Category Archives: books

The Art of Travel

books, philosophy, quotes, travel,

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardour and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems — that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of why and how we should go — though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia or human flourishing.

This paragraph from the first chapter of Alain de Botton’s book The Art of Travel sums up what it is about. The author likes to think about things, and especially about how to have a good life, which naturally is a concern of my own as well. His conclusions and even many of his presuppositions are different from mine, however, which makes the reading of his books into a stimulating discussion with myself as I also haltingly debate with him.

He provokes me to clarify my thoughts on matters I am already familiar with and introduces me to quite a few people I haven’t known well, in a context that helps me engage with their ideas and principles, too. Flaubert, Baudelaire, Van Gogh, and some non-French and/or lesser known personages both real and fictional such as Edward Hopper, Duc des Esseintes and Alexander von Humboldt make appearances in the pages of this book. Wordsworth gushes over the beauties of the Lake District and John Ruskin gives drawing lessons.

These people are “guides” whom de Botton brings along on his philosophical rambles, and whose travels, writings, and works of art help us to think creatively and usefully about our goings-forth. Parts of the book are given to Anticipation, the Exotic, Curiosity, Possessing Beauty, and Habit.

The fact is, this book has got me pondering and arguing on so many topics that I’m going to need several sittings at the keyboard in order to sift through the potpourri and rearrange it to my liking. In my mind and notebook I’ve been taking parts from one chapter to stick in a different place altogether, and making some new categories of my own.

There are critics at all levels who don’t appreciate de Botton’s style and objectives. For a few, it is because he tells us the obvious. That is a problem some of us have: We speak of what we are thinking about and other people say (hopefully just to themselves), “Well, duh!”

I don’t blame you at all, if you are one of these people. But I count myself among those who enjoy staring back at all of those things that are staring us in the face; we notice how this thing is connected to that one and the other, and the light is bouncing from one facet off the face of another obvious something and caroming all over the place. And we can’t help writing about it.

Creating jokes and clean streets.

books, creativity, quotes

I picked up Paul’s Johnson’s book Creators the other day and am enjoying it three years after my first encounter. This is from the opening page:

Creativity, I believe, is inherent in all of us. We are the progeny of almighty God…. He created the universe, and those who inhabit it; and, in creating us, he made us in his own image, so that his personality and capacities, however feebly, are reflected in our minds, bodies, and immortal spirits. So we are, by our nature, creators as well. All of us can, and most of us do, create in one way or another. We are undoubtedly at our happiest when creating, however humbly and inconspicuously.

Johnson mentions some of the many creations humans produce, such as written works, farms, and businesses. Some of these wonderful works are not lasting, though they are valuable for as short as a season or as long as centuries.

Some forms of creativity, no less important, are immaterial as well as transient. One of the most important is to make people laugh. We live in a vale of tears, which begins with the crying of a babe and does not become any less doleful as we age. Humor, which lifts our spirits for a spell, is one of the most valuable of human solaces, and the gift of inciting it rare and inestimable. Whoever makes a new joke, which circulates, translates, globalizes itself, and lives on through generations, perhaps millennia, is a creative genius, and a benefactor of humankind almost without compare.

I transcribed the above about jokes because that form of creativity is worlds removed from anything I can imagine drumming up. I am fascinated by the art of making or even telling jokes; the chapter in Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood in which she relates how her parents worked their art of joke-telling describes an exotic land to which I could never go.

I’m more familiar — quite familiar — with the type of art Johnson also appreciates in this account:

I sometimes talk to a jovial sweeper, who does my street, and who comes from Isfahan, in Persia, wherein lies the grandest and most beautiful square in the world, the work of many architects and craftsmen over centuries, but chiefly of the sixteenth. I asked him if he felt himself creative, and he said, “Oh, yes. Each day they give me a dirty street, and I make it into a clean one, thanks be to God.”

 

Esthetics and Agriculture

agriculture, books, quotes, , , , , , , , ,
 

We made at least two wrong turns getting to the mountains last month, and they helped put me in touch with my farming roots. In the middle of August the fields are lush with the bounty that gives California’s Central Valley the name of The Greatest Garden in the World. Tomatoes, corn, cotton, walnuts, tree fruits, grapes… Wikipedia says that every non-tropical crop is grown here.

On our second meander, in the northeasterly instead of southeasterly direction, we were surprised to see fig orchards on one side and pomegranates on the other. What could be more exotic or impossible? William Saroyan describes the impossibility in his 1930’s story “The Pomegranate Trees” that Mr. Glad and I have laughed over a few times:

 

“My uncle Melik was just the worst farmer that ever lived. He was too imaginative and poetic for his own good. What he wanted was beauty. He wanted to plant it and see it grow. I myself planted over one hundred pomegranate trees for my uncle one year back there in the good old days of poetry and youth in the world. I drove a John Deere tractor too, and so did my uncle. It was all pure esthetics, not agriculture. My uncle just liked the idea of planting trees and watching them grow.

“Only they wouldn’t grow. It was on account of the soil. The soil was desert soil. It was dry. My uncle waved at the six hundred and eighty acres of desert he had bought and he said in the most poetic Armenian anybody ever heard, Here in this awful desolation a garden shall flower, fountains of cold water shall bubble out of the earth, and all things of beauty shall come into being.”

Melik plans to have apricots, peaches, figs and olives too, but he never gets beyond planting the pomegranates, which eventually fail, because instead of a fountain there is only a trickle of water flowing from the many wells he digs.

