Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald

January 2025

I picked up this book, probably about a year ago at the recommendation of Dan Russell. In terms of single-author collections, I’ve liked this more than anything I’ve read in years, perhaps with the exception of Loren Eisley’s essays. Regardless, Macdonald is a superb writer, and in particular her descriptions of the natural world are remarkable. I intend to seek out her other books.

I like, as well, her view of what literature ought to do:

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. — Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights. p. ix

Favorites

2. Nothing Like a Pig
9. Ants
10. Symptomatic
12. Winter Woods
18. Deer in the Headlights
35 Eulogy
38. Dispatches from the Valley

The Craft of Writing — things I’ve learned here

Describing a Moment: “And then it happens: a short, collapsing moment.” This passage, by foregrounding the nature of the moment, and the movement from uncertainty to realization, does a superb job of highlighting and intensifying an epiphany. (In Nothing like a Pig.)
A beautiful resonating description: “a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams.“
Use of incongruity for stream-of-consciousness. In Deer in the Headlights she does a great job of conveying the incongruity of two worlds — the forest and the highway — in a single sentence that juxtaposes glimpses of the nature of each. Similarly, in The Student’s Tale, the first sentence, with independent clauses connected by a series of “ands,” really conveys an immediate stream-of-consciousness experience, where the attention is hopping around, and making non-rational connections as it does so (.e.g, the grapes on the table are black, and so is the taxi out front).
Transforming dynamic movement into a pattern.“The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines…” (Ants). For me, this generates a pattern — a vault of sky circumscribed by imagined flightlines – that extends over time and creates a persistent space which frames other happenings…

1. Nests

This essay describes nests. She begins with her feelings about nests develop when she was a child, and encountered them in her yard. She then goes into the present, and reflects more on this than their meanings.

*2. Nothing like a Pig

This essay describes an encounter with a boar. She reflects both on the boar, and more in general on animals in particular, and how the conception of an animal differs from the reality of the animal

Then it happens: a short, collapsing moment as sixty or seventy yards away something walks fast between the trees, and then the boar. The boar. The boar.

– Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald, p 11.

A great bit of writing. The “short, collapsing moment.” The uncertainty about distance — “sixty or seventy yards” — and what she is seeing — “something.” The revelation: “and then the boar.” And the repetition: “The boar. The boar.“

3. Inspector Calls

A very nice short piece about an encounter with autistic boy, who is visiting her flat with his parents. In particular he connects with her bird and the bird with him.

4. Field Guides

“Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen.”

5. Terkels Park

An essay on the place where she grew up. A bit nostalgic, but it was unusual, and had interesting reflections, so I found it worth reading. Some very nice writing:

I could lie awake in the small hours and hear a single motorbike speeding west or east: a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams.

— ibid. p 12

My eyes catch on the place where the zoetrope flicker of pines behind the fence gives way to a patch of sky with the black peak of a redwood tree against it and the cradled mathematical branches of a monkey puzzle, and my head blooms with an apprehension of lost space,

— Ibid. p 13

6. High-Rise

About watching migrating birds at night from the top of the Empire State Building. An interesting discussion of how birds migrate — the height and speeds at which they fly, and the way they navigate — and the problems that the lights and tall buildings of the city give them.

7. The Human Flock

“Overhead a long wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky.“

Recounting the observation of large flocks of migrating cranes, and continuing to a discussion of the dynamics of swarms and murmurations. “Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching 90 miles an hour…” This segues into a concluding comment on refugees, and a plea to regard them as individuals rather than masses.

8. The Student’s Tale

An account of meeting a student who is a refugee and spending time in camps…

A great opening sentence:

There’s a window and the rattle of a taxi and grapes on the table, black ones, sweet ones, and the taxi is also black and there’s a woman inside it, a charity worker who befriended you when you were in detention, and she’s leaning to pay the driver and through the dust and bloom of the glass I see you standing on the pavement next to the open taxi door and your back is turned towards me so all I can see are your shoulders hunched in a blue denim jacket.

