Do I read too much?

What does SHE think?

That question is instantly joined by another: Why do I read? Then there is, of course, What else could or should I be doing? And right away we can discount Sunny Juliet’s opinion, since hers is a distinctly self-serving perspective. In her point of view (I cannot imagine I’m misreading her on this), all the hours I’m focused on objects held in my hands is robbing her of my attention, and there’s no amusement for her in watching me, either, as what I am “doing” seems so little like doing anything.

 

Oh, my dear, impatient, so patient companion!

 

Even with a beef bone, she hopes for play with momma.

What do I seek in all this reading? That’s the “why” question. One answer is understanding. I want to understand as much as I can of the knottiest, most insoluble human predicaments, problems to which I will never have a full answer as long as I live. That answer surely elicits another “Why?” What is the good of understanding that leads no further?

 

Oh, tree in the garden! What knowledge did its fruit offer? 

 

I see different kinds of hungers for knowledge and understanding in different human beings. The pragmatically scientific want to take things apart, see how they work, and then do things that have not been done before. They are eager to change the world. Why? Sometimes for the betterment of mankind, sometimes just “Because we can.” Around those seekers, always, are hangers-on and parasites with no intrinsic hunger of their own for the knowledge and inventions, who do, however, care very much for the wealth that can be generated, wealth multiplying itself into the future, if only one makes a reservation early enough on the investment bandwagon. Theirs is hunger for accumulation, which is qualitatively different from hunger for knowledge. 

 

And yet, honestly, don't most of us have a certain hunger for accumulation? I look around my life and see art on walls, books on shelves, stacks of photograph albums, dishes of stones and fossils, and physical representations of beautiful living things.

Beauty and memories, memories and beauty. Objects that invite my eyes and my hands, pages that carry me over oceans to inhabit other lives and other times and also let me relive my own past years. Associations carried by these material objects are my real accumulated wealth, the objects themselves only carriers.

Does the quest for understanding life look more to the past than to the future? “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” wrote Kierkegaard. We do seek hope in the possibility of applying our understanding to the future. For example, restricting the question of “how we came to be where we are” to immediate family and acquaintance rather than society as a whole, I can see errors I have made and try to avoid repeating them in what remains of my time on earth. Sadly, human societies, with longer spans than individuals but always peopled by those shorter-lived humans, have difficulty learning from previous generations. Somewhere in his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the insatiably curious physicist wrote that we live our lives, see where we’ve gone wrong, and then die. For some reason, the simple truth of that statement, the flat-footed way he phrased it, amuses me no end. That's us, all right! And is that how it will be with our species as a whole? I wonder. They came into existence, succeeded magnificently for a while, then messed it up and went extinct. Maybe. Understanding too late--.

 

Besides understanding, however, there’s no denying the strong element of escape in much of my reading, and often these hungers pull in decidedly opposite directions. When the world is too much with me and I want to drown out the clamor of politicians who have once again invaded my thoughts with one outrageous act or speech after another, my hunger for escape pulls away from my hunger for understanding, and I can only feed them in turn, first one and then the other, these jealous rivals, setting aside Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith for The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes.

Looking for understanding,

the search continues.

Caveat emptor: I’ll stop here for a moment to remind myself and my readers that naming desires, like naming emotions, distorts our inner reality. They are not things and do not occur singly, and my attempts to tease out separate strands from an inchoate stream can be only a partial and misleading picture. All analysis distorts. Keep that in mind, please, and what I write here will not seem, perhaps, quite so absurd!

The open road! Escape!

And now I’m thinking that understanding and escape are very earthbound dimensions of reading hunger, very, very human, and that there is something else, woven tightly into these hungers and yet also very different, and that is our longing to live beyond the limits of our individual life spans, not only longer but also larger. You see instantly how the desire to expand beyond cannot be separated from hunger for understanding or for escape—and yet, do you also see that it cannot be completely expressed by those two hungers? We want something eternal, deathless. No theologian, however, I'll just leave that teasing suggestion right there.

 

I have more to say about the comfort of remembering, which also lets us slip time's constraints. 

