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A review by kylegarvey
About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez
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).