— The Student’s Tale, Vesper Flight, Kate Macdonald, p. 53

I think this is a marvelous stream-of-consciousness sentence, with the writers attention shifting from taxi to grapes to taxi to the woman and then to the student whose shoulders are hunched. The second person is also very effective.

*9. Ants

About the mating flights of ants, and the birds that prey upon them. Also reflects on the power of scientific understanding to enhance the beauty of things, rather than detract: “…it’s things I’ve learned from scientific books and papers that are making what I’m watching almost unbearably moving.”

A red kite joins the flock, drifting and tilting through it on paper-cut wings stamped black against the sky.

[…]

The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines, warm airspace tense with predatory intent and the tiny hopes of each rising ant.

— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 63

*10. Symptomatic

Discusses her experiences with migraines. The writing is beautiful and ranges from describing the onset and symptoms of her migraine, to the way in which she has come to live with them. Ends with a partial analogy to earth undergoing climate change…

I was busily signing books when a spray of sparks, an array of livid and prickling phosphenes like shorting fairy lights, spread downwards from the upper right-hand corner of my vision until I could barely see through them.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 66

11. Sex, Death, Mushrooms

On mushroom hunting: “It is raining hard, and the forest air is sweet and winey with decay.“

The air is damp and dark in here. Taut lines of spider silk are slung between their flaking trunks; I can feel them snapping across my chest. Fat garden spiders drop from my coat on to the thick carpet of pine needles below.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 80

I like feeling the snapping, and the spiders dropping from her coat to the forest floor. It animates the scene, and tells us she is moving through it.

* 12. Winter Woods

Beginning with her custom of walking in the woods every New Year’s day, she reflects on the things that are distinctive about forests in winter. From the revelation of the landscape, to the bark textures and angled branches of leafless trees, to the sometimes transitory life that becomes evident. Winter woods, she suggests, are full of potential:

So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal. But winter woods teach me something else: the importance of thinking about history. They are able to show you the last five hours, the last five days, the last five centuries, all at once. They’re wood and soil and rotting leaves, the crystal fur of hoarfrost and the melting of overnight snow, but they are also places of different interpolated timeframes. In them, potentiality crackles in the winter air.
—ibid., p. 85

13. Eclipse

On viewing a solar eclipse. The phenomenology of the event, but also the deep, irrational, fundamental, emotional impact. The essay is reminiscent of Joan Didion’s essay, and in particular the way in which the fading daylight alters the colors in ways that cast the landscape in an alien light. It ends, beautifully, with a description of the light returning, and the emotions that brings.

14. In Her Orbit

A description of a trip with an astrobiologist to study extremophiles at very high altitudes in the Andes. Some beautiful descriptions of desolate and unworldly environments.

15. Hares

A description of the phenomenon of boxing hares, their place in English thought and mythology, and their decline due to environmental change.

16. Lost, But Catching Up

A very short essay description her glimpse of a hound that was trying to catch up to the pack during a fox hunt.

17. Swan Upping Nestboxes

About the English tradition of “Swan Upping,” and her experience observing the activity; all interladen with reflections on the role of tradition and its uneasy releationship to Brexit, which had recently occurred.

18. Deer in the Headlights

Discusses her changing feelings about deer, from initially wishing to known nothing about them and valuing them as a source of surprise and delight, to a desire to understand them. She says it better, though:

Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals. There are many creatures I know very little about, but the difference with deer is that I’ve never had any desire to find out more. They’re like a distant country I’ve never wanted to visit. I know the names of different deer species, and can identify the commonest ones by sight, but I’ve always resisted the almost negligible effort it would take to discover when they give birth, how they grow and shed their antlers, what they eat, where and how they live. Standing on the bridge I’m wondering why that is.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 141

As the title suggests, much of the essay is about deer-vehicle collisions; and also about how people react to them, in the moment, and, sometimes in cruel ways, on the internet. It is a complex essay. It doesn’t really speak to me, but there are a lot of great turns of phrase and passages.

