It is sobering how well "Refuge" has held up as an anthem for our times. Both the illness and the vanishing habitat themes resonate perhaps even more deeply now than they did upon its publication. One of the loveliest braided memoirs I've ever read.
I agree. Remember when it felt unusual? And now it fits right in with a whole genre of cautionary nature writing and memoirs that look outward and inward together. Getting back into it for this little inquiry, it felt as fresh as ever.
Next time you're stuck getting in or out the driveway while someone is doing recovery work down in the canyon, I'm confident you can knock off at least a hundred.
Thank you, Kalpana. Literature is so funny. I felt that very thing strongly once I got to reading and typing these passages, though just the idea of assembling them did not move me as much. The words themselves really did draw me into that long continuity of time.
Everything here, marvelous, but especially putting up Stafford and Melville. I'm often surprised by literary writers I know who haven't read _Moby Dick_. The storms: Wowza, we so need a president in the US who understands the power of these recent storms to global warming. Yours is one of my favorite Substacks. I'll be writing you to you today to write again for Inner Life, this time as my guest and I'll promote you for the week before. Look for my email, lovely.
Ah, thank you, Mary - ever kind! I agree about Moby-Dick. It’s amazing, but people think it’s more intimidating than it is. The Stafford poem found me. I was looking for my Robinson Jeffers collection and stumbled on this instead. It felt like the right “last word.” I love surprises. :-) Yes to good leadership! Will check email ….
Haha! I picked up Moby-Dick thinking I would find a dramatic passage from The Chase, but I landed mid-book at The Mast-Head and decided that this post needed “sublime uneventfulness” after all. It sounds very nice! Glad you enjoyed the poem. I like the way it opens slowly and leaves something to mull over. Thank you for sharing!
I'm currently reading Jane Eyre with my daughter. I didn't love it as much the previous times I've read it, but this time it's hitting me just right. It's magnificent.
I think we need to read Moby Dick soon. It's such a magnificent novel.
Recently I discovered Christopher Tin's beautiful choral album The Drop that Contained the Sea. It's a beautiful tribute to the water cycle and the power of water in all its forms, 10 songs in 10 different languages including Sanskrit, Old Norse, Ancient Greek (a selection of the Sirens' song in The Odyssey.) It could be the soundtrack for your beautiful curated selections about Sea and Rain.
What a coincidence, Melanie! I just started Jane Eyre with my kids, too. I was enchanted immediately by the weather, which Charlotte and Emily Brontë both evoked so well that I can feel it still from my first teen immersion.
Thank you for the musical tip. It sounds marvelous. Duly noted. Thank you for Restacking. 🙏🏼
You selected such wonderful passages. I wrote about water too this week, the lack of it in the Colorado River specifically. So I was struck by that passage from Refuge. In the 70s people were still upset about all the damming of the Colorado had submerged. And now Salt Lake, like Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at their lowest levels ever and that worries us too. It is such a fine balance— and yet the extremes are so punishing.
I think by the time I read Refuge in the 90s, shorelines at Salt Lake and Lake Powell were already receding to a concerning degree, so even then it was hard to imagine the flooding that TTW described. The growing populations in the dry intermountain west seem like a water bubble waiting to pop.
Tara these passages are all resonating as I watch the rain falling, non stop since yesterday, the roads, those that are holding up still, littered with leaves and branches… the storm is passing here but how accustomed we have become to the debris. How much worse will they become?
I really like the calming passage you chose from Moby Dick… oh for calm seas!
Thank you, Susie! I'm glad these passages (especially Ishmael's reverie) mixed well with your weather. We had wildfire smoke instead, so when little patters of rain fell on the carport, it was a joy to hear them, even if they were not enough to put out the fire. Fortunately, crews herded it in another direction, and the winds helped, so we have clear blue autumn skies with red and yellow leaves. I hope you get some nice clearing to enjoy walks after your soak.
Tara, I have just replied to your comment on my last post when I should have come here first... perhaps golds and crimsons are not the best wishes to give, it seems as though you've quite enough of those particular shades and sadly not in the shape of autumn. I am relieved you are safe - may you stay that way. 🙏🏼
Tara, I felt rewarded all through reading this more than I anticipated in a focus on the weather. The justness of such a focus is very well supported by your selections. Indvidual responses:
I've read Jane Eyre multiple times but not in many years: how powerful is the evocation of Jane's despair!
"“They say that ‘Bulger’s’ was scattered promiscuous-like all along the Fork for five miles." I love a mix of regional vernacular and heightened diction. David Milch performed it brilliantly in his marvelous Deadwood series on HBO, Shakespeare meets Dickens meets the old West.