 

Through the Looking Glass brings back, for me, the excitement I felt when I ran into the kitchen to tell my mother, “It’s a chessboard!” Lewis Carroll had not stated it so baldly, and my parents had not explained the story to me that way, but all of a sudden, reading it to myself, I had seen the chessboard when the Knight told Alice he could go no farther because he had reached the end of his move, and I had to run and tell my mother, who responded, “You didn’t know that?” No, I didn’t, but the excitement of my discovery was not dampened by her amusement, because I discovered it for myself, as I still remember with pleasure. 

 

If I were to pick up right now, today, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it would carry me back to the Parc Monceau in Paris (as merely thinking of the book carries me back), especially if I had the French paperback. One summer, day after day I went to the Parc Monceau with that book in hand, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’ être, lost in an Eastern European world inside the landscaped French world around me in my dream city far from home. 

 

And Wind in the Willows! I read that book to my son, giving the different animal characters different voices, and we had a wonderful time, which he still remembers. Then when the Artist and I had a layover in the Detroit airport on our way home from France, we read to each other (from a battered paperback copy that is here in my house somewhere, but where?) the chapter “Dolce Domum,” tears streaming down our faces, while all around us business people busily consulted their Blackberries and the contents of their briefcases. 

Are you still with me? Are you as tired as Sunny Juliet of my egghead ruminations? “Momma, get real!”

 

Real is snow in thick flurries and wind that drifts it across roads!

Well, here’s what was real for me on Monday evening as the blizzard swirled and on Tuesday morning when darkness had not as yet retreated: I was reading, for the first time in years, Jim Harrison’s novel, Dalva. First published in 1988, Dalva is written in the first person, the first and third sections in a woman’s voice, and what inspired me to revisit this book in 2025 was the new collection of Jim’s work in French translation that concentrates on his women characters, both in first-person stories and in third-person works with central female characters.

I have to admit that when Dalva first came out, it was hard for me to “hear” the female narrator’s voice, what with Jim’s own gravelly, very masculine speaking voice so familiar to my ear. Reading the book now is a very different experience. For one thing, Jim’s speaking voice has been gone for nine years, and he had been gone from Michigan longer than that, gone to live in Montana and Arizona. But also I am 37 years older than when I first read this novel. Thirty-seven years of varied life experience, shall we say, gives me a much richer perspective, and now Dalva’s voice comes through strong and clear to me, and I am loving this book, truly loving it, and have a much deeper appreciation for what the author accomplished, not only in writing from a woman’s point of view but in speaking so many truths.

 

It is somewhat a mystery to me how the rich can feel so utterly fatigued and victimized.

... 

 

Now there’s a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue.

... 

 

The tomatoes looked as if they were suffocating in the glass jars, livid red and suffering.

... 

 

…I had told him that I was without a specific talent, other than that of curiosity, and he saw that as a large item. It is terrible to assume life is one thing, only to discover it is another. A highly mobile curiosity gives you the option of looking into alternatives. 

 

There is also, I must admit (Another admission? Is this post becoming overly confessional?) my love for southeast Arizona (a love that took me by surprise), and the way the mountains and high desert haunt my northern Michigan winter finds solace in Harrison’s descriptions of places not far from my former winter stomping grounds in Cochise County. He was just a couple of mountain ranges west and south. Hackberry trees along dry streambeds, mesquite on overgrazed acreage, eroded gulches, alligator juniper at higher elevations—all that. I came to know such country intimately.

How much poorer my present life would be had I not come back to re-read this novel! How many hungers it satisfies!

 

I would defend my answer to my own original question by noting that I spend no time whatsoever watching television and none drinking in bars, although as a word-addicted, dream-addled, introverted widow I do not hold my priorities up as superior to anyone else’s. All I’m saying is that reading is a priority in my life, and this is where I look for comfort and strength and beauty and understanding.

Also, never fear, Sunny and I manage a lot of dog-and-mom time, indoors and out!

 

Challenges

Tunnel, teeter-totter, and hurdles that Sunny is learning to master

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

 

-      William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

 

This particular truth of Shakespeare’s is so often quoted out of context (almost always!) that we easily forget its role in the play and poor Malvolio as the victim of a humiliating practical joke, but just so, in the usual fashion, I too intend to shove Malvolio offstage and use Shakespeare’s words to introduce my own topic:

 

Some challenges we choose, others are thrust upon us.