Here is how the essay begins:

The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks. They aren’t tame: I can’t get closer than a hundred yards before they slip into the gloom.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 140

And here is a passage I admire for the way it highlights the incongruity of the two worlds: nature and the highway. It moves from the forest, to the road, to the forest, to the road, to her standing, embodied, on the bridge.

For a while the road doesn’t seem real. Then it does, almost violently so, and at that moment the bridge and the woods behind me do not. I can’t hold both in the same world at once. Deer and forest, mist, speed, a drift of wet leaves, white noise, scrap-metal trucks, a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, beads of water on the toes of my boots and the scald of my hands on the cold metal rail.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 141

19. The Falcon and the Tower

She is watching birds — falcons — in an abandoned industrial plant in Dublin. The essay discusses falcons, and how they have adapted to living in cities and their infrastructures. Moves from their behavior and natural history, to the ways in which people have viewed them, to their change in habitat given the ‘advance’ of civilization. Ends with a reflection on the brevity of life, and a note of hope.

20. Vesper Flights

The essay that gives the collection a title. Begins with her finding a dead Swift and not knowing what to do with it. Segues into a description of Swifts and how they are somewhat “magical” — “the closest things to aliens on earth.” After describing their natural history, describes the phenonmenon of “vesper flights,” where they gather in the evening and fly up to 8,000 feet. She describes how this behavior was discovered, and goes through the history of this behavior being observed and understood. Interleaved with this is her accounts of how, as a small child, she sought comfort in the evening (her own private vespers) by imagining herself as embedded in layers of the earth below her and the atmosphere above her. This comes together as we learn that vesper flights, for Swifts, help them take account of where they are and the oncoming weather conditions, and as Macdonald reflects on ways in which she (we) can adopt practices that enable us to locate ourselves and think about what comes next.

21. In Spight of Prisons

A very nice, short essay about her annual practice of going to see glowworms in a quarry.

* 22. Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres

About her efforts to observe Oriels at the single place in Britain where they can still be found. Over time, their habitat is degraded, and at last there is only one… but, at the last moment, she is able to get a glimpse of it. She has a lovely sentence where she describes the song (or a song) or the oriel: “Wo-de-wal-e, wo-de-wal-e, a phrase like the curl of the cut ends of a gilded banner furling over the page of an illuminated manuscript.“

In this essay, she excels at capturing the fragmentary, mosaical nature of perception.

…what I saw became something like looking into a Magic Eye picture. Here was a circle, and in it a thousand angles of stalk and leaf and scraps of shade at various distances, and every straight stalk or branch was alternately obscured and revealed as the wind blew. I began to feel a little seasick watching this chaos, but then, as magically as a stereogram suddenly reveals a not-very-accurate 3D dinosaur, the muddy patch just off centre resolved itself into the nest.

[…]

Finally, I saw my oriole. A bright, golden male. It was a complex joy, because I saw him only in stamped-out sections, small jigsaw pieces of a bird, but moving ones, animated mutoscope views. A flick of wings, a scrap of tail, then another glimpse – this time, just his head alone – through a screen of leaves. I was transfixed. I had not expected the joyous, extravagant way this oriole leapt into the air between feeds, the enormously decisive movements, always, and the little dots like stars that flared along the edge of his spread-wide tail.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 177 & 179

23. The Observatory

About swans, beginning with an odd experience she had with one approaching her, and sitting beside her, in a moment of grief.

24. Wicken

About a visit to a nature preserve with her young niece, and her niece’s puzzlement about why there were so many animals here — ‘did they bring them from a zoo?’ Reflections on the shift from a time when nature and animals were all around us, to the present, when they are mostly found in special preserves.

25. Storm

A short essay describing a thunderstorm, and also reflecting on storms as metaphors, in particular, in this essay, for the onset of Brexit.

26. Murmurations

Begins with getting a passport replaced at the last minute, and then moves to how birds were seen during war time, and the rise and evolution of the notion of birdwatching.

