The making of poetry, paintings, and Umwelt.

I received an email from my friend, the painter Ellen Wiener, in which she mused upon the global reach of her grown children’s curiosity compared to the more focused and, as she acknowledges, Eurocentric purview of her own. “We are sliding,” she wrote, “and in most ways rightly so, into a much more global awareness. My children want to visit Mexico City, Japan, India . . . and my inspiring explorations are apparently in some London of 1785.” With the kind of sympathetic magic that has graced our correspondence for more than a quarter-century, her message arrived as I was spending a concentrated block of time each morning in something like the same historical neighborhood as she, albeit a dozen years later and some 130 miles to the west. If she has been figuratively cultivating botany at Kew and admiring the recognitions constellated at the museum of Sir John Soane*, transforming both into gem-like images that float in time and space with elemental grace and uncanny gravity, I have been wandering the Quantock Hills with two youthful poets and assorted companions in the pages of Adam Nicolson’s The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels. 

The year of Nicolson’s title, which straddles 1797 and 1798, saw, in the author’s estimation, a transformation in the human imagination. The vehicle for this revolution was a small volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, in which the otherworldly (“The Rime of Ancient Mariner”) and the conversational (“The Nightingale”) flowed from Coleridge’s quill and Wordsworth brought his lofty brow to bear on humble characters and naturalistic scenes, translating them into vernacular verse that gave English literature a new vocabulary and syntax of seeing. “These months,” writes Nicolson of the period his narrative ambles through with knowing appreciation of its natural setting and creative climate,

are when Coleridge started to develop his theory of imaginative education, of a mind shaped by the image-filled worlds into which a child can disappear; and Wordsworth began to discover the opposite, of childhood as the realm not of creative freedom but of unadulterated experience, of moments and spots of time that burned themselves into a child’s being, so that memory became the sculptor of the person.

I can’t easily dismiss the book’s claims for the poet’s reach, for it’s those two orders of apprehension that, on reflection, have shaped my own perception, if not understanding, of presence in the world, although I never recognized it so clearly until Nicolson provided the lens to see it. That the lens is that of poetry, and 200-year-old poetry at that, only augments the worrisome sense of anachronism that has had me wondering what exactly is the point of immersing myself, via Nicolson’s literary labor, in the notebooks and discarded drafts of Coleridge and Wordsworth as, day by day, in whatever direction one happens to look, the country seems determined to go to hell in a  handbasket. Not for nothing did I copy out Ada Calhoun’s description, in her recent memoir, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, of her exasperation as she listened to some of the decades-old interviews her father had conducted with Frank O’Hara’s self-absorbed New York art world contemporaries: “Why was I still listening to these people talk? I needed to focus attention on the present, where my father might be dying.” My father might be dying, too—is certainly dying, sooner rather than later, but nonetheless resort to the Quantocks has consoled me as I struggle with the paradoxical enervations, both patient and urgent, of his care, ignoring the anarchies loosed on larger lives as I tend one small, dear one.

“To them I may have owed another gift,” writes Wordsworth in the last poem in Lyrical Ballads,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

If I’m honest, the consolation I take from literary endeavors in the present fraught moment is just a happy byproduct of what I’d be doing anyway, because savoring the sentences of other writers, or turning my own around, are what my mind and heart have become habituated to in the course of nearly seven decades. Having learned to do both to at least a private level of satisfaction, they form, after all this time, the landscape I inhabit. 

The epigraph to The Making of Poetry is a quotation from a radio interview with Seamus Heaney:

The making of verses, the making of works, occurs in the edges of your life, of your time, in your late nights or early mornings . . . And my words, the words for me, seem to have more nervous energy when they are touching territory that I know, that I live with . . .

All our thought and feeling, whatever the venue we use to capture it, is more vivid when it touches territory we know; most of us, in the age of uprooted, portable relations in which we are both blessed and cursed to abide, do not inherit that territory but have to construct it. As those constructions age and weather, or are overtaken by the flotsam and jetsam of the rising newsfeed tide, they seem less resilient, more defensive, less ingenious and spontaneous than they once did. I feel more and more provincial every day: what once seemed an admirably and oddly eclectic set of interests—right now circling around the paintings of Joan Mitchell, the letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner, the films of Agnès Varda, obscure corners of the string quartet repertoire—seems increasingly parochial, as if I’m the parson of some rural church tending gravestones whose inscriptions grow fainter with each passing week.

Ellen and I are roughly the same age, so I suspect some of the vocational fixity she ponders in herself as she admires her children’s wanderlust is the result of the natural seasoning of impulse. But she is on the track of something more profound: the way the traditions on which our skills—more tellingly, our intuitions—have been nourished can begin to feel antique; not just venerable, but brittle. With comic ruefulness, she tells me how unused digital drawing instruments—gifts from her son—scold her from a nearby shelf as she goes about her habitual business: “I sharpen cylinders of graphite. Guilty.”

What she does with those cylinders of graphite, on the other hand, is filled with the innocence of inspiration, tempered by the long sentences the work itself hands down with its own inescapable judgement. First is the drawing, she tells me when I ask about how Leaf & Underlain, spied on Instagram (@ellenwienerart), is made:

Detailed pencil studies of rocks, plants and landscapes—as in

These are then transferred lithographically by hand or on the etching press (surely you don’t want the chemistry?) onto a colored ground and painted. Then scanned, resized, recolored & tweaked in photo shop. Then printed using Epson 900 inkjet. Then hand colored again with gouache, colored pencil, pastel and oil. All on paper.

Leaf & Underlain is one of a group of works Ellen calls “Bigeminals” (you can see them all at her website), because 

it embeds the word GEM but also because there is a break, a stutter between the images—as each pair needs a heartbeat of blank before the looker can begin linking the fragments. Each “duet” can be seen as the landscape and what essential ingredients & elements lie underneath. 

Floating on their black ground, the Bigeminals strike me as minerals mined out of thin air. They have the heft of rock and the ethereal beauty of jewels you can see into, light leading you through long vistas of formation with its frolicsome poise, time unleashing all its tenses in the same moment of looking. They’re like specimens from the field sketchbooks of Gabriel García Márquez, if he had only been a fossil hunter (which, come to think of it, he was).

