Books

Note: this is another (slightly edited) cross post from my attempt at a newsletter, Inverse Squaremy attempt at a newsletter, Inverse Square. It was a Sunday respite post there, but I was having too much fun with my West Coast siblings yesterday to get it over here. So it’s a holiday respite piece, I guess, and not one totally irrelevant to MLK day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about art lately, mostly about how it works for me—or rather what I do with it both in the moment and on reflection. ISTM that’s a question best pursued in company. So that’s the conversation I’d like to have, here, there, or anywhere. This post (and likely a lot of them to come, assuming I make good on my intention not to have this be a one-off) centers on reading (and by implication on writing—as I turn the page I’m always looking for instruction, or tricks I can steal). It happens that right now my reading for pleasure turns out to be enmeshed in the question of obligation: what do we owe to whom or what.

Enough with the throat-clearing preamble…on to the books!

(PS: let me know if this is something y’all would like to see more of on occasion—or if its surplus to requirements.)

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First up: Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field. This is the third volume of the second trilogy set in Lyra Belacqua/Silvertongue and Pantalaimon‘s universe (or rather a universe centered on Lyra and Pan’s world but that also encompasses ours and other realities).

This trilogy doesn’t have the same glorious shock of the first, His Dark Materials, and especially the opening volume, The Golden Compass. There, Pullman brings us his utterly strange and fully realized vision of personhood composed jointly of a human and their daemon, an animal expression of the self that is an equal partner in each individual’s journey through life. That world coheres from the first scene; Pan and Lyra are a whole being (nattering at each other!) from the start.  It’s at once a bravura example of world building and an amazingly rich driver of the emotional and intellectual investigation Pullman undertakes.

That’s all still there in the later work, of course. Lyra and Pan remain the protagonist(s). Interactions between two material expressions of a single person drive both the plot and themes Pullman gives us. But it isn’t a surprise anymore; six volumes in that’s just the way it is (which is a measure of the creative accomplishment). Yet I’m still thrilled at the work—and it is in some sense because of that familiarity, not despite it.

What I’m mostly thinking and feeling at this point in my reading (I’m about 3/4s of the way through The Rose Field) is how much Lyra and Pan’s alienation from each other (remembering that they are the same person) reminds me of the need for something that’s harder and harder for me to give at this particular moment in this world. That would be the robust exercise of empathy, of a commonality of feeling —and hence a duty of care—with and for self and others. I am routinely unkind to myself. And though I hope I’m not actively mean to anyone around me, I know that I am regularly unaware of and unavailable to near and far. Pullman and Lyra and Pan and Matthew and Ionides and the rest do not instruct; they don’t tell me what to about distance or loss or how to do it (the problem that bedevils several of the one/two protagonists throughout the book). They do, or rather they have made me feel a reflected sense of their troubles, which makes me study my own circumstances. Can’t ask more of an artist or their work.

Plus…it’s a fabulous, galloping plot across an endlessly fascinating landscape. What’s not to like?

And second, more briefly because I’m much less far along, a new release: Is a River Alive? The book keeps reminding me that Robert Macfarlane is as close to an essential writer as I can think of right now. His work straddles the turf between nature and adventure writing and has always been shot through with a deep moral questions. I think I need to write a longer reflection on the way the books of his I’ve read so far have taught me both new stuff—facts and ideas—and new tools, ways to approach the craft of writing.

For now, let me just say that Is a River Alive is absolutely worth your time. It opens with a question and a challenge: can we learn how to think of our world as a place in which rights and hence obligations can inhere in something other than just people, or even animals. Can the natural world, can ecosystems, can landscapes exert a moral claim on us? Do such claims exist in themselves—not as a gift we bestow and could withdraw, but as an essential property within a social vision that encompasses both ourselves and the places and natural systems we inhabit and require for survival?

What makes this more than an abstract question is Macfarlane’s great gift—his ability to bring place and non-human events and agency to life in detail and tragic and uplifting beauty…in words. TL:DR—the man can really write.

That’s enough for now. I hope this is a useful or at least a pleasantly diversionary note. Let me know in the comments if you’d like more of these from time to time.

Cheers.

Open thread, but if you want to talk about the theme of obligation or about what you’re reading now and why, that would be a bonus.

Image: Titian, St. Jerome [and his lion], c. 1575

Random Reading Respite. (As in, my version of the 3 Rs)Post + Comments (67)