27. A Cuckoo in the House

On cuckoos, how people perceive them, and in particular a rather eccentric British intelligence agent — Maxwell Knight — who raised a cuckoo. Didn’t grab me, but others might well find it a fascinating tale.

28. The Arrow-Stork

About tracking migrating birds. Makes this interesting point:

Projects like this give us imaginative access to the lives of wild creatures, but they cannot capture the real animals’ complex, halting paths. Instead they let us watch virtual animals moving across a world of eternal daylight built of a patchwork of layered satellite and aerial imagery, a flattened, static landscape free of happenstance. There are no icy winds over high mountain passes here, no heavy rains, soaring hawks, ripening crops or recent droughts.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 217

29. Ashes

About destroying diseased trees, beginning with elms with Dutch Elm disease in her childhood, and ending with ash trees and the emerald ash borer.

30. A Handful of Corn

About feeding animals. Starts with a nice anecdote about an elderly woman who put out corn to attract badgers at night. Continues into the practice of feeding animals, and makes the interesting point that there are some animals it is socially acceptable to feed, and others — foxes, rats, pigeons — that it is not.

31. Berries

This short essay begins with her decorating a Christmas tree, and sprucing up its decorations with berries from outside, but feeling slightly guilty because berries exist as food for birds. Segues into natural history of both birds and berries.

A great bit of description: “…like a gravity stricken whirlwind, a pack of fat birds swirled down from the blank sky…“

32. Cherry Stones

About the return of hawfinches to Britain, the excitement it engenders, and the ways in which their behavior seems to be changing vis a vis what habitat they prefer. Also touches on the blurring of natural history and national identity.

33. Birds, Tabled

About the practice of capturing and keeping birds, which in England is mostly done by the working classes, and which is, it seems, looked down upon by others. She discusses the practice, how bird keepers feel about it and their birds, and the class differences and that this highlights. Interesting.

34. Hiding

An interesting piece about hides (what we in the U.S. call “blinds”). It touches both on the aims and experience of watching animals from blinds, as well as the human experience within blinds.

* 35. Eulogy

A eulogy for a friend: a description of the her friend is interleaved with a night outing to see nightjars. A beautiful piece of writing.

The essay begins with a description of the outing, setting out while it is still light, but with the darkness coming:

As night falls, our senses stretch to meet it. A roebuck barks in the distance, small mammals rustle in the grass. The faintest tick of insects. The scratchy, resinous fragrance of heathland grows stronger, more insistent. As we pass clumps of viper’s bugloss we watch the oncoming night turn their leaves blacker, their purple petals bluer and more intense until they seem to glow. The paths become luminous trails through darkness. White moths spiral up from the ground, and a cockchafer zips past us, elytra raised, wings buzzing.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 255

After this, she makes the connection to her friend: “Soon all color will be gone. The thought is a hard one.” And then, after writing about him: “Now, watching the slow diminishment of sense and detail around me, I’m thinking of Stu and what is happening to him, thinking of his family, of what we face at the end of our lives’ long summers when the world parts from us, of how we all, one day, will walk into darkness.“

A somber essay, but ending with a note of, not hope, but acceptance. Stu says, “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s not hard.”

It’s OK, he said. It’s not hard. Those are the words I am remembering as we walk onward, as the minutes pass, until night thickens completely and there is starlight and dust and the feel of sand underfoot. It’s so dark now I cannot see myself. But the song continues, and the air around us is full of invisible wings.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 259

36. Rescue

An account of a visit to the house of a friend who rescues and rehabilitates swifts. It begins with her friend feeding nestlings, and ends with the release of a swift, and a haunting description of the swift’s transformation as it is about to take to the sky.

37. Goats

A brief, funny story about her, her dad, and pushing goats. Wouldn’t call it an essay though.