“I guess what I’m trying to illustrate are miniature myths,” Ellen explains to me, “. . . the mood is poignant though—as in looking at souvenirs.” In this context, the word souvenir unfolds in time, unwinding its history from its current meaning of “memento” through its French forebear in the verb se souvenir—to keep the trace of someone, something in memory—and back to the Latin subvenire: to come to help, come to mind. The nervous energy of which Seamus Heaney speaks, that animates words into poetry, is found along the roots of that etymology, in the coming to mind that comes before souvenirs become commodities, when they move like creatures through the imagination. There is a cryptography to consciousness: a thought Coleridge, if not Wordsworth, would have loved to ponder.

I discovered a word recently and, with the serendipity fresh knowledge invites, now seem to be stumbling upon it everywhere. It was coined by the zoologist Jakob von Uexkűll, who, in the years between the two world wars of the twentieth century, “transformed the study of animal consciousness,” as David Trotter recently wrote in the London Review of Books (in a piece, believe it or not, on Sylvia Townsend Warner), “by demonstrating that all organisms experience life in terms of a species-specific, subjective, spatio-temporal frame of reference uniquely adapted to the environments they inhabit. He called this frame of reference an Umwelt, or immediately surrounding ‘world’.” 

It’s no different for human beings, as far as I can see: our Umwelt is the territory we know. There we wander, sometimes without leaving home, among all the souvenirs that we’ve assembled, or are assembling us: Ellen sharpening graphite cylinders while I deploy semicolons not so far away, on the other side of Long Island Sound.

❖

*Note on Sir John Soane: At 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, facing the largest square in the city, an elegant small house conceals behind a modest façade the most remarkable and personal museum in London, perhaps in all the world.  Its creator had an extraordinary career: beginning as a bricklayer’s boy, John Soane (1753-1837) became an eminent architect whose innovative elaborations of Greek and Roman motifs produced such influential buildings as the Bank of England and the Dulwich College Picture Gallery. Bequeathed to the nation by its owner upon his death, Sir John Soane’s Museum is crammed with sculptures, paintings, and curiosities that occupy every available inch of wall and floor space. The Picture Room, for instance, a chamber of modest dimensions, is designed with such ingenuity that it contains more than 100 works—including compositions by Canaletto, Piranesi, Hogarth, and Turner—arranged on walls that are hinged screens, each opening out to reveal new layers of paintings and drawings behind. All in all, the museum is a wonder-cabinet bursting with astonishing contents and cultural resonances, including more than 7,000 books, a seemingly endless supply of artifacts and antiquities, and such singular items as the sarcophagus of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I. 

On Jeremy Denk’s memoir.

To write about music is hard. Jeremy Denk does it with as much poise and ingenuity as he performs Bach and Mozart and Brahms, turning the intensity of his study into expression both inviting and absorbing. I’ve enjoyed his prose for years, eagerly seeking it out on his now defunct blog, thinkdenk, and delighting to come upon it in the wild, mostly in book reviews. I still remember an image from a review he wrote ten years ago of Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach: a score, Denk said, is “at once a book and a book waiting to be written.” Denk’s own acclaimed recording of the Goldberg Variations appeared within a year of his piece on Elie’s book, and it rewards repeated hearing. Before you listen to it, follow this link to the archives of The New Republic to read Denk’s scintillating discussion of the majesty and magic of Bach’s music. (Try this sentence as a teaser: “Bach is all about the beauties of consequences.”)

So it was with happy anticipation that I picked up Denk’s memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons, published this spring. As the subtitle suggests, the book is structured as a series of lessons, each headed with a playlist of classical compositions that no doubt provide atmospheric accompaniment should you choose to track them down. The text itself—written in supple, conversational, splendid prose—moves between practice and theory. Chapters detailing his coming of age as a budding musician through the adolescent vale of awkwardness (and, let’s face it, there are few beings more awkward, in the familiar American milieu in which Denk was raised, than a prodigy on the school bus, despite the graces his talent was learning to summon at the keyboard) alternate with chapters focused on the fundamental musical capacities—harmony, melody, rhythm—that sound from, and slip through, the fingers of virtuosity. The young Denk’s actual music lessons, with a cast of memorable teachers, taskmasters, and one guru (in the shape, spied through an elegant haze of cigarette smoke, of the Hungarian-born pianist György Sebők), are recalled in all their painstaking hours of suffering and occasional moments of transcendence. While Denk’s mordant humor is a joy throughout the book, it is especially funny when describing the hard work of achieving mastery: “Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.”

A pianist’s mastery comes through the hands, and that’s where Denk starts an early chapter on harmony. 

I know my hands pretty well. I know these halves better than myself as a whole. My right hand is more agile, more Fred Astaire, willing to throw itself into a flurry of fast notes at a moment’s notice. It has a tendency to try too hard and tire itself out. My left hand is better at solid notes, things that require cushioning, weight, gradation. It can play louder than my right, and more smoothly, but prefers not to move fast; it believes in patience and preparation. You could say that my left hand is older than my right, and wiser, and so much lazier.

It is this, well, tactile approach to harmony, and then to melody and rhythm, that makes Denk’s book so rewarding. Here he is on the beginning of Brahms’s first Piano Trio, opus 8, in B major.

For the first few notes, it’s just a major scale, nothing memorable. But then Brahms decides to skip one note. This act is crucial and defining: the melody acquires identity and purpose. One skipped note—no big deal. You might say I’m making a mountain out of a molehill: a cutting and fitting indictment, if it weren’t for the fact that melody is the greatest device ever invented for converting molehills into mountains. It’s a stage where details are destined to become momentous. You understand this skipped note is important because Brahms immediately returns to the note he left behind. The gap he’s created must be addressed. I’m trying to describe this in analytical language, so that musicologists won’t roll their eyes at me, but meanwhile it tugs at my heart. 

