Dark Mountain 3: An Interview with Dmitry Orlov

For the past few weeks, I have been reading through the third Dark Mountain anthology. It is a lovely book, and has a maroon color and tough hardcover binding that makes it look a little like my old high school English anthology ("Voyage to Literature" or whatever it was), which I never returned and discovered years later was full of wonderful stories.

The Dark Mountain book, too, is a pleasure to hold and look through. Pretty much everything I have read so far—the essays by Hannah Lewis and Charlotte Du Cann, the interviews—has been worthwhile, and "Dark Ecology," an essay by Paul Kingsnorth, is on its own worth the price of admission.

Or would have been, had I paid for the book—they sent me a copy for free because it contains some of my work, an interview with the writer Dmitry Orlov, who currently lives in Boston and sat down with me for coffee a few months ago. For the curious, this lecture is probably a good introduction to his work, and his book, Reinventing Collapse, is well worth reading.

Orlov is a formidable man, and our interview is a little dance between my not particularly well-informed good spirits (for whatever reason, I am happy most of the time), and his dark, witty, and more knowledgeable analyses. A sample:

AA: A quote from your book: “We may be hurtling towards environmental doom and, thankfully, never quite get there because of resource depletion...” This might be a mystical question, but is there some sense in which the planet will not allow itself to be destroyed? Do you have any sort of faith in that?

DO: No. We could generate gas by setting spent coal pits on fire. That will take care of the rest of the ecosystem. We could have open pit nuclear reactors using not just the spent fuel, but the nuclear weapons. We could make the whole place radioactive just for the sake of keeping the industrial systems and the military systems going a little longer. There's really no limit to human stupidity. If people set their minds to destroying this planet, I'm sure they'll manage to do it.

Any of my readers who have been interested in the reviews I've published with Dark Mountain would, I think, find the book worth owning. It is a little expensive, especially for people outside the U.K., but it's a beautifully produced volume, one that I'm proud to be part of. Like "Voyage to Literature," I think you won't regret keeping it around.

 

Jefferies, Jensen, and Catastrophe

Dear Readers,

I apologize again for the enormous delay in posting, but at least I have still been writing. I recently published a review on the literature of catastrophe, focusing on Richard Jefferies, the Victorian nature essayist, and a number of much lesser modern writers. I think this one is a pretty good piece of writing.

I also wrote a less satisfactory review of the second volume of Derrick Jensen's Endgame, which was a difficult book for me to engage with. Nonetheless, Jensen's work is worthy of respect, perhaps more than I gave him. Here is the review for the curious.

Also, in case I have readers in India, my essay about Joseph Tainter's book is being republished in an Indian environmental journal called Eternal Bhoomi, copies of which are apparently sent to various schools there. The dominion of English in India is a troubling phenomenon, but one that I have no right to criticize, considering my skills in Hindi and Kannada. In any case, if my writing finds an audience in my home country, I can only be grateful.

I think I have been writing a little too much about impending doom. It's probably time for something else. I might review Catherine Carswell's fascinating book about D. H. Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, or the wonderful poetry of Thomas McGrath. The abyss, after all, is not going anywhere. In the meantime, my mysterious audience, be well,

Akshay

Fantasy Sports and the Destruction of Awe

Sports have been a big part of my life ever since I came to America. I spent afternoons playing basketball and football with my friends, of course, but there was an exponentially larger amount of time spent watching games, checking scores in the paper, and listening to chatter on the radio—the whole business of following professional sports. I have been thinking lately about how my personality was shaped by this investment, and what an enormous role sports continue to play in the lives of most Americans, particularly men. Also, I want to tell you about why I hate fantasy sports.

I was eight when I arrived here. Within a few years, I became devoted to following professional basketball, football, and baseball in a way that I had never followed cricket in India. In America, I watched as many games on TV as I could, and on most nights I tucked a radio beneath my pillow and struggled to stay awake until the end of the Orioles or Bullets game (they are the Wizards now, and as uncompetitive as ever).

The next morning, I would open the sports section and read almost all of it. Obsessions began to coalesce around certain teams, players, and races. One year, I became deeply invested in the duel between David Robinson and Shaquille O'Neal for the regular season scoring title. I was rooting for Robinson—the quiet and classy player—and I remember being elated when he scored 71 points on the last game of the season to secure the title.

I shunned the obvious stars like O'Neal and Michael Jordan. Instead, I followed second-tier notables who I decided were in some way morally superior to the stars. Tim Brown and the Raiders were one mysterious obsession. For several years, I desperately rooted for the Trailblazers to beat the Bulls in the Finals, which never happened. I fixated on Terry Porter, the Blazers' point guard, who had a strangely-shaped head and a fantastically accurate three-point shot. He hustled; he was a good ball distributor, calm and never showy; he never argued with refs or got into fights. He played the game, I decided, the right way. All of my favorites were finesse players, soft-spoken, who usually fell in the end to more determined and (I thought) ruthless teams.

Sometimes, when I think about the time and emotion I spent on sports, I feel like I must have wasted half of my childhood. Lately, though, it occurred to me that something valuable happened during those years, that I was building a personality and a place in the world using the tools at my disposal. Already, in my choice of idols, I was feeling out the kinds of success that, at my best, I would be capable of. Other children, of course, chose differently. Locked up in the bubble of modern childhood, we all found heroes to act for us—with us, it sometimes seemed—as a way of developing an identity and a sense of consequence.

“Recognize the natural power in the man, as men did in the past,” D.H. Lawrence writes in Apocalypse, “and give it homage, then there is a great joy, an uplifting, and a potency passes from the powerful to the less powerful.” On dozens of nights, this energy passed into me, both joy and despair, through a television or a crackly radio, with an intensity that has rarely been equaled in later life.

When Jordan pushed Bryon Russell at the end of Game 6 to get off his jumpshot, and no foul was called, I learned something about the privileges of the powerful. When Jeffrey Maier interfered with what should have been a long Yankees fly-out, I learned something too. The play was called a home run, and probably cost the Orioles the game. I was in a rage for days, but some knowledge started to move inside me about how nothing in the real world was going to live up to my theoretical ideals of purity. Obviously, these lessons were coming through the world as well, but in sports, as on stage, the inessential drops away, and how much more memorable the action becomes! Certain games and plays become talismans for a lifetime: instructive, illustrative, sometimes beautiful.