* 38. Dispatches from the Valleys

A curious essay centered around her experiences in her first job out of college, working on a falcon conservation-breeding farm. She describes what it was like — it sounded unpleasant to me, but she clearly got to do many things she loved and valued. She describes what led her to leave the farm, and does a good job of creating tension by naming two incidents, first “the dreadful incident with the ostrich,” and then “the cattle on the hill,” and describing each played out.

The ostrich incident — euthanasia of a horribly injured bird — was straightforward, if unpleasant. The “cattle on the hill” incident is quite strange: it involves her spending hours sneaking up on them, and then jumping up and scaring them into stampeding, though she does not know why.

At the end of the essay, though, she recounts an epiphany, and, for me, it resolves not just the ‘cattle on the hill’ incident, but the whole essay:

And then I thought of the day I stalked the steers on the hill and it resolved into perfect clarity. For I had seen myself as one of those steers, one of a feral and uncared-for herd enjoying life in the middle of nowhere, not thinking about what would happen in the future, and not much worried about it, but knowing deep down that one day I was headed for the abattoir. There would be no escaping the deep sea for the shore. And my stalking and shouting was not mindless. It had been an inchoate attempt to knock them out of their contented composure. It had been a warning to make them run the hell out of there, because the valley we were all in was dark and deep and could have no good end.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 282

39. The Numinous Ordinary

An interesting essay with some nice passages in it, but it didn’t really resonate with me.

40. What Animals Taught Me

Discusses the author’s changing conceptions of and relationships to animals. She liked caring for them, as a child, but came to recognize that was about her feeling good about herself, rather than about the animals. As she grew older, she found that an intense focus on animals was a way to make herself disappear, to allow herself into a separate world that did not contain the difficulties she was faced with. Later, with respect to falconry, she speaks about how she learned that the other party in a relationship might see it very differently — a lesson she was slow to apply to humans. The “deepest lesson animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.” And “None of us sees animals clearly. They are too full of the stories we have given them.“

Towards the end of the essay, speaking of a rook, she comments that now what she enjoys is not imagining that she can feel what the rook feels, know what it knows, but that it’s slow delight in knowing that she cannot.

As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. We noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 299

# # #

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Reading on my own, circa Fall 2024.

This book or extended essay is based on a lecture on Women and Literature that Woolf gave, or at least that is the framing of it in the book. She approaches the topic by explaining how she came to develop her thoughts about it:

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial–and any question about sex is that–one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

She begins with an account of going to Oxbridge, and walking about the colleges. She notes that, being a woman, she is barred from walking on the grass, and is not welcome in the library. She has lovely descriptions of the landscape and colleges:

To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.

And as we accompany her, she recounts her thought process. I love her metaphor (more extensive than the excerpt I quote) of thinking as fishing…

Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Pausing in my account here, but passages that I like for various reasons follow:

“Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, ‘Tell me then how you wrote your essays?’ For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.“

“Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, old though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. “

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction — so we are told. “

“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me.”

“I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.”

TBD –The first chapter is brilliant, and I have high hopes for the rest of the book, but have gotten distracted! But I shall return.

Reflections on “Glaciology,” by Lia Purpura

6 June 2024

Kate C, after reading my latest essay, directed me to this essay.

It is a lovely piece for writing, and on I can learn from. Looking more closely, I see this essay won the Pushcart Prize. You can find it here: https://agnionline.bu.edu/essay/glaciology And there is more by her — at least in the same place this was published — that you can find at https://agnionline.bu.edu/about/our-people/authors/lia-purpura/

It was as if after the big event of snowfall we’d forgotten there was more, still, to be said. A cache of loose details below to attend. A trove poised. A stealth gathering.

Deposition below the singular-seeming white cover.
—Lia Purpura, Glaciology

Thoughts on “Of Fragments and Segments” by Heidi Czerwiec

I was ambivalent about this piece. It made me think, but much of the discussion seemed toassume that very personal metaphoric uses of terms like “fragment” and “segment” had some kind of inter-personal validity, …which I doubt they had. But still, it was interesting to think about how (or whether) you break an essay into pieces, and what sort of work that separation does.

