Art is Life is Art: Susan Reep Photo Art

Question for December 4 is What book- fiction or non – touched you? Where were you when you read it?  I need to talk about two: Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees and Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War.

If the measure of whether a book touched you or not is how many of the quotes you remember, the work of fiction that has stayed with me is The Maytrees by Annie Dillard.  When I was a seventh-grade language arts teacher, I’d tell my students that what we take from a book depends upon our life experiences.  A book read ten years ago can be a whole new book on the next reading depending upon the happenings in our lives, the knowledge we’ve acquired.  So I have to say that aging must have been heavy on my mind last year.  I think I have that worked out mostly,  but it doesn’t mean that books and articles that touch upon aging won’t resonate more than others.

The Maytrees was one of the first books of the year for me, and at first, I didn’t even like it.  I’d never read Dillard – not even Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. Dillard’s prose is spare, but as I became accustomed to it, the book began to speak to me.  It builds slowly with characters that seem like a motley bunch and made me question, could there possibly be this many quirky people in one small community?  As I searched my own experience I realized the answer was yes, there could.  Many of us could string together events in the lives of neighbors and friends and decide it has to be fiction because these lives couldn’t be so complicated, messy or strange – but they are.  And The Maytrees, set in Cape Cod I think, or at least a very small similar sea-town that would attract artists and summer vacationers, and perhaps the more eccentric who live year-round, gives us an ultimately believable cast of characters.  Characters who, when you strip the quirks away, are just people after all.

I’m just going to put in a few of the quotes that struck me – probably because of where I am in life.

“Their summer friends in particular harvested facts row on row from newspapers like mice on corncobs.”  This sentence made me remember how good I am at Trivial Pursuit with all these miscellaneous facts taking up storage space in my brain.  How do we get through life without accumulating knowledge we won’t need, or more important, how will we know what knowledge we will need when we are assaulted on all fronts every single day with more information than any one person can process? It’s so easy to get caught up without stopping to think – is this how I want to spend my day? Do I really want to read this article? Watch this newscast? Or should I just take a walk and let everything settle?

And this one: “How constantly, Lou thought, old people claim to have been once young.  It is as if they don’t believe it. ..that old people were old never jarred her, but it shook the daylights out of them.”   Watching my parents and intimately aware of my own thought processes and the position aging has in our society, this sentence made me realize (oh, I already knew it but this brought it into focus) how much time I spend in mild distress at getting older.  I think old age does shake the daylights out of the elderly because every day is a challenge and getting dressed can be an act of courage.  I think we still feel the same inside but our outsides won’t cooperate so in a way we don’t believe we were ever young. And that nicely transitions to the next quote.

“The tragedy of age, Jane said, is not that one is old but that one is young.”  This is profound.  At 63, I still feel like that 18-year-old setting forth on my own, my thoughts are youthful (not the same as immature I hope), I AM young.  But my body betrays me and the disconnect leads to Dillard’s “tragedy of age.”

One last quote from this book.  I’ve thought about this constantly throughout the year.  How many times a day do we say, “I don’t have enough time.”  “I can’t do that, there isn’t enough time.” “I wish I had more time!” This quote about the main character Lou: “Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.”

Powerful, huh?  In its simplicity.  Why has this stuck with me? Because we all DO have the same amount of time: 24 hours in a day.  It’s how we use it that matters.  We make choices.  Life is about choices.  If we need more time, we should evaluate how we spend our time.  Simplify.  Discard the time-wasters.  Of course doing that takes the time to think about it, and thinking time is the hardest of all to get.  I frequently told my students that time for thought was not appreciated in our society.  Say you’re at work, sitting at your desk staring into space, and your boss walks by.  S/he asks what you’re doing, and you say “thinking.” How does that go over? Not well.  We’re industrious Americans and should be churning out whatever it is we churn out.

The Maytrees isn’t a great book but it comes close.  At least for me, at this particular time in my life, it came close.  I sure remember it.

BUT WAIT – there’s more.  I have to include a non-fiction book too.  I know that everyone reading this blog is a thinking person or you wouldn’t be here. You owe it to yourself and to our soldiers to read this eminently readable work of non-fiction by reporter Dexter Filkins.  He was stationed in Iraq – I don’t remember for how long, but over a year I believe – and the way he narrates his experiences takes you somewhere you really, truly don’t want to go.  But you have to go there because thousands of our troops go there in this forever war, and this makes crystal clear why they are not coming home as whole people.  Sometimes literally if they make it home at all.

Read this book and you will “get it.” You’ll have to take this on faith because I can’t communicate like he does about the real hell war is, especially an undefinable war started on false pretenses.  And the complete impossibility of comprehending life and war in an Arab country. I lived in an Arab country for two years so have a foot up, but anyone who doesn’t have first-hand knowledge can come as close as possible with this book.

If you are intrigued, read Desert Queen, a book about Gertrude Bell, and you’ll get the whole thing.

Tiny adendum – I really enjoyed a book called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, and The Wild Things by genius Dave Eggers is pretty profound on many levels.  And a great kids book that may  not really be for kids is Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.  All three easy reading but requiring much thought.  You’re lucky the battery on my kindle is dead, or I’d go on forever!