Little Joys and Comforts

Hawthorn trees have been a recurring joy to me since I discovered the first one in my meadow. This year I’m appreciating how much earlier they leaf out than some of the other, statelier trees, how sweetly they hold raindrops, and the way last year’s berries (haws) still attract my dog. She will stand on her hind feet to reach the ones on the branches and root through the grass hunting for those on the ground. Funny girl!

 

Sunny Juliet herself is a joy and a comfort both. As she becomes a more relaxed and easy companion, though, I find myself addressing her and speaking of her more and more often as Sarah! Will she ever be as mellow as our practically perfect Sarah? Will her name have changed completely in my mind to Sarah by the time she reaches old age? 

These days, still Sunny Juliet, when she and I go outdoors for our morning rambles I take along a foraging bag and bring home leaves and flowers for my evening salads. Our walks and finds and my salads are all quiet joys of my country life.

Of course, not everything in life can be a joy or a comfort. Sometimes -- though I realize this may sound odd -- I find a kind of satisfaction in understanding something, some event or trend or belief system or outcome, even when I would wish it completely out of existence if I could. How does such-and-such a system work? Why do people pursue certain policies? In what ways are we manipulated to believe and act against our own interests and that of the earth? And how can human interests ever be separated from the interests of the earth’s health? (That’s a rhetorical question. The separation is impossible.) Like a farmer friend of mine, interested in economics as I am myself, I want to understand, whether or not I can change a thing. I would add, and whether or not there is the slightest hope that human beings will see the light in time to save the earth and the human race.

 

With that in mind, I sit down to read Naomi Klein’s bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It is not a comfort book, by any means, nor is there anything joyful in the reading (other than the intellect that put the thoughts together), but it makes so much sense that what I cannot understand is how some people think that every aspect of our lives should be “privatized” and others think that pure and complete socialism is the only answer to organizing society. How can people not see that a mixed economy is the only one supporting a society that works for all? How can the world at large not see that private enterprise has important strengths and should not be thrown out but that there are important aspects of life that cannot be left to a winner-takes-all game? 

 

Meanwhile, they who see clearly their own (short-term?) advantage in disadvantaging others are leading country after country, including the United States and Canada, down the winner-takes-all road, and I don’t expect to live long enough to see this turn around, though maybe I will be proven wrong. Maybe, as an optimistic friend believes, the Eighth Prophecy of the indigenous peoples of the world will turn us away from the edge of the cliff in my lifetime. I would love to be wrong in this way! 

Just because -- for the relief of beauty!

Satisfaction in inquiry, in understanding, in an exchange of reasonable views with others is all an important part of my life and always has been. I have that with books and with friends, in my work as well as in my leisure. When evening comes, however, I am ready to welcome comfort. By evening Sunny and I have been outdoors more than once, and I have surveyed the progress of spring in field and forest. We’ve had fresh air and exercise, and my salads of foraged greens are satisfying. Maybe Sunny has had the added benefit of a play session with her new friend. All in all, it’s been a good day, in the bookstore and at home, reading and talking to people and getting out into the natural world. But at bedtime, what I want is comfort. 

 

Maybe a new novel or a book of essays or, not infrequently, something I have read before, perhaps many times, will be my cozy bedtime reading. One favorite in the re-reading category is Christopher Morley’s novel, The Haunted Bookshop, sequel to the equally enchanting Parnassus on Wheels. Everyone in the secondhand book business knows these two novels! They were part of what seduced us, eventually, gradually, but ineluctably, into the bookselling life.

In the 1950s and 1960s, my parents were members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a subscription book service founded in 1926. Originally, a panel of judges chose each month’s selection, and one year Morley’s novels about bookselling were chosen as a monthly selection, the two books together coming to our family home. Despite the ages of the two main characters in Parnassus on Wheels (it is a romance between two middle-aged people, as well as a paean to reading, books, and bookselling), I was captivated by a story that had, for me, all the necessary dream elements: a horse; a “gypsy” wagon; country life; travel; and books! Then came The Haunted Bookshop, with an attractive pair of young people, mystery, suspense, danger, and love in the air! As a girl, I read both books over and over, and I continue to read them over and over today, decades later.

On the subject of re-reading, as on the subject of books in general, I am passionate. Never re-read? That would be like never revisiting a place once loved, spending no more time with a friend of many years! And as every re-reader knows, each reading of the most familiar book is a new experience. New but familiar, yes. As with people we have known and loved for years, there is always room for surprising new realizations. 

