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amaustin's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book. I just recently read Paterson by Williams Carlos Williams and I feel that the meditative qualitative of both really complemented each other. There is something really lovely about utilizing poetry and prose and fiction together in a search for hiring meaning, and in this book in particular it really resonated with me. I like the idea that you can come back to something multiple times and take fresh meaning from it, find joy where before you found disappointment, because something in you has changed enough to receive it. And similarly, the near impossible quest to define that which is indescribable--and the dogged determination to do it anyway.
Leonard's quest felt to me like an obsession to describe the qualities of nature that are both beautiful and harsh, familiar and yet alien. We do not own nature; we can observe it, change it, destroy it, connect with it, but can never own it. And while we live our relatively self-centric lives, nature goes on without us. It reminds me of a poem (which also happens to feature birds):
"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Leonard's quest felt to me like an obsession to describe the qualities of nature that are both beautiful and harsh, familiar and yet alien. We do not own nature; we can observe it, change it, destroy it, connect with it, but can never own it. And while we live our relatively self-centric lives, nature goes on without us. It reminds me of a poem (which also happens to feature birds):
"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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