An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard

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Dillard’s inimitable prose makes this memoir one of the best I’ve ever read. True, we are of an age, so much of her experience chimes with mine. I didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh where three huge rivers come together, but in another steel town, where rivers run into the bay and “old” money (much of it from Gilded Age robber barons) existed uneasily with a brawny, considerably immigrant working class.

Like Dillard, I was allowed to run free from a now-surprisingly young age, learning the neighborhood and later the city street by street, landmark by landmark. She captures the essence of the period in details and imagery, such as: “Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe. “

Loosely organised by chronology, the individual sections each explore some aspect of childhood. There’s one about going to the library, one about summers at the lake with her grandparents, one about being afraid of the nuns at the Catholic school—“They had no bodies, and imitation faces.” She talks about her love of baseball and spending hours perfecting her overhand pitch only to find that as a girl she was only allowed to play softball.

Not uncommon occurrences, but the detail and the verve with which they come at us make reading this book a vivid and participatory experience. She writes of being five and terrified of going to bed because of the thing that enters her room at night, searching for her.

It was a transparent, luminous oblong. I could see the door whiten at its touch; I could see the blue wall turn pale where it raced over it, and see the maple headboard of Amy’s bed glow. It was a swift spirit; it was an awareness, it made noise. it had two joined parts, a head and a tail, like a Chinese dragon. it found the door, wall, and headboard; and it swiped, charging them with its luminous glance. After its fleet, searching passage, things looked the same, but weren’t.

I dared not blink or breathe; I tried to hush my whooping blood. If it found another awareness, it would destroy it.

Though she later figures out that it is a passing car reflecting a streetlight—the moment when she realises that reason is a tool to conquer fear—she still sometimes lets herself be afraid for the pleasurable frisson of terror.

The fragments work together to achieve a coherent narrative. One of the most astonishing threads has to with her becoming conscious of herself. She writes of lying on the kitchen floor, listening to the icebox motor, cars going by, the “unselfconscious trees.”

Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilarated with a yelp and a gasp.

Entering this book is like falling into flood that sweeps you away with a boundless enthusiastic drive to experience everything. We get not only these early years, but her exploratory middle years and frantic teens.

We see the beginnings of her interest in natural science that eventually flowered into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. We follow her into the rock collection she was gifted by a neighbor, labeling her eventual 340 rocks, imagining the task of searching for rare rocks. We see not only her wonder, but her imagery and realistic humor. “When you pry open the landscape, you find wonders—gems made of corpses, even, and excrement.” Prying open the landscape seems like the essence of Pilgrim.

A continuing thread is about leaving, achieving escape velocity. She begins with her father’s decision—likely a result of his compulsive reading and rereading of Life on the Mississippi—to “quit the firm his great-grandfather had founded” and take his boat down the river all the way to New Orleans, “the source of the music he loved: Dixieland jazz.” She was 10 at the time. He did come back, but his adventure haunts her throughout the book, all the way to the end when she herself takes off for college.

She gives us full and vital portraits of her parents, both of them huge jokesters, practicing jokes before unleashing them at parties or at home. Her mother, given to practical jokes, “dearly loved to fluster people by throwing out a game’s rules at whim—when she was getting bored, losing in a dull sort of way, and when everybody else was taking it too seriously.” I envy Dillard some aspects of her parents: the jokes, the family dancing madly to records in the living room.

One aspect she doesn’t go into, which may speak to Pittsburgh’s population or to her being a little older than I, is race. For me, the increased pace of the Great Migration and the flight to the suburbs dramatically changed my home town. Dillard’s is a privileged childhood, more so than mine which was privileged enough. Privileged not only because it is a white childhood, not only because it is during a time of stability and prosperity, but also because it is a wealthy one.

While much of my enjoyment of this book was how much it recalled my own childhood, I imagine that people of all ages would enjoy it, not just for the portrait of a time now gone, but for the boundless energy of her amazing prose. I will be recommending it in the memoir classes I teach, for its structure, its detail, and its meditation on trying to connect the dots of your life, trying to find the connections that make them seem continuous.

What memoir have you read that took you back over your own life?

The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward

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This collection of essays and poems, subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, together provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. It is divided into three parts: Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee—past, present and future.