 

When I chose The Haunted Bookshop for my bedtime reading the other night, I thought as I held it in my hands how many associations and memories the book contains. To begin with, my volume is from the same book club edition my parents had, so it brings back my earliest readings, and I pause lovingly over the illustrations, which delight me as much if not more than they did years ago. Now in my eighth decade of life, I have still never been to physical, geographical Brooklyn, but thanks to Christopher Morley, Betty Smith, Alfred Kazin, and other writers, Brooklyn has come into my life – here, in this book, in that “between the wars” period that so fascinates me. But also, the chapter headings, the paper – all these little details are important, and as I hold the open book in one hand and rub Sunny Juliet’s chest with the other – she is lying on her back, unmoving, her feet in the air -- the two of us indulge in the most contented hour of our day together. 

 

Charms of this story for me personally? There is the location of the bookstore, its entrance below the level of the sidewalk, exactly like the imaginary tea room the Artist and I planned for the Marlborough Building in Kalamazoo; a coal furnace, so like the furnace in the basement of my parents’ house, where I, like Roger Mifflin (only without a pipe), would gaze into the flames after shoveling coal and see another world; an Elevated railway, like the wonderful, noisy, smelly El I knew in Chicago; and, naturally, a winsome little dog, with a quaint packing case dog bed, decorated like a library.

There is the excitement of the bookseller when called to appraise an important private library; there are windows with transoms; there is corned beef hash (and that is distracting, pulling my mind away from the story and to breakfast at J&S Hamburg in Traverse City); there is that magic name, later adopted by a Sixties a cappella vocal group, Manhattan Transfer. In short (and I am reining myself in, because I could go on and on in this vein), because this book has been part of my life since girlhood, and because I have read it over and over in the ensuing years, my own life’s memories and associations are part and parcel of my re-reading. I notice in tonight’s reading but decide to overlook the sexist attitudes, including the violent impulses that accompany the leading man’s love for the ingenue, because it is all taking place so long ago, my father only a year and a half old, my mother not yet born – and anyway, it is a story, and these are fictional characters. And it means more to me now, as a story set in a bookstore, than it ever could have before my own bookstore had been around for over 30 years. 

Following the final page of his story, Christopher Morley adds a page about bookstores, first quoting from another of his own books, John Mistletoe:

 

The bookstore is one of humanity’s great engines, and one that we use very imperfectly. It is a queer fact that most of us still have the primitive habit of visiting bookshops chiefly to ask for some definite title. Aren’t we ever going to leave anything to destiny, or to good luck, or to the happy suggestion of some wise bookseller?

 

Without claiming wisdom for myself, I will urge my blog readers – because surely you are all bookstore visitors, too! – to visit bookstores as you go to a potluck dinner, ready to discover and be delighted by something you didn’t know you wanted until it came into your hands. Then your excitement will be a bookseller’s joy.

 

And here is the envelope, ready to open --

Happy morning sight, courtesy of SUNSHINE!
 

My top nonfiction picks of 2023 -- so far (the year isn't over yet) -- are not rank-ordered or alphabetical, as I limited the list to four books. First is one I read most recently, but all four work together in my mind. Maybe they would do the same in yours.

But first I should delay the opening of the envelope, shouldn't I? Quack on about the weather a bit, draw out the suspense? You already see by my opening image that we have sunshine this Monday morning in Leelanau County -- and what a lovely gift it is! I took time out from a big cleaning-sorting-reorganizing-decision project to hang laundry outdoors on the line and get Sunny up to the dog park in Northport after picking up my mail. On our way to the village, we stopped along one of my favorite back roads, too, but I'll save that image for the end of my post and use cloudier photographs between beginning and end to highlight the contrast. 

Tamarack on the first of November

But now -- the books!

 

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, by Katherine May. 

 

Author Katherine May, though suspicious of groups, says she craves more and more being part of a congregation but doesn’t know where to start. “Nowhere has ever seemed to fit.” She doesn’t want to insult any religious community by making only a partial commitment, being a “wavering presence in the room,” and she is also “wary of stealing from traditions” and “cherry-picking the comforting parts of complex religious traditions – usually the aspects that tell us everything’s okay – and ignoring the counterbalancing obligations….”  But her strong sense is that we in the West have let ourselves lose childhood’s enchantment (“small wonder magnified by meaning”) by considering it “childish,” and let ourselves become indifferent to it. May wants enchantment back, and she courts it at the seaside, on hilltops, in the presence of stars and of fire. Who doesn’t want to be carried away, if only for a few fleeting moments? (Where do you court enchantment?)

Clouds, light, and color always enchant, don't they?

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein. 

