Not many books of essays bring me to tears. I was affected in almost every synapse in my brain and every emotion in my heart; this was perfection in language, in heart, in science, in exploration and adventure, in deep, real connections between strangers, in anthropological examinations of tribes and people; perfection in being attuned to every holy and sacred place, thing and moment in the world; and, and, and, his being able to verbalize it so so so exquisitely. Gush, gush, gush. An anonymous reviewer of Annie Dillard, my favorite revered author, wrote she was a “fine wayfarer, one who travels light, reflective and alert to the shrines and holy places,” and Melvin Maddocks further wrote of Dillard, “here is no gentle romantic twirling a buttercup.” I haven’t found anyone of Dillard’s equal in the way she affected everything in me, heart and head, until now. Every quote I have ever loved about Dillard, by Dillard, inspired by Dillard, easily attaches to Lopez in these essays. Lopez describes the absolute beauty of this world and simultaneously reminds us of the absolute terror of this world. He details the landscape of geography and the landscape of the heart and soul of the people that inhabit the geography. oh and so poetically. While on a diving trip in the Caribbean (searching for depth in Bonaire), Lopez describes the unique and almost spiritual experience of diving:"something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. it is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. it is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. it is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. it is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. it is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror." I have never been scuba diving, but I love snorkeling, and swimming, and being in water, so I have experienced a taste of the above, but can’t it apply to all spiritual experience? Or physical experiences that engage more than one sense, even skydiving, or parachuting, skiing, hiking? Or even taking a walk at dusk with a glorious sunset? It is about being out of body and out of mind at the same time, which is like a therapy for many ills as well as what countless people seek from drugs and oblivion. For me, Lopez is describing a conscious oblivion that always has a texture of spirituality to me, whenever I feel “the intensity of life,” whether familiar or not. Just amen, and hallelujah. (And just a caveat: I am not at all religious. This is what makes Dillard so powerful to me, reclaiming the language of religion that glorifies god and glorifying nature, and people, and connection and thought.) Bravo, Mr. Lopez, bravo.”I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. what I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. how were they related? what were the verbs? which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. no one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?” Throughout the essays there were important things to learn. Lopez can almost make airplane engineering interesting (flight), the specifications for a pottery kiln (effleurage, the stroke of fire), and the architecture of both a real whaleboat that they used to hunt Moby Dick, and the replica one he keeps in his study that leads him to a mediation on light, life, and craftsmanship (the whaleboat). I prefer that he writes pages and pages of this stuff: brown bears and red foxes roam the mountains on the most northern Japanese island. (a short passage in northern Hokkaido) How did I never know there were brown bears in Japan? Are they genetically related to brown bears elsewhere, say, just over the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia? Or even farther away? Mr. Lopez, usually able to anticipate my questions, absolutely ignores my absolute disbelief that I did not know that bears lived in Japan and that we need further explanation as to their genetics and function, taxonomy and evolution. I guess that is another book. He interacts with an elder of Ainu tribe, the indigenous tribe of the area that suffered a similar fate as our Native tribes, and describes the absolute organic and holy process of trying to communicate with people who speak other languages, how much is conveyed with a gift, or a smile, or sharing food.Who hasn’t wanted to travel to the Galapagos? (orchids on the volcanoes) This is where Lopez really demonstrates what he is after, and it is nothing less than you can imagine. “I’d looked out over a seared lava plain at the thin, desultory cover of leafless brush and thought, ‘in this slashing light there will be no peace.’” He is astonished that in a place that prior travelers had described as “holocaust-“ like and barren as “dragon-lair,” with an “inglorious panorama of Cretaceous beasts,” that he finds mist and fog, and something wholly unexpected, “a kind of tenderness about it: its stern volcanism, the Age of Dragons that persist here, eventually comes to seem benign rather than aberrant.” I get the need to pilgrimage to Utah every few years for the same