Category: now-reading

EP#28: The Art of the Personal Essay*

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate, 1994.

June 2026 — ???

This is the 27th book we’ve tackled for the Essays Project. This is a giant anthology which should keep us going through the summer – and given anticipated travel likely well into next year. While we had considered being more eclectic, and curating batches of essays from various authors, after one trial (Johnson, EP#26) it seemed easier to return to a published anthology which both eases the burden of selection, and guarantees us paper pages upon which to make notes. So here we gol

Introduction

An excellent introduction that takes on the task of trying to distinguish the personal essay from other sorts of essays, and from seemingly similar writing such as memoir and autobiography. Among Lopate’s claims about what distinguishes the personal essay from other forms of essay:

  • Sets up a dialog with the reader based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship
  • Contains self-revelation, personal experiences and tastes, and can affect a confidential manner
  • Less formal in that it may have a rambling structure, relaxed diction, freshness of form, and makes no claims to completeness or definitive treatment. Digressions are OK.
  • Depends more on style and personality than flawless reasoning
  • May be conversational, with throat clearing, or putting objections in the mouth of the reader
  • Struggle for honesty; vulnerability; self-revelation; self-doubt and self-questioning; admission of uncertainty, lapses, errors, defects, shortcomings. Interrogation of one’s own ignorance. Amused self-observation.
  • The narrator must be reliable
  • Contrariness: Stand a platitude on its head. Implicate first oneself, then the reader.
  • Unashamed subjectiveness; “skeptical yet gyroscopically poised.”

And this taste for the miniature becomes a strong suit of the form: the ability to turn anything close at hand (Charles Lamb’s ears, Virginia Woolf’s moth, Samuel Johnson’s boarding house) into a grand meditational adventure.

—The Art of the Personal Essay, p xxviii (in Introduction by Phillip Lopate)

Forerunners

Seneca: On Noise; Asthma; Scipio’s Villa; Slaves

As Lopate says in the introduction, one of his goals is to bring in writings that, while not essays by his definition, have some of the central characteristics he sees in the personal essay. Seneca, followed by Plutarch, are the two [western] classical antecedents.

Seneca seems particularly apt in that, unlike most classical authors, his personality comes through: we come to get a sense of the man through his writing about other things. Other essay-like characteristics include a focus on the mundane (how people behave in a bath house), and moving from the particular to the universal (from asthma to death), and a bit of impish humor at the end (where after all this complaining and discussion of the noise, he admits he is about to move elsewhere.

Plutarch: Consolation to His Wife

The Plutarch entry, cast as another predecessor to the essay, seems less apt than Seneca’s work, because it is a letter to his wife rather than writing addressed to a larger audience. As a consequence, the familiarity of his voice, and the emotional quality of his writing (also a consequence of the topic), seem to me to spring from the particular circumstances, rather than the sort of impulses that motivate personal essayists,

… reading break …

These next three pieces are not essays, in my view, but indicate that the impulse that shaped essays arose independently of western thought.

Sei Shonagan: “Hateful Things”

Sei Shonagan is a court lady in 10th Century Japan. She comes across as a snob: opinionated, mannered, petty, spiteful.

This forerunner of the essay is essentially a list of everything she hates, ranging from the minute (a mosquito’s buzz in the bedroom at night) to boorish ill-mannered people. Mildly amusing, and the list tells us a good deal about her and the times and situation in which she lives.

This piece illustrates Lopate’s “unashamed subjectiveness” and “self-revelation,” and the essay’s “taste for the miniature” (e.g. the mosquito’s whine). The list form of this essay also anticipates modern essays that cast themselves as lists (which I don’t care for)

Kenko: Essays in Idleness

Kenko was some kind of court functionary in 13th-14th C Japan, with a reputation as a poet.

The piece is composed of a series of unconnected (as far as I can see) passages about places, scenes, thoughts and so forth. Though as the editor selected the passages to include, perhaps there would be more connection if we could see it all.

It is true it had an informal tone, and treated with every day life. And that it looks closely at small things. And that it, perhaps, in its fragmentary, drifting form illustrates the approach of keeping things open and incomplete.

That said, I did not find this writing very interesting. Lacks the wit, verve, and humor of Shonagan.

Ou-Yang Hsiu: Pleasure Boat Studio

An 11th C Chinese Sung dynasty classical poet ranked as one of the 8 masters of classical Chinese prose. He was a member of the imperial court, and held various offices throughout his life.