Here is the original essay: https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2022/04/craft-of-fragments-and-segments-by-heidi-czerwiec/

Some thoughts:

Fragments are natural and respect the object; segmentation/cutting imposes an external / artificial agenda.
First, the reading of “fragment” as “to break” seems etymologically valid, but the notion that breaking (in fragments) is somehow more violent the cutting (as in segment) is, at least on a physical level, dubious.
When things break – think about minerals, but it can apply to any material object – they break in accordance with their structures. Often this is because material objects have an intrinsic structure, that includes planes of ‘weakness’ along which they will fracture. When a material object “breaks,” it breaks in the most ‘efficient’ way — it uses the minimal energy to break, and, when it breaks, it is releasing tension that is distorting the structure of the object. In contrast, cutting ignores internal structure, and imposes an external agenda on what is being done. Breaking is true to the structure of the object being broken; cutting ignores that structure, although in some cases, surgery for example, the surgeon may take that into account.
It feels to me like much of the essay is wallowing in metaphor, or at least treating personal metaphors as though they have some kind of agreed-upon interpersonal validity. I’m not convinced that authors who talk about segmentation really have distinct meanings in mind relative to those who talk about fragmentation.
The final paragraph seems on the mark to me, but I’m not sure it really follows from the previous material:

It appears that the more white space – the less “whole” the text appears, the more fragmented, the more visible the breakage – the more charged that space becomes for the reader. That also means more work on the part of the reader. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the reader considers the pieces segments or fragments.

The crux of the issue: To me, the crux of the issue is ‘what work does the white space do?’
- Help the reader understand the temporal and topical structure of the text, understanding that the white space is parsing the essay into chunks of some sort?
- Give the reader time – a beat or two – to assimilate what has been said
- Signal the reader that it is time to pause and draw meaning from what has been said – that if the dots have not been connected it is now the reader’s turn?
- Save the author from having to craft an explicit transition from one fragment to the next?
Interpretation of Fragments. Mosaics, and collages, and cubist and pointillistic paintings, work because the individual elements can be perceived as wholes, and simultaneously apprehended in parallel to form a larger pattern. Segments of text don’t work this way – interpretation is serial and plays out over cognitively meaningful lengths of time… Re-membering, and re-calling are important, as is the author’s provision of signposts that will help the reader…

# # #

LS: A Wilder Time,* William E. Glassley

*A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice. William E. Grassley, 2018.

A lyrical book that provides an account of a geologic expedition to gather evidence for a 1.8 Ga collision between continents that resulted in a series of shear zones in western Greenland. Also important for providing evidence that plate tectonics has been going on for a long time, something that has been contested. Content is quite interesting, but I also appreciate it for its lyrical writing about landscape and geology, which is this focus of my “LS” project.

EP#15: The Making of the American Essay*

*EP#15: The Making of the American Essay, John D. Agata (Graywolf Press, 2016)

Favorites are indicated by ** – there is only one: Blood Burning Moon.
* indicates those that I found something notable in, though I was not keen on them
(*) indicates something previouly read that I still like.
Frankly, I did not care for most of the essays (or, really, most were not essays, but presumably informed or influenced American essayists) in this volume.

This is the 15th volume CT and I have taken up in our essay reading project. Here we return to the type of book we began with — the broadly historical anthology. This differs from previous anthologies we’ve read in that it appears that the editor introduces each piece, something we’ve wished for in the past, especially when we’ve been mystified by why an essay was selected.

Later: Now that we’re farther into it, I’m a little less keen on it. A lot of the material in here are not actually essays: there are short stories, one sermon, a book chapter or two, and some very long pieces (Mark Twain’s A Letter from Earth), none of which strike me as essays. I had hoped for essays, or at least short essay-like pieces… and there are some, but quite a lot is other material. Although his initial introductions were pretty good at situating selections, as the book moves on the introductions are less about the selections, per se, and instead his sort of personal arc through American History. He is also quite fond of experimental work — work that, while it might have raised questions at the time, or contributed to discourse among the literati, is difficult to imagine anyone reading for pleasure or even enlightenment.