And then there is Denk’s command of musical and cultural context as well:

Melodies belong to specific pieces, but harmonies are shared—across a style, across a culture. They belong less to individuals than to periods of time. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, between 1770 and 1820 or so, all built off the same basic set of chords, like a starter set of Legos. There are extensions, excursions, extenuations, but basically they work from good old one, four, and five, the fundamental trio. Harmonies are a vehicle, a stage, a backdrop. There are endless famous melodies (“Ode to Joy,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Like a Virgin”) but it is incredibly, world-historically rare when a harmony is so original that it attains the celebrity of melody.

I could go on quoting this book for a long time. The coming-of-age parts—his trying and, most importantly, enduring relations with his troubled parents; the anxious turmoil of committing to a musical career; the turbulent emotions as he plays hide-and-seek with sexuality—are engaging, and excellent in their way, but as unsatisfying as real life often proves to be; the coming-of-artistry parts, on the other hand, are arresting in the eloquence, and just as good the second time through (I tested this). They make you want to listen better, and teach you to do so, leaving the reader—in my case, at least—feeling the way Denk felt when Sebők sat at a keyboard to instruct him through four bars of Mozart’s Concerto in C Major, K. 415:

Everyone in the room saw the theme’s possibilities at that moment, and also Sebők’s greatest qualities: wit balanced by elegance, refined attention to the smallest distinctions. The result was not a theme but a little machine for the production of happiness, with intricate, interlocking parts. There were no mysteries, in a way, since he’d explained everything; and yet mystery remained.

On the painting of Joan Mitchell and birds on the wing.

Note: Although it stands well enough on its own, this post picks up where an earlier one, A New View, leaves off.

Lacking precise pathways, the sky, muses the unnamed narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, “never preserves our tracks. The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it.” Unlike the landscapes we mark out and inhabit, I’d add. Up on the twenty-second floor, looking out or up, what I see is what Lahiri’s character evokes, a “vast and vaporous territory”: “Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can’t be defined.” We make no tracks in it, nor at this height, as far as I can see, do creatures more suited to its freedoms; which is to say, for all my flights of fancy, no birds in view.

No Birds: it’s the title of a two-panel painting by Joan Mitchell that has held my attention across the months I’ve spent pondering the painter’s work with the aide-mémoire of two books—the comprehensive catalogue of a 2021-2022 retrospective of the artist’s career, co-organized by San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, and a much slimmer, oversized portfolio published to commemorate a more narrowly focused exhibit at Manhattan’s David Zwirner gallery in 2019—that I acquired on a whim after reading a report of the SFMOMA show. The two volumes and the impressions they prompted opened windows on a different kind of perception than the ones in our new apartment, with their vista of cityscape, distant water, and surrounding horizon, afforded. Or maybe not a difference of perception as much as a difference of perspective. In any case, aspects of the revery induced by the larger looking were reflected in the attentions and energies—the fixed but moving traces of art and mind—the books’ vivid color plates served up. Over the course of many weeks, an early morning focus on Mitchell’s images took on a cavalierly devotional air, as if I were turning from the illuminated inspiration of our new home’s unstained glass to duck into a private chapel in search of keepsakes of color and light smaller than the sky and, reduced from canvas to printed image, wall to page, turned into the radiant leaves of a book of hours.

Toward the end of May, I pulled my head out of the books and, at the same time, out of the long stretch of pandemic induced at-homeness that had been keeping us comfortably captive in the apartment, driving to Baltimore to see firsthand the Mitchell exhibition with which I’d been having a remote conversation for three seasons. A little giddy from all the figurative fresh air the trip provided, I entered the show with an intentness that was soon deflected by the inviolate confidence, the formidable reserve of the first canvases I saw. I decided to walk through the several galleries to get my bearings, then circle back to the beginning.

What shouldn’t have been startling as I made this passage was the sheer size of the works: most dwarfed the viewers standing before them, and some—Bonjour Julie, Ode to Joy, La Vie en Rose, Salut Tom—had an expanse breathtaking and somewhat forbidding. I was aware of these enormous dimensions from my reading, but after so many months of viewing the paintings on pages the scope of their multi-paneled reach was daunting. They didn’t invite attention so much as challenge it with a kind of adamantine bearing that, at first blush, contracted one’s presence; it was unnerving. I didn’t expect them to be so indifferent to me.

I walked quickly, on the lookout for a painting I’d been thinking about for some time, in increasing hope that the imaginative company I’d kept with it would offer consolation to my restive alertness. And there it was: two conjoined canvases that together measured about seven feet tall and thirteen feet wide, a swirl of intensely articulated brushstrokes and fierce daubs and jabs of paint that exuded the expressiveness of their application, flaunted it, overwriting the joining of the panels to make a panorama of the act of composition. You had to keep your distance to take it in; even then, you could never get the whole in view. Too big to comprehend in a single glance, it leads vision on a rapid dance through the field of goldenrod yellows that occupies the lower portion of the painting, then up to follow back across the panels the long, wide green-black strokes that stretch like ominous portents against an invoked sky.

Field, sky: like many of Mitchell’s paintings, No Birds, despite its abstract vigor, suggests a landscape. The particular one it alludes to was first seen through the eyes of Vincent van Gogh in Wheatfield with Crows, which dates from July 1890, the month of his death. In the Hollywood version of the Dutch painter’s story, Lust for Life, it’s the painting Kirk Douglas, who portrays van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film, is working on en plein air before—addled by the circling crows that he impetuously adds to his picture with jabs of black—he abandons his easel and wanders offscreen to shoot himself. In real life, in a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent described the canvases he created that fateful month: “They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to express sadness and extreme loneliness.” He didn’t mention the birds.

Similar in structure—the top band of the composition a lowering sky, the bottom two-thirds or so an uncannily sun-soaked, threshing fertility—and movement—van Gogh’s brushstrokes angling up and to the right vehemently, Mitchell’s following the same pattern with a swarming keenness—and in their apprehension of mortality in the throes of life, they differ in density. Wheatfield with Crows is saturated with color and almost scored with paint; its vigilance is fierce but static. No Birds is backlit with gesso, as if the entire vision is passing across an unfathomable illumination, or emptiness; nothing is settled: the drippings one doesn’t see at first but are soon apparent everywhere—in the lower right quadrant; underpinning much of the left panel—drawing attention from the bravura brushwork, are like murmurs disquieting sureness of expression, or some residue rendered from eyesight itself.

Van Gogh’s is an art of perceptual tension. It coalesces its subjects into a single act of concentration, a focusing at fever pitch that holds the eye rapt: an enchantment. While his paintings are alive with palpitating imagery, they have in the viewing a fixed duration. We tend to take them in all at once, entire. (This is one reason, aside from the beauty and wonder it repeatedly conjures, that his peculiar genius would come to play so well on postcards in its afterlife.) He makes the transience of vision, of sense slipping away, substantive, applying paint to the canvas with a physicality palpable even in reproduction.

Where van Gogh stops time, Mitchell frames it; within the frame, it’s still on the loose. Mitchell’s evocation of field and sky is a landscape being made, transitory even as one looks at it. No birds—but eyes in flight, darting in dark strokes and trails of green, in dancing yellow stomps and tangles; color taking wing. Vision finds no repose, no place to alight, but nonetheless a furtive liberation within the play of forces the conjoined canvases connect in their eavesdropping on their own making: gestures toward expression, of expression, resound with the repetitions and insistencies of speech, its circling back and interjections, its mutterings and exclamations, a pursuit of fleeting feeling that leaves a lingering sense.

“When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness,” wrote William James,

what strikes us first is the different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

There in Baltimore, the more scrutiny I gave No Birds, the more capacious it grew. “With the big painting, I am totally in it,” I would hear Mitchell say later on a video screen in another room of the gallery, explaining why the seductiveness of scale attracted her over the charms of more compact forms, and one can catch the presence of her body in the painting, in the length and durance of the brushstrokes, animated and animating, at the same time instances and memories of movement, the arm’s reach and gestures inscribing an inner eye’s alertness.

She’s in it, and so are we: it’s impossible to encompass No Birds in a single view, or to know exactly where to look. It is a landscape of the places of flight we live in, filled with thoughts of relation, following the twists and turns of phrases that fall between the periods of life’s sentences, that come to rest in no conclusion. Our eyes venture across the artist’s imagery like they might explore an actual setting, settling here—a patch of blue—then taking off again before landing there—that cascade of drips—as we follow the patterns of motion and emotion with which Mitchell marks her world. It’s landscape as a kind of liturgy, a public display of private cognizance, capturing consciousness on the wing.

Henry James accepts his brother William’s challenge.

The passage from William James quoted above is from “The Stream of Consciousness,” the eleventh chapter of his Psychology: Briefer Course. It’s nestled in a subsection headlined “‘Substantive’ and ‘Transitive’ States of Mind,” a fascinating consideration of how the conclusions we come to color our understanding of the movement of mind that carried us to them. Our substantive, or settled, states of mind, James explains, tend to overwrite the syntax of relations that gives our transitive states their motive force.

If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum naturâ, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. [Emphases as in the original text.]

“In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades”:it’s hard to read this sentence, and the two that follow, without inventing a scene in which William’s novelist brother Henry, puzzling over his elder sibling’s newly published work in London in 1892, takes a professional interest and exclaims, “Challenge accepted!”

In the years that follow, Henry will retire from London to Lamb House in Rye to conjure The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, novels not only steeped in but aboutfeelings of and, and if, and but, and by, all the emotional relations that the words we speak can’t capture but stumble toward, over, under, around, before, after, into, against in the urgent uncertainty of our prepositional being. I picture Henry sending affectionately inscribed copies of his late masterpieces one after the other off to William in Cambridge, Massachusetts, playfully triumphant in the conviction that the recipient would never grasp how well his kid brother had succeeded in meeting the challenge the psychologist had inadvertently thrown down.

A note from Russell Baker.

I’ve always wanted to keep a large correspondence, animated with letters from friends and strangers, immersed in a to-ing and fro-ing of ideas, events, writerly insights and readerly pursuits. And for a long time I did, although I confess I am only now coming to realize this as, in a desultory way, I sort through several stray boxes of papers that survived last year’s downsizing from our home of twenty-five years to our present apartment. What they hold is lots and lots of letters, most dating from my time running A Common Reader, the book catalog I co-founded in 1986 and ran for two decades. There are letters from readers of every stripe, and from writers as well: flipping through the files labeled A and B, I see notes from not-yet-novelist André Aciman, the productivity guru David Allen, Jennifer Armstrong (author of a book about Sir Ernest Shackleton, Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World, whose genesis she traces, bless her, to discovery of an earlier book on her eventual subject in our catalog), novelist Nicholson Baker, Otto Bettmann (founder of the eponymous image archive), serial visionary Stewart Brand, conductor Philip Brunelle, and others.

I was especially happy to find an exchange of letters—and even notes back and forth on a packing slip, on which we bantered about particular titles he’d purchased—with long-time New York Times columnist Russell Baker. Unearthing this exchange brought delight for two reasons. First, because it recalled the occasion of our meeting: a dinner in the summer of 1992 at the Nantucket home of Jean and David Halberstam. We’d been invited to visit because of Margot’s culinary friendship with Jean, and one of the highlights of our short stay was the dinner Jean lavished on for the four of us, plus two additional couples: the Bakers (Russell and Mimi) and the Conroys (Frank and Maggie). Bookseller that I was, the table seemed set for me with volumes among the cutlery, from our host’s The Best and the Brightest to Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time to Baker’s Growing Up, which had garnered its author his second Pulitzer Prize a decade earlier. The food was splendid, the conversation animated and amusing, the welcome of a young couple into a coterie of old friendships warm and genuine. Graciousness came in with the island tide.

Second, because it reminded me of Baker’s friendly, funny tone. Upon returning to my office, I’d sent him, at his request, the latest issue of A Common Reader, thanked him for recommending a book I’d been quick to read, and mentioned M. E. Screech’s new translation of the Essays of Montaigne, which had recently been published (the French sage had somehow seasoned the talk during the fish course). Four months later, as Christmas approached, I received the following reply:

Dear Jim,

Year’s end is apologizing time for me. All the good letters from entertaining people that got put aside for good letters-of-­reply sit in a big dusty pile growing cobwebs, and I finally concede that once again this year I just didn’t have many good letters-of-reply in me.

