Scott Russell Sanders's Blog: Life Notes, page 2

Our Common Humanity

In February 2021, one of the darkest periods of the Covid pandemic, I took part in an online literary festival. Each of the featured speakers was given an hour to present his or her work. When my turn came, I read passages from my book The Way of Imagination, and I spoke about the role that imagination plays in social reform, science, art, and ethics. I emphasized how, by nurturing compassion, this mental power may help us to overcome the many forces that divide us.

By the time I finished my presentation, the online audience had posted dozens of questions. The first person called on by the moderator was one of my fellow speakers, a writer of Penobscot lineage who denounced me for using the word “tribal” in my talk, which she took as an insult toward Native Americans. I tried to explain that the word “tribe” could be traced back to the ancient Romans, and that I used “tribalism” to mean the human impulse to create divisions between Us and Them, between those inside and those outside our moral regard. Refusing to listen, she talked over me, called me insensitive, accused me of reinforcing stereotypes about indigenous people as savages. I tried to point out that I had referred to racists and partisan politicians, not to indigenous people, but she continued her diatribe without giving me a chance to respond, and used up half of the time allotted to Q&A. I chose not to argue with her, so that others might have a chance to pose questions or make comments. Next, the moderator called on another of my fellow speakers, a poet, who used up the remainder of the Q&A time to attack me for using the word “we” when talking about artists, because she was convinced that my collective pronoun would not include her, an immigrant from Taiwan, and she resented always being marginalized, forever a victim of colonial contempt from people like me. Again, I had no chance to reply. Having run out of time, I said a brisk goodbye to the audience and logged off the Zoom link. It took me an hour, and a long walk in the park, to calm down.

Each of these attacks had been triggered by a single word—“tribal” and “we”—and by assumptions about my attitudes for which the two writers had no evidence aside from what they saw on the screen. What they saw was a seventy-something, white-bearded, pale-skinned male, who they felt certain must be hostile toward them as individuals and toward those with whom they identified. In short, they saw me as belonging to an alien tribe, someone to fear and despise.

This was not the first time I had been given a taste of what it feels like to be profiled, to be judged by my outward appearance, nor would it be the last. White guys have it coming. I get that. But this experience of being stereotyped, while instructive, was also disturbing, which is why I am mulling over the event a year later. If we had met in person instead of onscreen, if we had sat at a table and learned about one another's lives over cups of coffee, would my fellow writers have been so quick to assume the worst about me? If they had read any of my books, would they have realized that I treat with respect both immigrants and indigenous people? Would they have discovered that I am an ally rather than an enemy?

What most troubles me is the possibility that these two writers, and many other bearers of personal as well as historical grievances, need to see me—and people who look like me—as irredeemably Other. If this is so, they will never believe that when I say “we” I include them and all the rest of humankind, and when they say “we” they will never include a great many people who care about their suffering and their heritage. So we must listen to one another, patiently, forever open to the possibility of kinship.

Books That Draw Us Back

Of the roughly fifteen hundred books on my shelves, I’ve read at least half of them more than once, and many I’ve read three or more times. Sometimes I only review the underlined passages and the notes scribbled in the margins—always in pencil, since ink bleeds through paper like a bruise. But usually I read every page. What draws me back to favorite books of prose as well as poetry might be the rich quality of the language, the striking metaphors, elegant phrasing, vivid images, and the musical sound of the sentences. If the book is a work of fiction, I might reread it because I was fascinated by the characters or captivated by the story. If the book is nonfiction, I might take it up again because I was intrigued by the subject matter, enlightened by the argument, or impressed by the author’s wisdom.

I read for pleasure, mental travel, and knowledge, but above all I read for insight. The best books are inexhaustible, revealing new depths on each reading. They also reveal new dimensions in me, as I grow older and bring to the reading more life experience, including the experience of writing books of my own. Here is the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, himself a prolific author, coming upon such a revelatory book: “I went out this afternoon, read some stuff on meditation....Then came back and began a new Penguin containing Bashō’s travel notes. Completely shattered by them. One of the most beautiful books I have ever read in my life. It gives me a whole new (old) view of my own life. The whole thing is pitched right on my tone. Deeply moving in every kind of way. Seldom have I found a book to which I responded so totally.”

I drew this passage from The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo (HarperCollins, 1998), which I finished reading today for the third time. My hardcover edition of the book, with a photo of Merton in his monk’s garb on the cover, rests beside me on the desk as I type. Next to it is my well-thumbed copy of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the book that Merton found “Deeply moving in every kind of way.” Written by the great Japanese writer Matsuo Bashō, it was published in 1966 as a Penguin Classic, in a translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa. You can be certain that Merton returned to this book more than once, as I have. Any book that affects one profoundly on a first reading is likely to reward further visits.

RACHEL'S LIBRARY

In my book The Way of Imagination (Counterpoint, 2020), I invented a young woman named Rachel, an ecologist, who lives early in the 22nd century. As she struggles to help save the last surviving runs of salmon, she laments the disastrous legacy from the generations that preceded hers—the killing heat, violent storms, wildfires, floods, droughts, pollution of land and waters, extinction of species, hunger due to crop failures, shortage of fresh water, waves of epidemic disease, and social upheaval. She wonders if any American writers were paying attention to these crises back in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when much of the damage and suffering could have been foreseen and avoided.

Because I wanted Rachel to know there were such writers, I imagined her receiving a trove of books from her great-grandmother, a poet and environmentalist who lived in our present day. After acknowledging the limits of my tastes and the scope of my reading, here is the shortlist of authors I proposed for Rachel’s library: Edward Abbey, A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Jim Harrison, Robert Hass, Barbara Kingsolver, Galway Kinnell, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams.

The list could have been greatly extended. The notes from which I drew this sample included more than a hundred additional names, including writers such as Alison Deming, John Elder, Robert Finch, John Hay, J. Drew Lanham, Bill McKibben, Kathleen Dean Moore, Gary Nabhan, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, Kim Stafford, and Ann Zwinger. But the few names I offered in The Way of Imagination should be enough to serve my purpose, which is to characterize the literature from our time that addresses most deeply and urgently the grave challenges we are passing on to our descendants.

Recently, a reader from North Carolina wrote me to suggest authors he would add to Rachel’s library: E. O. Wilson, Wes Jackson, Thomas Berry, Bernd Heinrich, Lewis Thomas, Ted Kooser, David Suzuki, and Chet Raymo, among others. All worthies, for sure.

Now it’s your turn: Whom would you add to Rachel’s library?

Hermann Hesse's SIDDHARTHA

Siddhartha

Every time I reread Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the novel reminds me of a more idealistic time in my own life and in American culture, when young people cared more about finding meaning than about making money.

When I first read the book, in 1969, during my graduate studies in England, I felt the “restlessness of soul” that stirs Siddhartha. Was I not also, like Siddhartha, “a seeker, insatiable”? Over the years, and subsequent readings, I have come to share Siddhartha’s skepticism about gurus, systems, and head-knowledge: “Something was no longer in him, something that had accompanied him right through his youth and was part of him: this was the desire to have teachers and to listen to their teachings. He had left the last teacher he had met, even he, the greatest and wisest teacher, the holiest, the Buddha. He had to leave him; he could not accept his teachings.” Again: “He had known for a long time that his Self was Atman, of the same eternal nature as Brahman, but he had never really found his Self, because he had wanted to trap it in the net of thoughts” (39).

After Siddhartha becomes involved with a woman, with business, with the affairs of the world, he is gradually drawn into the cares and values that he scorned as a young man: “Slowly, like moisture entering the dying tree trunk, slowly filling and rotting it, so did the world and inertia creep into Siddhartha’s soul; it slowly filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, sent it to sleep” (61). His response to this realization is to walk away—from relationships, money, business, ordinary affairs—and to settle down to live beside a river, where he can lead the simple, austere, unaffiliated life of a ferryman. Here I must part ways with him, for I am committed to my wife, children, grandchildren, students, community, and writing; I could not give up these duties and connections, even for the sake of enlightenment.

Beside the river, Siddhartha lives with another ferryman, Vasudeva, who is old, poor, simple, and wise. “Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life. This thought matured in him slowly, and it was reflected in Vasudeva’s old childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, and unity” (106-7). In an earlier passage, Siddhartha reflects on what it is that distinguishes him from the many passengers whom he takes across the river: “With the exception of one small thing, one tiny little thing, they lacked nothing that the sage and thinker had, and that was the consciousness of the unity of all life” (106).

In his wisdom, Siddhartha lets go of seeking: “Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal” (113). That is a hard lesson for someone as goal-oriented, as purpose-driven, as I am. Meditation, of course, is a training in the letting-go of desire, of agendas, of goals. If we took the Sabbath seriously, it would be a weekly reminder to set aside our projects, let go of our schemes, quit striving and grasping for a spell—long enough to hear and feel a reality greater than our own small selves.

Near the end of the book, Siddhartha tells his lifelong friend, Govinda: “Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it” (115). Again: “It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. but I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect” (119).

News Fast

I am in the second week of a news fast, a discipline I practice now and again for the same reason that other people go on a food fast—to purge the poison from my system. The poison, in this case, is the venom that oozes from the mouths of politicians, pundits, and power brokers whose insults and lies fill the headlines and airwaves.

Take in a steady diet of contemptuous speech and you’re liable to feel contempt yourself, not only for this or that supposed enemy but for our entire species. Read constantly about cruelty and corruption, and you may lose trust in the power of honesty and kindness. Absorb enough reports about wars and threats of war, and you may cease to believe in the possibility of peace. Immerse yourself in stories about the purchasing of legislators and judges by corporations and billionaires, and you’re liable to give up on democracy as a failed experiment, and you may even yearn for an autocrat who promises to keep the stores full of stuff and the gas price low. The algorithms on social media amp up anger and hostility. Even late-night TV, which might seem like harmless entertainment, relies on ridicule for laughs, coaching us to scorn not only people we already dislike, but also people whom we had been naive enough to admire.

Strife grabs our attention; harmony lulls us to sleep. That’s why news is littered with the language of violence: clash, attack, battle, scorn, troll, slam, humiliate, denounce, assault, harass, rape. In the flood of images and words, strife rules, as thousands of media sources compete for our ears and eyes. I gave up watching TV news on commercial channels years ago, because I was repulsed by the smirking hosts and snarling guests, and the images of mayhem haunted my sleep. But even the highest quality news sources available in print and online feature conflict, for they, too, must garner enough readers to please the advertisers.

Most of the time I am one of those readers, sampling a dozen or more sources every day, but as my spirits sink lower and my view of humankind darkens, I realize that I must take a break to recover my sanity and to recall our better traits. So I tune out the news for a spell and tune in the eternities. I watch birds, weed the garden, listen to music, reread favorite books; I visit the art museum on campus, strolling among students whose faces glow with promise; I chat with neighbors on the sidewalk and I ask checkout clerks how they’re doing; I write letters to friends, actual letters on paper, and I phone other friends just to hear their voices; I listen to kids whooping with joy on swings in the park, track the moon through its monthly phases, watch films about wildlife and conservation and the cosmos, and I take walks around town with my wife.

I’m aware that a responsible citizen should be informed about what’s going on in the local community, across the nation, and around the planet; but one should also have enough faith in one’s fellow citizens to believe that together we can fashion a more just and peaceful world. Taking a break from the news helps me regain that faith. If the world seems blighted to you, and hope seems foolish, you might try this remedy, which costs nothing but a little restraint.

In Praise of Birches

Among the trees I’ve met first in a book, and only later in a forest, my favorite is the paper birch, also known as white birch or canoe birch. As a writer, I’m partial to paper, which you can hear in its Latin species name, Betula papyrifera. Common in the woods of New England, but rare south of the Great Lakes where I grew up, this is the tree Robert Frost celebrated in his poem “Birches,” which I read for the first time in an English class during the spring of my junior year in high school. The following summer I memorized all fifty-nine lines of “Birches,” in hopes of impressing a girl at science camp by reciting it to her on an evening walk. The girl was fifteen, supersmart, and cute to boot; I was sixteen, and dazzled by her. On a night lit by fireflies, we took our walk, and I poured rather more romance into the recitation than Frost had put into the poem, although he did say, “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better,” which I took as encouragement for courtship. The girl smiled at my theatrics, but didn’t laugh. Five years later, after graduating from different colleges, we got married. That’s the chief source of my affection for paper birches. Midway through my seventies, I’ve lost a few lines from the poem, but I haven’t lost the girl, now a grandmother, who dazzles me still.

Loving Trees

I was asked to write a short note to help launch a new journal called Plant-Human Quarterly. Here's what I offered:

We take care of what we love. But how do we learn that love?

When I was a boy, walking with my father in the woods near our home in Ohio, he would often say he wanted to visit an old friend. Then he would guide me to some great tree, and before he told me its name, he would have me notice the shape of its leaves, the sound of the wind in its branches, the smell and feel of the bark, the flowers or nuts it might bear, the plants that grew in its shade. Once I had become acquainted with the tree, he would say, for instance, “This old fellow is Sycamore,” and then he would say, “Sycamore, this is my son, Scott.” And so I met various kinds of oaks and maples and hickories, beech and sassafras, black cherry and tulip-tree, mulberry and walnut, and dozens of other species.

In this way my father taught me not only to identify trees by their distinctive traits, but to recognize them as fellow creatures, each one an individual just as I was, and each one also, as I was, a member of a family—an ironwood among ironwoods, a buckeye among buckeyes.

I told this story about walking in the woods with my father in my children's book Meeting Trees. Today, having often celebrated trees in my writing, I’m sometimes asked, in a tone of incredulity, “Do you actually hug trees?” to which I reply, with equal incredulity, “Of course. Don’t you?”

The Poet Takes a Walk

After reading Ted Kooser's new collection of poems, Red Stilts, which he had sent to me, I kept thinking about this writer, now in his eighties, strolling his Nebraska town with eyes and ears attentive to every stirring of life. So I wrote this little story to send him as a gift in return for his book:

THE POET TAKES A WALK

Of course, he is not only a poet. He is also a husband, father, son, citizen, and a whole cast of other characters, all inhabiting the same skin, like a crowd of joeys jostling inside the pouch of a mother kangaroo. The character rivaling the poet for the lead role this morning is the handyman, for he is on his way to the hardware store in search of a spring to replace one that broke the day before on the latch to the garden gate. Ordinarily, he would be at his desk this time in the morning, pen in one hand, chin resting in the other, his mind pulling images out of the air and tethering them to the page with words.

But his wife was awakened time and again in the night by the banging of the garden gate, which fidgeted in high winds blowing across the plains. Hard of hearing, the poet slept through the ruckus, learning of it from his wife over breakfast. “Do you think you might fix it?” she asked, her eyes hollow from loss of sleep. Of course he could fix it. If not a farmer himself, hadn’t he grown up in farm country, gone to school with 4-H champions, studied the tools heaped in the backs of pickup trucks parked on Main Street? He promised his wife he would quiet the gate before dark.

So the man approaching the hardware store this morning is as much husband as handyman, determined to mend a bit of the world for his beloved. He will seek out the elderly clerk, a man of roughly his own age, hold out the broken part in his palm, and say, “I’ve come in search of a spring.” Forming that sentence, with its two iambs followed by an anapest, the poet envisions water welling up to fill a stony pool in a pasture. From all directions, tracks worn into the ground by thirsty cows converge on the water, as workers from the chicken plant converge on Wayne’s tavern at quitting time. Or as creases gather at the corner of an eye accustomed to squinting in the harsh prairie sunlight. Or as fabric purses at the mouth of a draw-string bag.

The poet is chasing other metaphors when he hears the raspy voice of the elderly clerk asking, “What can I do for you?” Recalling his errand, the handyman shoulders aside the poet and holds out his hand to display the broken spring. “Need one of those, eh?” says the clerk, before the poet can utter the sentence he has prepared. They walk to the back of the store past shelves crowded with tools, parts, cans of paint, lawn and garden gear, and gizmos whose uses the poet can only guess. The clerk stops before a bank of small wooden drawers stained dark from oily and sweaty hands, slides one drawer out, stirs the contents with a blunt finger, then pulls out a spring. “Bingo,” he says.

Bingo, the poet thinks, heading home. Church basements. The players expectant as each number is called out, hoping as gamblers do with every turn of the wheel, every roll of the dice. Hope springs eternal. The spring of the year. A spring in my walk. Spring a surprise. Nothing springs to mind. Everything springs to mind. Leapers, dancers, arches, mouse traps, curly hair...

“Wherever are you going?” The sound of his wife’s voice calling to him awakens the husband, who discovers that he and the handyman, father, son, citizen, and the whole cast of characters have wandered past the house and halfway up the block. Bundled inside their shared skin, and giving the appearance of a single person instead of a crowd, they turn around, reach the garden gate and, by dint of much finagling, repair the latch well before dark. The poet’s wife goes to bed early, hoping to catch up on sleep, but the poet sits at his desk past midnight, every now and again writing a line that wells up in his mind like water from a pasture spring.

The Way of Imagination

My book, The Way of Imagination, appears August 11 from Counterpoint Press. Here's a brief description:

Imagination breaks the shell of the status quo, summoning up objects that do not yet exist, actions that no one has yet performed, and wiser ways of living. It powers art, science, and all forms of human creativity. My new book seeks to show how imagination might guide us through the current social and environmental upheaval, as climate heating, epidemic diseases, divisive politics, and loss of biodiversity alter our place on the planet and our lives together.

The damage to the natural world caused by our swelling numbers and unbridled appetites has been abundantly documented in books, films, scientific reports, and the daily news. Likewise, we are constantly reminded of the violence and divisions within our society and around the world. Rather than pile on yet more daunting evidence, in this book I seek to understand how we stumbled onto this path toward social and ecological ruin, and how we might change direction. Clearly, we can change direction, because millions of individuals, organizations, and communities, across America and around the globe, have chosen a more promising path, embracing conservation, restoration, and peacemaking. Unless you have been scouting around for alternatives to the industrial growth economy, you may not be aware of these hopeful efforts, because the good news about solutions to our planetary crisis tends to be drowned out by the bad news about Earth’s unraveling. The path to healing begins from acts of imagination.

Reading Macfarlane's Underland>

If you are an avid reader, when a new book by one of your favorite authors comes out, you may hold off diving into it until you can give it your full attention. At least I often wait to open a much-anticipated book, like a present left in its wrapper. For me, one of those favorites is Robert Macfarlane, a superbly gifted and perceptive British author, now in his forties, a fellow at Cambridge University, a husband and father. When the American edition of his latest book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, was published in June 2019, I bought a hard cover copy right away, and placed it on the must-be-read shelf. It arrived at a hectic time for me, so there the book waited, a promised pleasure, awaiting a moment when the pace of my life would slow enough to allow for a leisurely, savoring reading. That moment arrived in the cruel April of 2020, when the COVID-19 scourge forced me--and millions of others--to shelter at home. At last, I opened this much-anticipated book, and read a few rich, revelatory pages each day. What a great pleasure it provided, amid the havoc and suffering wrought by the coronavirus--a reminder, through its artistry and insight, of what we are capable of at our best. Here is my review.
Underland by Robert Macfarlane

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In previous books such as Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, and The Old Ways, British author Robert Macfarlane has written vivid, engrossing accounts of his journeys on the surface of Earth, from valley floors to snowcapped peaks. In Underland, he delves below ground, into caves, mines, burial mounds, catacombs, the entrails of cities, the moulins of glaciers, a nuclear waste storage site, and other subterranean realms. He is an intrepid explorer, and a gifted narrator--excellent company for anyone who enjoys superb prose and vicarious adventure. He is also a subtle thinker, as he reflects on the ways in which humans have left their marks on Earth, and Earth in turn has shaped our imagination and cultures.



View all my reviews