As I got older, my sports fixation weakened. I left my hometown; I became more able to influence the circumstances of my life; and I stopped forming as many profound relationships with players and teams. Increased free agent movement was maybe part of it. I also no longer had as much time to devote to following sports. With less information, the moral qualities I attributed to these players felt more like fantasies, unsupported by their behavior on the field or court. So I went in search of other heroes.

Sports were always there, though, in the background. I still like the sense of community they can create with very different kinds of people. A more authentic foundation for community would probably be better, but, well, as in childhood, you take what you can get. A regional identity based on sports is better than none at all. Now that I've been in Boston for a while, I even have the stability and information to form new identifications. Tim Wakefield is a hero of mine (recently forced into retirement by the increasingly soulless Red Sox); so is Ray Allen (still playing with the Celtics, also increasingly soulless, as demonstrated by the awful Kendrick Perkins trade).

Even though I still care about a few teams, I've never returned to the kind of attachments I had when I was a child. A few years go, though, at the request of friends, I joined some fantasy leagues and started to follow baseball and football more closely again. This is not uncommon; as far as I can tell fantasy sports are becoming an American obsession. Some people I know spend as large a portion of their free time following sports as I once did. The spirit, though, is very different.

I suppose most people know how fantasy works by now: you choose players from real teams to form an imaginary one. The complex network of interrelationships in every game is reduced, by league consent, to a handful of tracked categories. The players' performance in the real world then generates points for you, and you compete against other players in the league based on this statistical ground.

This is fun at first. People watch games with the computer in front of them; the stats update every few minutes. Very soon, though, as anyone who has participated in fantasy knows, it starts to change how you interact with the players and the sport. The game begins to appear through a lens of numbers. You start to root for meaningless things (late touchdowns, inconsequential yardage), watch games in which you have no interest, and weaken emotional attachments to players as you cut and bench them. There is no such thing as an honorable defeat or a shameful victory in fantasy football, only larger or smaller numerical margins. It is roughly analogous to reading a book to count how many times the word "the" appears, or counting the number of B flats in a symphony, and then comparing your total to an opponent. You destroy the point of the exercise for the sake of ending up with a number.

Why are so many people participating in something that works to drain the emotional significance out of sports? It took me some time to think of an explanation, and here it is. I think this is actually the whole point of the endeavor.

Spectators are devoting a great deal of their lives to following the ups and downs of a group of people who are, for the most part, stronger, more graceful, better paid, and more respected than they are. What relationship can one have with such idols? Well, you can bow before them. This is what children do. I think this is healthy, especially if the heroes are genuine. David Foster Wallace's beautiful essay, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," is an example of how this can occur as an adult. The feeling of awe is more sophisticated, more analytical, but it is awe all the same—it is a species of what I felt as a child. And it is the only way you can justify spending any part of your life watching strangers play games. The same applies to being a spectator of an art form. If you aren't looking for gods, and willing to pay homage when you find them, you are wasting your time.

To love a hero requires humility, though—the willingness to kneel, the consciousness of one's own inferiority. In a paradoxical way, it requires strength. The problem is that most Americans, especially American men, find kneeling an impossible posture to maintain. They are drawn to the spectacle of power on a grand stage, but are uncomfortable with worship or even sincere admiration, which acknowledges that someone is, in a profound and genuine way, better than you. At the one football game I went to recently, I was amazed at how much abuse was heaped on the players the instant a few plays went wrong, only to change back to cheering when things went well (all of this noise blurs together on television).

This crowd, I realized, resented its own idols. They were uncomfortable with their own adulation. All across our society, you can observe people acting out this anxiety. Listen to sports radio and you will hear an endless parade of know-it-alls who put themselves in the position of the general manager, suggesting trades and line-up changes. On television, the commentary is increasingly devoted to ranking plays and players, which is not the same as acknowledging superiority. To arrange things in an order of merit is a way to assuage a sense of insecurity through control—to place yourself above the people under consideration and move them around like pieces on a board. I know this because I used to enjoy making such lists.

This is the appeal of fantasy sports: to become a listmaker. Then you can push around what were once heroes and reduce them to sets of numbers, which are then used to achieve meaningless victories over your peers. It is the epitome of what Stephen Harrod Buhner calls the statistical mentality, which of course invaded real sports before the virtual ones. The hero of Moneyball, for example, is a manager who makes moves and trades based on computer-based statistical analysis, although it is unclear why this is heroic rather than merely clever (the movie insists on the former).

The players on such a team become irrelevant; all of the prestige goes to the coordinator and his computer sidekick, which is exactly the appeal of fantasy football. This is part of a larger trend of withdrawing admiration from the people directly involved in an activity—those who actually do things and make things—and transferring it to their coordinators. The problem is that there can be no beauty or courage or grace in coordination. To focus on such activity is to distance yourself from everything that makes a performance meaningful.

You do achieve something by creating this distance, though; you abandon the possibility of awe and instead experience a sense of phony power. One of the scenarios I've seen in several new ads is an ordinary fan berating a player for his poor fantasy performance.

A quote from Goethe: “The only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love.” Randall Jarrell added a perceptive modification: “But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves.”

Jarrell, as an American, knew that something needed to be added to the quote. It is the danger in our otherwise noble egalitarian rhetoric: because power flows in both directions, anything we refuse to revere eventually becomes less worthy of reverence, and finally not even worth paying attention to.

Maybe this seems like too much weight to put on sports. Certainly we should all spend less time sitting on our asses. Still, when I think back to the intensity of my childhood memories, I feel like there was something of value in the way I cared and followed and obsessed. Even today, I can still be stunned into admiration by what human beings are capable of. Some of the most inspiring tennis I have ever seen has been played in the last few years; the football playoffs from this past year were incredible too. These are some of our society's few collectively shared pleasures, and in the right spirit they are genuine ones. Shut off the computer; try not to ruin it.

Some happy developments

Hello, dear neglected readers. It's been too long and I will post something soon; the world is still full of good books. But, in the meantime, several pieces of my writing have appeared around the Web.

First, Paul Kingsnorth, whose collection of poetry I reviewed a few months ago, discovered this blog and generously invited me to be part of the Dark Mountain project. They are re-publishing some of my old reviews -- starting with this one -- and then I'll be writing new essays for them as well.