I'm struck by how much more narratively vivid Gilgamesh is than Genesis -- also by this simile: "it poured over the people like the tides of battle." Battle is not compared to the weather but rather the weather to battle, the vehicle, as I. A. Richards would have it -- war represented as the more familiar element than even the weather whose quality is borrowed to aid understanding.
One of the characters in my Magellan novel spends much time atop the mast (a thing I've never done) and Melville describes the drowsy languor of the infinitude just as I've imagined it and crucial to a key scene of mine. Very affirming!
I love the Stafford as much as I always love Stafford.
Thank you, Jay, for taking such time and care with the post! I'm glad you found the rewards plentiful. I loved the excuse to pick up Jane Eyre again. It's funny how I remembered the novel as soggy enough for this post. It was, but only in the right places.
That combination of regional vernacular + heightened diction is one of the reasons I enjoy reading Bret Harte's short stories. He was marvelously consistent about that particular form of linguistic play. I must be one of the last people to never have cable TV, so I missed most of the Deadwood series, but somehow I caught some episodes early on. (Colleagues in western lit talked about it all the time.)
I love your observation about the battle metaphor in Gilgamesh. I had not noticed that, but you're absolutely right. To think of battle being more familiar than strong weather! Yikes. Then again, this was more than strong weather. It must have been horrific - beyond what we saw in the news of the last few weeks from the southeast.
Way to imagine your Magellan scene! I think if I were to write someone onto a mast-head watch, I would make him (or a cross-dressing "her") young and enthusiastic to climb and then sick sick sick, and dizzy with hanging on. That's how I'd imagine it. But Melville had time to get used to it, and I think I would ask to swab decks instead. Landlubber, I am!
It is sobering how well "Refuge" has held up as an anthem for our times. Both the illness and the vanishing habitat themes resonate perhaps even more deeply now than they did upon its publication. One of the loveliest braided memoirs I've ever read.
I agree. Remember when it felt unusual? And now it fits right in with a whole genre of cautionary nature writing and memoirs that look outward and inward together. Getting back into it for this little inquiry, it felt as fresh as ever.
One of my favorites:
“For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who's six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
“The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
- from Renascence, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Wonderful! I love Millay but didn't know that poem. Do you think you might memorize and recite it for our little Oct 25 project? 🤔 😉
She wrote it she was 20, so it’s maybe one of her earliest major works.
All 200+ lines? I’ll give it a whirl.
Check my edit ^^^^
Next time you're stuck getting in or out the driveway while someone is doing recovery work down in the canyon, I'm confident you can knock off at least a hundred.
Or borrow some politician’s teleprompter.
Haha! That's worth trying. It sounds like the seedbed of amusement.
Impressive! (Do I mean Millay at 20? You with your long poem? Whatever.)
Let’s limit it to Millay at 20 to manage expectations.
😂
The beginning of her poem is stunning and she somehow maintains her momentum to the end.
Very thoughtful post indeed. Thank you, Tara! Your selections reminded us that this has been happening forever and that we must heed nature’s forces.
Thank you, Kalpana. Literature is so funny. I felt that very thing strongly once I got to reading and typing these passages, though just the idea of assembling them did not move me as much. The words themselves really did draw me into that long continuity of time.
Everything here, marvelous, but especially putting up Stafford and Melville. I'm often surprised by literary writers I know who haven't read _Moby Dick_. The storms: Wowza, we so need a president in the US who understands the power of these recent storms to global warming. Yours is one of my favorite Substacks. I'll be writing you to you today to write again for Inner Life, this time as my guest and I'll promote you for the week before. Look for my email, lovely.
Ah, thank you, Mary - ever kind! I agree about Moby-Dick. It’s amazing, but people think it’s more intimidating than it is. The Stafford poem found me. I was looking for my Robinson Jeffers collection and stumbled on this instead. It felt like the right “last word.” I love surprises. :-) Yes to good leadership! Will check email ….
These were beautiful and extra heartbreaking given the current devastation with more to come. 😞
Floods have been part of our earth’s balance for thousands of years.
Strange to think of balance in the long view and devastation to life and homes in the short. I have great respect for wind and water.
You had me at Jane Eyre and Refuge, and then you closed with Stafford! What balm for these times.
This was definitely a post I enjoyed writing, thanks to all the good books I had an excuse to open at once. 😊
What a lovely selection of writing. The William Stafford poem was particularly fine. And I wish everyone some of Melville's "sublime uneventfulness."
Haha! I picked up Moby-Dick thinking I would find a dramatic passage from The Chase, but I landed mid-book at The Mast-Head and decided that this post needed “sublime uneventfulness” after all. It sounds very nice! Glad you enjoyed the poem. I like the way it opens slowly and leaves something to mull over. Thank you for sharing!
I'm currently reading Jane Eyre with my daughter. I didn't love it as much the previous times I've read it, but this time it's hitting me just right. It's magnificent.