Ward, who collected the pieces, supplies the introduction and a piece on what she learned from DNA testing, noting how hard it is for people to discover the genealogy of the black side of their family. Two pieces look at the legacy of black writers, Rachel Ghansah comparing her grandfather’s life to James Baldwin’s and Honorèe Jeffers questioning Phillis Wheatley’s history as it is presented to us.

The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

Some pieces convey personal experiences, such as Garnette Cadogan’s essay comparing his experiences walking in his native Kingston, Jamaica with walking the streets of New Orleans and later those of New York. Never having been given “The Talk,” he had to work out for himself how to camouflage himself—preppie clothes and his college sweatshirt; never a hoodie or jeans and tee shirt—and the rules to follow to keep white people from being afraid of him or police from stopping him.

Many of the pieces respond to the relentless killing of black people by police and armed vigilantes, such as Claudia Rankin’s “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Emily Raboteau describes going with her family to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City that connects Harlem and the Bronx. There she discovers a mural that leads her on a tour of discovery around the city to find all the murals that, combining love and activism, educate adults and children on how to protect themselves from police brutality and structural racism.

I was especially intrigued by Kevin Young’s funny and piercing “Blacker Than Thou” where he talks about white people wearing blackface or actually “passing” as black, such as Rachel Dolezal. “But if you are white but truly feel black, then why do you have to look like it?” Blackness, he says, is not about skin color but about culture. He says of black people, “Any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable.”

Of Dolezal, he says, “She wears the mask not to hide but to gain authority over the very thing she claims she wants to be.” Her claim is of a piece with her other stories that paint her as a victim. And, as with blackface and other examples of passing, it says more about how those white people view blackness.

Poems by Jericho Brown, Kima Jones, Clint Smith add texture and imagery, always a more intense experience for me. And I loved seeing Natasha Tretheway’s familiar “Theories of Time and Space” opening the Jubilee section.

I learned a lot from this cornucopia of voices. I still have a lot to learn.

What have you read lately that made you cry and laugh and thunder with rage, and most of all made you think?

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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This 2015 debut novel finally gives us the Vietnamese war and its aftermath, not from an American perspective but from a Vietnamese point of view. The narrator is half-French and half-Vietnamese, rejected by both cultures, but told by his mother that he will do something extraordinary.

Like his parentage, he embodies the title: he sees both sides of every issue and can understand where the various parties he has to deal with are coming from. Even his loyalties are divided. He is committed to the communist cause and working at their behest as a mole in South Vietnam, an aide to a general. At the same time, he is utterly loyal to his two childhood blood brothers, Bon fighting for the south and Man for the north.

The story is framed as a confession to a commandant. A prisoner, though of whom is unclear at first, the narrator begins with April 1975 and the helter-skelter departure of the U.S. from Saigon. As a side-note, reading this book during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan gave the story added power. After a harrowing scene at the airport, he and Bon escape on one of the last planes with the general and his family. The narrator would have rather stayed and cast off his cloak to welcome his comrades but is ordered to continue as a mole to track what the Vietnamese refugees are up to in the U.S.

Much of the book is taken up with his experiences in California. While the racism and colonialism are much as you would expect, the narrator’s voice carries the story here more than the plot, at least for me. Others in my book club disagreed and liked this part the best.

The voice being so engaging makes it hard to stop reading; I would often look up and realise I’d read long past the time I’d allotted. There’s an understated humor punctuated by barbed comments about the people the narrator encounters. Seeing through them so easily enables him to detect their machinations and dance around them.

At one point he is asked to consult on a movie. He accepts even though he knows they only want him to collect Vietnamese refugees to be extras—extras who will be killed in a multitude of ways. He tries instead to bring some of their point of view to the story, correcting details, finagling speaking parts.

This section to me illustrates what this novel is: not so much an anti-war story as an attempt to show what the Vietnamese really thought or think about the war, the U.S., and the Americans’ arrogance and entitlement. Seeing the narrator code-switch as he moves between different groups of people is illuminating.

Just as a big part of my interest in the tv drama Breaking Bad is watching the main character change from a caring teacher to a progressively more aggressive drug dealer, here I enjoyed seeing how our narrator navigates different circumstances.

The parts I come back to are where he and other characters reminisce about their country, their homes, the village routines. As one person in my book club said, it’s something they hold close to their hearts. Even going back and finding everything changed does not disrupt that connection.

