Snippets

  

Outdoors Nearby

 

Days are cool now, in the low-to-mid 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but nights are not much cooler (low 50s), so the transition from summer to fall creeps along thus far in small increments. In corners here and there, fall colors begin to sing, but for the most part the world is still green, even if (except for the brightness of rain-refreshed grass) a tired sort of green that seems to say it’s getting ready to give way.

In Swann’s Way, the opening volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust wrote of hawthorns in blossom, and the summer I first read those descriptions of the family’s walk alongside the flowering hedges, I was obsessed with hawthorns. Whenever the Artist and I went for an evening drive, my eyes searched in vain for hawthorns. Later, in another summer, I found one on the hill between our farmhouse and the neighbors’ house on the slope where our dogs used to meet for play. And now there are two or three closer to me, one in my meadow, another bearing its fruit closer to our south boundary.

 

“Hips and haws,” I muse, admiring the bright red berries and thinking of a character in The Borrowers, Homily, Arietty’s mother, so reluctant to leave their indoor home and take up a long outdoor search for fugitive relatives, imagining and mourning in advance the poor diet they might expect: nothing but rose hips and hawthorn berries. To my ear, that sounds as poetic as milk and honey, but the hawthorn berries are small, mealy, and tasteless, I find. Better to leave them for the wild things, although I do love seeing them.

Here, anyway, is a morning Continental breakfast of reading snippets, just small bites to go with morning coffee.

 

On Rereading

 

How can you be objective in the face of a book you love, which you have loved, which you have read at different times in your life? Such a book has a reading past. In rereading it, you have not always suffered in the same way—and above all you no longer hope with the same intensity in all the seasons of a life of reading. … The animus and anima quests do not yield the same riches at every age in the life of the reader. Above all the great books remain psychologically alive. You are never finished reading them.

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

 

(Is life too short to reread books? Are there too many people in the world [and is life too short] to hold onto old friendships? In the past two days I have reread Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River and am now embarked, once again, on her Q Road. Her characters find much more sustenance outdoors than mere hips and haws.)

 

On Attention

 

Attention is not just another [cognitive] function…. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to….

 

So it is … with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.

 

Science, however purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object…. Yet this highly objective stance … is itself value-laden. It is one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment….

 

Attention also changes who we are…. [B]y attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so … we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think and feel.

 

-      Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

 

(Not only the company you keep socially, but the movies you watch, the books you read, the music in your ears, etc. is continually shaping and reshaping you [I/me; we/us]. As race car drivers say, “Where your eyes go, your car goes.” Similarly, where your attention goes, your heart and mind go. Do we live increasingly in a hall of distorting mirrors? I have ordered for Dog Ears Books the new book by Naomi Klein with her investigation of that idea, so stay tuned. And by the way, the left brain, which McGilchrist calls the emissary, rejects facts incompatible with what it already "knows.")

 

On the Comfort of Rocks

 

How can I convey the comfort I find in reading geology? Rocks don’t care. They have no needs or desires of their own and cannot suffer pain or hurt feelings, and neither do they heed ours. Rocks award no prizes, mete out no punishment. They have stories of their own but do not—cannot—clamor to be heard in their own voices, and that lack of argument is restful, even when the subject of an essay is volcanic eruption. There are eruptions, yes, but no wars.

 

      - P. J. Grath, “What I Like Is Sometimes (But Not Always) What Others Like,” Books in Northport, Dec. 27, 2012

 

 

And there you are, here we are, already into the second half of September, with Leelanau UnCaged coming up on Saturday the 30^th. Not only will my bookstore be open on Waukazoo Street, but we will have a special offering of our own that day: 

 

 

DOG EARS BOOKS PRESENTS:

“TWO POETS READING”

106 Waukazoo St., Northport

Saturday, September 30

(during Leelanau UnCaged)

4 p.m.

Fleda Brown

 

Michael Delp