Also, a surprise: Energy Bulletin reposted that article. I wasn't a regular reader of this website, but there's very often interesting things there, and I recommend the site to anyone who doesn't find my recent gloomy preoccupations entirely baffling.

Next, a friend at htmlgiant asked me to write a review for them. I saw Stanislaw Lem on the list, a writer I loved in college, and requested The Cyberiad. It was just as enjoyable as the other books of his I've read, and unlike many other science fiction writers, contained little outdated techno-messianism, just a deep feeling for the limits of human understanding as well as a rollicking sense of humor. Here is the review. Htmlgiant publishes its reviews anonymously, to facilitate honesty/nastiness, but I am quite happy to identify it as my own work.

Finally, I secure my livelihood partly through the generosity of the literary magazine Ploughshares, where I work to put together the issues and often write for the blog. So far, I've reviewed a recent Tolstoy biography, the poetry of A. S. J. Tessimond (who I discovered through the wonderful blog First Known When Lost), and the Japanese writer Kanoko Okamoto. I also contributed to or assembled our lists on books for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the Winter.

That's all for now. Some good books that I've read recently, but probably won't write about, include Joe Bageant's two books, In Zanesville, by Jo Ann Beard, and the Blackmores' excellent translations of Victor Hugo's poetry.

The Somerville Poetry Project

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts, a little town next to Cambridge. My wife and I moved here mainly because the rents were low, but over the last several years we've developed a love for the place, from our plot in the community garden to the Chinese takeout place down the street. About a year ago, a friend told me that Somerville gave grants to writers. I don't normally try for such things, but I sent in a few pieces and several months later they told me I had gotten one. The Council's only requirement was that I complete a community benefit project. A meeting with some other grant recipients to work on a project together predictably didn't amount to anything, so I came up with an idea on my own. In case the concept is useful to anyone else, here it is.

For most of my life, I was indifferent to poetry. I liked words in pretty much every other form, but something terrible seemed to happen when you spaced them out. In ninth grade, I remember our English teacher gave us a poem -- I think it was by Robert Frost -- about (I thought) snakes slithering down a hill. The teacher asked what the poem was about; before I could chime in with my snake answer, someone said it was about the sun coming out and melting the snow.

This was apparently the correct answer. I read the poem again; it still seemed to be about snakes. I decided then that I was going to keep my mouth shut about poetry, because it was sneaky stuff with no purpose other than making the uninitiated demonstrate their stupidity.

I held to this opinion through most of school. One exception: I remember being shaken by "Dulce et Decorum Est," because we hadn't ever read it in class; the poem just appeared on a test. I read it twice, and remember sitting stunned and feeling the words work inside me, until eventually I roused myself and went about labeling the rhyme scheme and stresses. Completing the test defused my interest; I didn't seek out any other Wilfred Owen. The only pleasure I got from poetry in those years was the sense that I had extracted the meaning that the author had, for mysterious reasons, decided to hide.

Eventually, though, I discovered that the actual problem was that I had only been reading poems in school. Poems don't offer themselves to people approaching with weapons in hand; they leave a husk of dry meaning behind and then disappear down some burrow. It took several years out of school for me to approach poetry unarmed, with no papers to be written, when I made the attempt for new reasons: I wanted to feel cultured and to impress women. The muses considered these reasonably worthy motives and consented to brush against my hand.

A few years ago, when I was reading a lot of Milosz, I discovered his poetry anthology, A Book of Luminous Things. Certain poems in that book began to affect me in a profound way, and I finally understood why verse, until recently, had been acknowledged by almost all writers as the supreme literary art. Poets I had read in school with almost total incomprehension, like Hopkins, began to make a great deal of sense. And it seemed a shame that so many people who love to read never even consider sitting down with a book of poetry.

Some of this is simply taste, but some of it, I am convinced, is that the art form remains freighted with anxiety from school, where students are given extremely difficult work much too soon and then forced to decipher and analyze it.

So: I thought, why not present some great poems in a tension-free environment? My idea was to make booklets of some of my favorite poems in the public domain and leave them around Somerville. I typeset the poems, printed the pages, bound the booklets with waxed thread, and left them where people would find them: coffee shops, bus stops, libraries, and assorted park benches.

Inside each book are several blank pages, with a note encouraging the reader to write a few words in the space and leave the book elsewhere: a poem, or song lyrics, or any words that seem worth writing down to them. Frankly, I expect a few pages will be filled with obscenities, but that's fine. Hopefully, the books will make the rounds for a few months before wear and tear, weather, and carelessness remove most of them from circulation.

I'm not sure yet if it's been a success. All I know is that the booklets aren't where I left them anymore. A few local outlets were nice enough to write about the project. It was, in any case, a pleasure to spend some time re-reading favorite poets, and discovering a few new ones, and to think about what kinds of poems could communicate with a large group of people.

The arts have always felt threatened in America, and this is especially true in hard times. Poems don't feed anyone or help pay the rent. They do, however, tell us something about how hunger and poverty have been borne in the past, and borne with dignity. The dignity does not lie in the poet prescribing certain actions or responses -- equally great poems can call forth anger and calm, stoicism and despair. The dignity is in the language, the sense that the sorrow has been shaped and transformed.

There is comfort, too, in joining our individual fate with countless others. To quote Robinson Jeffers, "prose can discuss matters of the moment; poetry must deal with things that a reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved by." In poems, I feel how little humanity has changed, and how much I can share with a Tamil woman in the twelfth century or a Chinese bureaucrat in the eighth. This sense of fellowship is both a steadying and enlarging influence, and an antidote to the sense of meaninglessness produced by too much throwaway culture.

I remember a passage in Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, where the narrator describes the teaching of literature as trying to sell a real diamond on the street for a quarter. Almost everyone will pass it by, because who among the uninitiated could believe that the diamond was genuine, and that a mind and spirit could be enlivened for a lifetime because of a few old pages and some quiet attention?

Well, my thought is that you stop trying so hard to sell the diamond. Just leave it somewhere, and hope that a few people might pick it up and turn it around in their hands. If anyone would like a copy of the PDF, feel free to send an e-mail to somervillepoetry@gmail.com. I tried to have a mix of the famous and fairly obscure, so hopefully there's something for everyone.