I think most of us can identify with that. Reading itself helps me be more aware of other ways of seeing the world, so I’m grateful that my book club likes to explore diverse voices. Nguyen’s book won the Pulitzer and is a great addition—and corrective—to books about the Vietnam War.

What books about the Vietnam War have you read?

Pumpkin Moonshine, by Tasha Tudor

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With little ones in the house several days a week, I’ve been reading lots of picture books. This one is a favorite just now, as we enjoy all the pumpkins on porches while we walk around the neighborhood.

Sylvie—who appears to be around four years old—is visiting her grandparents in Connecticut and wants to make a Pumpkin Moonshine. She and the dog Wiggy climb up the hill to the cornfield where she chooses the largest pumpkin, one that is half as tall as she is. She can’t lift it, so she rolls it in front of her, like a snowball in winter.

When they reach the edge of the field it gets away from her and caroms down the hill, starting the livestock (cue various animal sounds) and knocks over the hired man, making him spill a can of whitewash over a startled cat (the 20-month-old’s favorite page) before bumping into the house. Sylvie and her grandfather go on to make a Pumpkin Moonshine from it.

I’d never before heard this term for a Jack-o’-Lantern, but it is certainly descriptive. I don’t know whether the author knew it was also a term for a homemade alcoholic beverage made from pumpkin, sugar, yeast and water. The book was first published in 1938 and Sylvie puts on a bonnet to go to the field, so the time period is well established.

Writing a picture book is said to be one of the hardest writing tasks there is, and nothing chills the heart of an agent like hearing that their popular author of adult books wants to write a picture book. Of course, you have to consider what words and ideas are appropriate for your young audience, but the biggest problem is that you have very little real estate in which to tell the story. Every word needs to be essential, even more than in poetry.

If you are the artist, too, like Tasha Tudor, you do have the advantage of knowing what information will be conveyed in the pictures. Tudor has been my favorite artist of children’s books since, well, since I was a child. I’ve collected a shelf-full of books with her illustrations. While some might view them as sentimental or outdated—more kindly characterised as nostalgic—I found and find them full of magic, probably because she illustrated my copy of The Secret Garden, one of my favorite books of all time and a formative one from my early years.

She lived in New Hampshire and then in Vermont. Somehow I always sensed the air of New England in her work. Pumpkin Moonshine was Tudor’s first book. She went on to write and illustrate many others and illustrate still more, gathering awards along the way.

The children love the idea of going out and choosing their own pumpkin. The terror of losing control of it on the hill is manageable for them. Add in animal noises and the face on the startled cat and you have an exciting (but not too exciting) adventure for young children, ending with the somewhat subversive comfort of Sylvie and her grandfather hiding in the bushes hoping to see the surprise and fear of passersby when they see the Pumpkin Moonshine on the fencepost. My munchkins enjoy even more the description of the process of making the scary thing and of Sylvie planting its seeds the following year.

Who is your favorite picture book author or illustrator?

The Odd Woman and the City, by Vivian Gornick

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In this 2015 memoir, Gornick gives us a flâneur’s tour of New York City and of her own quirky take on life. She calls it a memoir, but to my mind it falls somewhere in the grey area between memoir and personal essay.

Author of memoirs such as Fierce Attachments and one of the best texts on writing memoir, The Situation and the Story, Gornick warns us up front that she has not only changed names but reordered certain events and used some composite characters and scenes. I have no problem with pseudonyms, but shy away from reordering and composites. To me, these take away from the truthfulness of memoir, which after all is supposed to be nonfiction. Once I start thinking of characters, scenes and timelines as not real, then the power of nonfiction seeps away like air from a balloon.

That said, I assume her thoughts and reactions are real, so I enjoyed the opportunity to spend time in her company as she walks the city streets, usually accompanied by her gay male friend Leonard (real? not real?). She says:

What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports.

Having spent a large part of my life in cities, despite or perhaps in addition to enjoying more rural settings, I appreciate her immediately setting aside the image of New York as the grand opportunity for a young male genius to prove himself. Instead she says, “Mine is the city of the melancholy Brits—Dickens, Gissing, Johnson, especially Johnson.”

