Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Summer blew through so quickly, it seems.  I feel keyed up and have subsequently been trying to make the most of everything, during this intense time.  It helps counterbalance my anxiety about... (fill in the blank).  I took three island painting trips in three months, and also participated in a painting workshop far inland, to be with some un-island nature for a change.  My studio is full of new paintings, destined for the future exhibits which I will be piecing together over the winter.  Fall activities are in full swing, now.  The chimney sweep is on approach.   New caps for the chimneys, check.  Furnace cleaning, check.  Firewood delivery on its way for next year, check (this year's is already stacked and dry and ready to burn).  Cat beds for Hodge are deployed strategically throughout the house, in sunny windows and near the woodstove, for maximum kitty comfort as the cold encroaches.  I just put a layer of peat moss in the compost pile, to work its magic over the winter and spring.  Will add a thick layer of dried leaves whenever they finish falling off the maples in the front yard, next month.  I repotted the house plants and brought them indoors for the winter.  The garden was a bust this year - we only had some flowers and herbs and lots of weeds, since I decided to let things go for a season.  I'll clean everything up once the first hard frost does most of the work for me.

Indoors, I'm still putting bookplates into my books.  And I haven't been reading much but what I have been reading has been splendid.  Back in May I bought a copy of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (Viking 2012).  I read it quickly, in thrall to the care he takes with his writing, and equally in thrall to the ideas he espouses, namely those relating to walking and pathways of all kinds.  My intrepid stepfather walked 1200 miles on the Appalachian Trail this season (between April and August), and so around here we have been fairly obsessed with all things long-walk.  I used to have a collection of books about very long walks and while some of that collection is no longer with me, I seem to have recently attracted more reading on the subject than I ever had in the first place.  And Macfarlane's book is such a gem.  Not least because he mentions many other authors and books I have loved for so long, and he then proceeds to take his place among them.  A wonderful, rich, and wordy meander on tracks, paths, and traversable landscapes around Great Britain and elsewhere.  This book is worthwhile for all that, and then too for its bibliography, which he begins by saying (p.395):

"Walking is among our most ancient of practices, and it has been undertaken for an irreducibly complex variety of causes and desires.  The literature of walking and paths is extensive and wayward; this bibliography includes a selection of the books, essays and articles that I have read about these subjects, as well as those concerning the book's other broad preoccupations: archaeology, cartography, grief, joy, landscape, metaphor, navigation, orientation, pilgrimage, touch, tracking and toponymy, among others."

Thirteen pages of reading suggestions follow.  He asterisks those he finds particularly interesting.  I could read from this list for months.  On it I find old friends and intriguing newcomers, both.  One of the latter, well, I couldn't help but notice her, since throughout The Old Ways Macfarlane mentions her many times, in glowing terms.  He even begins the book with an epigraph from one of her books.  She is Nan Shepherd, and the book he goes on and on about is her quiet masterpiece The Living Mountain.

I can say masterpiece since I have now read it too.  But I needed prompting to do so.  And the universe obliged, as it often does.  Here's what happened.  I read Macfarlane's book, and paid attention, and took notes, as I always do when I read.  I wrote down several of the instances when he gave Nan Shepherd's writing high praise.  When he speaks of her, he places her in his paragraphs beside Gilbert White, and Lawrence Durrell, and Goethe.  By the third or fourth time he mentions her, and quotes at length from her book, I am thinking, Okay, okay, OKAY.  Get this book I have never heard of until now.  I wrote the title down, to find a copy sometime soon.  It's about her long walks in the Cairngorms in Scotland.  Must find a copy.  Then a month went by.  And part of another.  As they do.  And I got busy, and I ignored my own note to self.

Now we come to the good part of this story.  Remember I mentioned that this summer I took a painting workshop, inland?  I didn't know the workshop teacher but he has a great reputation and I have loved his paintings for years, and I wanted to paint in the area where the workshop was being offered, so I signed up for his class.  (Not having taken a class in 16? years or so, maybe more, eeek, nervous.)  The class was the better part of five days.  Early on the teacher and I were talking and I asked him what he was working on.  He said that he'd been struggling with his painting over the previous winter but had made some small paintings based on a book he'd read.  A book he'd in fact read five times in succession, it had made such an impression on him.  Just a little thing, he said - pinching his fingers together - short, but so good.  His wife would say to him, "Are you reading that book again...?"  Yes, he was.  Being a book person (he didn't know that about me, we'd never met), of course I asked him the big question.  "What is that book?"  And he said, "The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd."  While looking at me, perhaps not expecting me to know or care about his answer.  I looked at him.  My mind became quite busy.  I said, "...that book about the Cairngorms?"  He looked at me.  Perhaps suprised at what I had said.  And said, "YES."  I said, "I just read The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, and he goes on and on about Nan Shepherd."  He told me he's read everything Robert Macfarlane has published.  I suggested also reading Macfarlane's exemplary twitter feed, and resolved to get my hands on a copy of The Living Mountain as soon as I possibly could.

