The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds by Margaret Wise Brown
It was only this year that I learned about the great love story of Margaret Wise Brown’s life, after coming upon the almost unbearably beautiful poems she wrote for her beloved—the actress Blanche Oelrichs, who wore suits and ties and performed under the stage name Michael Strange. When Michael lay dying of leukemia, Margaret coped with the loss the best way she knew how—she wrote a love letter in the form of a children’s book: The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds—a strange and wondrous parable about life, death, and how to bear our mortality, now long out of print. On its first page, above a golden feather, appeared the simple dedication “For Michael Strange.” Michael entered the dark wood a season after its publication.
The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck
In 1940, as humanity’s most ferocious war was rupturing the world, John Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts decamped to the nonhuman world and its elemental consolations of interdependence, embarking on an exploratory expedition in the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California—“a long, narrow, highly dangerous body of water… subject to sudden and vicious storms of great intensity.” Wading through the tide pools, his hands callused from collecting specimens, his feet stung by poisonous worms and spiked by urchins, his mind invigorated by the ravishing interconnectedness of life, the 38-year-old writer found himself contemplating the deepest strata of reality and its intercourse with the human imagination. What emerges is a meditation on the nature of knowledge disguised as an expedition journal—a wanderer’s delight in the adjacent pleasure gardens of science and philosophy of mind, composed two decades before Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for his fiction. At its heart is Steinbeck’s passionate refutation of the Western compulsion for teleological thinking—the tendency to explain things in terms of the purpose they serve, antithetical both to science and to the Eastern notion of being: the idea that everything just is and any fragment of it, any one thing examined by itself, is simply because it is. Despite his magnificent novels, despite his large-souled letters, I consider this his slender book of nonfiction his finest work.
Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy
Even though I practically live on a bicycle, I had never heard of Dervla Murphy until a friend sent me her obituary this spring. I was instantly taken with the indomitable spirit of this unboastful woman who had biked from Ireland to India in the middle of the Cold War as a gesture of friendship to humanity. But as I read her book Full Tilt, I fell nothing less than in love with this sunshine of a person and the immense largeness of heart with which she encounters people of such different cultures and dispositions—people whose boundless hospitality ends up affirming what she had to have already known in her bones to endeavor on so dangerous a journey at all: “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.”
Crowning it all is her luminous prose, always deeply alive and awake to the elemental beauty of the natural world. It is on this beauty that she slakes her soul when, along the way, she narrowly escapes death by landslide and wolf pack, by Islamic fundamentalists and a six-foot icicle, prevailing over bandits and bureaucrats with her pistol and her copy of Blake’s poems. What emerges is the kind of book that rekindles your faith in the human spirit and re-enchants you with the staggering beauty of this world.
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