 

I’ll begin with myself (since this is my blog). In my own quite ordinary life, a new puppy was a challenge I chose (not anticipating quite how much of a challenge she would be, but that’s a common story, too, I’m sure), while being transported to Widowland was a challenge life thrust upon me, for sure. Certain aspects of this truth doubtless apply to your life, as well, in that some challenges you would have avoided if possible, and others you probably went out of your way to embrace.

 

Some human beings are born into the world challenged, with physical handicaps or poverty thrust upon them from the very beginning. I can’t say I was “born on third base,” but I was born in the United States, broadly speaking into the middle class, of educated parents, and all that was a head start that I didn’t have to earn.

 

Books

 

All these thoughts ran through my mind this morning as I was reading Jacob Wheeler’s new nonfiction book, Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World One Child at a Time. Hanley Denning was a young woman from a comfortable American background whose life trajectory changed dramatically when she saw children living in extreme poverty in a garbage dump outside Guatemala City. Hearing the subject of this book, you might shudder and want to back away, fearing it would be too “depressing” to read, but such is far from the case, because Hanley’s determination to help the children was matched by her love for them and her ability to connect not only with children in Guatemala but with wealthy American donors to make a difference. Given all that, the story of the growth of Hanley’s nonprofit, Camino Seguro, or Safe Passage, is inspiring and uplifting. As I read this book, my head and heart are filled with images of children – and their parents – who find safety, joy, love, and learning in their challenging present, as well as hope for a better future. A wonderful story, well told by the publisher of Leelanau County’s Glen Arbor Sun.

An inspiring story!

Hanley Denning chose early on in life on the challenge of long-distance running, and she went on to choose the almost superhuman challenges of changing the lives of some of the poorest children in the Western hemisphere. Most of our lives are much tamer, but no life is immune to challenging situations.

 

Anne-Marie Ooman’s book, As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book, recounts challenges of a different kind. For most of Anne-Marie’s life, her own mother’s example was one she was determined not to follow. With five children born in six and a half years, both Oomen parents had to work hard to feed and clothe them all in rural northern Michigan, and the children had to work, too. Anne-Marie wanted a different kind of life -- and she wanted it away from the farm. Signing up for a college semester abroad, against her mother’s wishes, was one early blow she struck for her own freedom, determined to become a writer, not a housewife. While writing, however, was something Oomen chose, different challenges awaited her with the coming of her widowed mother’s old age. 

We can all learn from Anne-Marie's honest true tale.

 

When a parent can no longer live alone safely, how do adult children deal with the problem? Where does the money come from for increasing levels of care? What kinds of conversation are possible between unhappy aged parents and confused, guilt-ridden adult children? Are there ways to avoid the unhappy feelings of the two generations?

 

No one chooses old age. Inevitable it is, however, for those who live long -- the price of long life -- and however well prepared we may try to be, it cannot be otherwise than challenging. 

 

Where Jacob Wheeler’s book about Hanley Denning is inspiring for the enormous challenges his subject took upon herself, Anne-Marie Oomen writes of challenges more of us are likely to face, whether we want to or not. We can learn, though, from both books. From Wheeler’s, we see the enormous difference that one very other-directed person can make in the world. Yes, it can be done! From Oomen’s, looking ahead to very probable situations in our own lives, we can perhaps avoid some -- not all! -- of the problems she and her mother and siblings experienced, profiting by what the author would have liked to know and understand earlier. 

 

We will not all move to Guatemala, after all, but we are all getting older every day of our lives. 

 

Dogs

 

One of the many wonderful things about dogs is that they don’t compare the lives they have to other possible lives. When a dog is sick or hurt, the dog doesn’t cry, “Why me?” and in a household with only one often boring adult, the dog doesn’t say, “I never asked to be born! I wish I had a different family!” I am the one who chose the challenges of learning agility work for Sunny Juliet, not Sunny herself, but she is responding whole-heartedly! The work exercises her mind along with her muscles. It requires her full attention, and her attention channels otherwise wild energy into focused energy. The payoff (besides generous treats throughout the exercises) is that after a lesson she and her classmate get to run around and play off-leash. Social time! Happy dogs! 

 

May we all meet the challenges of the day with courage and cheerful spirits --. 

