I’m not sure which version of COVID I caught? The ability of that clever little virus to shape shift around vaccines has to have exhausted the Greek alphabet by now? Less than the flu, but more than a cold, whatever version I’ve been hosting, kindly delivered last week’s five-day vacation/retreat. Fortunately for me, I discovered my public library’s version of books on tape a while back (i.e. Hoopla). From the comfort of my sickbed, I was able to download two of Wendell Berry’s novels set in his semi-autobiographical farm community of Port William, Kentucky.
Berry’s plot lines were perfect for my COVID consciousness. They move at a pace similar to a baseball game. Like E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, his lush descriptions of rural farm life move as deliberately as the river than runs out on the edge of his semi-autobiographical community of Port William. If I accidentally drifted away for a minute, I’d miss stunningly beautiful writing—more poetry than prose—but the plot would always graciously await my return—just like a summer’s afternoon baseball game on KMOX.
About five days into the recovery process, I felt healthy enough to take our dog for her morning walk in the wooded park behind our house. By then, the remnants of Hurricane Beryl had stalled over the Midwest, delivering a slow, steady, drenching rain. As I stood, leash in hand, a scene from the novel, Jayber Crow (Berry, W, 2000) re-animated my imagination. In it, the narrator described how rowing his boat in the rain was magical, despite his being soaked to the skin. Fortified with that frame of meaning, Winnie and I launched ourselves into a soaked park for a half an hour of magic!
It was in the midst of that walk when I noticed myself getting younger. Splashing around with my standard poodle reminded me of my college introduction to St. Louis, when Dan Bergbower and Jerry Meier, and I decided to go for a mid-summer night’s romp in the rain. If Wendell Berry were sharing the memory that surfaced on my walk, he’d want you to know about Dan Bergbower’s laugh. A cross between a whoop and a cackle, Dan had a laugh that would rattle all the silverware at your dinner table. On that soggy adventure decades ago, sweeping soccer kicks of water would activate that laugh, accompanied by a string of good natured curses. In a move suggestive of his future priestly vocation, Dan would grab hold of a wet branch, pull it back like a slingshot, and let it fly like an aspergillum right into our unsuspecting faces—cackling like a whole tree full of crows!
Far from taking me away from the moment I was enjoying with my poodle, that memory somehow made me more present to it. I’m hoping that’s how old age will work. In his beautiful book of reflections, Anam Cara, John O’Donahue described how attributing “memory” to computers is a misnomer. They are capable of information storage. But memory? Only persons can do that. The gift of aging, according to him, is that accumulation of memories which has the power to insert you more powerfully into the multi-layered texture of this time and this place that may well contain a little more unforeseen magic for you.
Come to find out, a good summer’s novel can function like a treasured memory inserting you more vividly into the here and now moment. When I conduct a little epistemic surgery on my walk in the rain, what emerges is a daisy chain of inner-events that opened me to an enchanting morning. Wendell Berry’s imagination gave me a kind of encouragement to step beyond my comfort into the rain. Once on my adventure, I was looking through the lens of his lush writing, revealing a brand new three-dimensional landscape that I’d been walking through and around for twenty years! Fully immersed in this Transcendent moment, a doorway into a similar Holy landscape from decades earlier graciously yawned open. The passage through it miraculously did not remove me from the here and now moment, it only enhanced it. It was almost as if, in that woods between the worlds, I could titrate the delight of forty years ago into my current adventure.
Spiritual reading, biographies, documentaries, and self-help books all have their rightful places and purposes! But for my money, a profoundly well-written piece of summer fiction is like Mary Poppin’s “spoon full of sugar” that makes “the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”
That’s why I want to put a call out to my readers. Would you be willing to either email me, or write into the “Comments” section of the SMC blog, novels that have had an impact upon you. Please very briefly provide a summary of the story, and a description of how it touched you. I will publish what you send me in next week’s edition of SMC. Let me show you an example of what I mean.
Novels that Have Changed Me
Zorba the Greek
Kazanzaki, N.. 1946. New York: Simon & Schuster
In college, Nikos Kazanzaki’s Zorba the Greek smacked me in the head with the notion of plunging headlong into life without reservation and to suck every last drop of juice out of life’s experiences.
Prodigal Summer
and Demon Copperhead
Kingsolver, B. Prodigal Summer. 2000. Perennial, Harper Collins.
Kingsolver, B. 2022. Demon Copperhead. Harper Collins.
Lately, Barbara Kingsolver, like E.B. White and Wendell Berry, is blowing me away with her nature mysticism and poetic prose. In her books Demon Copperhead and Prodigal Summer, she’s made my rural relatives that we used to consider “hicks” come alive in a new way. Both books have me reflecting upon the importance of small communities where you are seen and known. Like Berry, she makes me see landscapes more deeply. She makes me talk to God more.
Dialogue
Even if you don’t send me your picks, surface and reflect upon significant novels in your life from the various segments of your life starting with childhood fiction to the present moment. Be sure to include in your conversation how the book affected you.
Have you ever been tempted to write? If you did, what would the story be about?
What was an interesting chapter in the story of your life?