And Sometimes I Wonder About You, by Walter Mosley

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Talk about spinning literary gold from genre fiction! Each Walter Mosley book I read is even better than the last. This 2015 novel is the fifth book in the series featuring Leonid McGill. This New York-based private eye has the strong, if peculiar, code of honor that I always like to see in a protagonist. A former thug who is still mistrusted by the police, he now works when he can to undo the damage his young self wrought.

Although he and his wife Katrina never recovered their marital life after she returned to his house, and they both seek lovers elsewhere, he does love her in his way and feels responsible for her. Of the three children they are raising, only one is his blood child. His son by another father, Twill, is the child he shamelessly loves best, perhaps because he sees a little himself in the independent young man. Leonid has a tight circle of friends and a wide, if often underground, network of contacts.

In this book, he has to juggle responsibilities for work and family. Katrina is still hospitalised from her attempted suicide in the last book. Twill, who has joined Leonid’s agency, takes on a highly dangerous case without telling his father. After Leonid turns down a case brought to him by a homeless man, the man is murdered. The private eye vows to find the killer and tries to ensure the man’s children are provided for. On top of all this, a simple train ride back from a business engagement in Philadelphia turns life-threatening when he helps a woman who is being stalked by a gangster, a woman who is more than a match for Leonid himself and threatens to disrupt his life.

The unexpected twists and overwhelming danger as Leonid tries to resolve each issue kept me glued to the book. The love and integrity and compassion are equally riveting. The brilliant cast of characters, many familiar from the previous books in the series, continue to evolve. Most of all, how the theme of family and the many forms it can take plays out is fascinating.

There are a lot of layers to this book, as there are for any of Mosley’s novels. You can simply go along for the ride or take a little time to consider these characters and what their lives and challenges have to say about our splintered society. Either way, you’ll find this book rewarding. Although you can enjoy it as a standalone, I do recommend reading the series in order to enjoy the subtle ways all the characters grow.

What Walter Mosley novels have you read? What do you think of them?

Writers’ Retreats

Retreat

We just wrapped up this year’s Time to Write Writers’ Retreat at beautiful Pinewoods Camp. For four days, twenty writers left our everyday chores and overscheduled lives behind to gather in the woods. We were free to write all day or join optional group activities, such as writing to prompts or critique sessions. In the evenings we came together in front of the fire to share readings, stories and social time. A fabulous cook kept us well-fed throughout.

The retreat was restorative in many ways: jumpstarting writing and providing the opportunity to share our successes, questions, and resources with other writers. Most of all, we reveled in the peace of this magical place: the mist on the pond in the morning, the breeze in the oak and pine trees, the company of birds.

I hope you can find space to step out of your routine for a bit to restore and recenter yourself.

Do you ever go on retreat, even if it’s just a walk in the woods?

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

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When I ran across Matt Mikalatos‘s blog posts on rereading C.S. Lewis’s work, I was inspired to look again at the Narnia books. In Prince Caspian, a sequel to the first book, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are about to board a train back to school when they are suddenly whisked off to the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though they do not recognise it at first because over a thousand years have passed.

Narnia is now ruled by Miraz who became Lord Protector of his nephew Caspian upon the death of Caspian IX but now calls himself the king. Miraz prohibits any mention of Old Narnia: the talking animals, dwarves, the dryads and other what we would call mythological beings, and most of all Aslan himself. He dismisses Caspian’s nurse for telling the child such stories and replaces her with a tutor.

Dr. Cornelius turns out to be just as devoted to the old ways but more circumspect, and it is he who warns Caspian to escape when a son is born to Miraz and his wife, thus putting Caspian’s life in danger. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, who had become Kings and Queens in Old Narnia are dragged back to help Caspian and the remaining Old Narnians in their attempt to restore the rightful king to his throne.

I came to the Narnia books in my late teens, not as a child, but it was a time in my life when I was on the lookout for magic, spending time in the woods, studying Transcendentalism, and caught up in the 1960s whirl of possibilities. Charmed by the magical aspects of the Narnia books, I found the overtly Christian foundation a little off-putting, though tried to fit it into my then-exploration of different religions. I was also dismayed by the treatment of women and what I now know as colonialism, but recognised where these fit in the context of Lewis’s time.