exposure to badlands and otherworldly, other planetary-like vistas that feed something in me, something opposite of the peace that placid mountain streams feed on a more daily basis. (Maybe a trite metaphor, but accepting and seeking out the badlands of the heart or soul, a prereq and national holiday for me.) (this essay uses the word archipelago so many times, I think I inhaled deeply each time, it is a reflexive meditative and Zen word for me…)I could feel the past in this place, just by his words, and feel the absolute innovation and startling novelty of Darwin’s evolution. We grew up with it, it is as natural and on the tip of our tongues as gravity; but to the people of Darwin’s time and shortly after, it was thinking so new, so unbelievable, it must have broken open so many minds, opening them to the wonder and intensity of life. Lopez also writes about the economy and preservation of the Galapagos and how it affects and is affected by tourism, in a sobering way that makes me, again, simultaneously, want to visit and want to not visit. I want to leave us with the below imagery, but Lopez writes that his most vivid memory of Galapagos will be the storm petrel colony where he observed the birds being hunted by short-eared owls. The area was littered with pieces of bone, wings, feathers, and bodies of birds that starkly demonstrated the “flow of natural selection.” I practice, practice, and practice acceptance of the inevitable terror with the beauty, but choose always to focus on the beauty. While I don’t believe there is evil in nature, this quote of Wallace Stegner has always resonated on this topic: “wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”“In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort…because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin’s insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits.” The following passage stands on its own (informed by indifference). “The Wright and half a dozen other valleys in the Central Transantarctic Mountains are collectively referred to as the dry valleys. It has not rained here in two million years. No animal abides, no plant grows. A persistent, sometimes ferocious wind has stripped the country to stone and gravel, to streamers of sand. The huge valleys stand stark as empty fjords. You look in vain for any conventional sign of human history- the vestige of a protective wall, a bit of charcoal, a discarded arrowhead. Nothing. There is no history, until you bore into the layers of rock or until the balls of your fingertips run the rim of a partially exposed fossil. At the height of the austral summer, in December, you smell nothing but the sunbeaten stone. In a silence dense as water, your eye picks up no movement but the sloughing of sand, seeking its angle of repose. On the flight in from New Zealand it had occurred to me, from what I had read and heard, that Antarctica retained Earth’s primitive link, however tenuous, with space, with the void that stretched out to Jupiter and Uranus. At the seabird rookeries of the Canadian Arctic or on the grasslands of the Serengeti, you can feel the vitality of the original creation; in the dry valleys you sense sharply what came before. The Archeozoic is like fresh spoor here.I took several long walks in the Wright and adjacent Taylor Valleys. I did not feel insignificant on these journeys, dwarfed or shrugged off by the land, but superfluous. It is a difficult landscape to enter, and to develop a rapport with. It is not inimical or hostile, but indifferent, utterly remote, even as you stand in it. The light itself is aloof. During the brief summer, it is warm enough for a few days or weeks to create meltwater; a few, inconsequential streams tumble down from the glaciers above the valleys. The sparking surface of the water is aberrant, a false promise, the land’s irony. The only really animate force here is the wind. It blows, always, from the interior, from the west- often, in the spring, at well over sixty knots. It wallops and scours the mountains, eroding and fracturing, sweeping clear the debris… the wind, a katabatic or gravity-driven wind, enters the valleys after falling vertically nearing two miles from the summit of the East Antarctic ice sheet; it comes into the valleys with a discernible hunger, and its effect on the land, which it abrades an lacerates with bits of sand and ice are often peculiar.” The resulting rock sculptures are ventifacts. Google them. See: http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/d...There are ponds in this land that never freeze despite -60 and -70 degree temperatures. They have so much salt and a mineral called antarcticite that they do not FREEZE IN WINTER. AT MINUS 60 DEGREES. CAPS DONE IN CASE THIS TRIVIA DOESN’T BLOW YOUR MIND. OPEN. WIDE OPEN. Before he finishes, in beauty, he writes about the scattered mummified seals that he stumbles across over and over; scientists do not know why they come so far inland but they die of starvation and are preserved and freeze-dried by the cold and wind. Online, there are