I meant to write you something about Screech’s translation of Montaigne, something like my own translation of Montaigne producing hundreds of little screeches from my French professor and wondering if one of them had grown up glibber than I in Montaignesque French, but I have lost the touch for sophomore humor. It fades with age. Until a few years ago I did it rather well, but now the result when tried in the newspaper is invariably embarrassing.

I have been collecting all year for a Norton anthology of American humor. A depressing task (though, being a scissors-and-­paste job, not half as depressing as having to write one’s own book). Humor, I find, wears out its welcome faster than an Alumni Association fund raiser. After 20 minutes of conscious humor­seeking, the hunter is powerless to summon the feeblest grin, the sickliest smile. Even Perelman palls after 5,000 words. One begins to notice that Mark Twain is straining desperately, that O. Henry is recycling old tricks, in short that all one’s superiors are not so superior after all. But of course they are. It’s only the obligation to read them that spoils them for the hunter, as the 9th grader’s obligation to read “As You Like It” spoils Shakespeare for him for years to come.

Enough. God bless us every one, especially book folk.

That seems a good sign-off for this post.

Staring out the window after moving house.

I stand at the window and watch the storm suffuse the sky, a palette of grays and blacks blending into one another as the heavens concentrate dark power. Twenty-two storeys above the modest streetscape I survey, I see the city hunch its shoulders against the sodden twilight; the movement of the rain begins to meet the glass. The wind driving the water is silent to me, palpable only in the spray that beads upon the panes, inches away but out of reach. Behind the bulk of an apartment building even bigger than ours I glimpse a patch of the river that snakes through the park two blocks away, and beyond the park the illuminated hotels, small office blocks, and houses that gather into several neighborhoods, until the city cedes the view to a rim of trees describing a horizon the encroaching night will soon blur.

Thus, at the start of September, I pondered the arrival of Hurricane Ida—technically a post-tropical cyclone by the time it had reached us—from the perch afforded by our apartment on the top floor of a building in downtown Stamford, Connecticut, to which we’d moved in May from a house more or less in the woods. I was balanced between a sense of immersion in the storm’s elements—it was as if I were looking it in the face as it pressed against our windows—and detachment from its threats. After all, I was suspended in the air, fathoming weather from an unfamiliar angle, closer to the sky than was my custom; at the same time, the panes before me weren’t shivering with every gust as the windows in the house we’d left had taken to doing over the past few years, and trees weren’t looming outside them like ominous giants whose majesty might be upset at any minute, unleashing dormant vehemence in a splintering of trunks and limbs. Which is to say I had the good fortune to study the storm, to respect it without fear, almost admire it, unlike many people inhabiting the miles I overlooked, who would struggle against its violence through the coming night and subsequent days, powerless, inundated in floods and sorrows; it was a savage storm.

The next morning, despite the deadly wreckage on the ground, the view from the same window was brilliant, the sky delivering astonishing delight: in the distance to the south I could see Long Island Sound reflecting the sun’s return; looking west from the water and farther away, the skyline of Manhattan rose like a chimera, serene in its remoteness, like a sketch of San Gimignano in the deep background of some imagined Renaissance painting, a figment of destination never to be reached. The destination we had reached, five months earlier, was thirty-five miles away from the four-bedroom house on two-and-a-half acres that had been our home for a quarter-century. The transition to our new residence—the listing, cleaning, sorting, packing, showing, selling, storing, moving—was made with unexpected but determined speed. We’d leapt into the process with trepidation—how would we ever sort through the lifetime of possessions we’d accumulated? how would our four new rooms accommodate them?—and then, increasingly, with a glee that grew to abandon as we put each category of goods—clothes; cooking equipment; the paper trail of our daughters’ passage through grammar school, high school, college, even, for one, wedding day; tchotchkes and cherished mementoes; books, books, books—under the increasingly tightly-focused lenses of utility, need, sentiment, and deadline, mapping what remained after our purposeful inventory to fit the dimensions of our new quarters.

That exercise, of course, was part of the point: could we make what’s left of our lives more by carrying less? How much of what we were leaving behind would we really miss? What kind of gaps would we create in the present by moving out of the crowded past, by distilling the history that house held to furnish a set of empty rooms? It took us nearly a month of work with tape measure and masking tape to mark out where each piece of furniture would fit. With uncharacteristic meticulousness, I measured the walls that would accommodate bookshelves and calculated how many books the shelves would hold, then simulated my prospective library in the old house, volume by volume, to see exactly which ones would make the cut to fill the total my formula allowed. Margot did the same with the tools of her culinary trade. We did a good enough job of preparation that the two-hundred-odd boxes the movers deposited in the apartment’s large living and dining area, taking up nearly every available foot of floor space, were broken down after a few days into what quickly felt like the perfect mise en place for the next few years—not only orderly, but pleasing. In the end, the culling proved liberating, even though we made our editing easier by putting more stuff in storage than prudence could validate, as if archiving manuscripts for a variorum edition of a future that only promises time for a single reading.

If the matter of our memories—the stuff that accretes to the substance of living like barnacles upon a vessel—were dispersed, discarded, consigned to the forgetfulness of storage, the meaning of those memories would travel with us, even be made easier to admire through the less clouded lens of a less cluttered life: that was the bet we made as spring turned into summer. And what I began to realize the morning after the storm had wreaked its havoc was that despite the shrinkage in space, the view had widened: the large windows through which I had watched the arrival of Ida, and now welcomed her departure, imbued attention with a new capacity. The high-ceilinged rooms they filled with light—bright by day, even when the sky is overcast, and sparkling and elegant in the evening courtesy the urban illumination that surrounds us—were making hours feel bigger moment to moment and, so far at least, month to month, than the house, looking inward on its crowded, happy history, ever did. Nestled into the downslope of a hill and sheltered by trees, the house fixed gazes inward as surely as the children it sheltered domesticated love. In contrast, the vistas afforded by our new aerie stretch to the edge of sight, unlocking intimacy and reframing what it could see.

