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graywacke's review against another edition
4.0
36. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez
published: 1998
format: 273 page Paperback
acquired: from Downtown Books & News in Asheville, NC, in 2014
read: Aug 16-31
rating: 3½
A collection of essays with a nature-writer's tone. I had to work through a few things before I could begin to understand where he was going.
Since Lopez is considered a nature writer, I was maybe a little confused by what I found and by what aspects did and did not appeal to me in this essay collection. He rarely stayed long on the natural subjects. Instead he would constantly divert to human elements, human relationships to nature and their stresses and perspectives, and his own personal history. And when he does dwell on the natural surroundings, he has a strong tendency to focus on the visual and especially on the light. This maybe doesn't sound unreasonable, but it can be limiting.
Another aspect that threw me was, ironically, the wonderful quality of his opening essay, titled A Voice. This introduction talks about his first years in New York, and then growing up in rural California just outside LA in the late 1940's and early 1950's and then ending up back in New York again before later making an effort to travel everywhere. California, a lost version of it, had tremendous impact on him and the way he sees the world.
So I struggled with Lopez a long time, trying to figure out why some things didn't work and yet other parts worked really well. It seems there were some things he simply couldn't capture, or, if he tried, he had to take a very roundabout course to his point. He was clearly very knowledgeable, but he seemed unable or unwilling to bring all that knowledge to bear in his essays and in his descriptions.
In a later personal essay he writes about his efforts to become a nature photographer, a pursuit he later gave up to focus on writing. I thought this was really revealing and wish I had known it up front. It explains his focus on the light and the visuals, and, more significantly, his internal contradictory feelings toward nature photography. Both have some bearing on how he writes about nature in general. He's not here to glorify it because he doesn't want to edit out, so to speak, the other sides of nature, the fuller picture. This essay helped me understand some of what he was trying to do with all these earlier essays, which to me were sometimes working and sometimes not (an odd aspect in a selected collection), and more typically felt mixed.
When I re-look at all these essays with this in mind, I think I see Lopez as a struggling writer with broad philosophical approach to human and natural relations that is difficult to capture in a persuasive narrative. His goal is maybe a bit elusive, and even his own point of view is maybe not simple to establish, something that needed to be worked for each essay. And this adds something to whole collection and to the writer, although I'm hard-pressed to explain exactly what I mean. It gives a depth dimension of some sort, and adds weight the collection as a whole.
I'm happy to have read this and taken in Lopez's perspectives.
published: 1998
format: 273 page Paperback
acquired: from Downtown Books & News in Asheville, NC, in 2014
read: Aug 16-31
rating: 3½
A collection of essays with a nature-writer's tone. I had to work through a few things before I could begin to understand where he was going.
Since Lopez is considered a nature writer, I was maybe a little confused by what I found and by what aspects did and did not appeal to me in this essay collection. He rarely stayed long on the natural subjects. Instead he would constantly divert to human elements, human relationships to nature and their stresses and perspectives, and his own personal history. And when he does dwell on the natural surroundings, he has a strong tendency to focus on the visual and especially on the light. This maybe doesn't sound unreasonable, but it can be limiting.
Another aspect that threw me was, ironically, the wonderful quality of his opening essay, titled A Voice. This introduction talks about his first years in New York, and then growing up in rural California just outside LA in the late 1940's and early 1950's and then ending up back in New York again before later making an effort to travel everywhere. California, a lost version of it, had tremendous impact on him and the way he sees the world.
"I could not have understood at this age, only eight or nine, what it might mean to have a voice one day, to speak as a writer speaks. I would have been baffled by the thought. The world I inhabited—the emotions I imaged horses to have, the sound of a night wind clattering ominously in the dry leaves of a eucalyptus tree—I imagined as a refuge, one that would be lost to me if I tried to explain it."This opening essay stands out, and is also unlike anything in the next maybe 150 pages of text before another essay revisits his youth. And none of his other essays really captured me like this opening.
