![]() ![]() To me that’s like calling your family a collection of people or a tree a collection of sticks. Though I’m overall grateful for the reception of my new book Orwell’s Roses, reviewers have called it “a collection of essays” a number of times, which suggests a failure to recognize structure or internal cohesion if it is not tightly focused on a single figure or a chronological sequence. Why not understand by analogy, decenter the narrative, seek patterns of resemblance in parallel, explore the terrain rather than cutting a swathe through it? Why not meander and see what lies alongside? Such books are concerned not so much with what happens but with what it means they are less about destination as resolution, and more about meaning revealed along the way. But just as a mushroom hunter is neither lost nor without purpose, these books are not without structure or direction. That is, such books are not linear, not built around a single chronology-in fact, they are often not structured around chronology at all. Other books-some of mine, I hope-are instead trying to map the surrounding territory and understand where we are. Some books have a single storyline, and they pass briskly through the landscape, often to a destination that doubles as payoff as “What the hell will Jane do with Rochester?” or “Who got the Eustace diamonds?” Or they tread a wide familiar road that is the chronology of a life, a movement, a war, or some other event. ![]() You’re not trying to get somewhere else but to know where you are. Most of the time I go into such landscapes, I walk or run, cutting a line through the landscape, but I learned in the years when I used to gather gallons of blackberries in the tree-shaded gulch through which a creek ran, that there’s another kind of depth achieved by moving slow, seeing close-up, lingering, living in detail. I was detouring to admire the wildflowers in the little meadows punctuating the aspen and pine forest, and he was naming all the species of fungi and teaching me what to look for and vetting every mushroom that got plucked from the earth and popped in his sack. We were looking at the ground, unhurriedly, trying to discern boletus mushrooms in the moist leaf litter, bending down to inspect and occasionally collect. If we’d tracked the routes we took, they would’ve resembled how toddlers scribble across a piece of paper, back and forth, back and forth, with a bit of round and round. This summer, a day after a promising thunderstorm, my friend Greg took me mushroom hunting in the New Mexico mountains where he’s been collecting them for forty years or more. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |