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