So I struggled with Lopez a long time, trying to figure out why some things didn't work and yet other parts worked really well. It seems there were some things he simply couldn't capture, or, if he tried, he had to take a very roundabout course to his point. He was clearly very knowledgeable, but he seemed unable or unwilling to bring all that knowledge to bear in his essays and in his descriptions.
In a later personal essay he writes about his efforts to become a nature photographer, a pursuit he later gave up to focus on writing. I thought this was really revealing and wish I had known it up front. It explains his focus on the light and the visuals, and, more significantly, his internal contradictory feelings toward nature photography. Both have some bearing on how he writes about nature in general. He's not here to glorify it because he doesn't want to edit out, so to speak, the other sides of nature, the fuller picture. This essay helped me understand some of what he was trying to do with all these earlier essays, which to me were sometimes working and sometimes not (an odd aspect in a selected collection), and more typically felt mixed.
When I re-look at all these essays with this in mind, I think I see Lopez as a struggling writer with broad philosophical approach to human and natural relations that is difficult to capture in a persuasive narrative. His goal is maybe a bit elusive, and even his own point of view is maybe not simple to establish, something that needed to be worked for each essay. And this adds something to whole collection and to the writer, although I'm hard-pressed to explain exactly what I mean. It gives a depth dimension of some sort, and adds weight the collection as a whole.
I'm happy to have read this and taken in Lopez's perspectives.
kylegarvey's review
4.0
Barry Lopez, who died recently and had a Fresh Air obit I heard, was a prolific travel writer. His About This Life (a semi-autobiographical collection of shorter pieces) is the kind of heady nonfiction that seems flat at best but is actually quite deep. Simplistic on the surface, but soon pretty marvelous. Not informational travel purely (though the Bonaire or Hokkaido essays or the ones about North American animals do have a lot of information in them), but it's experiential travel, like memories, like impressions… "The odor and the flowers’ colors in the garden attracted me", so he'd want visits there, for instance to re-gather alphabet blocks he'd purposely pushed out his window the day before (21).
Lopez "understood that my Jesuit education, my social and economic class, my good grades, my trained and confident young man’s voice, my white skin, and the hegemony of my religion all pointed toward being well received in the world" (28). In a reading he skipped class sophomore year to attend, an Odyssey translation, he crystallized an attitude toward language and story: "galvanized in beauty by [the] presentation. History, quest, longing" (29).
"'Did you see the octopus!' someone shouted after a dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was there, just then? Why?" (54). A part to roll your eyes at a little, but it soon develops into truer, more interesting expression. He would lie awake "trying to remember some moment of the day just past. The very process of calling upon the details of color and sound was a reminder of how provocative the landscape is, to both the senses and the intellect" (85).
In Hokkaido, "Nowhere here is 'scale-of-human-enterprise' large. It meshes easily with the land" (72); and in a Galápagos spot "You extend your fingers here to the damp, soft rims of orchids, blooming white on the flanks of dark volcanoes" (79). A few facts ensue, like "The cleft fore-edge of a lowland tortoise’s carapace resembles the sharply rising pommel of a sixteenth-century Spanish saddle, the old Spanish for which was galopego" (87); and a lot of opinions/reasoning ensue, like "Our knowledge of life is slim. The undisturbed landscapes are rapidly dwindling. And no plan has yet emerged for a kind of wealth that will satisfy all people" (91). I beg to differ, though, sort of -- a Green New Deal might redefine and re-orient us toward what's healthier.
With lush synonyms for days, Lopez can describe in precise detail things others might say were 'big', 'loud', 'good'. It rarely if ever seems needlessly verbose, or like he's putting ornaments on something hollow. It's all fascinating. Like in "Flight", when he contemplates time itself (142) or the goods we push hither and yon (146). There's a bit of shame later at the stereotypes we've all helped cultivate: "animals are all beautiful, diligent, one might even say well behaved" (176). But soon, "The shock to the senses comes from a different shape to the silence, a difference in the very quality of light, in the weight of the air" (177).
