| Although it's only July 4th at the time of this writing, I
can't help but think of the
Doors'
refrain, "Summer's almost gone." Maybe it's because I just finished rererereading
Ray Bradbury's poignant and wise Dandelion Wine, a book that was a summertime
rite of my adolescence. It had been at least ten years since I last read
it, so it's hard for me to pinpoint why I find it so touchingly appropriate
now. Is it because I have grown into the ideas of mortality framed by the
narrative, or did those seeds so long ago sown burst into bloom at memory's
touch? It is nostalgic without being maudlin, instructive without being pedantic.
Few books treat childhood with so much insight and respect. The children
are not precocious wiseacres, but rather keenly observant, sensitive, and
thoughtful beings with an intense curiosity about life. 12-year-old
Douglas Spaulding and his 10-year-old brother Tom are at the center of events
in Green Town, Illinois, Summer of 1928. It is the summer when Douglas loses
his innocence, thus ending an age. Bradbury is also keenly aware of and
ambivalent about the technologies changing the rhythms of life in this small
midwestern town, so in a larger sense the book is saying goodbye to an American
way of life which by the time of the book's writing in 1957 was long gone.
And although it's never mentioned, the story takes place one year before
the start of the Great Depression--a great wicked something which will
eventually shatter the fragile community so idyllically portrayed here. But
as much as Dandelion Wine is a meditation on mortality,
it is equally a celebration of life.
The book starts magically on an early summer outing to pick berries and
foxgrapes. Bradbury is a master of suspense and lends a tense supernatural
air to the outing, calling to mind with concise yet vivid descriptions the
almost narcotic air of childhood's summer days. But there is something lurking
out there--not a bogeyman (there will be those later), but a great, natural
force. Douglas exults when he discovers what it is: the revelation that he
is alive.
Echoing Laura in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, he asks his younger brother,
"Tom...does everyone in the world...know he's alive?" He is elated by this
new awareness, but there is a darker flipside to the joyous epiphany. Through
deductive reasoning and after watching many of the townspeople die--some
of old age, others by more sinister means--he realizes that he, too, must
one day die. And, after watching his great-grandmother opt out of life, so
too does he realize that the decision whether or not to live is a matter
of personal choice.
While Dandelion Wine is both a heartbreaking and heartwarming evocation of
a bygone era, above all it is about embracing the moment, letting go of
the past, and forgetting the future.
Time's Arrow
Martin Amis
I don't like to use terms like tour de force, but really there is no other
description which comes to mind when considering Martin Amis's astounding
book Time's Arrow. A story told in reverse, where effect is cause and cause
effect. The simple premise of telling a story faithfully in reverse, starting
with death and ending with birth, yields achingly poetic descriptions and
opens a whole can of metaphysical worms. What's most amazing is the degree
of suspense in wanting to know where the protagonist (a psychosomatic amnesiac)
was before he got to where he ended up. This book will fascinate anyone who's
ever run films in reverse for the pleasure of watching water run uphill and
bullets being sucked into guns.
Einstein's
Dreams
Alan Lightman
I used to assign this book to my English students because it's easily digestible
standalone chapters made for easy and entertaining reading. It's also a tiny
book, perfect for carrying in one's pocket for quick little impromptu reads
at bus stops and bank lines. Framed as the dreams Einstein might have had
while formulating his theory of relativity, the vignettes are as poetic and
humane as they are philosophically intriguing. Lightman, a professor of physics
at MIT, rifs on different possibilities of the structure of time by couching
the mindbending postulations in mundane contexts, deftly balancing theoretical
physics with human interest. More than an intellectual exercise, it is a
strangely consoling book which calls into question our preconceptions of
the inflexibility, linearity, and irreversibility of time. So much so that
it's the one book I gave my mother when she was diagnosed with cancer. |
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