Kidland and Other Poems, by Paul Kingsnorth

A few months ago, I discovered the work of the Dark Mountain Project. It is a collective of artists/scientists/environmentalists with some shared premises: that our society is not actually serious about solving its environmental problems; that we are driving towards a wall of firm ecological limits; that, even with the parts falling off our industrial machine, we will fairly soon hit this wall with a greater or lesser degree of violence; and that any environmental vision that imagines our Western lifestyles continuing unchanged with a few solar panels and hybrid cars is an unworkable fantasy.

The sooner we abandon this fantasy, they argue, and acknowledge the coming cataclysms, the sooner we can start talking about—not solutions, but other visions of society and culture that might work in a world of severe and chaotic weather, depleted soil and oceans, and very little remaining oil.

There are statistics to defend these claims, but if you haven't felt, emotionally, the bankruptcy and destructiveness of the modern industrial project, I doubt they will convince you. For whatever reason, I am already at that place. When I read the Dark Mountain manifesto—and I am not usually the sort of person to read manifestos—I felt page after page the ring of absolute truth.

I still have to get copies of the Project's two anthologies, but I read some of Paul Kingsnorth's contributions—he is one of the Project's founders—and felt a deep affinity. His favorite poets are also mine—Edward Thomas, John Clare, Robinson Jeffers—and he has a belief, which I hope is not delusional, that the arts have something to contribute in changing the consciousness of people who are losing faith, with good reason, in industrial society and its promises.

Kingsnorth has mainly written journalism up to this point, but from his website he seems to see himself fundamentally as a poet. Kidland is his first book of verse. It may seem strange to see a cyclone on the horizon and emerge from your shelter to present the storm with some poems—but, well, the world needs poems along with guides on organic farming; they make life worthwhile whether disaster is a year or centuries away. And in any case disaster is always approaching.

The question remains, though: what kind of art does one make for a society that has no long-term future? If you believe this is a silly question, and aren't convinced about any of the premises I mentioned in the first paragraph, don't bother with Kingsnorth, because his work won't make sense to you. If any of them struck a chord, though, I think his poems will be worth your time.

I read Kidland with pleasure and with disappointment. It is an extremely uneven book: too eager to make points, heavy-handed, and now and then very beautiful. It reminded me of a Robert Musil quote that you can't feel profoundly out of step with your society without doing some damage to yourself. Rage and a sense of disconnectedness from one's potential audience—and from humanity as a whole—injure as much as they inspire. Declining civilizations often cripple their own genuine talents in this way; this is part of how the disease wards off the possibility of healing.

Let me give an example. Here is an excerpt from “Kidland,” the long narrative poem at the center of the book. It is about a man who has set up camp in a forest in Northern England—a “utopia of one,” in his words—because of disgust with the ecological destructiveness of his species. There is also a young city woman, Sarah, who stumbles upon his camp, and a farmer who is abandoning his land in the area. The quote below is from the man in the woods, who is speaking to Sarah:

Where is the urgency? he was saying. Can you not see
how things are? The great forests are burning, the great
   forests
of the world. The breath of your lungs is taken from you
and what do you do? There are a million jewelled creatures
that you will never see, that the world
will never see again. There is poison in the water
and in the air and in every cell that you are made of.
Poison: our gift to the world. Do you ever wonder
What the place would be like without us? Free
I would say, to breathe again.

Every one of these thoughts can find a home in my mind, but when I read these lines they are just words. The music is missing—that something that carries the words into the deeper consciousness and makes them larger than the ideas they contain. “Talk / is cheap,” Sarah responds, a fitting response. This long, ambitious poem then goes on to feature a heavily allegorical rape and a sudden death. As with some of Jeffers' narrative poems with their extremes of emotion and violence, for anyone expecting realism the story can feel a bit ludicrous.

I think it is telling that Kingsnorth's most ambitious poems are, to my mind, the least successful, while the small lyrics are often wonderful. Here, for example, is the poem that follows “Kidland.”

and the trees

and the trees on the hill stand waiting to reclaim the field
and the field lies yellow and cut beneath the sky
and the sky hangs grey above the grassline
and the grasses quieten at the approach of night
and night comes and I rise and move towards the trees
I hope they will have their way soon
and I tell them so

Let that sit for a second. Try to read it slowly if you can; I know the monitor makes it difficult. The thought is the same—the sense of sympathy with the non-human world, the question of what it would be like if we were gone, or at least left things alone. Here, though, the lines sing. They are coming from a deeper place, as they do in another poem about trees, “A chaos of you,” which ends with this description: “They dream, rooted, of the hills beyond their kerbside / and in the autumn, unexpected but meant for the moment, / their dreams are carried away to be born.”

Robinson Jeffers wrote something interesting once in a letter to Mark Van Doren about Van Doren's now-forgotten poetry: “I have a criticism,” he wrote, “and no doubt from me it will surprise you. I think you are too (vulgar word) pessimistic...Civilization is bitter to the singer, it is bitter in that essential way to everyone, but I think we can remember that there was a time before it and will be a time after it, and can keep an important part of us timeless enough to be uncivilized.”

Jeffers knew that he was handling material that was difficult to make poetry out of—but he was rooted in the natural world and also in a historical sense of the ebb and flow of civilizations. He often seems to be flying at an enormous height where he calmly sees the wreck of our modern civilization just a few miles down from the ruins of Rome and Kahokia and Palenque, along with the mountains and rivers that have survived them all. The fact that his society was in decline did not strike him as an unprecedented calamity but part of a longstanding historical pattern.

Kingsnorth's best poems have some of this timelessness, but a great deal of his work is instead filled with an entirely understandable disgust, not just with the world modern man has created, but with humanity itself. There is almost a longing for apocalypse. In several poems, a character stands in for Man and Kingsnorth writes about fundamental flaws in his character: too much greed, too little foresight. Again, one can sympathize, but the attitude makes the poetry captive to a few ideas: “I give you what you ask for, / you ask for more. I leave you / alone in the place, you wreck it all,” says the creator figure in “Changeling.”

Disgust, I think, is hard to make poetry out of—you say temporary things when you are disgusted, and in such moods it is best not to try to make points about humanity. In one of my favorite poems, “Parable of the tares,” though, the disgust deepens into a kind of acceptance, and Kingsnorth captures the fury and distraction of the masses living within a disintegrating system—it is a worthy successor to “Rearmament,” the Jeffers poem that gave the Dark Mountain project its name.