She speaks of Samuel Johnson’s distrust of village life with its closed and insular society. “The meaning of the city was that it made the loneliness bearable.” Gornick calls herself an odd woman, one who finds herself on the margin of society. For her the city does more than heal loneliness; it gives her a chance to dream, to buy time to find her own way: eschewing acquisitions, turning away from the honey trap of romantic love. “I prize my hardened heart,” she says.

Her openness provides receptors where I can attach my own thoughts and experiences. When she speaks of Freud’s discovery that we are, throughout our lives, divided against ourselves and resistant to being cured, I’m reminded of the Jacqueline Rose essay I read a few weeks ago. When she mentions William James’s pronouncement that our inner lives are always in transition and that “our experience ‘lives in the transitions,’” I think of my classes where I encourage writers to explore the multiple emotions one character may experience moment to moment.

I enjoyed her literary games: Is your life Chekhovian or Shakespearian? Who would have written the story of this person: Edith Wharton or Henry James? I liked her references, such as when she discusses the relationship between Constance Woolson and Henry James, or when she speaks of an insight gained from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: “One is lonely for the absent idealized other, but in useful solitude I am there, keeping myself imaginative company, filling the room with proof of my own sentient being.”

I’m cherry-picking parts I especially liked. In between, there are many wonderful scenes and witty, revealing conversations, such as this one where she runs into a former lover.

“You used me!” he cried.
“Not nearly well enough,” I said.
“What was all that about anyway?” he asked wearily.
. . .
“I can’t do men,” I said.
“What the hell does that mean,” he said.
“I’m not sure.”
“When will you be sure?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what do you do in the meantime?”
“Take notes.”

If you are looking for fascinating company in your own useful solitude, try spending some time with Vivian Gornick. This brief and captivating book will set you thinking and reminiscing.

What memoir have you read recently that felt like a meeting with a longtime friend?

Autumnal Tints, by Henry David Thoreau

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I had to laugh when I started this long essay. Thoreau begins by saying how surprised Europeans and even many Americans are when they first see the spectacular foliage of a New England autumn. Today, we in New England are besieged by RVs and SUVs with out-of-state plates clogging our roads and highways as leaf-peepers from all over chase peak foliage.

My hilarity soon turned to admiration as Thoreau takes us through the season’s offerings, from the purple grasses of late August to the scarlet oaks of late October. His lovely descriptions include what natural science information he has and sometimes lead to larger thoughts.

How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and Birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the soil.

How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,–with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.

Some sections made me sad, such as the one on elm trees. I have a slight memory of great rows of elm trees from my early childhood before they were decimated by Dutch Elm Disease.

Other sections are thrilling, such as this excerpt from the section on red maples:

How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! . . . If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.

I also recognise his personal relationship with certain trees.

I notice a small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree for several autumns invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season, perhaps. I should be sorry, if it were cut down.

One of my favorite maples was cut down last winter and I am missing it greatly just now. However, there are many other trees to wander among and admire, so I will go and do that now. I hope you will join me in appreciating this brilliant season and Thoreau’s appreciative essay.

What trees are you walking among?

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

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I have read Walden a few times since I first encountered it in high school. Back then I was charmed as so many are by the idea of going to the woods to live, and thrilled by his bits of philosophy. Despite a heavy load of schoolwork, I still spent as much time as I could outside, among the trees, so it’s no surprise that I adopted as my lifelong personal motto “To be awake is to be alive.”

Later readings brought more informed insight. I learned how close his retreat was to town, for example, and paid more attention to his many visitors. I found that he had pulled together parts of his other essays which explained the resulting crazy quilt structure. The first chapter, though, remains a bit of a slog.

On this reading what struck me most was the chapter titled “The Ponds.” It’s mostly about Walden, of course, but he also briefly describes other nearby ponds: Goose Pond, Flint’s Pond (also known as Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Fair Haven.

When I first read the book as a teenager I lived by and loved the Chesapeake Bay, so I was not terribly impressed by his pond. However, all these decades later, it turns out that I have spent a good part of my life in a small cabin by a pond in Massachusetts. Now I can appreciate his beautifully observed descriptions of the water and woods.

“Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.” Being surrounded, like my pond, by pine and oak woods and blueberry bushes makes it seem like “an amphitheater for some kind of sylvan spectacle.” I recognise his descriptions of the “blue flag (Iris versicolor)” growing along the shore and the hummingbirds in June. He speaks of the transparency of the water and of the stones along the shore, recounting stories of how they came to be formed.