And I did.  Right after the workshop I ordered a copy, read it, read it again, and I'm still thinking about it, nearly two months later.  I wanted to write about it here, long before now, but today is finally the day.  Robert Macfarlane wrote a 30+ page introduction to the reprint (Canongate 2011; the book was originally published by Aberdeen University Press in 1977, after sitting unpublished, in manuscript form, for decades).  I suggest skipping the introduction, as good as it is, and going straight into the book itself.  Then go back and read the introduction for Macfarlane's care-full parsing of her prose.  He has read the book a dozen times, and places it on equal footing with other great books published in the 1970s, namely Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, John McPhee's Coming into the Country, and The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.  The difference being of course that their books were written, published, and lauded, and her manuscript sat in a drawer, after one rejection from one publisher, for about thirty years, before she tried once more to get it into print.  Macfarlane read it when a friend recommended it as "a lost classic" of nature writing.  He says alongside J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, "... it is one of the two most remarkable twentieth-century British studies of a landscape that I know."  (p.xiii)  But here I am not taking my own advice, and reading from the introduction, not the text itself!  And all this makes the book sound like some kind of best-thing-ever-written, when it is just over 100 pages, and isn't really even about anything, other than coming to know a place.  There is no story - just description, and experience, and that slow knowing.  About the whole place - the elements, plants, rocks, animals, birds, other people in the landscape.  Weather, light.  Colors.  Water.  The senses.  The book does remind me of a series of paintings, made over a lifetime, about a place so beloved that descriptions of it never come close.  The opening sentences give us a perfect taste of the whole (p.1):

"Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge.  To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature.  And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here.  To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living.  This is not done easily nor in an hour.  It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems.  Yet it has its own rare value.  It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it.  However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me.  There is no getting accustomed to them."

She continues:

"The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped out by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water.  Their physiognomy is in the geography books - so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet - but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind."

OH, so good.  And these are just the first two paragraphs!  They make me want to write.  And walk.  Which I have been doing a lot of, this summer.  For one of the things that has kept me away from writing here has been walking, not just reading about walking.  Ryan and I have walked many short sections of the Appalachian Trail here in Maine over the last five months, in solidarity with my stepfather, and the trail has taken me places and shown me things I would never have experienced otherwise.  Sometimes I bring my paints along, sometimes not.  Sometimes I just look and that is more than enough for that day.  I'll read more about it (and paint about it, and maybe write about it too) when winter truly comes and I'm indoors for the coldest days.  In fact, I think reading books about long walks might be a good winter reading project this year.  I've already got some of the books listed in Macfarlane's bibliography, and I see many others I'd like to track down.  More on all that soon, after the fall chores are finished and I'm in for the duration.  Until then, the leaves have barely started turning here and the outdoors is still calling.  October, here it comes!  Maine's finest season?  (Well, I love all the others too.)

♫ ♪ ♪ Turn and face the strange, ch-ch-changes ♫ ♪ ♫ and make up your own next line, to this familiar song, because everything sure has changed, and fast.  Ryan and I were talking last night about the great little library sale we went to almost two weeks ago, where we saw some old friends, browsed around with happy anticipation, purchased four bags of books, bought groceries on the way home, and generally enjoyed life.  It seems like months ago, now.  I cleaned, coded, and priced most of the books, the day after I bought them, and they still sit in the front hall today.  They will be there for a long time, I think.  They're not going anywhere.  And neither are we.  Except for necessities when we absolutely must, and of course to get out into the wild.  We are so fortunate here in Maine that the big open spaces of nature are all around us, and remain accessible.  Beaches, trails, land preserves, quiet roads we can walk on - as spring arrives they will be saving graces, as they always are.  I am lucky in that I usually work on my own, and in solitude.  That will continue, I hope.  I don't yet know what will happen to my summer painting season, but since there is nothing I can do about that, and it is tiny in the grand scheme of things, I set it on the back burner in my mind and let it cool down.  Ryan will be telecommuting after today, as the college he works at transitions to online everything.  We have income, health insurance, and some savings, to help us get through, and share with family and friends who will be in need when things get worse, as it seems they will.  A lot has shut down.  Friends and neighbors are already out of work.  We are planning to buy their goods and services when we can.  Heartbreaking, all of this.  I can hardly get my mind around it.