Nothing is permanent, everything pulling apart, cascading
away from the highest peaks. Vibrate the strings of this
   once green world
one final time, make merry, go with laughter
and with fury, almost-masters.

“Almost-masters”—there, I think, is the hand of a real poet. If there are only a few such moments in this book, that's more than most of us ever manage.

I wrote earlier that declining civilizations find ways to resist their own renewal, not only by how they treat artists but also by stunting and distracting the public that might encounter the ideas these thinkers produce. The machinery of distraction, though, requires resources, and eventually it comes apart along with everything else. As the official narrative frays, once marginal ideas begin to get a hearing. Many of these ideas will be crazy; the Dark Mountain Project and Kingsnorth are not. They strike me as some of the few people looking at our likely future with open eyes. As a poet, Kingsnorth is still finding his voice, but he is walking down a genuine path and has my gratitude.

Man and the Natural World, by Keith Thomas

Most people in today's society are profoundly helpless. Try to imagine what you would do if the water stopped coming out of the faucets and filling up your toilet tank. As America and perhaps the global industrial system begin to come apart at the seams, one stops taking such services for granted. One also realizes that potable water comes out of faucets every so often in human history, but then also disappears, usually for centuries at a time.

I would give you some of the specifics, but unfortunately I have been realizing lately that I am a historical illiterate. Virtually everything I know about the human past has been picked up from historical novels, movies, or asides in books about other things. I haven't read a work of pure history in a long time, and it's only recently -- as I realized that modern industrial civilization is just as susceptible to collapse as the ones that have come before it -- that I began to feel the weight of my ignorance.

Which brings us to Man and the Natural World. I found it for a dollar at an outdoor book market and was attracted to the title. Thomas describes changing attitudes to the natural world in early modern Britain, a time period that he sets at approximately 1500-1800. A great many things happened in the relationship between Britons and their natural environment during this period: enclosures of common land, increasing urbanization, the birth of scientific taxonomy, early attempts at conservation, and many others. I read a few pages, saw that Thomas was an engaging writer, and decided to take a first step towards dispelling my massive ignorance of the human past.

Man and the Natural World, as a study of attitudes, contains references to an extraordinary variety of sources, everything from poetry to pamphlets to popular sermons to the log books of merchants and aristocrats. Thomas realizes that to convince people that a certain belief was actually widely held, he must accumulate a fair amount of evidence, and the book often consists of fascinating lists of information. Here is an example from the chapter on botanical nomenclature:

Anyone who wants evidence of the way in which polite sensibilities have changed with the centuries need only consider the briskly anatomical nature of this now suppressed terminology, for in the seventeenth-century countryside there grew black maidenhair, naked ladies, pissabed (or shitabed), mares fart and priest's ballocks. In the herb garden could be found horse pistle and prick madam; while in the orchard the open arse (or medlar) was a popular fruit. Even the black beetle was twitch-ballock and the long-tailed titmouse bum-towel. Many of today's more fanciful flower names—lords and ladies, for example—are deliberate inventions of the nineteenth century, designed to obliterate some unacceptable indecency of the past...

If this passage bores you, don't bother with Man and the Natural World. If you are delighted and a little sad that the pissabed is now called a dandelion, this book will give you endless pleasure. My favorite country-name for a plant was "welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk," now commonly known, apparently, as the houseleek, and still associated with virility in some quarters.

Man and the Natural World is more than a wonderful assemblage; Thomas's arguments slowly emerge out of these progressions of lists, and his points are complicated and sometimes disturbing. For example, one might simply long for earlier times when local people knew plants and their functions. As Thomas demonstrates, though, these names only existed for plants with some obvious human utility, and placed man's needs at the center of their world (pissabed describes the diuretic quality of the plant's roots, whereas the more modern word dandelion apparently comes from the "lion's tooth" shape of the leaves themselves.) Early naturalists who came to rural people to help identify plants soon reached the limits of their knowledge; rural curiosity did not extend to even common plants that had no known human function, so the naturalists had to go around naming and classifying these plants themselves.

"By eroding the old vocabulary, with its rich symbolic overtones," Thomas writes, "the naturalists had completed their onslaught on the long established notion that nature was responsive to human affairs." This may seem like a simple impoverishment, but it also led to the modern attitude, which I am certainly in sympathy with, that parts of the natural world deserve to be left alone whether people can get anything out of them or not.

Another fascinating chapter is on the human attitude towards animals. Thomas shows how urbanization and the keeping of pets led to a sentimental attitude towards animals (he has a list of animal names over time, showing how they got progressively closer to human ones) which then led, often, to the revulsion of city-dwellers towards country people who made a living off these animals. And the country people were, indeed, enormously cruel. Some of the old means of producing tastier meat, including nailing live ducks to a floor by their webs, are as brutal as anything one can find in a modern industrial plant, albeit on a smaller scale.

So which attitude is "correct" -- that of the practical countryman, or the city sentimentalist who refuses to give up the meat and services which these animals provide, but instead, like Gilbert White, simply plants a screen of trees to protect himself from the sight of the slaughterhouse? And to what extent is vegetarianism -- which is my personal choice -- even possible without the global supply lines that provide people in cold climates with a continuous supply of varied food?

These questions arise constantly while reading this book, because Thomas convincingly shows how most modern environmental attitudes actually arose out an increasing estrangement from nature, which then produced a longing for the world that was being destroyed, often without a concomitant willingness to give up the fruits of that destruction.

...by the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of people had come to find man's ascendancy over nature increasingly abhorrent to their moral and aesthetic sensibilities. This was the human dilemma: how to reconcile the physical requirements of civilization with the new feelings and values which that same civilization had generated...The growth of towns had led to a new longing for the countryside. The progress of cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued nature. The new-found security from wild animals had generated in increasing concern to protect birds and preserve wild creatures in their natural state. Economic independence of animal power and urban isolation from animal farming had nourished emotional attitudes which were hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the exploitation of animals by which most people lived.

Obviously, none of these contradictions have gone away. It is generally comfortable city-dwellers that call for environmental protection, are quite convinced about climate change, and then take flights across the country to enjoy the scenery of their favorite national park, all while depending on massive quantities of resources to maintain every aspect of their lifestyle.