Book Pairings

Immigration and our southern border

[Note: EXCEPTIONAL CLOSING (as the Parisians call it): Dog Ears Books will be closed this Sunday through Wednesday, Sept. 26. After that we will be OPEN for regular 11-5 hours Tuesdays through Saturdays through the Thanksgiving weekend]

“Pairings” — it’s a familiar idea these days in certain social and professional circles. What wine best accompanies an herbed goat cheese, a rib-eye steak, or a rustic apple tart? Which craft beer is a good accompaniment to seafood gumbo or a hearty chili con carne? The aim is to pair the glass to the dish so that their contents bring out the best in each other, the better to delight the palate. 

I was groping toward the notion of book pairings back when I suggested that readers of Hillbilly Elegy would find their reading experience deepened by going from J. D. Vance’s memoir to Nancy Eisenberg’s historical survey, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. The two books represent two different genres and different degrees of complexity, one a close-up, personal view, the other an objectification through history’s long lens, each book’s content helping to shed additional light on the other. I didn’t then have the phrase “book pairings” in mind, but it helps me now to clarify what I had then and have continued to have in mind when I recommend two books together.

Geology and beach stones

An obvious pair jumped out at me this summer, Lake Michigan Rock Picker’s Guide and The Last Ice Age and the Leelanau Peninsula. The latter provides about as much geological background as most people want, while the former helps to identify stones picked up on the beach. Nothing too heavy here. Again, however, the books are complementary. Both are also small and inexpensive, just right for the car glove compartment or bicycle panier.

Sometimes it might be helpful and salutary to effect an unlikely mating. How about the Death and Life of the Great Lakes, followed by Lake Michigan Mermaid? Narrative poetry does not have to thought of as an antidote or challenge to science but can be seen as a helpful adjunct, a reminder and acknowledgement of personal values and emotional attachments. And why should we have to leave beauty or feeling behind to face facts? What a foolish notion!

Facts and stories. Sometimes two books offer both together to enrich a reader’s experience. One example for me of is that of La Frontera (a book of history and many personal stories) paired with Lauren Markham’s The Far Away Brothers (focused on current events and stories of the experiences of two specific immigrant boys). Anyone concerned with questions of border security and/or immigration from Latin America would find these two books together providing an intense course of learning. 

A recent addition to my Books Read 2018 list, Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, left me more than a little exhausted with its historical examples and survey of current disasters-in-the-making. (That is not a criticism. I heartily recommend the book.) In conclusion, Diamond gives a few reasons for cautious optimism and specific prescriptions for action, but I needed more, something inspiring at an emotional, on-the-ground level, and I’m finding it in Wendell Berry’s The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings. Any of Berry’s books — fiction, nonfiction, poetry — is a good introduction to his thinking and writing and living, and these essays are no exception. Berry and Diamond cover much of the same ground but from very different starting places and with very different perspectives. 

The suggested pairings above, I see, have neglected fiction, and fiction pairs well with nonfiction, as I learned in an undergraduate course entitled “History Through Literature.” In fact, in looking back at my own posts I see I recommended If the Creek Don’t Rise, by Leah Weiss, to accompany Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash. Look here to read about the novel and see my reasons for putting it together with the memoir and the history book. 

And now, here is a completely natural, intuitive pairing of two novels. Have you read both? If not, why not?

Anyone else have a suggestion for a pair — or a trio — of books to be read together? Comments and additions welcome!

We need to change our ways!

Old Dog … New Trick … Hmmmmm

The first Dog Ears dog, 1993-2007

We learned years ago in our household that an old dog is perfectly capable of learning a new trick. Our old dog, Nikki, was not the sharpest tool in the box. No matter. She was a stunning athlete, and she needed me. Then late in life, after many years with us, she accidentally pawed her water dish and flipped it over and was rewarded with having it immediately filled. Imagine our surprise when she took that lesson to heart and began to “flip her dish” whenever it was empty and she wanted to let us know it needed filling. "She flipped her dish! She figured something out!"

Another trick she learned even later was how to open a door. For years, even when a door was ajar, unless it was open wide enough to permit her passage, that dog would simply stand there, patiently, nose pointing in the direction she wanted to go, waiting for someone to push the door open for her. Then one day -- probably accidentally -- she pushed it herself. Hey, it worked! Success went to her head, and she pushed doors open many times in her remaining years. She even, to her dog dad’s dismay, learned to scratch at a door to request admittance. It was to my dismay that one oft-scratched door received a new coat of paint after my sweet girl was gone. 

