Book Review
The Flood of Awful News
reviews by Carol Van Strum
Global warming, mass extinctions, endless wars, poverty, vanishing aquifers, epidemics, peak oil - the flood of awful news from all quarters is overwhelming. Lest we succumb to despair, here are four books to savor and revisit as needed. Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry re-affirm the faded priorities of empathy, propriety, and garden-variety common sense in both our personal lives and the language of human discourse.
Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, by Wendell Berry, 2000. Counterpoint, $14.00 paper.
Given: New Poems, by Wendell Berry, 2006. Shoemaker Hoard, $14.00, paper.
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, by Barbara Kingsolver, illustrations by Paul Mirocha, 1995. Harper Collins, $13.00, paper.
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver, illustrations by Paul Mirocha, 2002. Harper Collins, $13.95 paper.
Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
by Wendell Berry, 2000. Counterpoint, $14.00 paper.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
-- Albert Einstein, What I Believe, 1930
The Emperor of China, in Hans Christian Anderson's familiar tale, foolishly replaces a beloved, real nightingale with a dazzling mechanical bird that "can be opened up and explained," sings reliably on command, and has a predictable repertoire. Inevitably, the clockwork bird wears out, and the Emperor, bereft of music, sinks into a fatal stupor of despair and mistrust. Being a fairy tale, the story ends happily when the banished live nightingale returns to sing the dying Emperor back to life.
Like the thoughtless Emperor, our technological age has replaced reverence for life with misguided faith in a mechanical substitute that can be opened up and explained, controlled, and operated reliably on command. What began as an imprecise scientific metaphor for biological processes, writes Wendell Berry, has so pervaded our language and thought that life itself has been reduced to a patentable commodity: "Whenever one perceives living organisms as machines, they must necessarily be treated as such."
Our dumpsters and scrap yards overflow with the wreckage of how we treat machines; our like treatment of living things, including each other, has sickened an entire planet. The lethal fallacy in perceiving life as mechanical, Berry says, is the delusion that we know what life is:
Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is, as Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans, its predictably inept masters.
Because our knowledge and understanding - of life, of ourselves, of our world - will never be complete, we can never predict with certainty the consequences of our actions. "And so the question of how to act in ignorance is paramount," Berry writes, particularly given the rapacity of commerce and our willingness to destroy what we cannot make.
Taboos against tampering with things beyond our understanding are as old as civilization. The theme recurs from ancient China and Greece to the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, and more recently and urgently, Albert Einstein, Norbert Wiener, Leo Szilard, Philip K. Dick, and a host of others. Yet time and again, the lure of power and din of progress have drowned voices of wisdom and experience.
"We need a new Emancipation Proclamation," Wendell Berry writes, "not for a specific race or species, but for life itself…"
Life is a Miracle is Berry's emancipation proclamation. Examining the priorities of science, industry, education, religion, and the arts, he identifies the common element missing in a broad spectrum of human affairs. The missing element, summed up in a single, elegant word, is propriety.
Propriety, Berry reminds us, is an old-fashioned term, sadly out of favor, acknowledging that we are not alone, that whether we like it or not, we exist in concert with other living things and must conduct ourselves accordingly. "The antithesis of individualism," propriety requires constant questioning of how our behavior affects other lives, which in turn inescapably affect our own. The self-critical questions raised by this concept, Berry notes, are as foreign to our sciences, arts, government, learning, and religion "as they are to the global corporations whose existence depends on their (and our) willingness to ignore such questions."
A civilization that destroys its sources of life is as bereft of propriety - and common sense - as the despairing wretch who kills himself to exert control over life. Whether by folly or by intent, both are equally suicidal. The remedy is not patchwork technological bandaids on the damage, but a radical attitude adjustment in the standards and goals of science, medicine, and other professions, a shift from profit-driven applications to vigilant design, ever appropriate to human and ecological health. "By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair," Berry urges. We would also free our language and life itself from massacre.
* * * * * *
Given: New Poems
by Wendell Berry, 2006. Shoemaker Hoard, $14.00, paper.
Berry's new book sounds a ringing coda to Life is a Miracle. Like trout suddenly visible in the ripples where they've been all along, his poems shimmer with a truth we knew already: the eternal given that life is indeed a miracle, as ineffable and inviolate as love. Here are psalms of joy - for companionship, for solitude, for a river, a field, the wanton perfection of a warbler - that no price tag or spreadsheet can measure. Here is the heartbeat stopped cold by the engines of progress - yet "under the pavement the soil / is dreaming of grass."
In our never-ending battle to preserve life, we too often fight - literally - on the destroyers' terms, allowing the lifeless, mechanized language of science and technology to frame the issues, and thereby predetermine the outcome. Wendell Berry's books are a vital reminder of what the battle is really and truly about, a fixed star to steer by through the law books and ledgers and scientific papers. Tender and fierce, solemn and playful, wise and exuberant, he is an ideal companion in such hostile territory, like facing Goliath with Henry David Thoreau and Zorba the Greek at your side.
