~ ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS ~
Long ago at Easter I had a looking-egg. Peering in a little porthole at the end, I saw a lovely little farm, a kind of dream farm, and on the farmhouse chimney a stork sitting on a nest. I regarded this as a fairy-tale farm as surely imagined as gnomes sitting under toadstools. And then in Denmark I saw that farm or its brother, and it was true, just as it had been in the looking-egg. And in Salinas, California, where I grew up, although we had some frost the climate was cool and foggy. When we saw colored pictures of a Vermont autumn forest it was another fairy thing and we frankly didn't believe it. In school we memorized "Snowbound" and little poems about Old Jack Frost and his paintbrush, but the only thing Jack Frost did for us was put a thin skin of ice on the watering trough, and that rarely. To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling. I can't even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. "It is a glory," she said, "and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise."
~by John Steinbeck
~from Travels With Charley (36 - 37, emphasis added)
The rutted drive was filled with rainwater. Every leaf and blade of grass was shining. Once we turned we quieted down. The towering woods to our left, the white clapboard house with blue shutters up ahead, the gentle hills of fruit trees to the right that spread out behind the house past where we could see -- it looked like a sampler stitched by an eighteenth-century girl. . . .
It wasn't as if I'd grown up in Los Angeles. I'd seen plenty of farms in my day, but never had I seen a place that made the tightness in my chest relax. The order in the rows of trees and the dark green of the lush grass beneath them soothed me like a hand brushing across my forehead.
. . . So often my mind went back to that day at the Nelsons' farm . . . "Maybe we can all go back to the Nelsons' farm," I said, thinking I could get another chance. We could live the entire day again![Just as in Our Town when Emily says:
"Oh, I want the whole day."]
. . . Generations of Nelsons had cleared the trees and planed the boards and pulled out the roots and the enormous rocks and planted the orchard. They looked after the cherries and the apples, the peaches and pears.
~by Ann Patchett
~from Tom Lake (160, 246-47, 305-06, emphasis added)
Notice how Patchett hints at the idea that the farm hasn't taken on this dreamy appearance spontaneously. The soothing sense of order derives not in accordance with the mysterious workings of Nature but from generations of clearing, weeding, planting, and planing -- as in "to make smooth or even" -- weeding out what is already there naturally, planting something deemed more desirable by humankind. Left to its own devices, Nature would most likely have taken another direction altogether.
Episcopal priest, author, and anthropologist Miranda K. Hassett refers to this human intervention as putting the land under disclipine. A few weeks ago, she wrote:
"My Lenten discipline this year is to spend a little time outdoors, with attention and intention, every day, if possible. Today it was just a short walk in our neighborhood with the dog. I started out thinking faintly sulky thoughts about how our immediate neighborhood isn't very interesting, nature-wise, and it's a very unprepossessing time of year -- all gray snow and mud. Then I started thinking about how this land is under discipline - flattened and cleared for a neighborhood, sculpted for water runoff, managed to mostly grow only grass where it's not paved or built on. Then I walked past the place where a freak August flood took a life in 2018, less than a block from our house, and thought about that for a while. I've never quite been able to figure out how to integrate that into my relationship with my neighborhood. THEN I noticed that the weird old apple tree in the neighborhood park has half-fallen, probably in that very heavy snow a few weeks back. The city will probably take it down this year, and I'll miss its witchy, unruly presence. Our dog would sometimes eat its wormy green apples off the ground.
"This is, I suppose, lesson one: Tuning in to the land, to the non-human created world around me, is not about going outside to 'enjoy' or 'appreciate' nature. Nature does not owe me beauty or enjoyment. Paying attention to the land can bring all kinds of uncomfortable feelings - grief, confusion, curiosity - not just 'look how pretty the trees are against the sky.'" (emphasis added)
Next Fortnightly Post ~ More Steinbeck
Tuesday, May 14th
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KITTI'S LIST
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