Nikki and dog mom at Good Harbor, years ago

But this post isn’t really about dogs. It’s about me and my bookselling life. Twenty-five years in the trade, and I’ve never taken credit cards, but today I made my first credit card sale. Sigh! To say I was reluctant would be an understatement. To say I was apprehensive, again, would hardly cover the territory. But today I processed a sale with a credit card. 

So the old dog has learned a new trick. She has been dragged, at last, kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. I’m not done with learning yet.

Me with Dog Ears dog 2, the beautiful Sarah

My Concerns: Independence and Independent Access

Today’s post is a sequel to the one preceding, as I continue musing on the value of handwriting. I will try very hard not to beg the question or to exaggerate the case to be made in favor of cursive script. I'm also including some sunny winter scenes to sweeten the pot.

Why do we put a high value on health, other than the fact that being sick is usually no fun at all? Aside from the yucky aspects of illness, don’t we also love to feel strong and healthy, in large part, because it means we can do things for ourselves, because we’re not dependent on others when we’re healthy? Getting old brings changes much more serious and unwelcome than wrinkles and sags, white hair and dry skin. There is the inevitable losing of strength and energy, the dreaded “slowing down” -- in short, not being able to do all the things one took for granted when young and strong. That’s what makes old age such a drag!

And human independence goes way beyond the physical. Americans generally consider a driver’s license, a valid passport, plenty of money, and freedom from debt as possessions and states to be desired. Being grounded as a teenager, going to jail or prison as an adult – the punishment in each case is loss of freedom and the curtailment of choices – but crushing student debt, burdensome mortgages, and payments on credit cards and/or new cars also place restrictions on independence.

Are you with me so far?

Okay, how about this: I can’t help believing that real, sustainable, and continued intellectual independence and efficacy demand an ability to function in the absence of electronic devices. I’m not arguing against ever using the devices. How could I do that and not be a complete hypocrite, given that I composed this essay on a laptop device and uploaded it to the Internet? My argument is, rather, that we should not become so dependent on them that we are helpless when the power goes out. We need basic competencies.

For a long time, parents and grandparents have been worrying that children relying on calculators are not learning basic skills in arithmetic. Well, why should they? They have calculators, so why should they bother calculating in their heads or on paper? Isn’t learning to do that a waste of valuable time?

Math skills make a good subject for me to defend because math was always my weakest academic subject. If I could, I would have avoided it altogether after third grade.

But now, as an independent adult, I don’t have to trust blindly in a cash register total or what a clerk tells me “the computer says,” because I can estimate the cost of my selected items before I got in line. I don’t even have to take a calculator with me to the store and hope the battery doesn’t go dead, either, because I learned addition and subtraction, multiplication tables, and estimating (that last, for me, the most difficult) back in my school days. I do it in my head. Estimating did not come naturally to me, and my math anxiety, supplemented by innate stubbornness, resisted it for a long time. Why look for approximate answers when I could do the calculation and get an exact number? Now I estimate on a daily basis and am thankful to have the skill. I have three avenues open to me – mental estimating or exact calculation, calculation on paper, or resorting to a calculator. Isn’t that range of possibilities preferable to dependence on the electronic device?

My mother learned shorthand when she was young, and I never did, but I did learn cursive handwriting and also developed my own idiosyncratic abbreviations for note-taking in college and graduate school. Relying on someone else’s notes would have made me very nervous. How could I know another student had understood the lecture or captured all the important points? In all honesty, I admit that I only took a typing class in high school because my parents insisted. Moreover, having that skill as “something to fall back on” – their argument -- worked against me for a long time: I kept falling back into jobs I hated! But finally I got it together to finish an undergraduate degree and go on from there, and being an excellent typist still serves me well.

Touch typing, that is. All fingers employed. One hundred and twenty words a minute. No two-thumbs texting or pathetic hunting-and-pecking with forefingers! 

      

I won’t reiterate here all my reasons for valuing books on paper a topic I’ve covered before (most recently here), but I do apply similar reasons to my case for handwriting. That is, I value it not simply out of nostalgia or because I grew up writing by hand or because ink is retro and cool, but because I can write on paper wherever I am, without an expensive device, without charging cords or batteries, without rare minerals having been extracted from the earth and without sending plastic and worse to landfills, and because I needn’t trust in a “cloud” to store my words or a sophisticated system to transmit them. With pen and paper, I exercise independence.