Books are not helping at the moment, but I think this state of affairs is only temporary, as I struggle to accept the changes.  I can't seem to settle on anything.  I've started a bunch of books in the last two weeks and each time I pick one up and read a little, I put it back down and think, Nope, that's not it.  I don't know what I'm looking for.  Peace, perhaps, and a lessening of anxiety, but those are both in short supply.  Because of world events, yes, but also, did I mention that I cut my finger by accident last week, in the kitchen, and our local doctor glued it up for me, and wrapped it, and told me not to get it wet?  Yeah, that happened.  I saw her again this week, and she said the same.  So.  No full-on hand-washing allowed.  I'm using little alcohol and witch hazel pads to swab the bandages down from time to time, and of course washing the rest of my hands and self as best I can, but wow, the latent ocd I usually manage to keep in check is raging right now!  Which would be funny, if it wasn't!  Anyway, a difficult situation is made more difficult by my own actions.  Thanks for visiting, Fate.  My finger will be fine, with time.  It's on my non-dominant hand and is a worrisome inconvenience at most.  I hold it up a lot to keep it out of the way (like now, while writing this) and it looks like I'm pointing all the time:  Hey you, and you, and you!  Yes, you.

What shall we do in the coming weeks and months to keep ourselves engaged and grateful and community-minded?  I am blank on that, at least for now, but glad to see that some of my favorite authors are doing wonderful things.  Like Rob Macfarlane, who is hosting a reading club on his twitter feed, and the book this weekend is the quietly magnificent nature memoir The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.  I spoke of it after reading it in the summer of 2018.  If you haven't yet tracked down a copy, this might be an excellent time to do so.  It's in print, so you can call your local independent bookseller and they will ship it to you, or find it secondhand from a used book seller on Biblio, or from Powell's, which has had to close its doors for now but is still selling online.  Emily Powell's letter about their shut-down says how we all seem to feel about what is happening in our country and around the world, the unthinkable.  History is engulfing us as we speak.  And yet I look out the window and see the first crocuses of spring, opening up, and radiating their essential nature.  Let's do the same and continue to share the good, no matter what.

I'm going to take my old turntable up to the studio and listen to records this afternoon, while I gesso canvases.  Preparing surfaces to paint on is always a joy, for me, and an act of faith.  I anticipate filling the empty canvases with beauty, light, shadow, and life, in the months ahead.  I hope with all my heart that we will weather whatever happens.  Stay safe and be well, friends.             

The blog habit is a hard one to break.  I have tried and failed a few times and apparently here we are once more.  Are blogs over?  It seems so, but it feels akin another question I hear sometimes, namely, Is painting dead?  I answer, if only to myself:  painting never; blogs perhaps, but writing never.  August is nearly done and I have painted and read and written less than I'd hoped to, all month long.  I have, however, read two books that I cannot contain myself about any longer and so here I am to mention them somewhere other than merely in my diary.  Which I do write in, regularly, but which doesn't offer much in the way of reciprocity in the realms of empathy or community.  Instead it just shows me more of myself, which frankly I am sick of at the moment.  Anyway.  The books in question.  Both are from the library sale haul I wrote about a few months ago.  I finally picked them up in turn and thought Read this now. 

The first is Pat Conroy's collection of bookish essays, My Reading Life (Nan A. Talese 2010).  I had never read anything of his before, none of his sagas, no fiction whatsoever, none of his memoirs.  But a good book about books I am always up for and this one sure does shine brightly.  All the essays therein are about books, reading, his family and education, and his writing life, but one of the best deals with a bookshop (p.110):

"...by accident, I had discovered the nerve center of my deliverance in a nondescript bookstore in Atlanta.... Thousands of books roared out my name in joyous welcome when I entered that shop for the first time."

He elaborates (p.111):

"Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.  You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure.  You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years.  If you do them the favor or understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart."

My Reading Life is a delight and almost convinces me to read War and Peace, so fervent is his chapter on repeatedly doing just that.  A sample (p.271):

"On the third reading, I found that spending time between the pages of War and Peace was one of the most compensatory pursuits I had ever discovered."