What I can see now daily, as never before, is weather, heralded by the infiltrating light—overwhelming even when muted by clouds—that awakens the interior and draws it outward, attracting my gaze toward a space capacious and mutable, indifferent to whatever notions I’ve woken with: thought is lost in the distance and grandeur that comprise the sky. Each morning is like the first exhibit in a museum of prayer: whatever we do, the weather comes as it pleases, rampant or restful. We can dress for it, prepare for it, welcome it or worship it, dread it or diminish it to data points—still, it responds only to its own accord, or some other calling beyond the reach of our plans and motivations. Every day delivers its own demeanor, and it’s good to acknowledge, if not embrace, its influence.

In such a vista, do the household gods give way to larger ones, those that hold sway out there on the horizon, where the thin air that quickens us—out of which we summon the stories of our lives and into which we disappear once our bodies lose their breath—dissipates beyond the ken of our known world?

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

So wrote Philip Larkin, transcending his resentment of the permissive liberties pursued by a younger generation, but failing to imagine where transcendence always comes down to earth, and what windows always frame: a perspective of our own devising, less complete but more complex than understanding. Comprehension, like transcendence, is impossible, as long as we are looking, no matter how clear we think the glass; apprehension reigns, with all the wonder and worry that word contains. Standing at my new window, I begin to see afresh what was before me all along: the airy nothing to which I’ve given, through love and loss and learning and memory, a local habitation and a name, a landscape I can carry with me.

A younger self’s definition of a retirement project.

Another discovery I made scanning the basement shelves led me to the OED to look up the word dwell. What I found surprised me. The first meaning—to lead into error, mislead, delude; to stun, stupefy—is traced back to the year AD 888 and King Alfred’s Old English version of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, written in Latin in AD 523. A century after this regal etymology, dwell has come to mean—per one of the ninety riddles in the anthology known as the Exeter Book—to hinder, delay. Two hundred years further on, to tarry has been added to its denotative repertoire; also around the year 1200, the modern meaning beings to swim into view: to abide or continue for a time, in a place, state, or condition. Another two centuries will pass before the usage to dwell on, upon is cited, in a translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s treatise on surgery. Only in 1520 does dwell assume the sense of to occupy as a place of residence, to inhabit—empowering Milton, some one hundred and fifty years later, to ring all kinds of resonant changes on the word’s several meanings, changes that have echoed in our ears ever since. As any reader of Paradise Lost knows, Milton was a poet who dwelt on things.

In any case, the discovery alluded to above that prompted my lexicographical inquiry was connected to my spotting Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building on a shelf to my right as I sat at my basement desk. I’d always had a great admiration—fondness might be a better word—for this book, and I wondered if I had ever tried to express it back in the day when it caught my fancy. So, with a little guesswork and a good deal of riffling through old print editions of A Common Reader, also relegated to the basement, albeit in regimented archival boxes, I came upon this entry in Catalog No. 161 (October 1998), recommending both Timeless Way and another Alexander book, A Pattern Language. I had entirely forgotten the content of what follows, but I was charmed to salvage it so serendipitously:

The project I have outlined for my retirement years is the composition of a discursive dictionary, in which a few score versatile, vivid, favorite words will engender essays in which I’ll order all I’ve learned, guessed, forgotten. I keep a notebook of inspiring vocabulary for potential inclusion in this alphabetical apologia, and I edit it occasionally to concentrate my plans. One word that entered the list early, and remains near the top, is dwelling, for it contains within its connotations elements of construction, endurance, and attention, themes of great personal import. It captures in its different parts of speech both the comforts and labors of a home and the root activity of the imagination. Christopher Alexander’s two magnificent books—ostensibly, and valuably, focused on architecture, building, and planning—have taught me as much as any I’ve read about dwelling in all its aspects, explicating with ingenuity, invention, curiosity, and a poised practicality many of the meanings the word encompasses. 

I first came upon Alexander’s works more than a decade ago, when my wife and I returned from a walking tour of Umbria. Sauntering from hilltown to hilltown, we had marveled at many things, not least the distinctive beauty of each town. The author’s provocative theory of architecture, elaborated in these rich and philosophic volumes created with the help of his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure, gave me words to describe the animated at-homeness I experienced in those small Italian cities. I was intrigued especially by Alexander’s idea of the evolutionary “pattern languages” that animate the most humane built environments, those places which “have that breath of sudden passion in them, which whispers to us, and lets us recall those moments when we are ourselves.” The self, I would venture—and Alexander’s elegant, epigrammatic, comprehensive attentions to the art of living encourage such leaps between concepts and categories—relies on its own pattern language, built of recurring activity, thought, emotion, and intuition. The more flexible that language, the more eloquent the life it dictates. For what is the imagination but a language of patterns? But I’m getting ahead of myself, to that book I’ll be writing in my twilight years. Suffice it to say that the two books offered here are among the most arresting volumes I have ever encountered, and you’ll never look at a window, a doorway, or a street in the same way once you’ve spent time with them. Alexander and friends have taken upon themselves the task of revealing how architecture can house so much life, and of putting their discoveries to work in the design of rooms, buildings, communities. In the process they offer inquisitive readers a reflective education in nearly everything under the sun.

Now that those then long distant twilight years are fast approaching, if not already here, I’m glad to be goaded by my younger self to add another quixotic literary project to my list. If I could find that notebook, it would speed things along.

Late November brought news of the death, after nearly a century of life, of the historian and literary geographer (“travel writer” sells her short by a long shot) Jan Morris. Among her many splendid books are The World of Venice, one of the richest portraits I know of that oft-portrayed city; Conundrum, an account of her midlife gender transformation; Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere; and her trilogy on the rise and fall of the British Empire: Heaven’s Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets. 
 
I included Pax Britannica in 1,000 Books. In that book, Morris tells her readers, she tries “to recall what the Empire was, how it worked, what it looked like, and how the British themselves then saw it.” She does this, I write, 
 
through an imaginative historical “tour” that leads from Ireland to India, Canada to Rhodesia, highlighting events, themes, and ideas—Victoria’s reign, shipping routes, the dissemination of seed and stock, economic imperatives, caste, law, art and architecture, military matters, the idea of fair play—that are reflective of both the adjective and the noun in “British imperialism.” 
 