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
by Barbara Kingsolver
illustrations by Paul Mirocha, 1995 Harper Collins, $13.00, paper.
and
Small Wonder
by Barbara Kingsolver
illustrations by Paul Mirocha, 2002. Harper Collins, $13.95 paper.
I was four years old when I first left home to go and see the world. Two policemen searching the city for a lost child found me three blocks away, asleep in a pile of grass cuttings. They were shocked by my mother's laughter when they brought me home.
"You wanted to see the world?"
We were standing on the back steps. There were drain holes drilled in each stair. Ants streamed up one hole, paraded past our feet, and vanished down another. Pansies and nasturtiums bloomed in the broccoli forest quilting the driveway; it was wartime, and cars were mothballed. Among the pansies, a robin plucked at the small heap of ribbon scraps and hair trimmings we'd saved for its nest.
"Look!" my mother said. "It was right here all the time. The world begins at home."
A world that begins in a driveway victory garden would likely appeal to Barbara Kingsolver. From her own back step, Kingsolver explores today's world with a kitchen-door wisdom conspicuously absent in current public discourse. Her essays are a refreshing - and often hilarious - antidote to the smug insanities of commerce, science, and politics. What makes her books a joy to read is their seamless, unabashed fusion of science, humanity, and awestruck reverence for the smallest and grandest wonder of all - the eternal mystery and variety of life itself.
High Tide in Tucson spans an eclectic range of modern experience: parenting, economics, voodoo love charms, wild pigs in the garden, a Titan Missile Museum, the author as reluctant rock star, a ravaged Kentucky watershed, a stowaway hermit crab dancing to the tides in Tucson, Arizona. With a keen eye and uncommon insight, Kingsolver finds answers in unlikely places to the oft-forgotten question, "What does it mean, anyway, to be an animal in human clothing?"
For Kingsolver, to be an animal - clothed or not -- means total immersion in the whole messy, unpredictable, sometimes joyous, sometimes painful glory of being alive. Her great gift is to draw us into other lives as precious and important as our own - a child, a butterfly, a homeless woman, a goose preening on the lonely brink of extinction - and convince us to care, deeply and personally, about what happens to them all.
Small Wonder, begun in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, has a more urgent tone. Searching for a glimmer of hope in the raging darkness of hate and fear, Kingsolver clings to an obscure news story from the wilds of western Iran. There, in a remote mountain cave, a toddler lost for three days and nights was found unharmed, warm and well fed at the breast of a massive she-bear.
"One child, one bear," Kingsolver writes. "I'd like to speak of small wonders, and the possibility of taking heart."
A biologist and inveterate observer, Kingsolver finds hopeful parables for survival in her own garden, in an untouched forest protected by Mexican farmers, in children's murals celebrating diversity in a remote Costa Rica schoolyard. She takes heart from these small steps toward a healthy balance between human communities and their environment, but has no illusions about the enormity of forces ranged against them.
At the heart of those forces is the profiteering drive of global commerce, a Goliath that sucks the world's wealth and resources into its own coffers, devising ever more deadly technologies to control the legions it has dispossessed. Inevitably, Goliath's corporate license to kill - by gun or bomb, cancer or bulldozer or microprobe - reduces murder to a profitable, and therefore acceptable, even admirable, enterprise. The Columbine shootings are hardly surprising, Kingsolver notes, when our children grow up "in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing."
Were humans to kill off only themselves, Planet Earth's myriad other life forms would breathe a huge sigh of relief, but sadly, no corner of creation is safe from murder by profit motive. "I have held in my hand the germ of a plant engineered to grow, yield its crop, and then murder its own embryos," Kingsolver writes, "and there I witnessed the malevolence that can lie in the heart of a profiteering enterprise."
The appalling implications of that malevolence are detailed in a chapter titled, "A Fist in the Eye of God." Kingsolver's brilliant critique of genetically engineered food crops is also a passionately informed hymn to biological diversity.
Is there any hope of taming the corporate Goliath? You better believe there is, says Kingsolver, letting us in on a secret too long hidden in plain view. We, the world's most profligate consumers, hold the power to control corporate behavior. It's called purchasing power, and all each of us need do is to exercise it, every day, starting at home. Unplugging the corporate siren song of television, conserving household and transport energy, and buying locally produced products, especially food, are but three of the ways individuals and entire communities are beginning to exercise that power effectively. Small steps, small wonders, but they add up.
In the wake of September 11, President Bush, equating patriotism with an orgy of self-indulgence, exhorted Americans to demonstrate their patriotism by shopping. Kingsolver reminds us that sixty-five years ago, faced with a monstrous global threat, our entire nation - rich and poor, child and adult alike - sacrificed comforts, rationed food and fuel, planted victory gardens and collected scrap metal in the truest spirit of patriotism: "a great generation who threw their hearts into an era of living simply, that others might simply live."
With civilization and life itself in the balance, revival of that spirit is our best and only chance for survival. If our leaders won't ask us for this, we can go ahead without them. Live simply, that others might simply live. Kingsolver revives a motto for all time. Her treasure map of small wonders points the way.
To Top of Page
BOOK REVIEWS
