Wednesday, October 24, 2018

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

Quotes:
When I read I withdraw from the phenomenal world. I turn my attention "inward." Paradoxically, I turn outward toward the book I am holding, and, as if the book were a mirror, I feel as though I am looking inward. ...
When I read, my retirement from the phenomenal world is undertaken too quickly to notice. The world in front of me and the world "inside" me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection of these two domains--or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them. ...
An open book acts as a blind--its boards and pages shut out the world's glamorous stimuli and encourage the imagination.

 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20758127-what-we-see-when-we-read
Also, the read-alikes associated with the title look quite promising for the obsessive/compulsive reader appetite.

Monday, October 08, 2018

OVERSTORY Richard Powers

Powers is holding his spot as my favorite contemporary writer. OVERSTORY exceeded all expectations. I'll never look at trees the same way again. Here are a few quotes to ponder:


"...cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality--all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals."

"As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking."

"Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn't red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green."

"There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things."

"Disaster is, as actuarial science proves..., just another number."

"...myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions."

"...anchoring, causal base rate errors, the endowment effect, availability, belief perserverance, confirmation, illusory correlation, cuing--all the biases you've learned about..."

"Mastery gets on board, goes online, and a million more lonely boys emigrate to the new and improved Neverland."

"Play becomes the engine of human growth."

"...memory is always a collaboration in progress."

"You can't see what you don't understand. But what you think you already understand, you'll fail to notice."

"Dying is life, too."

"Life has a way of talking to the future. It's called memory."

"Ta-ne Mahuta, Yggdrasil, Jian-Mu, the Tree of Good and Evil, the indestructible Asvattha with roots above and branches below. Then she's back at the original World Tree."

"...what life wants from people, and how it might use them."

 "This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. but life is going someplace. It wants to know itself, it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet know how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them."

"Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm."

The Overstory

In reading this novel, I searched for the connecting tendrils between the stories of the many diverse characters. I searched for the story's hero, but instead found not one but many. The psychologist, the scientist-forester-ranger, the artist, the vet, the death survivor, the actuary, the advocates, the lawyer, the wannabe actress, computer programmer, academics, engineers, even the supporting characters radiate intention and quest. The background characters blocking evolutionary pathways, whether judges-police-lumbermen, are as incidental as mountains and life goes on growing around the unsympathetic groundswell.

The Pacific Northwest is the setting for much of the story, but the entire U.S. is traversed with Powers connecting roots of characters and trees from coast to coast. Botanical drawings are interspersed throughout the text, almost like portraits, the trees themselves the real heroes.

Chapters are divided: Roots, Nicholas Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek, Neelay Mehta, Patricia Westerford, Olivia Vandergriff, Trunk, Crown, Seeds. Each chapter is a novel in its own right and each main character is associated with a tree species: chestnuts, pine, elm-ash-ironwood-maple, oak-linden, fig-banyan, redwoods, beech, ginko, apple. The myths, historical and factual information alone are mind-blowing, but all together they transcend the novel form into a text that can only be described as a lesson in life.

(paraphrased) Three trees: Lote-boundary of the 7th heaven that none shall pass, mulberry-of the magical elixir of life, and Now--the tree that grows all around us and in us and follows us wherever we go. Luohan Arhats-adepts who have passed through the four stages of Enlightenment and now live in pure, knowing joy. A sacred tapestry: leaning on a staff in a forest opening, peering through the narrow window in a wall, sitting underneath a twisted pine. Powers is the silkworm weaving the spirit of all of these disparate experiences together in one massive tome, a testament to the beauty and power of nature.