Essays from Now or Never
Barbara Kinsolver is, in my opinion, the best writer of fiction working today. And I'm glad to report that she excels at nonfiction as well.
This collection of essays, some previously published in magazines is wonderful. And I'm glad to promote just such collections.
Perhaps you're old enough to remember Reader's Digest. I don't know if their even still in publicastion. But many years ago, my Grandma kept the last issue of it in the bathroom. It was filled with condensed versions of articles and essays that you could read some of in just a few minutes. I did love the fillers -- short bits of humor contributed by anybody and used to fill out a page.
Anyway, I used to read the newspaper like that, just individual articles or letters to the editor or what have you, but with the news the way it is nowadays, the newspaper is just too upsetting. Unless you focus on the sports sections, but I'm not particularly into sports sooo, I've started reading just such collections as High Tide. You don't have to read the book all the way through, front to back. You can read just individual essays in any order.
Most collections do have some order to them, and this one does, but you don't have to stick to the order.
And it doesn't hurt that Kingsolver writes with the eye of an artist and the ear of a poet. And in reading her, I feel like I know her. She and I have so much in common.
The title of this book is from her coming home to Tuscon, Arizona, in America's Desert Southwest, from the Bahamas. While in that Caribbean paradise, she had wished her ",,, daughter could see those sparkling blue bays and sandy coves, I did exactly what she would have done: I collected shells." Arriving home in the middle of the night, she couldn't wait to show her daughter the collecion.
Her daughter's "...face glowed, in the way of antique stories about children and treasure. With perfect delicacy she laid the shells out on the table, counting, sorting, designating scientific categories like yellow-sriped pinky, Barnacle Bill's pocketbook...Yeek! She let loose a sudden yelp, dropped her booty, and ran to the far end of the room. The largest, knottiest whelk had begun to move around. First it extended one long red talon of a leg, tap-tap-tapping like a blind man's cane. Then came half a dozen more red legs, plus a pair of eyes on stalks, and a purple claw that snapped open and shut in a way that could not mean We Come in Friendship."
When my brother and I were in elementary school in land-locked Oklahoma, our family took a vacation to Galveston, Texas, an Island in the Gulf of Mexico. We didn't know anything about the ocean and sea shells. We found an abundance of tiny, pastel colored sea shells, more like very smooth stones, than anything we would have identified even as sea shells. We gather up a bag full of them and took them back to the motel, intending to take them home with us. During the night there began such a clatter of clicking and movement in that bag. We had no idea that they were alive! Needless to say, we took them back to the beach and carefully chose obviously empty sea shells to take home as souvenirs.
Kingsolver's attitude toward the hermit-crab stowaway was "...when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."
Or in the middle of the day. Isn't that how we acquire new friends and pets?
Her interests and knowledge reflect her educational background. According to Wikipedia, after growing up in rural Kentucky, she attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. She says she changed her major to biology after realizing that "classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby." She went on to get a master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona."
Sometimes, with the way things are it's good to read somebody like her.
She writes things like this, beautiful things:
"Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to thin at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living."
And
"To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another -- that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty, If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers."
This is a fairly little book, just 288 pages in the print edition, but it's full of the kinds of observations that remind me how good life can be. And, sometimes, it's good to be able to pick up a book and turn to almost any page and get just such a reminder.