On rereading the book now, I’m less struck by the religious overtones than by the similarity to today’s political climate. As Mikalatos says:

Imagine, if you will, a political climate in which truth has been completely discarded. Even the history books are full of falsehoods that advance the narrative of those ruling the nation. Stories of the past have been ignored, abused, or outlawed. In the midst of this political rule, certain classes of people have been persecuted, harmed, sent into hiding.

That is the world of Narnia during Prince Caspian.

As Hamlet says: “The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” Lewis himself said the book was about the “restoration of the true religion after corruption.” Leaving aside the religious aspect, the theme of a disordered world needing to be set right can’t help but resonate for me as I watch so many people who claim to follow democratic ideals betray them. At one point, after the children have been attacked by a non-talking bear, Lucy says:

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

Lucy’s question about talking and non-talking animals illustrates a technique that Lewis deploys throughout the book of using pairs as foils or complements. We have Prince Caspian and the four children; the separate narratives of the boys who pursue the war against Miraz and the girls who with Aslan dance and sing and awaken the Old Narnians. The latter pairing carries forward the scene early on when Dr. Cornelius takes young Caspian up to the tower to witness the conjunction of the two stars Tarva, The Lord of Victory, and Alambil, the Lady of Peace, which together indicate a great good is coming to Narnia. Note that both victory and peace are needed.

There’s also the contrast between belief and skepticism. In the first book it was Lucy who first visited Narnia and the others did not believe her. Here, she is the first to see Aslan and the others say they do not believe her, with terrible consequences. Believing in Aslan and the Golden Age of Narnia is what sets Miraz and his people apart from Caspian and his magical beings. I don’t see belief and skepticism as absolute good and evil, though understand why Lewis made them such here. To me, like victory and peace, both are needed.

Lucy’s reaction to not being believed illuminates a more important theme, that of doing the right thing even when no one around you agrees with you. Of course, the difficulty is that even they think they are doing the right thing, though as in this case a deeper look at their motives reveals more complexity. The question of what authority to follow is here handed off to religion, the old religion of Aslan. In our world and as adults this question has become more complex.

Much of my thinking about this book has been informed by Mikalatos’s posts and the ensuing discussions on them. He says of Lewis: “For him this is all about myth and fairy tales and what they signify. The stories we love are all about deeper truths.”

In my creative writing classes I often talk about tackling big ideas. As Donald Maass says in Writing the Breakout Novel:

A breakout novelist needs courage, too: the courage to say something passionately. A breakout novelist believes that what she has to say is not just worth saying, but it is something that must be said. It is a truth that the world needs to hear, an insight without which we would find ourselves diminished.

What deeper truth has a book you’ve read recently explored?

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams

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At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped.

It rains all the time in Faha. Sometimes it is a hard rain, sometimes a mist, and anything in between. The rain loves the earth in Faha. Noel helps his grandmother, Doady, race out and hang clothes on the line for a ten-minute dry span. So when the sun comes out and stays out, it might be a miracle.

The other remarkable event on Easter Sunday is the arrival of Christy, a middle-aged man who works for “the electrics” and will be staying in Doady and Ganga’s cottage, sharing the loft with Noel. For electricity is finally coming to Faha, bringing not only light to the unsuspecting villagers, but the previously unknown modern world. And Christy has a secret agenda.

I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored. Conflict doesn’t have to be a battle or a car chase; it can grow out of miscommunication and missed connections.

Through Noe, as he’s known, we enter into the life of the village: the doctor with his three beautiful daughters, the young priest whose well-known goodness leads him keeping the church door unlocked so thieves don’t have to break in. There’s a forge rather than a hardware store and of course the farms.

In the fields, cattle, memories dissolved by so many liquid mornings, noons and nights, had forgotten they dreamed of April grass and, by a clemency reserved for those who live placid in a perpetual now, standing in a green sweetness forgot the cold muck-grazing of February.

There’s a lot of gentle humor here. Williams describes the eccentric villagers with compassion and often a deft turn of phrase. In such a small village people must get along, no matter how oddly their neighbors behave. Noe and Christy take to riding Doady and Ganga’s bikes around to pubs—where of course it’s only polite to have a bottle of stout or three—in search of the legendary Irish musician Junior Crehan.

