The knowledge of objective truth
Reading, the pace of understanding, and work that's real
So, I'm reading this book, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees. I found it in my friend Dan's office in the English department at Middlebury College, where I taught writing this term. I knew the author, William Bryant Logan, but not this title. His book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, not only has the best subtitle I've ever heard, but is also an incredible love poem to soil, and will teach you a few things about the ground under your feet that will blow your mind.
When I find a book that's been out for a while but I've never heard of, and it's so absolutely the book that I needed or wanted just then, I can’t help think about how many others I've missed, how many gems have been published over the years that slipped beneath the tide, unnoticed, unsung. I suppose I could have the same hollow feeling about amazing people I've never had the chance to meet, but I don't. I lose a little sleep each night over those books that I have never encountered. Books that could probably change my life.
The thing about books that feels different than people is that you don't need to wait for them to reveal themselves; they are pretty quick to get to know. And then they stay themselves, on the shelf, for as long as you need them. You can pull them down, read a line, and remember the first time or the last time you read that line and how it made you feel.
There should be a word for the nearly-orgasmic way that a phrase can make you feel if it rubs up against you at the right time, in the right place.
Like the late summer day I read this line, lying in the grass, having just been for a swim in the pond brushing through green reeds: "At that rate of speed the impalpable eddies of evening air drum softly on the wings and the plane seems to be drilling its way through a quivering crystal so delicate that the wake of a passing swallow would jar it to bits." Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Wind, Sand and Stars. One of my favorite books of all time.
I write a chapter all about swallows in The Salt Stones (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions). I've been looking for a way to use this passage, to honor the memory, but I haven't found a way for it to fit. So, in case it doesn't make it into my book, I'm sharing it here.
Part of the thrill of reading Saint-Exupery is to think about how slowly planes moved through the sky in the early part of the twentieth century, with open cockpits. It's like thinking about the difference between planning one's life before cell phones and email and now - something I was talking to my students about this term and that is quite impossible to imagine, unless you've lived through the whole spectrum. How did you find anyone or plan anything? they ask, as I might have asked the first pilots, how could you see anything, or even breathe? There's something about the speed of communication and travel increasing that changes the way we think, or are able to comprehend the world. One understands one's thoughts differently when on a bicycle, say, than when staring out the window of a moving train, just as one understands them differently when composing a text rather than a handwritten letter.
This idea of speed might have to be the subject of another ramble, though, because I want to get to Sprout Lands, and the passage that struck me as I was reading last night, in the small pool of light in my own (cold) office in the farmhouse. The passage leapt out at me, at first, because it was about a shepherd. Naturally.
"A shepherd named Paxti Barriola...When he was fifteen, he first went up the hill to the shack and the fold, the borda, where he cared for a herd of about a hundred sheep." Logan describes this shepherd's life, his tending of the forest and fields as well as the animals, and his movements up the hills in the spring and down again in fall. "When I met him, he was eighty-eight." Logan writes. "He had retired the year before. He has spent seventy-three years at his job....'I was happy there," [Paxti] remembered. Really happy. No radio, no TV, no nothing.' He paused and looked into the fire. 'What a good place it was,' he continued. 'It was a good life. It fitted me.' It was not routine work to him, but a way of life that never stopped bringing him into the real."
I love that, bringing him into the real. Logan has this turn of phrase, "the knowledge of objective truth." Imagine watching someone really experienced use a tool - a blacksmith say, or a woodworker with a hand plane. The way they move the tool reveals the thinking not just in their heads but in their hands, a kind of truth that comes from years of minute perception and intuition. Logan writes: "It is not thinking. It is not feeling. It is the training of perception in the face of resistant materials. It is need and thought adjusting to the real. It is a new participation in the world of relationship, one through which a strange kind of flexible precision emerges unbidden."
Our movements in space change the pace of our perception. Perhaps this is why I love to walk with the sheep, watching them stop to take mouthfuls of grass as they go, truth-testing their knowledge of the infinite tastes and smells and textures in that vast salad bowl of the meadow.
Thanks for listening. Heading out for now -
Lovely. Thanks for sharing.