Three Non-Fiction Books

I have had the paradoxical problem of having had lots of time to read recently but not much time to write about what I have been reading. I am using this post to catch up on some of that. I am afraid a good portion of this post is going to end up being a long list of quotes I enjoyed from the books. It is what it is.

The first book is one I have been working my way through for a long time now. It is The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. I first heard of this book through Claire at The Captive Reader. She and I have similar reading tastes and her “Library Loot” posts always add endless books to my list of library holds. Wendell Berry is a novelist, essayist, poet, and environmental activist. I have read a couple of his novels and some of his poetry but this is my first encounter with his essays. I enjoyed them greatly. This is not a book you gulp down so it took me a while to read. There were a few essays that didn’t engage me and I skipped one or two but the book is full of sticky notes marking passages I enjoyed. His descriptions of the natural world around him are lovely.

For many years, my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather’s farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen in it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a famer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

Berry writes a lot about how humans self-centered attitudes toward the world around them are destroying what they profess to love. He believes that we must give up much of the conveniences to regain the world we are losing.

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need.’ I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me, I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

Finally, I have two more quotes from Berry about raising children. I really like these. They are so sane and reasonable.

What this means, I think, is about what is has always meant. Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world. And parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible.

The real failure is to give in. If we make our house a household instead of a motel, provide healthy nourishment for mind and body, enforce moral distinctions and restraints, teach essential skills and disciplines and require their use, there is not certainty that we are providing our children a ‘better life’ that they will embrace wholeheartedly during childhood. But we are providing them a choice that they may make intelligently as adults.

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time then you know that I have a fascination with life in the U.K. during World War II. I am not sure where that interest originated but I have shelves of books on the subject. I recently read Women of Britain: Letters From England. This volume has an introduction by Jan Struther who wrote Mrs. Miniver. Women of Britain is a compilation of letters written by women from all walks of life to friends or relatives in the United States. The letters were written from August 1939 to the end of October 1940. Once again, this book is full of papers marking passages.

We have 12 hours’ hell every night, and in the morning London just gets up, shakes the dust out of its hair and smooths its clothes and by mid-day is kind of normal, but looking sleepy and with a bit more plaster and bandages on the sore places. You never-at least I’ve never-met anyone who did get used to the raids, to the zoom of the German planes, and the sickening sound of bombs. It’s like giving birth to a baby-each time is bad-but you set out to have another one and you have it, and it’s over. And every night we get through-and it takes some doing to get through some of them-is one tiny step nearer victory-sorry for the platitude but it just is so and it helps to know it.

The next quote is from a letter written by an Air Raid Warden at the end of 1940.

It is all very different to what I imagined it would be and at times more horrifying. It was one night about 1.30, when my house shook so that I thought it must come down. On going to the scene of the explosion it was difficult for the mind to grasp that where there was now dust, rubble, broken glass, complete destruction, where, 4 minutes before, had been eight houses in tidy gardens. The night was exquisite and it made all the bombing around and the crashing barrage seem even more hideous. So strange that the small sapling trees still ringed the scene of devastation and flower beds showed unbroken shoots as if nature alone refused to be destroyed.

The last non-fiction book for today is Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser. You are spared endless quotes from this book because I simply blazed my way through it in amazement at these two women’s lives. I had vaguely heard of the Porter sisters before. For some reason, a reference to The Scottish Chiefs in Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott has stuck in my head for decades. However, I have never read any of their books. I might need to remedy that.

Jane and Anna Maria Porter were contemporaries of Jane Austen and much more famous than her at the time. They wrote, between them, 26 novels and should be credited with creating the historical fiction novel though Sir Walter Scott is usually given that honor. They were famous globally during their lives and interacted with many famous people of their day. Despite this, they lived in poverty for most of their lives.

The Porter sisters preserved their letters and Looser does a wonderful job of using these letters to bring to life the time and the women. The reader not only follows them as they become authors but also is allowed into their personal lives including their loves, losses, and frustrations. The drama of these sisters is amazing. Sometimes I wanted to shake them and sometimes I wanted to hug them. Either way, this was an amazing book. I might actually get around to reading The Scottish Chiefs after all these years.