But it’s the language that lays a spell on me. Writers are often advised to avoid too much dialect because it can be challenging for the reader. I once actually had to give up on a novel written in broad Glaswegian dialect after only a few pages. Instead we are advised to find a way to suggest the lilt of an accent through the music of our sentences: the choice of words and the way we arrange them.

Williams is a master at this, and rewards careful study. Every now and then he’ll throw in an Irish phrase, but mostly it is simply the music. The villagers’ memory is embedded in story, stories told over and over, that become the fabric of their share life.

The known world was not so circumscribed then nor the knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

And the other part of the binding is the old songs, traditional Irish music:

Gilbert Clancy… said the pipes recalled what couldn’t be remembered, the old bard times, and in their melancholy and joy was this world and another.

I loved being a part of this community for the space of this novel and will be looking for more of Williams’s books.

Sometimes we like novels or appreciate or even admire them. What novel have you read recently that you simply enjoyed?

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I read a lot of science fiction in my teens, mostly because my older brother was into it and let me raid his library. Then I read a lot of scifi/fantasy in my late twenties; I was in a difficult place and wanted to be anywhere else. It helped. So during this tense and terrifying week, I returned to that strategy. It’s been long enough that those books are ripe for rereading.

This 1971 novel begins with a man waking up amid fallen concrete blocks feeling dizzy and nauseated. Eventually a medic brings him around, shocked by how many different meds the man had taken.

George Orr has been taking multiple medications to keep himself from dreaming, because his dreams come true—literally. Not all of his dreams, but now and then he has what he calls an “effective” dream and when he wakes, the world has changed to conform to that dream. And he is the only one who knows that has happened; he is the only one who remembers the way the world was before.

As a result of his overdose, he is sent to Dr. Haber, a psychiatrist working on a machine similar to an EEG that can control the type of waves in a patient’s brain to induce dreaming. Over the course of the book Haber uses his machine coupled with hypnotic suggestion to try to instigate and control George’s dreams. But the effect is usually unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic, because dream logic comes up with its own way of implementing Haber’s directions.

One constant, though, is that with each dream Haber gets a promotion and more power. He claims he only wants power in order to help people by solving the terrible problems in society. But Haber’s vision of an ideal society is a little scary given his belief in utilitarianism and eugenics. Haber’s ability to implement his beliefs using George’s dreams combined with his own insatiable hunger for power and fame drive the world down a dangerous path.

We writers are advised that, along with hooking the reader’s attention, we should use the first page to teach the reader how to read our book. Make sure they know what genre it is. Identify the protagonist, their goal, and what or who is preventing them from achieving it. Give at least a hint of what themes will be explored. I have to say that rereading the first page of this book after finishing it changed the story for me and filled me with awe at Le Guin’s mastery of the craft.

What’s also interesting is how much Le Guin is able to explore different philosophies and approaches without slowing the story. In my workshops we’ve been talking about generating suspense, and she has definitely crafted a page-turner. George’s dreams and the new world each creates are fascinating. And often destructive, to the point where one wonders how this world can possibly survive.

Well, out of the frying pan, as my mother used to say. It felt like the story of the last four years, right from the first page: waking up to an unrecognisable world, one that has changed in catastrophic ways. Still, I’m glad I read it this week. And now things have changed again. Someone has had a good dream.

Do you read scifi/fantasy? Why?

Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck

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I’ve noted before in this blog the curious fact that books I pick up at random sometimes talk to each other in ways that deepen each of them. Lately I’ve found myself reading books about home and the wild and the border between the two.

Visitation highlights different aspects of last week’s book, Abigail, where the teenaged narrator is sent precipitously and secretly to a boarding school far away from the home she misses. The school, a former monastery, is vividly described, its stones, its curious doorways, its atmosphere of age and order. Part of her maturation is to make a home for herself in this bleak environment. Next week’s novel, too, is deeply engaged with these themes, but more about that next time.

The main character of Erpenbeck’s novel is a plot of land by a lake in Brandenburg, and the homes built there, especially a fabulously detailed home built by an architect in the 1930s. The architect comes up with details to enchant his wife: colored glass in the living room windows, a finial he himself carved, a secret closet, a wrought-iron bird in the balcony railing off the bedroom. The succession of people who live in this house and next door mirror the changes in East Germany during the ensuing decades.