As a naturalist, he traces the pond’s rise and fall, its fluctuating temperature, and its various colors. He also worked as a surveyor and his map of Walden could still be used today. He names the kinds of fish and waterfowl, and detects traces of ancient paths “worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.” He says of being out on his boat “In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon.”

There is something about a pond, a humble one like mine and his, that invites contemplation. Often I set my books and papers aside just to watch the way the light glints on the water or to listen to the rustle of leaves and pine boughs and the sparkling bird calls. Many evenings I have left the lamp off, preferring instead to watch the way the light fades behind the far woods, the water and sky holding the last of the light, the dark band of trees between.

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light.

He speaks of fishing during the midnight hours “from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.” And of “communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below.”

It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes and other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

In the second chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” he says

For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain . . . and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.

I too have watched the way the mist drifts across the surface or sometimes rises in columns. I’ve heard a loon calling in the twilight and watched otters play by the bank.

He tells of an old man who lived by the pond before the revolution who told him that there was an iron chest at the bottom of the pond. Similarly, we have stories of the pond next to mine where somewhere near the center there is a piano resting on the bottom. We have searched for it, but never found it.

Thoreau says, “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” Just as I return again and again to my pond with its mysterious depths and sparkling surface, so too I treasure books like this where I can find something new each time I return.

How has your reading of this book changed over the years?

“To Die One’s Own Death,” by Jacqueline Rose

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London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 22 · 19 November 2020

Written during the first wave of the pandemic with its soaring death rates made worse by the fumbling response of corrupt governments, and amid accelerating climate catastrophes, Rose’s essay, subtitled “Jacqueline Rose on Freud and his daughter”, looks at how we cope with these repeated blows. If we shut down emotionally and intellectually, “does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the broken pieces and muddled fragments that make us who we are?”

Rose takes us back to a similar moment in time: 25 January 1920 when Freud’s favourite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, died in the last wave of the Spanish flu. A devastated Austria had lost the war; Freud himself had lost his earlier enthusiasm for his homeland’s role in the war and now supported the breakup of the Austrian Empire. With his family starving, and himself unable even to get to his dying daughter because there were no trains, Freud’s situation was eerily similar to what many experienced during our own pandemic: “the lack of state provision, the missing medical supplies, the dearth of equipment and isolation from human touch have made it feel to many for the first time that death is something of which a person – the one dying, and those closest to her or him – can be robbed.”

He turned to writing, adding the lengthy Chapter Six to Beyond the Pleasure Principle which was published later in 1920. In this chapter, he first presents the idea of a death drive in conflict with our drive for self-preservation, the life drive, deriving it from what “he had first identified in soldiers returning from battle who found themselves reliving their worst experiences in night-time and waking dreams.” He compares this repetition compulsion to his other patients and their resistance to therapy, concluding that “The urge of all organic life is to restore an earlier state of things.”

He carries this idea further to postulate an internal human need to craft our own track to the end of life, regardless of any limit for self-preservation, saying “The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” Thus, for victims of wars and pandemics and natural catastrophes, the randomness of their deaths robs them “of the essence of life.”

Rose’s essay continues, supplementing Freud’s ideas from another paper written during WWI, “The Phylogenetic Fantasy,” with current research on inherited trauma to look at how anxiety travels through generations, an anxiety that is a “response to an imperilled world, but also . . . a reaction to the tyranny of the powers that come to meet it.”

There is much more to this essay, and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for new insight into our current state of being. However, I was struck by the idea of an urge to restore an earlier state of things and its relevance to the stories we tell.

Books such as Robert McKee’s Story, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, and Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering describe a basic structure dating back to the Western world’s earliest stories. This ur-story begins with a normal world—troubled but getting by—that is disrupted in some way. Hence novelist John Gardner’s famous saying about all stories being either about going on a journey or a stranger coming to town: the two ways a world is disrupted.

The story then is about the attempts, usually by the main character, to restore their original normal world. But there is no going back, any more than there is for the soldiers reliving their nightmares. Instead, the main character must address not only the events around them but also their internal troubles, now no longer balanced but demanding change. By the end of the story, they are indeed changed, as Gawain returns to Arthur’s Court humbled and contrite after his encounter with the Green Knight, as Elizabeth Bennet enters her marriage realising that she must look beyond her first hasty judgments in order to discover real goodness.