I think we need to read Moby Dick soon. It's such a magnificent novel.
Recently I discovered Christopher Tin's beautiful choral album The Drop that Contained the Sea. It's a beautiful tribute to the water cycle and the power of water in all its forms, 10 songs in 10 different languages including Sanskrit, Old Norse, Ancient Greek (a selection of the Sirens' song in The Odyssey.) It could be the soundtrack for your beautiful curated selections about Sea and Rain.
What a coincidence, Melanie! I just started Jane Eyre with my kids, too. I was enchanted immediately by the weather, which Charlotte and Emily Brontë both evoked so well that I can feel it still from my first teen immersion.
Thank you for the musical tip. It sounds marvelous. Duly noted. Thank you for Restacking. 🙏🏼
How lovely to see words being used for something other than rancor and divisiveness. Thank you for the respite, Tara.
Truth! Thank you, Ken. I hope you are out enjoying *our* lovely weather, since we are so fortunate to have it.
You selected such wonderful passages. I wrote about water too this week, the lack of it in the Colorado River specifically. So I was struck by that passage from Refuge. In the 70s people were still upset about all the damming of the Colorado had submerged. And now Salt Lake, like Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at their lowest levels ever and that worries us too. It is such a fine balance— and yet the extremes are so punishing.
I think by the time I read Refuge in the 90s, shorelines at Salt Lake and Lake Powell were already receding to a concerning degree, so even then it was hard to imagine the flooding that TTW described. The growing populations in the dry intermountain west seem like a water bubble waiting to pop.
Tara these passages are all resonating as I watch the rain falling, non stop since yesterday, the roads, those that are holding up still, littered with leaves and branches… the storm is passing here but how accustomed we have become to the debris. How much worse will they become?
I really like the calming passage you chose from Moby Dick… oh for calm seas!
Thank you, Susie! I'm glad these passages (especially Ishmael's reverie) mixed well with your weather. We had wildfire smoke instead, so when little patters of rain fell on the carport, it was a joy to hear them, even if they were not enough to put out the fire. Fortunately, crews herded it in another direction, and the winds helped, so we have clear blue autumn skies with red and yellow leaves. I hope you get some nice clearing to enjoy walks after your soak.
Tara, I have just replied to your comment on my last post when I should have come here first... perhaps golds and crimsons are not the best wishes to give, it seems as though you've quite enough of those particular shades and sadly not in the shape of autumn. I am relieved you are safe - may you stay that way. 🙏🏼
Between us, we're getting all the good atmospheric effects, yours soggy, mine dry. :-)
Tara, I felt rewarded all through reading this more than I anticipated in a focus on the weather. The justness of such a focus is very well supported by your selections. Indvidual responses:
I've read Jane Eyre multiple times but not in many years: how powerful is the evocation of Jane's despair!
"“They say that ‘Bulger’s’ was scattered promiscuous-like all along the Fork for five miles." I love a mix of regional vernacular and heightened diction. David Milch performed it brilliantly in his marvelous Deadwood series on HBO, Shakespeare meets Dickens meets the old West.
I'm struck by how much more narratively vivid Gilgamesh is than Genesis -- also by this simile: "it poured over the people like the tides of battle." Battle is not compared to the weather but rather the weather to battle, the vehicle, as I. A. Richards would have it -- war represented as the more familiar element than even the weather whose quality is borrowed to aid understanding.
One of the characters in my Magellan novel spends much time atop the mast (a thing I've never done) and Melville describes the drowsy languor of the infinitude just as I've imagined it and crucial to a key scene of mine. Very affirming!
I love the Stafford as much as I always love Stafford.
Job well done, Ms. Penry!
Thank you, Jay, for taking such time and care with the post! I'm glad you found the rewards plentiful. I loved the excuse to pick up Jane Eyre again. It's funny how I remembered the novel as soggy enough for this post. It was, but only in the right places.
That combination of regional vernacular + heightened diction is one of the reasons I enjoy reading Bret Harte's short stories. He was marvelously consistent about that particular form of linguistic play. I must be one of the last people to never have cable TV, so I missed most of the Deadwood series, but somehow I caught some episodes early on. (Colleagues in western lit talked about it all the time.)
I love your observation about the battle metaphor in Gilgamesh. I had not noticed that, but you're absolutely right. To think of battle being more familiar than strong weather! Yikes. Then again, this was more than strong weather. It must have been horrific - beyond what we saw in the news of the last few weeks from the southeast.
Way to imagine your Magellan scene! I think if I were to write someone onto a mast-head watch, I would make him (or a cross-dressing "her") young and enthusiastic to climb and then sick sick sick, and dizzy with hanging on. That's how I'd imagine it. But Melville had time to get used to it, and I think I would ask to swab decks instead. Landlubber, I am!