He has named his office in the Palace Pleasure Boat Studio, and this piece explains why. He explains that the rooms that make up his office are arranged in a single row, and so the space is long and narrow like a boat. He also notes that after he was exiled he lived on a boat and sailed rivers, and comments that the real purpose of a boat is to deliver people from danger, and not pleasure. But at the same time he notes that some have found pleasure in living on boats, even though he has no time for such diversions. So I suppose his naming his office “Pleasure Boat” is ironic, though perhaps he also likes the connotation of delivering him from danger.

But it doesn’t really make sense to me. Not a vey thrilling piece in my view.

In terms of Lopate’s characteristics of personal essays, this shows contrariness, self-deprecation, and the conversational gesture of speaking to the reader: “Is there anything wrong with that?”

… reading break …

Fountainhead (Montaigne)

Introduction

  • Lopate suggests M may have been the greatest essayist who ever lived.
  • His family on both sides was wealthy; they were minor land owning nobility
  • Notes that he was raised speaking only Latin for the first years of his life, which (not mentioned here) also means he had almost no interaction with his parents or anyone except his tutor.
  • M studied law and practiced as a magistrate
  • He cast his essays as self-study, a portrait of himself in words.
  • His first book, written from 1572-1574, was short and filled with quotations and not especially personal—but it was a success and gave him more confidence.
  • M felt there was a basic unity to human experience. He regarded humanity as constantly in flux, and vain, ashamed and contradictory. But he embedded these views in a frame of forgiveness.
  • “His own sentences were sinewy, dry, yet succulent: they explode like pomegranate seeds on the tongue.”
  • He wrote in the vernacular, not Latin

…the spirit of humanism was in the air, via Erasmus and others, and the classical Greek and Roman authors were being used as a Trojan borse to open the gates to a freer, more speculative and self-analytical mentality (Socrates’ “Know thyself’). Rabelais great, bawdy novel, Gargantua and Pantagruel, likewise gave Montaigne license to write in support of pleasure and an integration of mind and body. Alongside an increase in classical learning and scientific knowledge, new worlds were literally being discovered. Explorers brought back reports of exotic native customs from the Americas and the Pacific, which fueled Montaigne’s relativistic bent.
—ibid., 44

While Montaigne deserves credit for inventing the form, I have to say I don’t care for his writing. He takes paragraphs to say what might be said in a few sentences. And although many seem to think the uncertainty and changeability is a virtue, or at least a characteristic of the new form, I find it a bit irritating. There is something to be said for emphasizing that an important aspect of the personal essay has to do with how the author approaches the topic, but Montaigne not only disclaims expertise, which is fair, but seems to shirk any responsibility for accuracy or accountability.

Having written the above, after reading a few of his essays, I do have to say that I appreciate his tolerant and even compassionate approach.

Of Books, Michel de Montaigne

The first two pages are mostly disclaimer. He portrays himself as unlearned (which does not seem accurate), and uninterested in grappling with difficult books or study—he just wants to enjoy himself.

  • “Let attention not be paid to the matter, but to the shape I give it.”
  • “I want them to give Plutarch a fillip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me.”

After this he comments on books he likes (and some he does not), beginning with entertaining books, fables, poetry. He also likes Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero.

Of a Monstrous Child, Michel de Montaigne

M describes a child who is a partial Siamese twin, with a headless body joined to his abdomen. He comments that this might be seen as an omen, but it is better not to: “there is nothing like divining about things past. ‘So that when things happen, by some interpretation they are found to have been prophesied.‘ [Cicero]”

M is compassionate, and argues against revulsion. “We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be. Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.“

… reading break …

Essay 3

xxxx

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The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, David George Haskell

March/April 2026

* The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, David George Haskell, 2012

In this book a biologist marks out a one-square-meter patch of forest, and visits it over fifty times during the course of a year. On each visit he observes and reflects on what he sees, starting with the concrete and then exploring a web of connections and associations that illustrate the systemic and interconnected aspects of the ecosystem. One part ecology, one part biology, one part poetry. Having read the first few entries it looks like it will be a great read. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Preface

Opens with a description of Tibetan monks making a mandela, and a comment that its aim is to symbolize the entire universe in this small circle of sand.

“I believe the forests ecological stories are all present in a mandala-sized area. Indeed, the truth of the forest may be more vividly and clearly revealed by contemplation of a small area than it could be by donning ten-league boots and covering a continent but uncovering little.

—The Forest Unseen, p xii

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Atoms of Delight, Kenneth Steven

Atoms of Delight: Ten Pilgrimages in Nature, Kenneth Steven, 2024

March 2026

A short book of essays by a Scottish poet about, essentially, walks he has taken — essays are usually followed by a poem that relates to the walk described. I believe that the phrase “Atoms of Delight” is taken from Scottish writer Neil Gunn.