Blogging would not exist without the Internet, and those of us who participate obviously use electronic devices to share our thoughts. Blogging takes place only by virtue (!) of a virtual world. But my entire life would not be over if my online life came to an end. The truth is, I like being offline at home, and I like being disconnected when I’m out walking with my dog. That, of course, is a matter of preference. Perhaps others would feel their independence – their powers – diminished in the circumstances I find so freeing. I get that. I do.

But that’s my point. I can go back and forth. And that, I think, the ability to live in different worlds, to use different tools and media, as circumstance demands or as preference indicates, is the greatest degree of independence possible.

What does it matter, one of my readers responded (on my Facebook link to the earlier post), the form of communication young people use, handwriting or texting or some other digital means, since all are ways to communicate. True, but to me this is like asking why learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and estimate if you have a calculator. For that matter, given the availability of audio books, why be bothered to read? Why not just listen to someone else doing the reading?

As for me, I’ll listen now and again, but I would certainly not trade literacy for listening. Neither would I give up handwriting (or touch typing) and be confined to poking my fingers and thumbs at a tiny screen.

Here’s another thought: Most Ph.D. programs have traditionally had foreign language requirements. Some gave that up to allow computer “languages” as substitutes, which seems suspect and squirrelly to me in most cases. A language is not, after all, a code. The intention of the original requirement was to ensure an ability to read important texts in their original language; a secondary benefit that comes with second-language acquisition, however, is the realization that many of the concepts we take for granted in our native language are not universal. Different people divide the world up differently. They see the world differently. It’s important to learn that. It’s the difference between learning to converse and read and write and think in a second language and having to rely on a program or “app” to translate for you.

So as far as the ability to read historical documents is concerned, what if future students of history were required to learn cursive handwriting in the same way they might be required to learn Latin or French or Russian? As a specialized professional skill? I can imagine the day, not far in the future:

LANG 350: “Cursive as Foreign Language”

And for many people, if an ability to read historical documents is all that’s at stake, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the vision. Well, here’s what’s wrong with it from my point of view, and it’s the same thing that’s wrong with giving up on learning second languages (or learning to read, for that matter) because “smart” machines can do the work for us:

Having the machines should make our worlds bigger, not smaller; enlarge our access to the world rather, not shrink it; give us greater flexibility and choice and independence. Not stunted brains and overgrown thumbs.

And I’ll stop now to ask, as the scary truck driver asked a hitchhiking friend years ago, in an ominously threatening tone of voice after subjecting her to his extreme political views, “Agree or disagree?”  If you disagree with me, though, that’s fine and dandy, because I’m enjoying thinking about the pros and cons of cursive writing on this winter’s day. It’s a pleasant mental vacation from the season’s national political campaigns and primaries, isn’t it?

Small, Deeply Satisfying Portions

Some books are heavy and formal, veritable seven-course meals. Impossible to rush through, they demand long stretches of attention. This is not a criticism: such books ask a lot of a reader, but they give a lot in return.

Others are teasing little tasting menus, light bites good with a single bottle of wine. Pleasurable and relaxing, they’re easy and fun, and you get through them quickly. And pretty soon you're hungry again!

Then there are slim, surprising volumes with gem-like lines that stop you in your tracks. Whether you read a book like this in a day or two or savor it in tiny, disciplined sessions over a longer period of time, the reading makes a deep impression.

The novel, for a long time, 
has been over-furnished.

With this simple sentence Willa Cather begins her essay “The Novel Démeublé.” A few pages later she stopped me in my tracks again:

The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and true effect.

Learn to write – and then unlearn. “How wonderful it would be,” Cather goes on, “if we could throw all the furniture out of the window....”

She rails not against the telling detail but the meaningless piling up of detail. Later, writing of the work of Stephen Crane, she applauds his Wounds in the Rain and Other Impressions of War, sketches from Cuba, noting that Crane

... didn’t follow the movement of troops there much more literally than he had in The Red Badge of Courage. He knew that the movement of troops was the officers’ business, not his. He was in Cuba to write about soldiers and soldiering....

Cather admonished writers not to let writing get in the way of their stories. Too much “furniture,” too many “realistic” details, too much stage-managing all detract from fiction as art.

Learn – and then unlearn. A diamond of advice.