And yet some of the attitudes that such people have developed, even tinged with hypocrisy and a lack of practical knowledge, seem to have enduring value: a respect for nature outside its utility to man, compassion for the lives and suffering of animals, and an aesthetic feeling for wild as well as managed nature. As D. H. Lawrence once wrote, the road that modern man has been struggling along has been filled with waste and mistakes, and we may end up going back to where we came from, but it has also been a real journey; there has been some development along with the destruction. When we begin to return to a pre-industrial pattern of life -- I am starting to suspect this will happen forcibly with the end of cheap oil, and probably entail a great deal of suffering -- hopefully there are some lessons that can be saved from the path that we have been on. We also have lots of things to re-learn from past societies, and books like Thomas's (his other classic work about the same early modern period is called Religion and the Decline of Magic) can help illuminate the road that led to the modern world, which we may soon be walking back down.

Brooke Allen and Paul Dry Books

A review I wrote of a good book on Syria (before the revolution) called The Other Side of the Mirror was just published at Ploughshares, and is available online. My reviews are also sometimes published on the Ploughshares blog.

I picked up the book because I've read some of Brooke Allen's essays before at The New Criterion and have always enjoyed her work; here, as an example, is her fine piece on Henry Green.

I can also recommend the publisher: Paul Dry Books. A friend gave me one of their books many years ago, and I've enjoyed exploring their list: a combination of good new books, like Allen's, and worthy re-issues like Walter de la Mare and Sister Miriam Joseph and some fine young adult novels. I recommend poking around; there aren't many small publishers left with an eye for books like these, and they deserve your support.

Notes on Democracy, by H. L. Mencken

I've never been more depressed about America or its prospects than I am right now. During the Bush years, I thought, perhaps stupidly, that everything would return to a tolerable state after he left. Obama's speeches on the campaign trail even made me hope for something better than a return to normalcy. Now it looks like the most aberrant and brutal policies of the Bush era are simply going to continue as part of a bipartisan consensus. And looking at the current field, there is no obvious hope of things getting better, only the very real possibility of them getting much worse.

So: what can a person do, assuming that you have the luxury to care about something beyond paying your bills and getting through the day?

1) You can get involved in fixing a broken system: lobbying for changes in the political process, supporting or creating a viable third party, maybe even running for something yourself.

2) Like Thoreau (before his John Brown days), you can try to reformulate your sense of idealism to function entirely outside the existing systems of power. Your program will then involve only yourself and maybe a few other people. Also, it'll probably require some surplus income or a wealthy friend. Individual civil disobedience falls somewhere between the first and second categories.

3) You can take a historical perspective, realize that things have never been all that much better or worse in America, and then have a good laugh at the endless procession of smooth-talking frauds and pious idiots that this country manages to produce.

Most people move up and down this list, but each has a natural resting place. If the third option has any appeal for you, and to a lesser extent the second, H. L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy might prove sympathetic. If the first, prepare to be quite brilliantly mocked:

...there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins. My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to virgins.

You have to be in a very particular mood to enjoy Mencken. The publisher kindly sent me this book several years ago, and it took increasing quantities of dismay to finally, a few weeks ago, arrive at it. Mencken is an entertaining writer but not, for me, an endearing one. Americans are naturally idealistic, which is part of the reason we are so easily fooled, and have such a hard time recognizing when we're working on ruining our own lives while actively destroying those of others.

When there is so little to be patriotic about, though, and you are both completely fed up and have no idea how to improve the situation, Mencken can provide a kind of desperate consolation. As he writes in the concluding section of the Notes, "I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology."



This book was published in 1926, when increasing concentration of wealth, virtually unregulated markets, and runaway war spending were preparing the way for a massive collapse. Manning the helm at the period were, among others, an inarticulate idiot, whose English was "so bad a kind of grandeur creeps into it," and a pseudo-idealist who reduced "all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones," and whose avowed principles were quickly compromised in the face of any resistance.

Notes on Democracy is not particularly cohesive; it is basically a series of witty political pamphlets with titles like "The Eternal Mob" and "The Occasional Exception." For some reason, it fell out of print for decades, and this useful re-issue features an excellent introduction by Marion Elizabeth Rogers, as well as extensive footnoting of Mencken's references to scandals of the day and America's political past. Most of these footnotes are useful; some are a little insulting—I wonder what Mencken would make of the fact that Bach and Freud as well as batches of fairly common foreign phrases, from Reich to vox populi, now apparently need to be identified.

Here are some of Mencken's arguments: most people are stupid and this is simply a genetic necessity. Forget education or any other system of improvement; these people are dumb because they have simply absorbed as much as they are constitutionally able to absorb. He expresses admiration for eugenicists like Francis Galton, and incredulity that anyone could think that folk music or folktales actually rose out of the common mass. He supports the theory that some great, now forgotten individual artists created this work, with the folk acting only as "referees, choosing which should survive," although he fails to explain why the idiotic folk would have such unerringly good taste.

(Note: I find this side of Mencken repellent, but there is enough that is worthwhile that I suggest simply getting past it. Most of this stuff is at the beginning of the book.)

Now, intelligent and honorable politicians, Mencken argues, when faced with this mob, either don't last long or quickly become frauds, consciously or unconsciously. Then the exploitation of the office begins. "The business of victimizing [this public]," Mencken writes, "is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art. It has its masters and it has its quacks ... The adept practitioner is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then, raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to it."

As you can see, there is both wit and insight here, both about why the bums do eventually get thrown out, and then inevitably thrown back in, with renewed hope. Again, Mencken suggests no solutions, but it is at least something to hear the truth spoken. Mencken once wrote, incidentally, that his only objective was only to make "life measurably more bearable for the civilized minority in America."

So what, you might ask, is Mencken's standard for "civilized"? He is not, it turns out, devoid of idealism; he simply believes—like Carlin, incidentally—that honor does not exist in groups, which inevitably work to destroy it, but only in isolated free individuals. In Europe, he says the aristocrats might once have filled this role; in America, their absence is filled, in the public mind at least, by the plutocracy. "[This plutocracy] is, of course, something quite different," he writes. "It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage—above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob only yesterday—and from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities."

He fails to identify the historical aristocracy that actually possessed these noble qualities, but he at least makes it clear what he admires. So, what should the few men and women in America that fit this description do for their country? Mencken's answer: leave it alone, and fight to make sure it does the same to you.

Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness.

It is partially Mencken's fault that this passage is all too easy to applaud. How else could someone who endlessly castigated America become such a celebrated figure in his time? Most people like to think of themselves as surrounded by inferiors, and this kind of writing lends itself to self-congratulation of the stupidest kind. But Mencken is constantly slipping out of such traps if you read him carefully; he has a complicated mind, and this is why his writing is still worth reading for more than turns of phrase. The capacity for doing without—there is a line that, say, Ayn Rand, would never have written. She would also never have mentioned public duty or any kind of obligation, to the state or otherwise. But Mencken's brilliant and racy style makes it very easy to read fast and miss the harder lessons, so the laughter his insults produce often settles into arrogant complacency.

This is finally, though, the reader's fault and not the writer's. And it is good to know that Mencken, in his own life, was capable of appreciating real artists and true statesmen, and seems to have been a man of both courage and (occasional) open-mindedness. I still find him, as I always have, a difficult writer to like. I admire people whose instinct, in the absence of definite evidence, is to believe before they disbelieve, who are willing to be fooled and disappointed repeatedly before they reject anything that might be worthwhile. Mencken's constant shoveling out of bullshit means he often loses his eye for gold. Notes from Democracy is filled, for example, with mockery of chiropractors and osteopaths, both of whom have long since proved—in the face of immense opposition—that they are not in fact quacks.

Something else bothers me too. Adjusting for comic exaggeration, many of the things Mencken says have the absolute ring of truth, but I feel like they should be said with sadness or rage instead of relish, because no one suffers more from the current arrangements in America than the masses on whom Mencken heaps so much contempt. It is also hard, today, to be satisfied with Mencken's vision of lonely and honorable individualism. Our most pressing problems, particularly the ecological ones, have demonstrated that we are an interconnected community whose private actions affect each other. Simply removing yourself from the contagion doesn't seem like a real solution.

But, well, maybe there is no solution, and that's that. This could be something, at long last, to consider, and Notes on Democracy makes the point too incisively to be ignored. If you have arrived at the mood I mentioned earlier, and need some desperate consolation, I recommend seeking it out.

Last Words, by George Carlin

I was beginning to realize something: I had a powerful new tool for my tool kit, though I've only made sparing use of it since. Getting laughs all the time wasn't my only responsibility. My responsibility was to engage the audience's mind for ninety minutes. Get laughs, of course, dazzle them from time to time with form, craft, verbal fireworks, but above all engage their minds.
                                        —George Carlin, Last Words

As I've written before, I think stand-up comedy is one of the few remaining vibrant art forms in this country. There are, as always, only two or three great talents, but there's a whole constellation of worthwhile secondary talents, a real sense of excitement about the medium, and a sizable and engaged audience.

Part of the energy comes from diversity: stand-up comedians are racially, economically, and philosophically much more varied than the usual creators of today's "fine" arts. Also, since good comedians work in many different registers—jumping, like Shakespeare, from farts and boners to reflections on death—they also attract a very mixed audience. Louis CK will riff at great length about masturbation, and then include a bit—maybe based on Peter Singer's ideas, maybe just his own thoughts—about how we make needless purchases when we know, on some level, that the same amount of money could probably save someone's life in another country. George Carlin could win over a crowd with an accomplished but fairly safe routine on airline jargon, and then hit them with a subtle and disturbing monologue on the fraudulence of most modern environmentalism (“The Planet Is Fine”).

While I was watching Carlin's routine on the American Dream, I remember thinking—Jesus, people are paying to hear this! These are some of the most honest and destructive reflections that anyone is going to hear on the state of this country, things a few wise writers have been saying for years (although maybe not so sharply) to a tiny and shrinking audience—and here this comedian has an auditorium of thousands, and millions on HBO and now on YouTube, willing to listen to him say them. And they're enjoying it! It's possible they ignored the disturbing parts and went home chuckling about something else, but the words still reached them. The seeds are in their head now.

I noticed, though, that some of Carlin's most profound routines, like the two I've mentioned, work better as transcripts. The ideas are coming too fast to digest in the monologue—they need the time and space that the page grants them. Nothing fundamental is lost when you read the words instead of hearing him deliver them. As Carlin notes in the quote above, which is from his "sortabiography" Last Words, it's not just about getting laughs anymore, it's about fully engaging the mind, and the page is usually a better way to do this than performance.

So I thought I would read one of his books. Last Words is the posthumous autobiography that Tony Hendra compiled from a hundred pages that Carlin wrote about his early life and many hours of interviews. I wish Carlin had lived to complete the writing, because the first third of the book about his childhood is by far the best part. A sample of his writing:

The highlights of my life were my trips to midtown with Bessie, listening to the radio, and thumb-sucking. I was a world-class thumb-sucker. My specialty at bedtime was to loosen part of the bottom sheet, wrap it around my thumb, and cram the whole thing into my mouth for extended, overnight sucking.

Imagine reading this out loud, delivering it like a comedian—I don't think it makes it better. This is written humor. And there's many more passages in the first third of the book that are just as charming. It's a wonderful picture of growing up in 50s New York, with all of the education and energy that a largely unsupervised street childhood can provide.

The book then goes into Carlin's time in the Air Force and the beginnings of his comedy career. And then Hendra must have had to step in, because the book features more transcripts of Carlin's routines, and the prose is less sharp, although it is animated with the same lively intelligence. Carlin's life becomes less interesting when he gets famous: the work takes over, along with predictable cycles of drugs and rehab, creative exhaustion and reinvention.

There are still thoughtful passages on the art of comedy, though, and the book is worth reading all the way through. In one section, Carlin discusses a line about abortion that he wanted to include in a routine, but that never seemed to work. “Audiences wouldn't follow me there,” he writes. “It was one step too far. They didn't enjoy the risk. I'm a realist. After a while, I dropped the line. And maybe they were right: maybe it was too complex an idea or the phrasing was too harsh. But it shows how the audience shapes the material. They are part of the process. I write, they edit.”