March Danceness: Notes on an Essay Contest

March 2024

Today I went to the “March Danceness” web site to check out the context for Kate C’s essay. I found the essays quite interesting and, as they are all supposed to be about ‘dance music’ from the ’00’s, I also enjoyed them as a window into a musical era and genre of which I was unaware. It also attracted a certain demographic, and I find it both interesting and a little amusing to hear those in their 30’s and 40’s lamenting their ages.

The contest is modeled on the metaphor of a sports playoff, where a large set of candidates pair up, are voted on, and then the winners pair up again… I am a week late to the party, but at least today I read all the essays for March 8, and voted on entrants. What follows are my notes for each day, though I think it unlikely that I will keep this up throughout the month.

Reflections on Nine Drafts of an Essay

7 March 2024

This evening I had a productive discussion about the process of developing an essay. I was allowed to look through a series of drafts the led to a just-published essay, and discuss the author’s process with the author. Although different people obviously have different processes, it was a great exercise.

EP#14: 2023 Best Science & Nature Writing–Overview

* The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2023 (ed. Carl Zimmer)

February – March 2024

CT and I selected this book to continue our essay project. However, after reading the first three pieces, we have reconsidered. Although the articles are interesting, they are not what either of would call essays. It’s really journalism, with the focus on ideas. The prose is generally clear and workman like, but as yet we have not encountered any writing that makes us pause to savor the phrase. We intend to look through the book, and — by paying attention to where the piece was originally published – see if we can come up with more essay-like pieces. However, we both suspect, that the book will not past muster vis a vis our project, and that we will move on to something else following our next meeting.

LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

February 2024…

This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.

EP #`13: Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

January 2024

Entry 13 in the Essays Project with CT; this is the seventh book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. This is the book that, with the help of a documentary and then movie, transformed him into something of a celebrity. It is an account of the experience of ‘awakening’ patients with Parkinson’s induced by Encephalitis Lethargia by administering L-Dopa, their experiences of returning to a sort of normal life, and then their declines due to the follow-on negative effects of L-Dopa.

LS* – Finding the Forest, Peter Bundy

December 2023

* This is part of a small project of reading essays that focus on landscape and natural history, the idea being to familiarize myself with this genre, and to develop a better sense of what I like and do not like.

This is a short book about the author’s journey into forestry. I’m ambivalent about it. The first part of the book focuses on his own story, which I don’t find particularly interesting or inspiring. I also have to say that the writing is a bit precious – he is fond of invoking Mother Nature, and personifying the forest; he also tries to be lyrical in what seems to me a clumsy and prosaic way. However, once he becomes established in his career as a forester, I find the book more worthwhile: it is a good survey of the today’s thinking in forestry, about both its past shortcomings and its current approaches. But the combination of preachiness, romanticism and clumsy attempts at lyricism will keep me from recommending it to others.

LS*–The High Sierra: A Love Story, Kim Stanley Robinson

November 2023

The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanely Robinson. 2022.

* I was reading this for other reasons, but nevertheless it fits well into my project to read essays that focus on landscape and natural history.

TL;DR: I love this book. But it is not for everyone. On the other hand, it is organized in such a way that readers interested in particular topics — geology, history, etc. – could skip through the book attending to one or a few themes that interest them. It has great pictures, too.

I’m a big fan of KSR, and think it likely that I’ve read everything he’s written, although it is possible that that omits a few early science fiction novels that were retroactively published after he became better known. I like the complex characters he develops, the intensely developed worlds he portrays, and especially his attention to geology, climate, economics, politics, and the role of large institutions – themes that are uncommon in much science fiction. Also unusual is that he sometimes ventures beyond the borders of SF, as with his novel Years of Rice and Salt, and especially with this book, which is multi-threaded work the interweaves memoir, geology, natural history and history.

LS* – A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson

November 2023

* This is part of a small project of reading essays that focus on landscape and natural history, the idea being to familiarize myself with this genre, and develop a better sense of what I like and do not like.