At 150 pages, this novel is short but surprisingly intense. I found myself engaging with each character more than in almost any other book I’ve read for years, and this in spite of the way they come and go. The one constant person is an unnamed gardener whose chapters intersperse the others as he goes about his work of planting and building and chopping wood. We have no access to his thoughts and he doesn’t speak, yet I know and treasure him.

There is little dialogue and few dramatic scenes, making this an unusual read for me. It shouldn’t work, but it does. There are events that listed sound boring—locking up a house, sailing on the lake, drying off with a towel, noting the cost of things—but the focus Erpenbeck brings to each makes them a profound experience. Focus, details, and a voice that speaks of joyous and terrible things with a calm compassion.

The land was originally intended as the inheritance for one of the mayor’s daughters, but he instead divides the land and sells it. The idea of inheritance recurs, each time a little different, sometimes as the symbol of a family’s continuity, but more often of loss, as with the mayor’s daughter. There are many such spirals—a sentence, a scent, a key—each turn revealing a little more. They pull you in deeper, another reason why this short novel feels so intense.

Visitation reminds me of Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor’s beautiful novel about a village over a span of thirteen years. Both books make me think about what inheritances are passed on and what are lost, about the so-brief time that we inhabit this world that is our home, and how the earth itself, though changed, persists. Our cares and worries, even in this terrible time, will pass. Feel them and move on.

Do the books you read ever talk to each other?

I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare

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Born in 1793 in Helpston, Northamptonshire, Clare came from the rural working class. His parents were both illiterate, and he himself only went to a dame school until he was 12, even then often pulled out to help his father in the fields. Yet when he read a poem—James Thompson’s “Seasons”—he was inspired to write as well and went on to write over 3,500 poems.

Many of his best-known and best-loved poems are about nature. He wrote about the rural world he’d grown up in with nostalgia but not sentiment, and about wherever he was currently living, employing a keen eye and great appreciation for the colors, textures, and ecology of country life. In “The Wren” he lauds the humble pleasures he finds around him:

Why is the cuckoo’s melody preferred
And nightingale’s rich song so fondly praised
In poet’s rhymes? Is there no other bird
Of nature’s minstrelsy that oft hath raised
One’s heart to ecstasy and mirth as well?
I judge not how another’s taste is caught:
With mine, there’s other birds that bear the bell
Whose song hath crowds of happy memories brought,
Such the wood-robin singing in the dell
And little wren that many a time hath sought
Shelter from showers in huts where I did dwell
In early spring, the tenant of the plain
Tenting my sheep, and still they come to tell
The happy stories of the past again.

His poetry was influenced by the folk song culture in his family and village, as described in Georg Deacon’s John Clare and the Folk Tradition. Clare played the fiddle and collected folk songs, fiddle tunes, dance instructions and folk customs. As a folkie myself, I’ve been at many a pub sing and can appreciate the effect of Clare’s cultural environment on his work. I’m also grateful for the tunes and songs he collected and preserved.

His life was not all songs and flowers, though. Clare was shocked and shaken by the rapid changes brought by the nascent industrial revolution. Villages emptied as laborers sought better jobs in town. Worst of all, for Clare, was the enclosure of the commons, a severe financial loss to working class folks who used the land for pasture and agriculture, and an aesthetic loss for people like Clare who loved the moors and the wildlife that prospered there. We’re learning much now about the importance of green space for psychological health, but Clare was sounding the alarm long ago, as in this excerpt from “The Moors”.

Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds & wild as summer flowers,
Is faded all—a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be.
Enclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave,
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now.

Clare wrote many poems to his first love Mary Joyce, whom he met at the dame school, but whose father turned him away. He later also wrote poems to his wife Patty with whom he had seven children, but continued to write about Mary until the end of his life. This excerpt from “First Love” shows his unconventional yet powerful imagery.

I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.
And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,

He suffered from mental illness in his later years, but continued to write even in the asylums where he was confined. While many of these poems are about nature and his lost love, he also wrote wrenching poems about his efforts to right himself, as in the title poem from this selection.