Another (p.274):

"...this novel will make you dizzy with joyous affection for the people you will meet on these pages."

And again, as if we remain in any doubt (p.281):

"Over the years, many critics have said that War and Peace is not even a novel, and they may be right.  Whatever it is, there has never been anything close to touching it.  It stands alone.  A star in the east.  Magnificent.  One of a kind.... I envy the young man or woman picking up this book for the first time more than any reader in the world."

Okay, okay, I'll get to it!  He out-effuses every other book reviewer or critic I have ever come across.  A noble feat.  I have a recent translation of War and Peace, should I read it this winter?  I want to, and I wonder if I actually will.  I did read another Pat Conroy book, after finishing My Reading Life.  His memoir about teaching black children at a tiny school on an island off South Carolina, The Water is Wide (originally published in 1972, still in print, I read a recent softcover edition).  Pretty rough, pretty fantastic.  Not like anything else I've ever read, it left me wanting much more.    

The second book I feel compelled to mention is Untold Stories by Alan Bennett (Picador 2005) - over 650 pages, the middle section of which is made up of his diaries from 1996-2004.  The next installment (diaries 2005-2015) will be published in the U.K. in late fall and in the usual way of things I cannot wait but will have to, unless I want to read bits online, since his diary entries have been published annually by the London Review of Books.  Apparently it's no good having set aside my reading of James Lees-Milne's diaries, since here he is in Alan Bennett's diaries.  Not James Lees-Milne himself, but his diaries, since Alan Bennett is re-reading them himself and mentions the fact in his own diary.  I am lost in diary-heaven!  The volume of Lees-Milne I left off with is still sitting on my bedside table, by the way, and has been all summer.  Even though it's on the bottom of the pile I won't forsake it much longer, I know.  Meanwhile Alan Bennett unknowingly provides me with the impetus to continue my blog, even if only sporadically, when he writes (p.179):

"Diaries lengthen the days.  To read back over a year when nothing much seems to have happened is often to be nicely surprised.... A diary is undoubtedly a comfort.  I feel better for having it written down, however hard the experience."  (p.179)

I look back in my own diaries and again here in this edited online version, and I must say I cringe sometimes, but at the same time I regret nothing!  A funny paradox.  Perhaps I have reached the stage of life where I'm no longer embarrassed by myself and my literary and artistic attempts and aspirations.  Not certain about that point yet, but there are glimmerings at least.  I don't know if I can bear to leave good books un-talked about, or diary entries unwritten, or paintings unpainted.  By me, I mean - tons of people are doing all that stuff, all over the place.  But I am talking about mustering up the bravery to make my own particular contributions, slowly, over time.  So I muddle along, and my work piles up as it usually does.  The older I get the more I think that these small day-to-day attempts are all that there is - they accumulate and may become something bigger or may not, but all start with the small choice, on any given day:  This happened; I have feelings about it and here they are.  You know?

Back to Alan Bennett, whose voice is so different from Pat Conroy's - reticence versus boldness perhaps, or even more simplistically, British versus American.  The essays in Untold Stories are terrific, and his diaries are compulsively good reading.  I want them to go on forever and dread that they won't.  Here is an example, perfect in my eyes - one entry from 1997 in its entirety.  Perfect purely for itself and also for that early-fall feeling, much in evidence around here, not to mention blackberrying, which I have been doing myself, along the roadsides of our small Maine town.  I'll leave you with this passage, which has everything I love most in prose - the decidedly rural, in contrast with the urban, where Bennett also lives; painterly colors and evocative repetitions of imagery; outward circumstances echoing inward feeling (p.217):

"15 September, Yorkshire.  Blackberrying up Black Bank, taking with me one of Miss Shepherd's old walking sticks.  Huge clusters of berries so that one can gather them almost by the handful.  Never so utterly at peace as when picking blackberries or looking for mushrooms, the spread of Ingleborough and Pennyghent still sunny while black clouds gather over Morecambe.  A flock of sheep comes up the road and won't pass me until I stand in the ditch.  The pretty farm girl who is bringing up the rear seems almost as reluctant to pass as the sheep, just giving me a shy 'Hello' and running on.  A mountain ash tree, weighed down with huge swags of crimson berries, catches the last of the sun.  It's like something by Samuel Palmer; paint it as bright and glowing as it is and it would seem like a vision."