We Look for Different Things

 

Sunny Juliet and I go for a long walk every morning, each of us exploring in her own way. My eyes are my foremost sense. For her, I suspect it’s her nose, but she uses her eyes, too, to spot something interesting up ahead, a reason to run up and inspect with her nose and then, often, give her teeth and taste buds a workout. 

The glove I dropped yesterday! I was looking for that!

Sunny notices visually either movement or novelty. If something appears that wasn’t there before, that’s something she has to check out. And if birds fly up out of a mesquite shrub or a cottontail or jackrabbit breaks its frozen pose to run, she’ll give chase – with equal success, I might add, in case of birds or bunnies. I’m looking at forms of mesquite, abandoned nests, seed pods of different sizes and colors, and speculating about remnants of old stone walls. I’m told that some of these courses of stonework were built to direct the flow of water during monsoon season, and that’s intriguing, but I also see pictures in my memory of two beloved former dogs posed on one particular section of wall.

Mesquite dragon growing from hackberry embrace...

...found life ended where it began.

Long a landmark for me, this one.

This more recently stumbled upon.

Sunny does not share my fascination with effects of light and shadow on distant mountains, and I do not share her enthusiasm for cow poop. Does she have memories of other times in the wash, from last spring or earlier this winter? I’ll never know.

 

While our interests are not identical, however, they are more or less compatible, and we both enjoy our rambles over the range together. At least, in our own fashion of “together.” It’s a bit the way the Artist and I enjoyed our books together. Each of us had literary loves not shared by the other, and we also enjoyed considerable overlap in our reading tastes, which is what allowed us to take such deep pleasure in reading aloud to, and being read aloud to by, the other. Of the three first books I’ve read in this new calendar year, I think he would have enjoyed most certain parts of On Trails but might have preferred the book I’m reading now, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, about a frontier expedition made in the 1830s. For the rest of you, here is my beginning-of-the-year recap:

 

1. Spragg, Mark. An Unfinished Life (fiction). I picked up this novel because I was absolutely crazy about the author’s memoir, Where Rivers Change Direction, but I hadn’t gotten very far at all into An Unfinished Life before I realized I’d seen the movie based on the book, and then as I read, I kept seeing scenes from the movie. The author and his wife worked on the screenplay, I read on the dust jacket. But I’ll say to you what I always say in cases like these, which is – if you haven’t seen the movie, read the novel first. And if you haven’t read the memoir, be sure to do that. It’s a completely different story but one not to be missed!

 

2. Moor, Robert. On Trails (nonfiction). I wasn’t sure I would read this book in its entirety. Thought maybe I’d dip into it, give a few pages a try. Well! Moor’s prologue tells of his hiking the Appalachian Trail, but the very fact that he put that in a prologue should have told me he had much, much more to say. Not only does he hike beyond the North American continent, not only does he investigate how animals other than human beings make trails, but he also investigates the notions of spiritual paths and introduces the idea of “desire lines,” as well as giving details of how public hiking trails are con- structed, so that as I read I kept thinking of more and more friends and family members and bookstore customers who would appreciate this book. He writes of how every hiker alters a trail:

 

Here is where the notion of the spiritual path, as portrayed in countless holy books, falters: scriptures tend to present the image of an unchanging route to wisdom, handed down from on high. But paths, like religions, are seldom fixed. They continually change—widen or narrow, schism or merge—depending on how, or whether, their followers elect to use them. Both the religious path and the hiking path are, as Taoists say, made in the walking. 

 

This is exactly what Henri Bergson said about life and about arguments of free will vs. determinism that depend on an image of a forking path and Moor has such a lovely philosophical turn of mind that I wish he had not dismissed Bergson as quickly as he did, but that was my only disappointment in a book that I highly recommend.

 

3. Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley (fiction). My admiration for Charlotte Brontë has grown by leaps and bounds through my reading of this novel. Set during the time of Napoleon, the story more than touches upon economic disruptions brought about not only by machinery but also by the war itself, the plight of those thrown out of work highlighted without demonizing factory owners struggling to avoid bankruptcy and ruin. Had I written the novel (there’s a dream for you!), I might have called it Caroline and Shirley, because it’s hard to say that only one of the two main female characters is “the” protagonist. In fact, Shirley comes into the story long after the character of Caroline has been established. Friendship between the two young women is based in large part on the recognition both have that their interests and values and thoughts are not those of other young women in their social circle. 

I can imagine readers who would be impatient at the long speeches the author sometimes puts in her characters’ mouths, more like carefully written and smoothly edited mini-essays than realistic conversation. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed them. And at other times dialogue moves swiftly, in short bursts like the thrusts of a fencing duel. There is even a passage in which I saw Caroline and Shirley as a kind of Greek chorus, delivering a description of a scene the author could have described herself more directly, and that struck me as a brilliant and fascinating experiment. 

Charlotte Brontë’s views of gender equality and social justice were way ahead of her time, and this book deserves a broad new modern audience.

 

Lose yourself in a book!

What do you look for in a book when you are reading purely for pleasure? Story, character, social commentary, mystery and surprise, crime and punishment, or something else entirely? If something else, what?