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

I come back to Clare’s poems often. I love the way he writes about nature and childhood, his yearning for his lost love and his indignation at the fencing of common land “In little parcels little minds to please”. Reading his work I can imagine myself tramping the moors, looking for jackdaws and starnels, and seeing “An oddling crow in idle motion swing / On the half-rotten ash-tree’s topmost twig”.

Have you read any of John Clare’s work? Do you have a favorite poem of his?

Wild Chamber, by Christopher Fowler

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What a comfort reading is during this dark time! There is much to be afraid of and loved ones to be afraid for, but it’s important to take a break sometimes, be somewhere else for a while.

I’ve been reading Fowler’s Bryant and May detective series in order. The two head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a division of the London police formed during WWII to handle cases that could cause public unrest. Persisting into the present, it operates like no police department you’ve ever encountered and is constantly under threat of closure by traditional-minded administrators.

Arthur Bryant has his own methods which involve consulting museum curators, white witches, and his own offbeat but strangely useful collection of reference books. He’s a bit of a trickster, with a sly sense of humor. Having more depth than the typical English eccentric, I’ve come to delight in the odd turns his thinking takes, even odder as he ages and others begin to suspect the beginnings of dementia.

John May’s reputation as a ladies’ man has taken a bit of a beating as he ages. With a more logical approach to solving crimes, he tries to protect his friend from his wilder flights and is the only one who stands up to him.

The other members of the PCU are, well, characters in the sense of being unique, believable, yet a little quirky. For instance, Janice Longbright is enamored of the style of 50’s screen actresses—makeup, heels, hair, clothes, the whole shebang—but not terribly practically for chasing suspects down dark alleys.

In this outing, Bryant and May are investigating the murder of a woman in one of London’s parks and gardens, originally called (at least once) its “wild chambers”. This garden is in an exclusive crescent, so it’s kept locked with only residents having access. How could a killer have gotten in? Where is her missing husband? And what does her murder have to do with one of Bryant and May’s cases a year earlier?

Since I’m unable to go to England this spring as planned, I especially relished the way the investigation led through many of London’s parks and gardens, calling up sweet memories for me.

In fact, London is the real protagonist of this series. The solution to the crimes almost always hinges on Bryant’s arcane knowledge of London’s past, whether it’s the history of Bedlam, the routes of lost underground rivers, or forgotten details about St. Pancras Old Church and King’s Cross.

Interestingly, Bryant and May is also the name of London-based company that ran match factories in the 19th century before being absorbed by other companies.

These two detectives would fit perfectly into a Golden Age mystery, though their stories are a bit darker than those standards. The stories don’t really fit into the various subcategories of mystery. Bryant and May aren’t amateurs, but the stories aren’t police procedurals—unless you’re willing to accept a perfectly wacky procedure. They aren’t cosies exactly, but neither are they grim crime novels. What they are is delicious. Funny, infectious, knowledgeable about human nature and London’s long history: the perfect vacation.

What are you reading? Does it give you rest, comfort or courage?

Horizon, by Barry Lopez

Horizon

In this profound and generous book, Lopez looks back over some of the travels that have shaped his understanding and philosophy. We go from Oregon to Antarctica, from Nunavut to Tasmania, from Eastern Equatorial Africa to Xi’an in China.

Many of these expeditions are scientific endeavors, where he has joined a team of archeologists to excavate the site of a long-gone indigenous peoples or scientists measuring boreal (ocean bottom) life or another team measuring glacier movement. Sometimes he ventures out for other reasons, such as revisiting the Galápagos Islands or tracing the route of Shackleton’s open-boat journey to Elephant Island.

He weaves in stories of explorers and adventurers, the well-known such as Cook, Darwin, Scott, and the lesser-known such as Ranald MacDonald, Edward Wilson, Lt. Adolphus Greeley. He taps poets, writers, and philosophers for insights and connections.

I’ve taken my time reading this book. It’s so rich! I’ve gone back and reread sections, or paused for a few days to consider what I’ve just read. More than once I’ve picked it up to find him addressing something that was on my mind, as in this paragraph from the section in Antarctica. I had been thinking about various lifespans, and in particular that of rocks.

