Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Booktalk


I don’t know about you, but I expect, at least occasionally, to gain some insights into my world; either through people I meet, experiences I have, or by allowing myself time for reflection.

For me, all three can happen when I read a book. Sometimes it happens when I read two in a row that I thought had nothing to do with each other. That happened this Summer.

After 40 years, I re-read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is a book my wife shared with my soon after we were married and it hit me like few others have. Not only is it gorgeously written, and intellectually rich, but the author’s curiosity and profound awakening to what was miraculously transpiring in the natural world at her feet inspired my life-long awareness of the incremental and particular world that is mine - right here in Afton, even.

It was her wonderment at the unimaginable inventiveness, immense complexity, and sheer fecundity of nature’s engine at work that awed her and transformed me.


Transformed me.

After re-reading that, I turned to a bucket-list book; Ovid’s The Metamorphoses - written 2000 years ago ( I have enduring weak spot for reading “first stories.’) It is a series of linked story/myths rooted in the appetites, foibles, and indifference of the gods as they muck around with human lives and their own eternal ones transforming, through confrontations and kindnesses, the world into its myriad varieties. The metamorphoses.

Like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, it is rich with the serendipitous, unbelievable, and often heartless “change” that is our world. Not only seeking to “explain” how that variety came to be (mostly through vengeful wrath) , but by sobering us to how unplanned, accidental, and out-of-our-hands this tumultuous but beautiful life of ours is.

Two writers. Two eras. Both trying to get a handle on why beauty and purpose emerge in a world that seems both indifferent and incidental, yet persistently dear and our own.

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