I’m enjoying the book, and the poems, but mildly rather than intensely. I stumbled across this book in a bookstore, while looking for something else. This is part of my effort to read more books that describe the landscape.

Serpentine

Recounting a walk to St Columba’s Bay that he has taken many times, both as an adult and especially as a child, and how the walk rekindles in him the feeling of being a child.

  • A memory of running ahead and waiting for his parents to catch up.
  • And, today, imagining that he can catch glimpses of his parents, from years ago, walking.
  • The bay is held in rock arms, and the ocean is fierce, not “any gentle sea lapping at the lips of the bay.”
  • Somewhere out in the bay there is a reef of serpentine, and he describes the pebbles they form, “like sweets specifically designed to catch the eye of a child.”
  • He describes gathering cobbles as a child — you’re either a tide dancer or a sifter. “I still come here, year on year, to be blown out of myself and into childhood.“

Hold it to the light and it changes
becomes a globe of fractures;
a cavern of ledges and glinting—
not one green but many at once.

…carrying the cuts of its journey,
the brokenness letting in the light

The High Lochs

An essay remembering the highlands, where his mother’s people are from, and where his parents went for outings, his mother fly-fishing, and his father bird watching.

“The fossil imprints left in the mind can only be chiseled out only as stories, because no other evidence survives. “

“It always seemed an impossible blue, perhaps because it was set against such dark garments of moorland.“

“The silence was like a thin, beautiful layer of ice, something you didn’t want to break.“


“At night the sky a breath of stars“

Cloudberries

About a time spent in the Norwegian arctic with the Sami, shortly after Chernobyl.

“The plateau wasn’t just a bare back of rock and trees: it undulated – rose and dipped and rose again. There were hollows and little dark eyes of pools that I recognised as lochans.“

Conkers

Not a bad essay, but this one did not speak to me.

The Pool

A Treasure

Agates

The Santa Crux Well

The Oaks

The Northern Lights

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Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks

March 2023

This is volume #25 in the Essays Project that CT and I are doing. It is the last volume of Sacks we have not yet read; we will also read Insomniac City by Bill Hayes, his partner in his final years, just for completeness. Then it is back to essays by other authors.

Introduction

Before the 1830’s, when “hallucinations” was introduced as a medical term, hallucinations were referred to as “apparitions.” I found that interesting because in reading old literature I also assumed they were superstitiously referring to seeing ghosts. So this gives the ‘seeing of appartions’ a different flavor.

Hallucinations are defined as seeing things that are not actually there — this distinguishes them from errors of perception. And hallucination also means that what is perceived in the mind is clear and detailed — it is like seeing (or otherwise sensing) an object, except there is nothing there. This distinguishes them from mental images. Dreams could be considered a form of hallucination, but are usually treated separately.

This book does not address hallucinations that occur as a result of schizophrenia, but rather those that appear to arise, directly or indirectly, from neurological traumas.

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Patterns in Nature, Philip Ball

February 2026

Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does, Philip Ball, 2016

About the Book

My pick for the first round of reading for the club for 2026. I’m obsessed with patterns, and this book has 250 beautiful photos. Whether it will go deep enough to teach me some new things is another question, but even if not it should be a pleasant read.

The Book

Introduction

  • In 1917 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form. One of his aims was to counter the tendency to ascribe all patterns to evolution, to assert that they were all products of adaptation and natural selection. Instead, he argues, that often patterns simply arise from physical forces.
  • Patterns are often (always?) produced via growth.

… it does make many patterns variations on a theme, and reflects the fact that they often arise from broadly similar processes-ones in which some driving force, be it gravity or heat or evolution, prevents the system from ever settling into a steady, unchanging state; in which various influences interact with each other, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes competing; in which patterns and forms might switch abruptly to a new shape and appearance when the driving force exceeds some threshold value; in which small events can have big consequences and what goes on here can influence what transpires at a distant point there; and in which accidents may get frozen into place and determine what unfolds thereafter. 

—ibid.,

Symmetry

  • Symmetry operations: Reflection; Rotation; Translation.
  • Patterns arise through (limited) symmetry breaking. Something that is perfectly symmetric, i.e. the same under all symmetry operation, has no pattern; pattern arise from reducing symmetry. “The more symmetry that gets broken, the more subtle and elaborate the patterns.”