The urge to restore an earlier state of things also makes me think of the nostalgia for a previous age that so many today have succumbed to. Not only do our stories tell us that such a return is impossible, but the image of that previous age is false, usually edited to be more attractive than it actually was. While often that false image has been deliberately created for political purposes, it is also true that our own minds chip away at our memories, according to recent research, subtly changing them each time we recall an incident.

We cannot go back to the time before the pandemic, and how we remember it may not even be reliable. We have been changed by this experience, in ways we may not yet recognise, and we are not yet at the end of it. Eventually, I believe, we will turn to stories to understand, help us grieve, and put the broken pieces back together.

What are you reading or listening to that is helping you better understand this extraordinary time?

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

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When I ran across Matt Mikalatos‘s blog posts on rereading C.S. Lewis’s work, I was inspired to look again at the Narnia books. In Prince Caspian, a sequel to the first book, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are about to board a train back to school when they are suddenly whisked off to the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though they do not recognise it at first because over a thousand years have passed.

Narnia is now ruled by Miraz who became Lord Protector of his nephew Caspian upon the death of Caspian IX but now calls himself the king. Miraz prohibits any mention of Old Narnia: the talking animals, dwarves, the dryads and other what we would call mythological beings, and most of all Aslan himself. He dismisses Caspian’s nurse for telling the child such stories and replaces her with a tutor.

Dr. Cornelius turns out to be just as devoted to the old ways but more circumspect, and it is he who warns Caspian to escape when a son is born to Miraz and his wife, thus putting Caspian’s life in danger. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, who had become Kings and Queens in Old Narnia are dragged back to help Caspian and the remaining Old Narnians in their attempt to restore the rightful king to his throne.

I came to the Narnia books in my late teens, not as a child, but it was a time in my life when I was on the lookout for magic, spending time in the woods, studying Transcendentalism, and caught up in the 1960s whirl of possibilities. Charmed by the magical aspects of the Narnia books, I found the overtly Christian foundation a little off-putting, though tried to fit it into my then-exploration of different religions. I was also dismayed by the treatment of women and what I now know as colonialism, but recognised where these fit in the context of Lewis’s time.

On rereading the book now, I’m less struck by the religious overtones than by the similarity to today’s political climate. As Mikalatos says:

Imagine, if you will, a political climate in which truth has been completely discarded. Even the history books are full of falsehoods that advance the narrative of those ruling the nation. Stories of the past have been ignored, abused, or outlawed. In the midst of this political rule, certain classes of people have been persecuted, harmed, sent into hiding.

That is the world of Narnia during Prince Caspian.

As Hamlet says: “The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” Lewis himself said the book was about the “restoration of the true religion after corruption.” Leaving aside the religious aspect, the theme of a disordered world needing to be set right can’t help but resonate for me as I watch so many people who claim to follow democratic ideals betray them. At one point, after the children have been attacked by a non-talking bear, Lucy says:

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

Lucy’s question about talking and non-talking animals illustrates a technique that Lewis deploys throughout the book of using pairs as foils or complements. We have Prince Caspian and the four children; the separate narratives of the boys who pursue the war against Miraz and the girls who with Aslan dance and sing and awaken the Old Narnians. The latter pairing carries forward the scene early on when Dr. Cornelius takes young Caspian up to the tower to witness the conjunction of the two stars Tarva, The Lord of Victory, and Alambil, the Lady of Peace, which together indicate a great good is coming to Narnia. Note that both victory and peace are needed.

There’s also the contrast between belief and skepticism. In the first book it was Lucy who first visited Narnia and the others did not believe her. Here, she is the first to see Aslan and the others say they do not believe her, with terrible consequences. Believing in Aslan and the Golden Age of Narnia is what sets Miraz and his people apart from Caspian and his magical beings. I don’t see belief and skepticism as absolute good and evil, though understand why Lewis made them such here. To me, like victory and peace, both are needed.

Lucy’s reaction to not being believed illuminates a more important theme, that of doing the right thing even when no one around you agrees with you. Of course, the difficulty is that even they think they are doing the right thing, though as in this case a deeper look at their motives reveals more complexity. The question of what authority to follow is here handed off to religion, the old religion of Aslan. In our world and as adults this question has become more complex.