Fig orchard in Madera Co.

But since the 1930’s, state-funded irrigation projects have increased the available farmland to such a degree that in the present day about one-sixth of the irrigated land in the nation is in our Central Valley. The pomegranate trees we saw with their ripening red fruits were not far from where the fictional Uncle Melik farmed.

I do think there is nothing more lovely than a fig tree with its extravagant leaves on curvy branches, and fruits more refreshing than a cup of cold water. Though I grew up in the Valley this was my first sighting of a groveful. I didn’t notice what kind of irrigation system is used in the orchard, but no doubt there was one.

View of Sierras from Tulare County (Pippin pic)

By means of our state water projects we take all that melted mountain snow pack and hold it behind dams so that we can let it out bit-by-bit all through the summer. In this long agricultural center of the state, on less than one percent of the total farmland in the United States, we produce 8% of the nation’s agricultural output by value. (Wikipedia)

Tulare Co. in Spring – still green in places

I’ve been googling to find out how many dams are in California, but that list is too long for me to take the time to count. Maybe I’ll just stick to the ones in the Sierra Nevadas that end up feeding canals and rivers that water orange groves and almond orchards and alfalfa fields. It turns out that list above is sortable, and I can see that in Fresno County alone there are eleven dammed lakes.

When you drive across the state, from a dammed mountain lake to San Francisco Bay Area in one day, the repetition of scenes along the highway impresses on you the importance of water. There are dead almond orchards on Highway 5, on the “West Side” of the Valley, that testify to water wars still going on, and to our inability to grow very much without irrigation.

Westside tomato field in April

It was 101° as we headed home through that fertile swath. All the crops whose irrigation was current were happy. The corn was probably growing inches every day, and the almonds swelling in their shells. We were happy to look out from our car through the windows that were closed to keep in the cooled air.

A little north of the dead trees, on a slope above the freeway, a Hispanic family were systematically planting new almond trees. It dawned on me that Why, yes, it is a week day, a work day, isn’t it? Not all the farm work can be done in the cooler mornings or evenings.

I recalled my sweaty and tanned father getting off his tractor, coming into the house mid-afternoon with a watermelon and slicing it into rounds at the kitchen counter. He’d put one big slice on a plate and eat it with a fork before going back out to take care of his orange trees.

Water melon. Melons are some of those things of beauty that Uncle Melik likely envisioned as he was trying to find their necessary water. And the people who tend the earth’s gardens, who are willing to build the dams and plant the trees and irrigate them all summer long are beautiful to me, too.

The house where my father ate watermelon.
Gardening requires lots of water – 
most of it in the form of perspiration. 

~Lou Erickson

I consider my difficulties.

books, quotes, writing, , , , , ,

My current difficulties stem from these realities:

1) The world is so full of a number of things
    I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

This rhyme has played in my head a million times since I learned it as a little girl. Maybe even then I suspected in my childish way the layers of truth in the sing-song, the irony of too-muchness.

2) I have been traveling a lot, and that brings me into contact with even more numbers of “things,” like real people, people in books, ideas in books, and new places I’ve visited. This summer, for example, I sat on airplanes for more than ten hours, and many of those hours were spent in the company of Alain de Botton as I read his book The Art of Travel. As I drifted off to sleep at night in a house not my own, I was soaking up the coastal delights of George Howe Colt’s childhood summer place, The Big House.

In the spaces between these literary adventures my more physical self was learning to reach right instead of left for a stirring spoon, and to relax in the hot tub of the Eastern summer atmosphere.

3) I need — o.k., I feel the need! — to write about at least some of the experiences in order to process the information and be restored from the overload/exhaustion of so much excitement. As Alain and I were musing together over the meaning of our travels, I scribbled notes in the margins and made a list in the back of the book of all the blog post ideas that were generated from our “discussion.” Every night for a week or two I have spent at least fifteen minutes writing and rewriting in my mind, in the dark, my review of the Colt book.

Even Archimandrite Sophrony is reported to have said, “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” [update: It seems to be Virginia Woolf who said that.] I don’t know what the context of this quote was, but the urge is a basic, human, compelling one, and applies to just about everything I know.

4) When I am on the trip, just returned from a trip, or packing my bags and boxes to set off again, there is less time than ever for this kind of writing, and also less mental energy. When I hear Thomas Mann say, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” I feel that I am certainly one of those. I could coin my own saying: “A homemaker-writer with a large family is somebody for whom writing is even more more more difficult than it is for other people.”

I hope I am not complaining, by using the word difficulties. I could say challenges, or pieces. Or thoughts, as in “Bring every thought captive to Christ.” In my mind I have more challenging pieces of thoughts and prayers and connections to be made than there are dust bunnies floating up and down the stairs.

This morning it all seemed too much, as I add another item to the list of things that make us happy as kings: We are going to the cabin! There will be stimulating conversation on the way, as our numbers will be doubled by the presence of our dear Art and Di. (That will add pieces, to be sure.)

Stars will shine crisply in the black sky at night, and in the mornings chipmunks will scurry in the brush below the house. Humans will eat cookies and bacon and drink coffee on the deck while we watch the hummingbirds squabble, and we’ll paddle our canoe quietly over the lake.

(Past posts about our Sierra cabin: 2009  2010  and  2011 )

Though I have picked up only a few pieces here to tie in my bundle, it’s been quite comforting. Now I can face my lists of more practical things like dinner menus, shopping needs, and what to put in my book bag. That won’t be too difficult.