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jdscott50's review
4.0
This was part of my learning about the City of Reno book series. The City of Trembling Leaves was written by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. More famous for the Ox-Bow Incident, this book is about his adopted hometown of Reno, Nevada. The opening sequence reminded me of Winesburg, Ohio and much of the book has a similar feel to it. However, instead of a nice small midwestern town, it reveals all the complexities of Reno. Some of the writing includes parts of Reno that are long gone from growth and development. You will never witness the South Meadows area with its trees and you will never run with the Mustangs in Spanish Springs (although you can still see the wild horses that roam the area if you go farther out). You still have the casinos that brought a culture that is just as bad today.
Timothy Hazard is born in San Francisco and moves to Reno as a teenager. We see him navigate his new environment and in exploring it he finds more about himself.
It is one of the only large sweeping books about Reno. It rivals Winesburg, Ohio in its purity and love of place and the people that live there. It provides a modern gritty twist that persists in most of the literature about the area. City of Trembling Leaves, Sweet Promised Land, Motel Life, and the short story collection Grind all cover aspects that make Reno what it is today.
Favorite Passages:
Houses are incipiently evil which have been intended to master time and dominate nature. That is a moribund intention. It feels death coming on all the time, and, having no faith in reproduction or multiplicity, tries to build a fort to hold it off. p. 6
Thus Reno is reminded constantly that it is only one small stop on the road of the human world, that it trembles with the comings and goings of that world, and yet that the greatest cry of that world is only a brief echo against mountains. P11
...the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved." P 12
Every person is also a jungle himself, a forest primeval, a prehistoric swamp in which life is rich, various and reproductive, in which it is very easy to get lost, but absolutely impossible to see everything. P 20
Tim could feel no motion in the air at all, vet a few of the little aspen's eighteen or twenty leaves were gingerly shivering and twinkling. It made Tim feel that he was in the presence of some vast, benevolent and very gentle force which he was too dull to perceive. Once in a while all the leaves would tremble-at the same time, making a faint rustling, as if in access of joyous but nervous expectation, and Tim would feel a sympathetic ascension. The heavier world of mountains and the house, of the voices inside and the burden of his own body, receded beyond the perimeter of his mind as be-yond a very far-removed horizon, and he was full of the motion and light of the little aspen. Perhaps this five-minute communion, stirring nearly forgot-ten leaves of the magic wilderness within him also, gradually becoming one tremulous expectation of something, performed the last preparation for Tim's conversion. He has compared it to another brief interlude, which came upon him years later. P107
"It was at this moment that I felt the birth of the world and the deep, sad kinship of everything in it. I had considered this kinship, of course, innumerable times, but I knew it then, beyond question. It was a revelation. It was in me without an idea. All that I had ever considered, argued and doubted about uni-versal kinship, by bones, and by atoms, by the seasons of fruiting and of death, by the immortality of generation, by the universes of space and of the grain of dust, was in that instant established and yet made a childish tinkering with notions. P109
It was August, but August is already autumn at that altitude...p165
I have always felt that Tahoe, when it was quiet, does not touch its bottom or shores, but is suspended like air, and coldly and constantly refreshed by its true affinity, inter-stellar. 165
Now I suppose I might say it’s the whole philosophy of life. I sit and listen for the sound of the nuclear. 204
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope. At such an hour in such a day, the power of the trees of Reno was great. Their certainty of forever, their knowledge that the river of life was brimming and rippling silently through God's pastures, reached even to the intersection of Virginia and Second. -Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves p. 232
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope...
Either you closed yourself and became one of the jealous or ambitious, or you were opened up, and became simply yourself, which was enough. P395
Yet there is one important difference between even this region and the truly moribund cities of the world, the difference which makes Reno a city of adolescence, a city of dissonant themes, sawing against each other with a kind of piercing beauty like that of a fourtheen-year-old girl or a seventen-year-old boy, the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved. Even from the very center of Reno, from the intersection of Virginia and Second Streets, and even at night, when restless clubs lights mask the stars, one can look in any direction and see the infinite shoals of the leaves hovering about the first lone crossing light. (12)
Timothy Hazard is born in San Francisco and moves to Reno as a teenager. We see him navigate his new environment and in exploring it he finds more about himself.
It is one of the only large sweeping books about Reno. It rivals Winesburg, Ohio in its purity and love of place and the people that live there. It provides a modern gritty twist that persists in most of the literature about the area. City of Trembling Leaves, Sweet Promised Land, Motel Life, and the short story collection Grind all cover aspects that make Reno what it is today.
Favorite Passages:
Houses are incipiently evil which have been intended to master time and dominate nature. That is a moribund intention. It feels death coming on all the time, and, having no faith in reproduction or multiplicity, tries to build a fort to hold it off. p. 6
Thus Reno is reminded constantly that it is only one small stop on the road of the human world, that it trembles with the comings and goings of that world, and yet that the greatest cry of that world is only a brief echo against mountains. P11
...the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved." P 12
Every person is also a jungle himself, a forest primeval, a prehistoric swamp in which life is rich, various and reproductive, in which it is very easy to get lost, but absolutely impossible to see everything. P 20
Tim could feel no motion in the air at all, vet a few of the little aspen's eighteen or twenty leaves were gingerly shivering and twinkling. It made Tim feel that he was in the presence of some vast, benevolent and very gentle force which he was too dull to perceive. Once in a while all the leaves would tremble-at the same time, making a faint rustling, as if in access of joyous but nervous expectation, and Tim would feel a sympathetic ascension. The heavier world of mountains and the house, of the voices inside and the burden of his own body, receded beyond the perimeter of his mind as be-yond a very far-removed horizon, and he was full of the motion and light of the little aspen. Perhaps this five-minute communion, stirring nearly forgot-ten leaves of the magic wilderness within him also, gradually becoming one tremulous expectation of something, performed the last preparation for Tim's conversion. He has compared it to another brief interlude, which came upon him years later. P107
"It was at this moment that I felt the birth of the world and the deep, sad kinship of everything in it. I had considered this kinship, of course, innumerable times, but I knew it then, beyond question. It was a revelation. It was in me without an idea. All that I had ever considered, argued and doubted about uni-versal kinship, by bones, and by atoms, by the seasons of fruiting and of death, by the immortality of generation, by the universes of space and of the grain of dust, was in that instant established and yet made a childish tinkering with notions. P109
It was August, but August is already autumn at that altitude...p165
I have always felt that Tahoe, when it was quiet, does not touch its bottom or shores, but is suspended like air, and coldly and constantly refreshed by its true affinity, inter-stellar. 165
Now I suppose I might say it’s the whole philosophy of life. I sit and listen for the sound of the nuclear. 204
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope. At such an hour in such a day, the power of the trees of Reno was great. Their certainty of forever, their knowledge that the river of life was brimming and rippling silently through God's pastures, reached even to the intersection of Virginia and Second. -Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves p. 232
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope...
Either you closed yourself and became one of the jealous or ambitious, or you were opened up, and became simply yourself, which was enough. P395
Yet there is one important difference between even this region and the truly moribund cities of the world, the difference which makes Reno a city of adolescence, a city of dissonant themes, sawing against each other with a kind of piercing beauty like that of a fourtheen-year-old girl or a seventen-year-old boy, the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved. Even from the very center of Reno, from the intersection of Virginia and Second Streets, and even at night, when restless clubs lights mask the stars, one can look in any direction and see the infinite shoals of the leaves hovering about the first lone crossing light. (12)
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