A Dickensian Christmas Eve

“The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner... The Grocers’! oh, the Grocers’! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose."

Swim away along the soft trails

I like many kinds of poetry, but any poem that looks out with love upon the natural world has my instant rapt attention. The American branch of this poetic tree is for me a livelier one than the British, especially when poetry and place stand in particular and abiding relation. So I like Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry. I like the poets that can't keep away long - poetically or bodily - from their particular patch of the natural world. One I've only recently discovered is Mary Oliver, dweller in Provincetown, Massachussetts, wanderer of woods, Whitman in hand, and writer of lovely nature poems. This one, simply titled “Morning Poem,” has the spell of the sacred, and the feeling of fresh air, that always grace the best nature poems.

Every morning
the world
is created. 
Under the orange 

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again 

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands 
 
of summer lilies. 
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails 

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere. 
And if your spirit
carries within it 
the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---

if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging --- 
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted -
 
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly, 
every morning, 
 
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy, 
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray. 

Little ones, baby ones

I've read a lot this week about last Friday's shocking massacre of six adults and twenty little children in a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut. There's a lot to read: ferocious commentary on America's idiotic gun laws, exposes of the NRA's membership and funding structure, histories of what Philip Roth calls “indigenous American berserk”, the President's moving homily.

What came home to me most vividly was imagining how little these victims were; how trustingly they must have walked into their classrooms that morning, sat at their little desks. It was an act of indescribable violence, yet it was not only their lives but their world that was violated. How different a six-year-old's world is from the one in which gunmen, policemen, ideologues, and lobbyists swirl and clash.

Their world, their school, was a place of discoveries, loyalties, stories, wonders, dreams. A place of possibility, curiosity, experiment, of exhilarating leaps of cognition and capacity. A place where they learned beautiful, venerable ideas; where the lovely aimlessness of infancy was just beginning to be tamed; where they read books and chanted poems and drew pictures and ran around in the sunshine and raised their hands to ask and answer questions. Where they learned things we have all forgotten long ago. In many ways the world of these little ones was bigger, much bigger, than ours. What shattered it was a terrible smallness.

Something made me think of this poem, from AA Milne's collection “When We Were Very Young,” with its invitation, its invocation of the world, so wide and deep, of childhood. 

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
Down to the stream where the king-cups grow-
Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

Where am I going? The clouds sail by,
Little ones, baby ones, over the sky.
Where am I going? The shadows pass,
Little ones, baby ones, over the grass.

If you were a cloud, and sailed up there,
You'd sail on water as blue as air,
And you'd see me here in the fields and say:
“Doesn't the sky look green today?"

Where am I going? The high rooks call:
“It's awful fun to be born at all." 
Where am I going? The ring-doves coo:
“We do have beautiful things to do."

If you were a bird, and lived on high,
You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,
You'd say to the wind when it took you away:
“That's where I wanted to go today!"

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

Come down to the water

One of the books in my armchair pile is Annie Dillard's 1975 Pullitzer-winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's modern nature writing with a streak of spiritual memoir. Reading it in a garden chair on the weekend, this passage caught my attention - and drew forth an ‘amen’:

We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and descirbe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

At the time of Lews and Clark, setting the priaries on fire was a well-known signal that meant, 'Come down to the water.' It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. 

Between a book and a hard place

In the tussle between books and their e-cousins, I probably come down somewhere in the middle. Yes, digital books are tremendously handy, but no, they'll never replace the joy of reading physical books. I don't get particularly worked up about the advent of e-reading or the decline of print (I suspect most readers are the same) so I tend to ignore the steady stream of articles that couch it as a dilemma. 

However, I did find myself persuaded by this excerpt from Andrew Piper's Book was There: Reading in Electronic Times. He argues that there's more to books than the pleasures of touching and turning pages. There's the space they create around you while you read; the connection they build between head and hands; the marks you make on them as you read; the way they give form and dimension to the written word, so you always know where you are, even when you're ‘lost’ in a book. One thing I complain about is having no sense, when reading on my iphone or kindle, of how far through the story I am, how close to the end. There's something about the place you've reached, and the diminishing thickness of pages behind it, that adds to the pleasure of reading even a familiar book. The more advanced e-texts now look more like real pages than the earlier versions did, in part I think because their makers have learned that the shape of a printed page, with its sharp edges and bare border, is indelibly part of how and why we read.

“There is a punctuatedness, a suddenness, but also a repetitiveness to pressing buttons that starkly contrast with the sedate rhythms of the slowly turned page...With my e-book, I no longer pause over the slight caress of the almost turned page—a rapture of anticipation—I just whisk away. Our hands become brooms, sweeping away the alphabetic dust before us.”

It's beautifully and lucidly argued - worth the read, though you may be inspired to print it off first. I was inspired to spend more time with books and less with screens. In keeping, I've put a pile of worthy books next to my favourite armchair, so I can read whenever I sit, thus indulging in the ‘readerly rest’ Piper recommends.