I turned one rock after another over in my gloved hands, to get its measure, to take it in more completely. In the absence of any other kind of life, these rocks seemed alive to me, living at a pace of unimaginable slowness, but revealing by their striations and cleavage, by their color, inclusions, and crystalline gleam, evidence of the path each had followed from primordial birth to this moment of human acquaintance.

The science is easy to follow, the descriptions gorgeous. Lopez depicts not only the natural world, but the human cultures that have come and gone upon it. What stands out for me is the unhurried accumulation of insights building one upon another, like a coral reef, to create an ethical framework, a structure that can hold the eager quest for knowledge of scientists, the adventurousness of explorers, the communities that care for each other and also the atrocities visited upon innocent people, cultures deliberately or accidentally wiped out, chemical waste dumped in cities and towns.

What are we to make of our current societies, where the drive for profit pushes technology without regard for consequences, where science is undermined by for-profit businesses and their government lackeys? There was much that was wrong in earlier centuries, earlier societies, but can we draw any lessons that could help us today? What is being lost as human cultures and species are obliterated, as glaciers melt into the sea?

And then we set that against the generosity of those who have sought to advance our knowledge, those who have labored to save the remnants of the past, those who have devoted themselves to conserving this world that we have so damaged, of Oates walking out into the night, of Shackleton’s determination to save every one of his crew.

Lopez’s accounts embody the respect for other cultures that many people today strive for. The cultures he explores—especially the lost indigenous cultures like the Thule of the Arctic, the Kaweskar of southern Chile—remind me of the long arc of human history, the coming and going of peoples. One insight I found particularly helpful was about communicating with “members of a culture that had experienced the brutal force of colonial intrusion. I knew the only right gift to offer people in these situations is to listen, to be attentive.”

The horizon he explores is physically and metaphorically the line where our known world gives way to air, to the space we still know almost nothing about. That liminal space is where exciting things can happen. The quest for knowledge and understanding—along with compassion—are what I value most in human beings. I will be reading and rereading this book for years to come.

Have you read a book that increased your knowledge of the natural world and challenged your philosophies?

The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, by Stuart Hall

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It’s actually all about race, I often find myself thinking as I read the euphemisms and cover stories promulgated by blustering politicians and repeated by their supporters. Growing up in a racially mixed city in the U.S., coming of age during the civil rights movement, I learned the code words and recognised what was really meant. It was so clear to me that “poor people” meant people of color that when a new friend told me she was on welfare, I blurted out, “But you’re white!”

As Lewis Carroll wrote in Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

You might think that this collection of talks given at Harvard in 1994 by Stuart Hall couldn’t be relevant 25 years later, but nothing could be more germane to what is happening today. Hall, a prominent intellectual and one of the founding figures of cultural studies, examines the three words in his subtitle and how their meanings—how we understand them—have changed over time.

In examining these three terms of cultural difference, Hall uses Saussure’s concept of the linguistic sign, which is that language, each word that we use, that sign has two parts: the signifier which is what we hear and what is actually signified, i.e., the abstraction behind it.

Thus, the title of the first part is “Race—The Sliding Signifier”. In this talk he examines how what we understand by the word “race” has changed over time, yet retains echoes of its earlier meanings. He finds these changes in what is signified by this and the other two terms by looking at public discourse, saying:

As we set out to ask what it means to rethink cultural difference in discursive terms, discourse should be understood as that which gives human practice and institutions meaning, that which enables us to make sense of the world, and hence that which makes human practices meaningful practices that belong to history precisely because they signify in the way they mark out human difference.

These three lectures are obviously not light reading, but they are immensely rewarding. Hall also invokes Saussure’s theory that our words do not operate independently; instead they are part of a web of meaning, related to other words, a systemic model. These three concepts are central to the process of classifying difference in human societies. And this system is hierarchical. It’s all about power or, as Humpty Dumpty says, who is to be master.

By looking at how the discourse around these three terms has changed over time and what lies behind those changes (see what I did there?), Hall challenges us to consider how these terms can slide in the future, as we look at the things that are changing our culture such as globalisation and mass diasporas, which are leading to a “weave of differences” rather than a binary (e.g., black versus white) definition of identity.

He says (italics the author’s), “The question is not who we are but who we can become.”

Who can we become?