What do you do as a year ends, having endured weeks of intense emotion - with seemingly more ahead? How to make sense of it, can you make sense of it? What can you compare it to - can you compare it to anything?
Reflecting back, way back, and re-reading Solnit, my go-to person for reading and thinking about culture and history and spirit.
“On November 5, 1968 Richard Nixon was elected President,
That year Women’s Strike for Peace was founded when a hundred thousand women in a hundred communities across the country staged a simultaneous one-day strike, launching an antinuclear peace movement that also prefigured the women’s movement soon to be born. That year, Cesar Chavez was considering leaving his community organizer job to try to unionize California’s farm workers, and the science writer Rachel Carson was finishing Silent Spring, her landmark denunciation of pesticides published in 1962. Just as the civil rights movement achieved not only specific gains but a change in the imagination of race and justice, so Carson’s book was instrumental not only in getting DDT banned in the United States—which reversed the die-offs of many species of bird—but also in popularizing a worldview in which nature was made up not of inert objects but of interactive, interconnected systems, a worldview that would come to be
.... This is the way the world changes, as Dickens understood when he opened his most political novel with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It usually is.
.....globalization has the same yin and yang that everything else has - and it is good to keep aware of this. Corporate globalization not such a good thing....but globalization that allows us to study and learn and communicate is incredible.
What gets called “the sixties” left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems most fundamental and most pervasive about all the ensuing changes is a loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness. The answers—the alternatives—haven’t always been clear or easy, but the questions and the questioning are nevertheless significant. What’s most important here is to feel the profundity of the changes, to feel how far we have come […]”
Taking the time to be mindful -- of time. Here we are again.
For me, Solnit is one of those writers who is a touchstone. One of a handful. Not only is she a great writer, she constructs ideas in a way I LOVE to think — pulling in disparate thoughts and pieces of information and history - both personal and not - weaving them together in magically seamless paragraphs.
I wonder if she does this for all of her readers? It must happen for some - for a good portion of her readers. She knows the importance of books and reading - having written:
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.
READING AND READERS
My Dad used to stop at the Detroit Public Library on his way home from meetings at the Engineering Society or teaching at the University of Detroit — those were two reasons he went downtown when I was little. He brought me books from the library and I remember laying on the couch in the family room, reading. One night I read something to my mother and she asked me if I had memorized it, or heard someone else reading it - I just kept reading and she went to get my dad - that was high praise. I knew that I had pleased them. The Christmas after that there was an entire set of Golden Encyclopedias underneath the tree. The ones you could buy at the grocery store - a volume a week. I think I already had the first two volumes, but my parents must have sprung for the entire set. Heaven. I devoured books, I hid inside of them. My father did as well.
One of the things my parents would fight about was the amount of money my Dad spent on books. Lots of IMAGE books and as his illness consumed him - a decent man - a devout Catholic, he became more of a religious fanatic. He loved jazz and geeky things of the late 50’s, early 60’s - having a record player under the dashboard of your car or wiring speakers to be able to have the records you played in the basement heard throughout the house. Cool minimalist furniture that I think my mother hated, and that his five kids destroyed with use. Jackie Gleason and Yogi Bear cartoons. Computers and all things digital would have blown his mind.
Time passed, more kids, more fights, mental health issues that often occupied and propelled anything else that was happening in the family.
I hid in books. Devoured them.
The Winne the Pooh series (the ones with the E.H. Shepard illustrations) were were read to us as kids over and over again, sitting on the couch around my mother. I have those worn copies now and read them to the children in my life. I would read anything about horses that I could get my hands on, the series, Misty of Chincoteague I loved. I read every Little House book, and the entire Nancy Drew series, begging for those instead of toys. I remember going through a Native American phase, a civil war phase, lots of sappy schmaltzy lives of the Saints - then I got to the point where I would just pour through the library shelves for anything BIG, The books with the most pages caught me immediately. I would fall into those, coming up for air when they were over - looking around and feeling confused - like you do sometimes when you first wake up.
I hid in books. Devoured them.
When I was in in middle school my dad brought home a list some priest had given him on a retreat: all the books a well educated person (read: white Catholic male, better yet a Jesuit) should read. He made sure all of them were on our bookshelves. I read them all. American classics like Theodore Dresser’s Sister Carrie, Steinboack’s The Grapes of Wrath - which astounded me.
To be continued.....
To be continued.....
