In Cold Enough For Snow, a new book by the Australian writer Jessica Au, the narrator is on a trip to Japan with her mother; they are traveling together but remain at a distance, isolated in their own experiences. In a book light on external plot the trip serves as a frame, moving the characters from one exhibit or restaurant to another and allowing for the narrator's reflections on what she is seeing and what for her is evoked in memory by those sights. At a showing of antique textiles, the narrator thinks "I wanted for some reason to speak more about the room, and what I had felt in it, that strange keenness. Wasn't it incredible, I wanted to say, that once there were people who were able to look at the world--leaves, trees, rivers, grass--and see its patterns, and, even more incredible, that they were able to find the essence of those patterns, and put them into cloth?" These personal responses to art, decoupled from academic analysis, are particularly moving. The connections she makes between artworks, memories, and feelings are often both wholly unexpected and entirely believable, giving voice to the strange ways our memories are catalogued and the ability of art to send long quiet feelings back onto the stage of our consciousness.
Emily Dickinson's herbarium suggests that she not only liked paying close attention, which is clearly on view in her poetry, but that she enjoyed keeping record of what she noticed in the world around her. So fragile that access is not permitted even for Dickinson scholars, the book’s sixty-six pages have been made digitally available on the Harvard Library's site. They show Dickinson to have collected and pressed a wide array of plants and flowers over the course of seven years, arranging and labeling them with a flair for artistic presentation. You can read more about this undertaking that began in her school years here, or view the book in full here.
Wendell Berry’s life work has been paying attention to the natural world and finding the precise words to express what he sees. The language in this poem is so evocative that the image just about drips off the page.
The Apple Tree
In the essential prose of things, the apple tree stands up, emphatic among the accidents of the afternoon, solvent, not to be denied. The grass has been cut down, carefully to leave the orange poppies still in bloom; the tree stands up in the odor of the grass drying. The forked trunk and branches are also a kind of necessary prose—shingled with leaves, pigment and song imposed on the blunt ligaments of fact, a foliage of small birds among them. The tree lifts itself up in the garden, the clutter of its green leaves halving the light, stating the unalterable congruity and form of its casual growth; the crimson finches appear and disappear, singing among the design.
Thank you for being here. I hope you found something to carry away with you, and that you'll consider passing this letter along if you know of someone who might like it.
Until next week,
S
Lately #9: At Attention
Everything this week sent me on a joyous journey. From stirring the memories of my own time in Japan, to delving into the loveliness of the herbarium, to fondness for an apple tree lost to me last year. Always so much in your posts to delight and inspire!