Now, a writer might say that this is selling out, the kind of compromise that makes stand-up comedy something less than a genuine art form. I'm not so sure. A few decades ago, Philip Larkin wrote about the two tensions from which art springs: “the tension between the artist and his material and between the artist and his audience.” In the previous century, he wrote, for most serious artists “the second of these has slackened or even perished.” And he saw this as a disaster for both the arts and the audience, as artists restrict themselves to ever smaller circles (and begin to say increasingly inconsequential things) and the mass audience falls back on purely commercial entertainment, never encountering anything that might wake them up a little.

Undeniably, most stand-up comedy falls into the category of commercial entertainment. It is slavish in its desire to please, exhausting in its endless facetiousness and refusal to say anything serious. (Go to a comedy club on a bad night and it is about as depressing an evening as you can pay for.) But when a comedian realizes, as Carlin did, that getting laughs is not his only responsibility—that something honest and challenging can take place in the space between the artist's personal vision and the audience's expectations—the night can become special.

Louis CK, who wrote a fine piece about Carlin when he died, is probably the best stand-up around right now, has been freeing himself more and more from the obligation to be continuously funny, especially on Louis, his TV show, and some of the episodes of that show are simply works of art (“The Bully” is my favorite of the ones I've seen). So are parts of Carlin's specials; and this book may have reached the same heights if Carlin had had time to complete it. It is interesting that he names more writers as inspirations than comedians: Noam Chomsky, Hunter Thompson, Gore Vidal. It's a shame he died before finishing—I think he had another career ahead of him.

Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the shelves at Goodwill when a wave of sadness came off a familiar yellow spine. It was Tuck Everlasting, which I had read as a child, fairly soon after I came to America. It was the same edition, with the same misty watercolor on its cover. A student (the front cover identifies her as Tatjana) had been through the little novel already, circling vocabulary words and identifying similes and metaphors. Her resolution petered out around page fifty; I like to think that she started enjoying the book at this point.

The little I could remember from childhood: there was a family that drank from a spring in the woods and became immortal. I couldn't bring back anything else or place the source of that sadness. A glance at a few pages indicated, though, that the prose was worthy of adult respect. Here is a character sketch of the mysterious stranger that comes to town: "His tall body moved continuously; a foot tapped, a shoulder twitched. And it moved in angles, rather jerkily. But at the same time he had a kind of grace, like a well-handled marionette."

(SMILE, wrote Tatjana next to this passage, successfully identifying one of the few actual reasons to read, none of which -- teachers take note -- involve spotting similes.)

I wonder why we so rarely return to early favorites. Maybe the fear of unraveling the memory of enchantment. There is a beautiful passage in John Crowley's novel The Translator, about a woman coming across a box of childhood art that she had made with her brother Ben:

She was surprised years later to find that her mother had kept a lot of the writings they had done, the drawings and the models, the chronologies and the maps. Most of the work was Ben's, which was maybe why she had kept it. When Kit took it all from the cardboard box, she felt a strange vertigo: she recognized and remembered these things and at the same time saw them shrivel and shrink; what had once been big and vivid to her became small, and not only in size. He had done it all on little pieces of shoddy paper, in colored pencils; he had been just a child. It was like picking up the body of a bird, and being surprised to find it nearly weightless.

What a pleasure, then, to feel none of this vertigo in the first few chapters of Tuck Everlasting, but instead writing of enduring charm and beauty.

One of the wonderful things about childhood -- I remember very faintly -- is a sense that everything is alive and can be communicated with: animals and plants, houses and roads. And one can see this sense of the world in Tuck Everlasting, as well as most books that speak to children. In the first few pages of the novel, the grass is described as cut "painfully to the quick" (how many adults would consider the suffering of cut grass?); the house where our heroine Winnie lives "was so proud of itself that you wanted to make a lot of noise as you passed, and maybe even throw a rock or two"; and the wood where the spring is hidden "had a sleeping, otherworldly appearance that made you want to speak in whispers."

Winnie is a lonely ten-year-old. Most of the time, she only has a toad for company (the toad, as one would expect in such a book, seems to be able to understand much of what Winnie says). One day, Winnie decides to explore the wood, which her family owns, and she comes across a beautiful boy, Jesse Tuck, drinking from a spring by an oak tree. She wants a drink too, but he won't let her, and she becomes understandably curious about why.

When the rest of the Tucks come to meet their son, they realize that the little girl might be a problem for them, and they grab her and take her to their house. There, they try to explain their situation -- how they drank accidentally from the spring once almost a century ago and have been alive ever since, unable to age or even get hurt, moving from place to place to avoid scrutiny. Angus, the wise and gentle father, tries to convince Winnie that no one else should ever know about the spring. There is a lovely conversation about the continuous flow of water in the pond, and how the Tucks have somehow been removed from this cycle.

Soon after this point, though, an adult reader begins to feel that this is indeed a book for children. A stagy plot gets underway involving a man who wants to sell the spring water. The plot moves rapidly in three- to four-page chapters, with virtually no summary narration; it's one tiny scene after another, a kind of eternal present that felt thin and rushed. The whole action of the book, including an unexpected act of violence and a late-night jailbreak, takes place in about two days.

Here is "a kid's review" from Amazon: "I read 'Tuck Everlasting' in sixth grade, and while reading it, noticed that it lacked the basic elements of a good book. The first thing I noticed that the book seemed to be -if I may- condensed."

Indeed you may, junior reviewer and sophisticate-in-training! Thankfully I had no such complaints when I was young; my imagination filled in whatever might be missing and turned a pencil sketch into a painting. As an adult, though, I was beginning to feel the shrinking that Crowley describes. I couldn't believe anymore that so much would hinge on Winnie, or that people would consider her quite so important. I was still glad I read the book, but felt like it belonged to my past.

Then I came to the Epilogue. It takes place many years after the main action of the book, and involves a choice that was presented to Winnie as a child. The Epilogue is only six pages long, but it transforms everything that has come before. It's an absolutely beautiful piece of writing, not just for children but for anyone. Here, as I read, I understood the wave of sadness that came off the book when I first picked it off the shelf. The end was still thought-provoking, still powerful.

So, perhaps the bird is light in one's hand at times, but it does wake up and fly again. It was nice to discover that my reaction as a child was authentic and lasting, and more to be trusted than my taste as an adolescent (most of my high school favorites, like Catch-22, I've never been able to finish again). I think most adults, even ones who didn't love this book as a child, would find the novel worth reading by the end. It is a lovely fable, and its resonance only grows, I think, once one has become more closely acquainted with death.