Fractals

  • A complex pattern may be described simply if one focuses on the process that generates it.
  • Fractal networks, having fractional dimensions, are good at spanning an integral dimensional space without filling it up.  
  • Fractal forms may be produced by growth and accumulation, or by erosion and removal.
  • Growth instabilities — self amplifying projections as in snowflake formation. 
  • In the absence of fractal structures filled spaces in which redistribution must occur must generate their own structures (e.g., convection cells or ‘pedestrian columns.’)
  • The self-similarity across scales means that a complex structure can be produced by a simple algorithm. 
  • The branching vein networks of leaves, unlike branches or roots, can intersect and join up, forming loops that provide alternative pathways if parts of the leaf are damaged. P 70. 

Spirals

  • Archimedean vs.  logarithmic 
  • Logarithmic: increase circumference as it grows; one side grows faster (to create curve). 
  • Vortices due to friction in moving fluid
  • Flow vortices vs self-organizing density waves

Flow and Chaos

  • Laminar flow
  • Shear flow
  • Kármán vortex streets
  • • • Flocking

Waves and Dunes

Bubbles and Foam

Arrays and Tiling

Cracks

Spots and Stripes

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Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson

October 2025

About the Book

Reading this with NS & DO, a subset of the 26 minute book group. As I begin, I find myself a little hesitant about a biography written about someone 400+ years ago, where there is presumably a scarcity of 1st hand accounts. But certainly his very detailed notebooks will help…

Later: And the notes do, indeed, help, although the undated nature of the notes, and the fact that they have been remixed over the ensuing centuries makes them less effective as a chronological record. Still, I’m learning a lot about Leonardo, his approach to life and innovation, and his accomplishments.

The Book

INTRODUCTION – I Can Also Paint

The introduction offers a general description of Leonardo as a man who blended art and science and who, in fact, probably did not distinguish. It suggests that we have much to learn from Leonardo in that “Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition,” in contrast to those who seem to have prodigious cognitive powers. Certainly, he left profuse documentation of his curiosity and his reliance on observation and analysis of the natural world to fuel his creativity and inventiveness. Leonardo: “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar.“

The rest of the introduction discusses sources — three early accounts — and offers some suppositions about Leonardo’s personality.

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Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King

October 2025

About the Book

I’m reading this book chapter by chapter with CJS.The topic is the emergence of cultural anthropology via the work of Franz Boas and his students, who included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Nealel Hurdson. The work described here laid the foundation for the belief that all humans are fundamentally equal in their abilities, and that much of what had been thought to be innate was culturally constructed.

The Book

C1: Away

This chapter is really a preface. It begins with a vignette of Margaret Mead arriving in Samoa, but then segues to the general aim of the book.

A little over a century ago, any educated person knew that the world worked in certain obvious ways. Humans were individuals, but each was also representative of a specific type, itself the summation of a distinct set of racial, national, and sexual characteristics.

Each type was fated to be more or less intelligent, idle, rule-bound, or warlike. Politics properly belonged to men, while women, when they were admitted to public life, were thought to be most productive in charitable organizations, missionary work, and the instruction of children. Immigrants tended to dilute a country’s natural vigor and breed political extremism. Animals deserved kindness, and backward peoples, a few rungs above animals, were owed our help but not our respect. Criminals were born to a life beyond the law but might be reformed. Sapphists and sodomites chose their depravities but were probably irredeemable. It was an age of improvement: an era that had moved beyond justifying slavery, that had begun to shake off the strictures of class, and that might eventually do away with empires.

—ibid., p 4

The claim of the book is that the work of Boas and his students was critical to overturning these understandings. Boas and his students invented (and named) cultural anthropology and developed the theory of cultural relativity. Their work challenged heretofore accepted ideas that people fell into natural categories that differed in their abilities and predilections. It did this via a scientific examination of cultures…

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The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekara

The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekara, 2023

This is an acclaimed science fiction book that has gathered both critical and popular praise. I read it a couple of years ago — I try to read the ‘best of the year’ books in SF – and it didn’t engage me, although I did manage to finish it. I am now reading it a second time, as part of a Science Fiction and Fantasy course I’m taking at the U, and am going to try harder to appreciate it; or at least to understand what others appreciate in it. And perhaps also reflect on aspects of it that prevent me from appreciating it.

At this point I’ve just started the re-read it. I am noticing some very nice turns of phrase. I also notice that the protagonist begins as, in a sense, an abused child who is being trained to do terrible things by a mother who sees him only as a tool. I’m not really noticing much in the way of love or affection or humor among any of the characters.