Much of my thinking about this book has been informed by Mikalatos’s posts and the ensuing discussions on them. He says of Lewis: “For him this is all about myth and fairy tales and what they signify. The stories we love are all about deeper truths.”

In my creative writing classes I often talk about tackling big ideas. As Donald Maass says in Writing the Breakout Novel:

A breakout novelist needs courage, too: the courage to say something passionately. A breakout novelist believes that what she has to say is not just worth saying, but it is something that must be said. It is a truth that the world needs to hear, an insight without which we would find ourselves diminished.

What deeper truth has a book you’ve read recently explored?

The Shape of a City, by Julien Gracq

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In the 1920s Gracq lived for a time in Nantes. However, being a child at boarding school, only let outside the grounds on vacations and Sundays, his perceptions of the city are fragmented and idiosyncratic.

I lived in the heart of a city that loomed large in my imagination, but which I did not know very well. I was aware of certain landmarks, and familiar with some itineraries, but its substance, and even its smells, never lost their exotic flavor; a city where all the views led only to ill-defined, unexplored, faraway vistas, a loose framework easily absorbed into fiction.

The mysteries of a city we do not know well leave room for the imagination. And the pictures formed by our imagination outlast anything we may learn later, as reflected in the quotation from Baudelaire that provides the book’s title: “The shape of a city, as we all know, changes more quickly than the mortal heart.”

One result of only learning about the city through Sunday afternoon school promenades, is that he understands the structure of the city to be a series of lines radiating out from his school, like a starburst, with no interconnecting lines between them. His mental map does not at all correspond to the two-dimensional paper map of Nantes. As a dedicated map-reader, I’ve long been interested in the interplay between our mental maps and the various other sorts available.

Even if we think we know a city well, it can still surprise us.

There is always that element of surprise when, walking down streets one expects to be ugly . . . we suddenly see them transfigured by a ray of sunshine – like a moment of fleeting happiness. But such a surprise caused by the most insignificant event or impression can also happen elsewhere . . . it could be an unexpected declivity in the road which invites, tempts one to continue in that direction, a very slight turn of a road’s axis which both veils and partially reveals a perspective, a tree leaning over the sidewalk from above the crest of an ancient wall, a pleasing harmony in the rhythm of buildings alternating with free spaces which suddenly catches the eye. Instances when we are overcome by a feeling of how wonderful it would be to linger there, sure that life has regained its normal pace and recovered its guideposts, and that the universe has found a way to renew us and confirm its promises with just one brief, smiling look.

The power of memory and imagination that weave through this portrait of Nantes—a hybrid of memoir, reflections, and travel writing—shows Proust’s influence on Gracq. Here, though, the author is less concerned with the social mores and peoples’ foibles than with the place itself.

His descriptions of various parts of the city are beautiful and evocative, yet somehow wearying. They are mostly unconnected to bits of reverie or even memory beyond the fact of being there as a child. Thus, it’s a bit like seeing someone else’s vacation slides. If I had been to Nantes before, I would have been able to summon my own memories and thoughts, but I haven’t so after a while the descriptions ceased to engage me.

I’m far more interested in his thoughts, such as his meditation on the borderline areas between city and country.

This is perhaps why I am more sensitive than others to the existence of all kinds of boundaries along which the urban fabric tends to fray and unravel, areas neither within nor outside of city limits . . . once we start imagining there is just one step from boundary to frontier . . . Adrift on shreds of inhospitable land, slowly conquered by silence and mired in a sort of catalepsy, I could feel from afar the immense, haunting presence of the city, like that of a giant beast holed up in its lair whose respiration was the only sign of life. In almost every town where I have lived since then, whenever I went for a walk, my steps would automatically direct me toward some point of departure into the country.

With references to Rimbaud, Dickens, and Hugo among others, there is much of interest here even though some parts sag. Readers of his other work, such as The Opposing Shore, know to expect beautiful writing, a slower pace, and an intelligent and well-read companion who challenges us to dig deep into ourselves and our own experiences.

One reviewer said that this book is “a model for how to write about one’s home place[.] … It should be required reading for anyone setting out to describe their home place.”

How would you describe your home city?