While, overall, it was an enjoyable read that managed to keep my interest, I was not that keen on it. It is an example of what I am expecting is a subgenre of writing where the author sets out on an ‘adventure’ with little or no preparation (and often with an even less prepared companion), and then recounts his misadventures. Amusing, but to someone who believes research and preparation, a bit difficult to engage with.

Bryson is, in fact, a good writer, and when he actually turned his eye on the environment around him managed to craft some nice phrases. The phrases I tended to like often fell into a few rhetorical categories.

LS* – Writing Landscape, Linda Cracknell

December 2023

Writing Landscape: Taking Note, Making Notes, Linda Cracknell, 2023

This is a small book of essays, both in form (easy to tuck into a pocket), and length. The essays follow a pattern: the author sets out on a journey — either to camp out for a few days, or to attend some kind of writers’ retreat or workshop – and reflects on the place where she finds herself. Her focus is on nature, and occasionally on the history or people associated with the place; she occasionally discusses brief encounters with people, but we learn nothing of her friends or companions.

EP#12: The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks

November-December 2023

Entry 12 in the Essays Project with CT; and this is the sixth book we’ve read by Oliver Sacks. Here we take up the neurological case account essays for which he is best known, after reading his two autobiographies, and other writings ranging from general essays to an account of his travels in Oaxaca. This book, published in 2010, explores cases in which people have lost visual abilities that we all take for granted – not so much blindness (although maybe there will be some essays on that), but rather the consequences of some of the many ways in which the complex and intertwined elements of the visual processing system may be disrupted.

EP #11: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood*, Oliver Sacks, 2001

Entry 11 in the Essays Project with CT; the ‘summer of Sacks’ has turned into the fall of Sacks. It is interesting to be getting such a comprehensive view of a single person’s life and writing. Uncle Tungsten was apparently written in response to the spontaneous surfacing of childhood memories as Sacks approached his 60th year. We’ve read some other essays from that time, mostly from Everything in its Place (essays on South Kensington and Humphry Davies), and found those very good though we hope considerable new ground will be covered. [Later: New ground is being covered — there is not a lot of repetition…]

* Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks, 2001.

w/KC: Four Essays by E. B. White* [The Planet]

September 2023

From “The Planet” section of the book “Essays of E. B. White.” Reading with KC, Fall 2023.

Part III: The Planet

Letter from the East (1975)

Reads, in fact, like a long letter to a friend or family member. Moves across a variety of topics: seeds and seed catalogs; a local wedding; mining; local aquaculture; the energy crisis and nuclear and tidal energy. It has a lot of nice turns of phrase:

EP #10*: The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks

*The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ According to the introduction, this book was posthumously assembled at Sack’s direction a couple of weeks before his death. One of the catalysts was a televised panel with other notable scientists and scholars — Gould, Dyson, Dennet, etc. — that was later captured in a book called “A Glorious Accident.” This book contains a wide range of essays on scientific topics, with, I suspect, particular attention to history.

w/CS: Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flyn

September 2023

Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flynn, 2021.* This book looks at how nature — fungi, plants, animals – are re-colonize landscapes that have been destroyed and abandoned by humans. Examples include massive slag piles, nuclear test grounds, etc. It examines both how primary succession occurs in unpromising circumstances, and how the absence of human presence facilitates re-wilding. In the introduction, the author notes that we are now in the midst of a vast self-directed experiment in re-wilding, driven in part by the concentration of people in cities (and a soon-to-be-decreasing population), and in part by the depletion of non-sustainable natural resources that leave ‘waste lands’ behind.

Post-reading comment: There are three or four chapters in the book that are great, and really align with the aims laid out above. Unfortunately, more of the chapters, particularly as one progresses in the book, are more in the line of what I would call disaster tourism: lyrical descriptions of degraded environments and terrible situations, with little or no mention of how the ecosystem has adapted or not.

* Reading with CJS, fall of 2023