pictures. “Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.” Taking a step back from the natural world, Lopez travels on forty flights accompanying various cargoes: horses from Chicago to Japan, tangerines from South Africa to Amsterdam, or paper money that come from currency exchanges all over the world. (flight.) Transoceanic pilots remark to him that the history of flight is so short, that they haven’t had a chance to name all the headwinds they encounter. They keep informal logs and hopes someone will sometime. About sunrise on a plane: “at 30,000 feet the sunrise clears the horizon about twenty-two minutes earlier than it does when seen from a spot on the earth directly below.” I didn’t know, but feel like I should have. Good trivia, but Lopez takes it further, of course. I told you he is alert and observant to more than just the holy landscapes, so he writes about flying alternate routes, avoiding hotspots like Iraq or Bosnia, but when they do fly over Afghanistan, they see trails of rocket fire and weaponry, and they know people are dying. At the same exact time, in the plane’s eye view, he looks to the east, and there is full moon rising over the Hindu Kush and to the southeast there are a hundred miles of lightning bolts and vertical rain on the horizon, and beyond all of this, a black sky with stars. And yet people are dying just below, and have been, and continue to. But so far, the wild, beautiful stars still shine.“An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.” One of my favorite essays is “The Whaleboat.” Lopez starts with a little snapshot of him reading a congressional report in his study, doing research for a book, on an expedition in the high Arctic in 1888. It is the original document, made of sheepskin, and the material is dark, depressing, about how most of the expedition died. But he looks up, and there is replica of a whaleboat, like Ahab’s in Moby Dick, that catches his eye, and the world outside the window that catches his eye, and we are off. He powerfully weaves a tapestry of moby dick, writing, light, forest, a window, a boat, the high seas, the high Arctic, exploring the landscape and philosophy. This and the Antarctica essay made me cry from their beauty and sense of words written for me at this point in my life, and isn’t that the undeniable proof that art is like breathing, that it affects and changes us, or at least good art. Just bravo, again, Mr. Lopez. ”I went down from the house in that hour, wearing the wet suit I use for tropical diving…since that day I have walked in the river in all seasons except late fall, winter, and early spring, when the water is too high…I’ve walked up and down it on moonlit nights, and on nights of the new moon when the only light falling in the woods has come from the bulb above my desk, that and photons from the stars above, the suns Ishmael imagined as islands in a “continentless,” continuous sea. Crabbing upcurrent some evenings, feeling the force of the water on my legs and a night breeze in my face, I often think of myself as passing the house offshore. Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.”“A string of memories about light as I observe it daily from this room, racing past in the mind’s corridors, would bind certain images. In the field below the house, a complicated splay of greens occurs more or less in the same ground plane: Himalaya blackberry, sword fern, wood sorrel, meadow rue, bracken fern, wild pea, tall blue lettuce, huckleberry, false Solomon seal, sweet cicely. The leaves and fronds of all these plants rotate so slowly through the day, tracking the sun through the forest canopy, the turning does not register as movement. It registers as a shift in the gamut of green. Or consider how a rainstorm changes color and contrast in the forest by weighing it down. Water suspended on branches and individual leaves bends trees and plants to point at a sharper angle to the ground. When the water drains or evaporates, limbs rebound and shades of green on the ground become stronger as the limbs admit more light, and the somber darkness of the forest floor gives way to deeper color. Cleansed of natural dust, these greens gleam…Or consider that light from a sun-shot sky flooding the canopy of a maple tree may be mistaken for a sheen brilliant on its leaves, the leaves in that moment mimicking the sky. And that in this configuration a greater volume of space surrounds the tree than if it is seen in the usual way, a dark-leafed tree against a pale sky.I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I’ve conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room.And what of the boat, where my glance still hangs? I imagine the six men in it in pursuit of something huge, cofounding, haunting. It instructs us in the infernal paradoxes of life.When I look at the replica, when I imagine the oar blades plunged in the green transparency of the a storm-raked sea, the boat cranking off a wave crest, six men straining in drenched motley wool and oilskins, their mouths agape, I know that life is wild, dangerous, and beautiful.”