He mourns too: "An incipient industry, capitalizing on the nostalgia Americans feel for the imagined virgin landscapes of their ancestors, and on a desire for adventure, now offers people a convenient though sometimes incomplete or even spurious geography as an inducement to purchase a unique experience" (183). There can be manipulation of this nostalgia if there's political will and people are removed from where they could find firsthand disagreement, though (185).
A rare, tiny misstep might be when Lopez bumbles around a poetic look at an anagama kiln, where I thought he tried too hard. I appreciate the secular spirituality, I do, but here it's ladled on too quickly, and the essay has a bit of a gawky, unpolished veneer overall. But soon after he returns to better things, including a profound and many-faceted Moby-Dick metaphor. As well as the power of physical hands for instance: "not hard to believe they remember the heads patted, the hands shaken, the apples peeled, the hair braided, the wood split, the gears shifted, the flesh gripped and stroked" (288).
From the very practical he misinterpreted while young -- like, financial rules, check writing ("You write in whatever you want… You can even, I said, write in a hundred dollars. More, a thousand, and go to the bank. They give it to you" (314)) -- to the very notional, the very abstract -- like, identifying with artifacts ("Just speculation [about] what they believe happened here [or similarly] about what we did" (343)), Lopez runs the gamut in some of the final essays in this book. Crisp vignettes usually enough.
Always a cute blend of astute memorization and fastidious note-taking, it must take, to jog through experiential nonfiction like this; as true, I imagine, for both a long-ago memory or an expedition hours ago! All to the reader's taste, it can seem mostly, how plain and utilitarian the prose is (all except little hints of poetry, of course), but far from just any old writer doing certain things it's unmistakably 'Barry Lopez doing certain things'. Even the boring, uniform 'doing' holds so much special.
There's a personal hope in photographs he says he has "perhaps because I presume we share certain principles related to the effort to imagine or explain" (310). Plus, earlier, he'd written that prose is far from just information conveyance, though: it's more to "help her discover what she means" (33).
Lopez "understood that my Jesuit education, my social and economic class, my good grades, my trained and confident young man’s voice, my white skin, and the hegemony of my religion all pointed toward being well received in the world" (28). In a reading he skipped class sophomore year to attend, an Odyssey translation, he crystallized an attitude toward language and story: "galvanized in beauty by [the] presentation. History, quest, longing" (29).
"'Did you see the octopus!' someone shouted after a dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was there, just then? Why?" (54). A part to roll your eyes at a little, but it soon develops into truer, more interesting expression. He would lie awake "trying to remember some moment of the day just past. The very process of calling upon the details of color and sound was a reminder of how provocative the landscape is, to both the senses and the intellect" (85).
In Hokkaido, "Nowhere here is 'scale-of-human-enterprise' large. It meshes easily with the land" (72); and in a Galápagos spot "You extend your fingers here to the damp, soft rims of orchids, blooming white on the flanks of dark volcanoes" (79). A few facts ensue, like "The cleft fore-edge of a lowland tortoise’s carapace resembles the sharply rising pommel of a sixteenth-century Spanish saddle, the old Spanish for which was galopego" (87); and a lot of opinions/reasoning ensue, like "Our knowledge of life is slim. The undisturbed landscapes are rapidly dwindling. And no plan has yet emerged for a kind of wealth that will satisfy all people" (91). I beg to differ, though, sort of -- a Green New Deal might redefine and re-orient us toward what's healthier.
With lush synonyms for days, Lopez can describe in precise detail things others might say were 'big', 'loud', 'good'. It rarely if ever seems needlessly verbose, or like he's putting ornaments on something hollow. It's all fascinating. Like in "Flight", when he contemplates time itself (142) or the goods we push hither and yon (146). There's a bit of shame later at the stereotypes we've all helped cultivate: "animals are all beautiful, diligent, one might even say well behaved" (176). But soon, "The shock to the senses comes from a different shape to the silence, a difference in the very quality of light, in the weight of the air" (177).