Although Morris is not blind to the dark side of imperialism, I continue,
 
her primary focus is to capture Victoria’s realm “at the height of its vigour, in an outburst of creativity, pride, greed and command.” Her cadenced prose is pure pleasure to read—her inspirations can capture a panorama in a sentence she will then unpack through a dozen informative and entertaining pages.
 
Nowhere is the evocative power of her inspiration on better display than in Hav, which remains my favorite among her books, even though I bypassed it in making the list for mine (sometimes I am a mystery to myself). In this beguiling novel, Morris invents her own city and sends us letters from it, detailing its fabled history and curious customs before bringing the story up to date with a report on her invention’s faceless twenty-first-century makeover. Steeped in the culture of a wholly imaginary place, Hav is filled with the palpable sense of expectation—of some discovery lurking just around the coming corner—that age-old distant cities hold, and alert as well to the horrific erasures that modern economies encourage. May its creator rest in peace.

Bookshelf autobiography, via an old catalogue.

I closed a recent post with a question posed by the philosopher Simone Weil. Happily, she’d also provided an answer. I didn’t reveal that Weil’s words were top of mind because I’d come upon them while flipping through an old copy of A Common Reader. As some of you know, that was the name of the book catalogue I cofounded in 1986 and published for two decades. I have a full set of all 300-odd catalogues in archival boxes in the basement, awaiting the verdict of time and decay, which I consult from time to time when I am looking for a particular sentence I think I already wrote a long time ago, or if I feel the need to wander through the verbiage of my halcyon days.
 
Occasionally I come upon a stray issue of the catalogue when I am cleaning the house or rearranging bookshelves. That’s what happened this time, when a copy of ACR No. 246 (dated January 2004)—newsprint pages wrinkled and torn, yellowed with unturned possibility—slipped from the middle of a pile of books at the bottom of a nightstand. On its cover is a photograph of the snowbanked path to the church of Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire, from a book called The Most Beautiful Villages of England, with text by James Bentley and photos by Hugh Palmer. Turning the page, I read, in the upper lefthand corner, my customary letter to customers, which opened with the Weil quotation, a formulation I’d forgotten in the intervening years and was happy to rediscover. In the welcome letter, I drew a dotted line from Weil’s profound idea to the more pragmatic purpose of the publication in the reader’s hand, in words I’d echoed in the newsletter I’ve referred to, where they seemed to fit the subject at hand: the perilous state of bookstores in the pandemic-straitened economy.
 
“What is culture?” the French philosopher Simone Weil once asked. She was not without an answer, and her response has always struck me as particularly apt: “The formation of attention.” To play a role in such formation is, to my mind, the best aspiration of a good bookseller; in this catalogue every month, my colleagues and I attempt to bring your attention to books and recordings that will enhance your private pursuit of culture, or encourage your participation in the broader conversation a shared culture makes possible.
 
Perhaps A Common Reader performed that function for readers. Every time I begin to doubt it, an email or an encounter with a former customer makes it credible: the strength of some readers’ attachment to that enterprise after all these years always buoys my spirit. What is never in doubt is that A Common Reader, by accidental design, played such a role for me; in the pages of No. 246, for example I can trace something of the formation of my own attention, both contemporary with the publication of that issue and trailing back through the long period of reading and bookselling that preceded it. That’s one of the rewards of a bookish life: the history of our interests, enthusiasms, passing fancies, and concentrations are palpable to us in the shape of volumes arrayed on a shelf of books—or, in my case, in blocks of prose arranged in collections on catalogue pages.
 
Those catalogue pages also served me in those years as a kind of journal, allowing me to record anecdotes from life I otherwise would certainly have forgotten, since I lacked the patience to keep an actual diary in which I might have filed them away more naturally. Flipping the pages of ACR No. 246, I spy a title, Italian Neighbors by Tim Parks, which supplies a case in point. My original catalogue description of Parks’s book reads like this:
 
I remember traveling with a friend of mine, who had attended medical school in Italy, to retrieve his transcripts from the university at L’Aquila. At the registrar’s office, he was informed that a verbal request was not enough: a written petition was required. So he wrote out a note, only to be informed that the letter had to employ a formula, exactly duplicating the wording of the sample of florid prose he was then handed. He copied it out and returned to the appropriate desk, to find out that of course he had used the wrong paper; the proper paper—officially watermarked—was available at the post office. Off we trudged, while he regaled me with the tale of the ongoing feud between the woman who manned the post office window and the owner of the bar across the piazza. Once he had tried to mail a post card, but the post office had no supply of the proper stamps. So he walked over to the bar, which sold them. The owner provided him what she insisted was the correct amount of postage, although when he returned to the post office the woman at the window informed him the postage was insufficient. He went back to the bar, whose owner refused to sell him any more stamps because, she claimed, the postal employee was a stupid liar. The two women glared at each other across the square; my friend pocketed his post card and moved on. This is the Italy that Tim Parks celebrates in this funny, affectionate, amusing chronicle of the life he and his wife have lived in the small city of Montecchio, not far from Verona. All the usual charms of Italian culture are here too, of course, and in abundance; but it is Parks’s special attention to the country’s unique marriage of “anarchy without, ceremony within” that make his book such a delight.
 
Before I continue, for those of you keeping score, the rest of the L’Aquila story is this: after we picked up the watermarked paper, and my friend transcribed the approved language to it, we returned to the university registrar to consummate the deal. My friend was then told to come back in two weeks, when the president of the university—who alone could affix the seal and signature that would unlock the transcripts, as well as the supplicant’s high school and college diplomas, which he had been required to submit when he enrolled (the actual diplomas, mind you, not copies thereof)—would be back from holiday. On the plus side, I suppose, if the process had been efficient, I’d have nothing to remember.
 
To return to ACR No. 246, a dozen or so pages beyond the Parks entry, I discover a consideration of Richard Watson’s The Philosopher’s Demise: Learning to Speak French, an entertaining and sneakily profound account of the author’s attempt to learn to speak French passably enough to deliver a paper in Paris. Despite the fact that Watson began these studies after three decades as a Descartes scholar, one who could not only read French superbly but translated it professionally, he had a hard time passing muster with the formidable Parisian professors of the Alliance Française. It’s a funny, wise book, and seeing it reminds me of the pleasure I found in striking up a correspondence with the author, with whom I shared a love of black liquorice as well as books. (I wrote more about Watson in the first newsletter of this year.) 
 
