.” Also pictured above: For more adventures, and lessons learned along the trail, the Land Library recommends a wonderful two-volume set: The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader (California, Oregon & Washington). Both books feature “boot-tested stories” spun by real PCT hikers, along with selections from well-known wanderers such as John Muir, Mark Twain, Mary Austin, Wallace Stegner, Barry Lopez, William O. Douglas, and Jack Kerouac, among others.
“There is a wonderful old tradition in some parts of Scandinavia, in which the children hang their stockings outside their houses during those days in early spring when the European common cranes first return from their wintering areas in France and Spain. Sometimes the children place an ear of corn or some other gift for the cranes, whose welcome voices and overhead flocks are the surest sign of spring and renewed hope for the future after enduring a long, unbearably dark and frigid Scandinavian winter.” — one of our favorite passages from Paul Johnsgard’s Sandhill and Whooping Cranes: Ancient Voices Over America’s Wetlands.
Harvesting Ice by Carl Larsson, 1905, and above, Larsson’s The Yard and Wash House.
Shivering at the bus stop this morning put us in mind of a memorable passage from Bill Streever’s Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places (a past favorite of the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s Book Club):
“The world warms, awash in greenhouse gases, but forty below remains forty below. Thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways is still thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways. Cold is a part of day-to-day life, but we often isolate ourselves from it, hiding in overheated houses and retreating to overheated climates, all without understanding what we so eagerly avoid.
We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force. Cold freezes the nostrils and assaults the lungs. Its presence shapes landscapes. It sculpts forests and herds animals along migration routes or forces them to dig in for the winter or evolve fur and heat-conserving networks of veins….
Imagine July water temperatures of thirty-five degrees. Imagine Frederic Tudor of Boston shipping ice from Walden Pond to India on sailing ships in 1833. Imagine Apsley Cherry-Garrard on his search for penguin eggs at seventy below zero in 1911. Imagine a dahurian larch forest that looks like a stand of Christmas trees on Russia’s Taymyr Peninsula at sixty below or a ground squirrel hibernating until its blood starts to freeze and then shivering itself back to life.
But none of this is imaginary. Our world warms, but cold remains.“
And whether you’re burrowed inside your warm house, or tucked away underground, here’s two excellent books from the Land Library’s shelves to help you appreciate the cold winter days!
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich, This Cold House: The Simple Science of Energy Efficiency by Colin Smith