At first Naomi Klein paid only peripheral attention to what she refers to as the “antics” of the “other Naomi,” but as Naomi confusion grew larger and larger, Klein gradually became obsessed with her double. You would be, too, if people kept attributing views to you that you had not only never expressed but never espoused! Klein is not, however, a shallow thinker, and her investigations went much deeper than the phenomenon of finding herself confused, on social media and elsewhere, with another writer with the same first name. “As I shadowed my double further into her world … I found myself confronting yet more forms of doubling and doppelganging, these ones [sic] distinctly more consequential.” In history, literature, and myth, a doppelganger is more than a confusing double. It can also be an unwelcome mirror, a warning. On social media, Klein points out, everyone presents a doppelganger of his or her real self, and while we in our 21^st-century doppelganger culture are paying attention to one another’s doubles and perfecting our own, we are distracted from and neglecting to notice more important changes in our world. This is a serious book, but it also contains funny moments. It is personal and at the same time important. I highly recommend it. (Did you ever wish you had a twin?)

Can you tell them apart? They don't care.

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, by Susan Cain. 

This book by the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking is probably not for everyone. Maybe there is no single book that would speak to all readers, but Bittersweet certainly spoke to me last winter with its meditation on “longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world,” and I don’t think it was only because grief had entered my life (although grief does have a way of cracking one open to small beauties and pains of everyday life, as well as to the feelings of others). But I can’t remember a time in my life without an acute awareness of passing time. “Always at my back I hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” were lines that seem to have been with me always. (I wonder if there is a connection between introversion and feelings of life’s bittersweetness. If Cain addressed that question, I have forgotten her answer. What do you think?)

Sunny loves tart wild apples, both for play and for snacking.

 

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

When this dense, heavy book first came into my hands, I skimmed the brain science and impatiently turned to the second part, focused on history. On my next reading, however, I determined to read more carefully from the beginning. There is a lot of repetition (for emphasis, I’m sure, not for “padding”), and not only does McGilchrist convince me, but I now read and look back on past reading through his lens. 

For instance: 

(1) I see May’s search for enchantment (see above) as a longing to recover the right brain’s “desire or longing … toward the Other.” 

(2) Tempting as it is to see those lost in Klein’s “mirror world” (see above again) as suffering under enchantment, I see them more as people who have abandoned enchantment and ambiguity for certainty, the left brain’s rigidity not allowing anything into the picture that would cast doubt on what it already “knows.” 

(3) Even Cain’s “bittersweet” feelings, it seems, would be rejected by the left brain, whereas the right brain has always realized that “light and dark, birth and death – bitter and sweet – are forever paired.”

Socrates and Plato prioritized ideas [of things] over “things themselves,” and while Hume declared that neither inductive reason, deductive reason. nor both combined were adequate to put together complete knowledge (implicit bodily/sensory/social background underlies all the rest, as Bergson and the phenomenologists finally realized, also), much of science to this day, and far too much of politics, continues to be ruled by the left brain’s hierarchies, rules, categories, etc. Even religious experience, when translated into theology and creeds, loses itself in left brain re-presentations of what was once known without mediation.

Leaves in the understory, overstory bare, sky cloudy

My favorite 2023 nonfiction list was longer at first, but I decided that these four will constitute my top recommendations for the year so far, because they came together for me, ideas from each strengthening and reinforcing and enriching ideas and thoughts from the others. I was reminded of my first semester in university, when everything I was learning -- drama, psychology, rhetoric, etc. -- seemed connected to everything else in a way that astonished and delighted me. 

 

I have yet to read either of the new books on private equity companies (my new self-study subject), books ordered for the bookstore and in stock now (one with “Plunder” as its title, the other with “plunderers” as part of its title), but one was featured in an interview on NPR with the author only the other day. 

There were also several other beautifully done and moving nonfiction titles in my reading since January. Among the latter group were: 

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts; Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, by David Abram; Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, by Andrea Elliott; My Venice and Other Essays, by Donna Leon; Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth, by Marcia Bornerud; The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, by Florence Williams; Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power, by Susan Page; and Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz. 

 

Every book in the longer list is worth reading, and as my short list is a highly personal selection, if my top recommendations leave you cold you may be more strongly drawn to titles in the unannotated list. Or perhaps you have (and I hope you do!) your own top nonfiction picks to share. Are there books of history, memoir, essays, science, politics, or economics that made strong impressions on you this year? Anything you wish everyone in the country would read? 

Glorious blue sky!

Look in the Mirror. Do You Read the Future There?

Marina sunrise, Monday, October 1, 2023

What kind of world do you see around you today, and what future world do you envision? Is it one you want?