This is my introduction to Barry Lopez and it was a less engaging one than I hoped it would be. The essays are personal, at times too personal, not in the sense that they are intimate but in that they present a take that left this reader wondering, “Really? You did that, huh?” On a long country road trek across the country you stopped to be respectful of any and all roadkill be it a deer, raccoon, cat, squirrel, crow, rodent. Each time you pulled off the road to provide an ecological burial? That’s just weird. It’s an aside in an essay not a full-length essay by itself. If were a full essay, it should end when your wife, played by Cher, realizes you’re doing this and slaps you once upside the head as she declares, “Snap out of it!”And there was something a little untrustworthy about some bits of it. “What about the boat,” he writes following the long, long description of a wandered mind, “where my glance still hangs?” This isn’t a Roadrunner cartoon, dude. Your glance either left that boat long ago when you wrote about all the remembered stuff that wasn’t the boat or you’re imagining yourself in a film that begins with you peering at a boat but dissolves into a movie until it dissolves back before credits roll ninety minutes later. Anyway, it was not my cup of tea despite some interesting essays and experiences in the tea bag, from circling the globe on cargo planes one after the other to trips to Japan and the Antilles and Manhattan. I have Arctic Dreams in a stack of to be read books so Lopez will get another shot but About This Life has delayed the attempt.
What do You think about About This Life (1999)?
You may know Barry Lopez from books such as "Arctic Dreams," "Of Wolves and Men," "Field Notes," or "Crossing Open Ground."All of them pale when comparing them to the incredible collection of writing and essays found in "About This Life."Rather than solely describing nature as potential for conquest, Lopez steps back and gazes on the relationship between human nature and non-human nature, mulling time and place, and asking: What does it mean to be who we are, where we are? His writing is some of the best of the late 20th century, and this book is the best example you'll find of it, regardless of his previous National Book Award, and Burroughs and Christopher medals.
—Claudia
"I came to value exceedingly novels and essays and works of nonfiction that connected human enterprise to real and specific places, and I grew to be mildly distrustful of work that occured in no particular place, work so cerebral and detached as to be refutable only in an argument of ideas."I struggled with how many stars to give this book. This is the first book I've read, haven't liked, but respected. I think it comes down to the quote I copied above. As readers we value very different things in books and it shows through in his writing. It just didn't resonate with me.
—Alexia
I had not heard of Lopez before but this book is a series of essays that he has written for other publications. They are descriptions of experiences in various places. Some I really liked were: A trip to the northern most Japanese Island of Hokkaido as he visits with some of the local people. He describes a desire to understand how air freight is moved around the world so he takes 2 weeks and travels on specially built 747 airplanes that carry cargo around the world. He describes his travel to Singapore to Cape Town South Africa, to Japan, to Denmark, all the while ridding in the belly of the 747 that is not designed for passengers. I liked his description of a man and his wood fired Kiln in Western Oregon, lots of detail but to me fascinating detail. Lopez might be categorized as an environmentalist. But he is really more a lover of nature and of people. I like his descriptions of the people he is around. Sometimes his writing is a bit vague, kind of like he expects me to be aware of what he is talking about, inside talk. But for the most part it is very good. I may want to read some of his essays again in a few years. He quoted this, which I really like: “The essence of real beauty may be gathered from the commonplace, from what lies close around us in life. By learning to appreciate this truth, our lives will doubtless be enriched and ennobled.” Jiro HiradaAnd he said this I liked: “When I traveled, when I rolled my sleeping bag out on the shores of the Beufort Sea or in the high pastures of the Absaroka Range in Wyoming, or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I absorbed those particular testaments to life, the indigenous color, and songbird song, the smell of sun-bleached rock, damp earth, and wild honey, with some crude appreciation of the singular magnificence of each of those places.”
—Richard