He mourns too: "An incipient industry, capitalizing on the nostalgia Americans feel for the imagined virgin landscapes of their ancestors, and on a desire for adventure, now offers people a convenient though sometimes incomplete or even spurious geography as an inducement to purchase a unique experience" (183). There can be manipulation of this nostalgia if there's political will and people are removed from where they could find firsthand disagreement, though (185).
A rare, tiny misstep might be when Lopez bumbles around a poetic look at an anagama kiln, where I thought he tried too hard. I appreciate the secular spirituality, I do, but here it's ladled on too quickly, and the essay has a bit of a gawky, unpolished veneer overall. But soon after he returns to better things, including a profound and many-faceted Moby-Dick metaphor. As well as the power of physical hands for instance: "not hard to believe they remember the heads patted, the hands shaken, the apples peeled, the hair braided, the wood split, the gears shifted, the flesh gripped and stroked" (288).
From the very practical he misinterpreted while young -- like, financial rules, check writing ("You write in whatever you want… You can even, I said, write in a hundred dollars. More, a thousand, and go to the bank. They give it to you" (314)) -- to the very notional, the very abstract -- like, identifying with artifacts ("Just speculation [about] what they believe happened here [or similarly] about what we did" (343)), Lopez runs the gamut in some of the final essays in this book. Crisp vignettes usually enough.
Always a cute blend of astute memorization and fastidious note-taking, it must take, to jog through experiential nonfiction like this; as true, I imagine, for both a long-ago memory or an expedition hours ago! All to the reader's taste, it can seem mostly, how plain and utilitarian the prose is (all except little hints of poetry, of course), but far from just any old writer doing certain things it's unmistakably 'Barry Lopez doing certain things'. Even the boring, uniform 'doing' holds so much special.
There's a personal hope in photographs he says he has "perhaps because I presume we share certain principles related to the effort to imagine or explain" (310). Plus, earlier, he'd written that prose is far from just information conveyance, though: it's more to "help her discover what she means" (33).
thecuriosityhourpodcast's review against another edition
5.0
This was an absolutely beautiful collection of essays, exploring the profound in the minutiae. Recommended to me, I have no qualms in recommending it to others. Lopez is a fantastic writer, and I found myself completely enraptured. This is fantastic!
theliteraryapothecary's review
2.0
There were some good lines, a little bit of beautiful language in here but in my perspective it felt like a lot of lists - where he went, who he saw, what he saw, what he knew... I felt a lot of the emotion left out - describing a sunset and saying he felt things but didn't allow the reader to feel those same things. It felt like a lot of "extra" words - He said that this happened, I felt that ..., instead of just letting the readers experience this. One thing I learned from grad school - whether in fiction or non-fiction, you should let you readers see and feel the experiences, hear the conversations, instead of telling them. Show Don't Tell professors always said. Because of this lack of emotion, I had a hard time connecting with the material in this book. I only finished it because I finish everything that I start reading, sooner or later.
jamiereadthis's review against another edition
3.0
At the intersection of that Venn diagram of my interests— community and storytelling and wilderness— here sits this book. There are some great essays here— on memory, on art, on biology and geography— and some fascinating subjects— like the essay, “Flight,” his first-hand account of riding shotgun on the boggling logistics of our global economy, or “Orchids on the Volcanos,” on the reality of the present-day Galápagos Islands, or “The Whaleboat,” on whaling from Melville and Moby-Dick to Greely and the doomed expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in 1888.
Points docked, really, only because of my adjacent reading of Rick Bass and Wendell Berry. In comparison it’s too pretty. It needs some muscle. It needs the fire in the belly. But, lest that keep anyone from picking it up, here’s a taste of what’s here, from the introduction no less, from the inconsequential part:
Points docked, really, only because of my adjacent reading of Rick Bass and Wendell Berry. In comparison it’s too pretty. It needs some muscle. It needs the fire in the belly. But, lest that keep anyone from picking it up, here’s a taste of what’s here, from the introduction no less, from the inconsequential part:
Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.(So I read this one via Rick Bass, right? It had to be, right? Nope. Elmore Leonard. These Venn diagrams, they overlap something fierce.)
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