 

Years ago here in Northport, when our community was even deeper in the doldrums than the rest of the country, a series of “visioning” meetings was held for local residents, and at one meeting, we were asked to draw a picture of our “vision” for the future. I use scare quotes there because I interpreted the word as meaning something positive – something like a best-case scenario that we might be able to work toward and bring about. (Yeah, yeah, prepositions at the end of the sentence. Move along, move along!) One local woman, however, took “vision” to mean a prediction, and hers (obviously based on the times we were in) was ominous: her drawing showed a street of empty storefronts with big CLOSED signs on all the windows. Very unhappy "vision," I thought. 

View from inside my bookstore to Saturday morning preparations for street fair --

Leelanau UnCaged 2023! Northport was full of life!

My bookstore, like all the village, was full of life, full of people this past Saturday for our annual street fair, Leelanau UnCaged. Music, food, arts and crafts, face painting and art fun for the kids! It is a happy day in Northport, and my guest poets, Fleda Brown and Michael Delp, read to an attentive audience – though I fell down on the job, neglecting to pick up my camera, too overwhelmed by their powerful words. If you weren’t here, I’m sorry you missed them.

But coming back to my sheep (meaning and origin of that French phrase here): Asking the question about the future today, I’m not trying to elicit only positive visions but not exactly asking for predictions, either. I’m asking what you expect, personally, in our country and in the world in the coming years. Is yours an optimistic or a fearful vision? Do you welcome the future you see? Or maybe you don’t look very far ahead, but even if you’re focused more on today than tomorrow, please keep reading, anyway, because today is where we all are now.

 

This post will not be a book review. (For a fuller idea of the contents of the book, please see the publisher’s description I have included in the comment section below.) Everything Naomi Klein has written in Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is worth reading, and most of it is very, very important, but I want to address a single narrow issue, more or less, one that has been hurting my heart. And I’m not just pointing a finger, either, because the temptation and danger are there for me as much as for anyone else. 

 

Klein notes that as the political divide has widened across the U.S., thinking has become binary on the left as well as on the right, with the left, simply to counter lies and conspiracy theories on the right, often defending the status quo rather than offering nuanced critique.

 

It's as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. This has happened on so many issues that I sometimes feel we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes…. 

 

When fear-mongers on the right encourage panic, the left knee-jerk is to dismiss all worry, and vice versa. The problem doesn’t stop there, either. 

 

There are also uncomfortable ways we have begun to imitate each other.

 

I added emphasis to the sentence above and set it apart by itself (though it does not take up three lines on my laptop screen) because that sentence brings into focus my today's concern. 

Potentially murky waters --

 

There were groups of people during the height of COVID concern who refused to wear masks, and when some went so far as to say it was for the good of the country and the human species if the weak and old were to die, mask wearers were indignant and horrified at such heartlessness. And yet, when unvaccinated people began to die, how many mask wearers made jokes about people dying of stupidity? “How,” Klein asks, “did we cede so much territory? Become so heartless [ourselves]?"

 

Klein uses this insight to introduce Steve Bannon’s strategy, that of picking up and using the left has dropped,

 

…identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have left neglected or betrayed…

 

-- but my concern here and now, in this post, is with what we are all becoming. The radio/television network that its followers call “conservative” has long hosted name-calling screamers who ridicule their opposition. (I choose to read their news online occasionally to know what they’re saying without having to hear the mocking voices.) I find it equally disturbing, however, when my fellow liberals stoop to name-calling and bad jokes, though I understand the temptation. “We have to laugh so we don’t cry,” one friend told me. But ridiculing our political opponents and those the opposition holds up as leaders and pundits will not open a single mind or heart, and, beyond that, it certainly does not make us kinder, happier people. A hate-filled future for our country? Is this what we want?

 

*****

 

Okay, let me switch gears. How do we escape from what Klein calls “the mirror world”? When I had almost reached the final chapter of her book, I picked up a paperback from 1962, The Image: A Guide to Pseudoevents in America, by Daniel J. Boorstin. Historian Boorstin’s thesis was that America had replaced originals with images, and now, like Narcissus in the Greek myth...

 

We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves. 

 

When cursed-by-the-gods Narcissus saw his reflection in the water, he fell in love with his image and “died of languor” on the spot, his own image a narcotic that not only put him to sleep but ended his life. And so Boorstin can’t help but wonder,

 

How can we flee from this image of ourselves? How can we immunize ourselves to its bewitching conceitful power? 

 

This becomes ever more difficult. The world of our making becomes ever more mirrorlike.