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On Solitude*, Michel de Montaigne

* On Solitude, Michel de Montaigne (Penguin Books, 1991, trans. M. A. Screech)

This is the first time I have read Montaigne, a little surprising since he is the originator of the essay form. I am not sure whether I will appreciate him…

Later: Montaigne’s essays are just not engaging me. But I am struck by the way he is engages in dialog with scholars and others who have come before. I don’t really resonate with the topics and language in play, but it would be interesting for me to try to do something similar with people who have influenced me.

E1: On Solitude

This eponymous essay Is written from the vantage point of a man in the “tail-end of life,” and explores the virtues of solitude. I was struck by how much, and how widely, he quotes from the classical literature. Hoarce, Seneca, Cicero, Erasamus, Socrates. The general theme is about the advisability and wisdom of withdrawing from public life, and the vices attendant in that and in the majority of people. Instead, he advocates turning inward, and cultivating one’s own happiness and virtue in a what seems to me a stoic fashion. This essay did not, in general speak to me, though there were a couple of quotes I liked. 

“We have lived quite enough for others; let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being”

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

“If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess: but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train.

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

On Books

TBD

On the Power of the Imagination

TBD

On Sadness

TBD

On Constancy

TBD

On Fear

TBD

How Our Mind Tangles Itself Up

TBD

On Conscience

TBD

On Anger

TBD

On Virtue

TBD

On Sleep

TBD

On the Length of Life

TBD

How we Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

TBD

# # #

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EP#20: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

* The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. 1984

The 20th volume in the Essays Project (co-reading with CT) gets us back to essays. Here we are continuing our side quest to read all of OS’s work. This is Sack’s fourth book, and its excellence is consistent with my belief that Sack’s somehow found his muse — at least for writing for general audiences — while writing A Leg to Stand On, his previous book. Hat, so far, seems to be about various forms of agnosia — the loss of knowledge or awareness of things. So far this includes face and object recognition, awareness of limbs (or the entire body), and portions of the visual field. Looking ahead, I now see that only the first section is on “Losses,” so there will clearly be a much wider variety of ‘neurographies.’

The Book

Preface to the Original Edition (1985)

There is also a 2013 Preface, but I find little of note, though if you are reading the book it is worth a quick perusal.

Sacks begins the 1985 Preface by reflecting on his epigraphs, which has to do with his practicing medicine as a physician also involving getting a view of the larger context of his patients’ troubles — he sees himself as as much as naturalist as a physician. He also says, interestingly, that: “animals get diseases; only man falls radically into illness.” In my view, this reflects his view that some (all?, almost all?) diseases have an ontological component. I love the comment in one of his letters: “What is so instructive about disease, like disaster, is that it shakes the foundations of everything.” He also discusses the value of broad accounts, even stories, and laments the modern tendency to eliminate or minimize the subject of ‘case histories:’ “To restore the human subject at its center — the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject — we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale….” (p. xviii) He also brings in myths and fables with their hero’s and archetypes — “travelers to unimaginable lands, lands of which we should otherwise have no idea or conception.“

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Migraine*, Oliver Sacks

*Migraine (Revised and expanded), Oliver Sacks, 1992

This is the 18th volume in the “Essays Project.” While the Essays Project has focused mainly on essays, we became intrigued with Oliver Sacks and are taking something of a detour to read his complete work, essays or not.

[[More to come…]]

Front Matter

There are prefaces to the original edition, and, to this, the 1992 edition. There is also a forward by William Gooddy, a migraine specialist whom Sacks praises in his prefaces. There is also a historical introduction, which summarizes over 2,000 years of medical writing on migraine; I will pass on summarizing this.

The following, from the ’92 Preface, is Sacks’ comment on the aims of the book; I think his thoughts on why humans may need to be ill, for a brief time, will be very interesting.

Migraine, of course, is not just a description, but a meditation on the nature of health and illness, and how, occasionally, human beings may need, for a brief time, to be ill; a meditation on the unity of mind and body, on migraine as an exemplar of our psychophysical transparency; and a meditation, finally, on migraine as a biological reaction, analogous to that which many animals show.

–Oliver Sacks, Migraine, xv

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Snow Crystals, Kenneth Libbrecht

Snow Crystals: A Case Study of Spontaneous Structure Formation, Kenneth Libbrecht, 2022

This is Libbrecht’s magnum opus, at least on snow; this goes deep into the science. …and I love that he has ordered the references by date, so you can see the history of the science leading up to Libbrecht’s work.

Notes still in progress…

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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.

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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.

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

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