Elsewhere in the catalogue I am intrigued to find a forgotten page devoted to what was then piled on my bedside table: a book of poems, The Wild Iris by this year’s Nobel laureate, Louise Glück; Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, a chronicle of the intellectual excitements of 18th-century Edinburgh by James Buchan; Monsieur Proust, an illuminating memoir, by the novelist’s housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, of daily life with an eccentric genius; The Dominion of the Dead, by Robert Pogue Harrison, which, since I described at the time  as a “surprising, elegantly imagined meditation on the ways burial of the dead provides the ground in which the seeds of living culture take root,” must not have kept me up at night; and, finally, two sets of reading—the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries, that have continued to cycle back into my beside rotation in the intervening years.
 
Flipping through the catalogue’s 152 pages (how did we ever produce these every month?), I am struck by how much of my attention therein is devoted to visual books. On page six, there is an entry devoted to the latest picture book by the remarkable artist Peter Sís, The Tree of Life, a layered portrait of the life and work of Charles Darwin. Like all of Sís’s picture books (including my favorite, The Three Golden Keys, which I’ve included in 1,000 Books), The Tree of Life is an act of imagination in the exact sense, translating complex networks of fact, idea, and emotion into drawings of meticulous detail and ingenuity. It’s powered by a curiosity that transcends the age-delimited audience the descriptor “picture book” might imply. 
 
Below the Sís, there’s a volume devoted to the work of Giorgio Morandi, the mid-twentieth-century Italian painter whose table-top still lifes of nondescript bottles, cups, and vases are singular devotions—there’s no better word—to the mysteries of time, space, and perception. Deeper in the catalogue, I find my attention turned to books about John Singer Sargent and Albrecht Dürer, and another about the art of Johannes Vermeer: “Time itself seems to hang suspended within the frames of Vermeer’s paintings, not only still, but pondering. His exquisite compositions—characteristically domestic scenes of unremarkable event—strike me as three-dimensional in a metaphysical way, as if their careful representation of familiar space took the measure of expectancy itself. rendering the secrets of some sixth sense.”
 
Paging through old issues of A Common Reader is like a conversation with volumes read and treasured for either passing or permanent reasons; with authors encountered in both books and, sometimes, life; with correspondents who’d recommended their own favorites for inclusion; and, pleasantly and often surprisingly, with my younger self, or, more exactly, with perceptions as they took form and memories as they found expression. Some of these perceptions and memories have become companions enduring enough that I now take them for granted as part of my private culture, the armature of attention I’ve mustered against the anxiety that experience, enigmatic in its increasingly mortal forward motion, engenders ever and always. 
 
On page 98 of ACR No. 246, I find, in a box headlined “The School of Eloquence,” a series of quotations from a sampler of the work of Samuel Johnson. One of them reads: “The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The wildest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.” Which makes learning sound a little like prayer, and reminds me that Simone Weil also wrote that “prayer consists of attention.” Are prayer and culture siblings, then, children of the mind and soul who seek meaning and know they always have something to learn, or to praise? And is the real art of learning—pace the assurances of the educational treadmills that train their charges in fungible skills for utilitarian applause and return on investment—a kind of enchantment, an endowment of powers more like senses than like certainties?

On Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.

Thursday night, December 3, we held our last Battle of the Books for 2020. I’d like to share some thoughts about one of the books that was championed (by Kiera Parrot, of the Darien Public Library): Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.
 
Tan is an artist-storyteller, creator of some of the most imaginative and mind-enhancing picture books I know. A couple of years ago, the Financial Times profiled him on the occasion of the publication of The Singing Bones, an art book showcasing his papier-mâché sculptures inspired by fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Exploring Tan’s resort to sculpture for the project, the author of the profile invokes the words of Philip Pullman, who, in his introduction to his own versions of Grimm’s tales, 
 
cautions against illustration, suggesting that it can run counter to the spirit of works in which description and characterisation must nearly always give way before the electric pace of the narrative.
       “I think he’s absolutely right,” says Tan. “The stories are a bit like the shadows in Plato’s cave. They’re two-dimensional and flat: it’s a witch, it’s a boy, it’s a prince, it’s a princess. But I like the challenge of illustrating a text that kind of says, ‘Do not illustrate me’. I realised I couldn’t use my traditional illusionistic representational style; it would have to be something stylised but also extremely simple, something that wouldn’t interfere.”
 
The linkage of Tan to Pullman interested me, for some years earlier I connected the two of my own accord. It started with an interview with Pullman I conducted in 2007, during which the author of The Golden Compass said: 
 
Stories can be presented in the form of words, but they can also be presented in the form of pictures. . . . Whatever stories are made of, words aren’t fundamental to it. Something else is. And what I think is fundamental to the narrative process is events—stories are made of events.
 
As if to illustrate Pullman’s point, Tan’s The Arrival came across my desk a few days after our conversation. This stunning volume chronicles—in a wordless pictorial narrative—an immigrant’s parting from his family and journey toward the future in a new land that is simultaneously ominous and hopeful. Told in drawings of varying sizes—sometimes there are twelve panels to a page, sometimes four; there are many full-page images—Tan’s tale juxtaposes the realistic with the phantasmagoric, giving shape to both the mundane material needs and the psychologically charged emotions of immigrant experience. Isolation, fear, want, sympathy, amity, joy—all are rendered palpable by the author’s enthralling visual invention. Tan composes an imaginative landscape in which the uncertain bravery of an immigrant’s journey is seen in its true grandeur; best of all, the artist creates a mesmerizing and mysterious “bookscape” in which readers young and old (and the older you are, I venture, the richer the experience will prove) can wander again and again, poring over details, elaborating events, fashioning narrative destinies, discovering new worlds. I’ve been thrilled to return to it this week, for its generosity greets experience, even in the face of adversity, with a welcome and a wonder that are in short supply in the nearsighted vision of 2020.