 

(Are dogs wiser than humans?)

Again with the mirrors! In the mirror world both Klein and Boorstin describe, the kneejerk reach for false villains is matched by an equally desperate reach for false heroes. And here is a problem I have with e-mails that plead on a daily basis for my donations in these “dangerous” times: It isn’t that I don’t see our times as dangerous, because I do, but I see our fear and fixation on opponents as dangerous narcotics, too, not as signposts to peace among neighbors. Because what we are being asked to fear is our neighbors! Each other!

 

I don’t know how much common ground there might be between Boorstin (who died in 2004) and Klein, since the former traveled from Communist Party membership to mid-20^th century conservatism, while the latter makes no bones about being an anticapitalist eco-leftist. Boorstin saw the beginnings of today’s mirror world when advertising invaded American politics, and Klein sees how the mirror world has divided Americans until, gazing at doppelgangers of one another over the abyss, we no longer share a view of reality. But somehow I don’t see them greeting each other as hard-and-fast comrades, because while they see similar dangers, they reach very different conclusions on what we need to do to get beyond the impasse.

 

Boorstin’s map for escaping the mirror world is stronger individualism:

 

Though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudoevents, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.

 

“Each of us must disenchant himself,” he counsels. 

 

Klein, on the other hand, sees too much individualism as part of what lures us into the mirror world – the idea that each of us, on our own, is responsible only for ourselves. The first wave of COVID, like the shock of 9/11, initial brought Americans together in common cause. Quickly, however, we retreated not only to our respective “sides” (and in the case of COVID, for those fortunate enough to be able to do so, to the safety of our private homes) but also from connectedness. And now, too many who should be making common cause on important issues have become sidetracked into splinter groups with tiny, often entrepreneurial, self-admiring agendas. Fearing and ridiculing a dangerous, monolithic opposition, we subject one another to scrutiny, too, and who on earth can measure up on all possible counts? Even if we don’t begin from individual isolation, it’s where we may end up if we can’t give each other a little slack!

 

So Klein’s recipe for exchanging mirrors and images for reality is not more individualism, but solidarity and connections.

 

We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human.

 

Our doppelgangers can teach us, she urges, that we are “not as separate from each other as we might think.” And while working on ourselves is a start, changing the larger world requires collaboration and coalition, even in the face of discomfort.

 

I cannot urge too strongly the reading of Doppelganger. Naomi Klein writes as a friend, trusting readers with her own errors and weaknesses and difficulties in her journey through the mirror world. As I said, this is not a book review, and I have left vast numbers of the author’s ideas for you to discover on your own, because I have been wanting for a long time to address what I see as outright meanness in utterances and writings of those with whom I otherwise agree, and it makes me sad, and one of the things I most love about Naomi Klein is that she refuses to stoop to unkindness. 

 

Besides, it’s a fascinating journey! Doubles, twins, identity thieves, avatars, doppelgangers, a house of mirrors – it’s an irresistible story, isn’t it? 

 

But now I need to get back to Iain McGilchrist, because a common underground thread I see connecting all of us in this splintered, divided, many-mirrored world is what McGilchrist identifies as a cultural over-reliance on the left brain, that narrowly logical, super-rational “emissary,” with its intolerance for ambiguity and an inability to make room for facts and ideas that conflict with its orderly catalog of guarded knowledge. 

 

Another strength of Klein’s view and her book: she sees the irresistible temptation to judge characters globally on the basis of single issues. Is so-and-so this? Or that? We are all, she says, both this and that, neither devils nor angels. 

 

And every new day is an opportunity for us to make better choices.

Scattered

My mind is more like these scattered crabapples on the ground than it is focused on a big, clear picture. Summer over, vacation past, winter looming. There will be time to settle down to large projects, but these days I'm more in grazing mode, easily distracted. Yesterday in the car, waiting for David, I started a book by May Sarton. I think it's called KINDS OF LOVE, but it's still out in the car, so when I woke up in the middle of the night it was Karen Armstrong's A SHORT HISTORY OF MYTH that kept me company.

Friend Sally stopped in the bookstore on Saturday and recommended Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM. John Cusack did an interview that Sally forwarded by e-mail, and I'll put a link in here as soon as I can figure out how. Then this morning's issue of "Shelf Awareness" featured Klein, also. The book certainly sounds, as our grandson Spencer would say, "right up my alley," so it will be on my next order list.

Most important thought of this morning, however, is that it is my son's birthday. A Michigan resident since the age of three months old, he will, like me, never be a native. (I was born in South Dakota.) But this is our home, right, Ian? Happy birthday!!!