Shades of Wendell Berry, the July 2004 Brown Bag Book selection.
It takes a while to get into the slow pace of action. That was my comment about the old Jayber Crow
book by Berry. In our modern urbanized
world and as it was for Aristotle, 24 hours is sufficient for a book, movie or
TV drama to take place. In my life’s
experience, this was not always the case and I prefer my Greek tragedy
Euripidean. It’s nice to take the pace
down a bit now and then. Reminds me of
tide-pooling in Carmel, which I used to do with my grand-kids.
You come up to the perfect pool, and all say, “There’s
nothing there!” They’re expecting a
twenty-pound salmon to be flopping in the water. But soon, someone sees a starfish move, or a
mussel. Then maybe a crab or shrimp
scurries along; a sea anemone moves with the tidal water flow. Baby fish become apparent, and snails: the
water is teeming with life,we just had to slow down enough to notice it all.
The characters of this book: Talmadge and Della, Clee and
Angelene are all quiet people; by heritage bound to the land. They are some of the strong, silent pioneers
of the NorthWestern Territories. I like
to think of my mother (nee Frances Blanche Cox) and her parents as Midwestern
pioneers, editing and publishing a county newspaper in rural Nebraska over a
hundred years ago. Pioneers try to enjoy
simple lives. They are not simple
people. Their lives are as filled with
money, sex, growth, temptations, evil and heartache as any modern city dweller,
even you and I. They are our heritage as Westerners. This is a tale of which we want to be a present day part. We admire their handling of adversity; the avoidance of violence; the extended helping hand. We also admire their almost Buddhist view of life and death, it comes with living off the land.
For me, this book tells the story of
“The Valley of Heart’s Delight”. I
entered San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley sixty-six years ago. The springtime view from the surrounding
foothills was an impressionist painting of billions of flowers: cherry
blossoms, plums, walnuts, apricots, almonds; thousands of acres of colorful and
fragrant flowers – the valley smelled sweet.
As a youth, I picked berries and nuts, later worked in a canning
factory. It was the Garden of Eden, or
so I wrote a few years ago[1].
The referenced video below describes my Santa Clara Valley. I know all these sites, all the companies: it is my home-town[2].
So, this Orchardist book lulls the reader into a serene
Nirvana, then before you realize it, transforms you into a Joyce Carol Oates
type of deeply introspective horror story with everyone going crazy. You, the reader, shake your head free of the
soporific effects of apricots & walnuts as the remaining pages grow
slimmer. This has been classic Greek
Tragedy: prologue – the Talmadge family, soon to die out; 3 episodes – Della’s story, then Angelene’s,
and finally Exodus - the story ends.
And, the Gods are in charge of all the action. It’s a 400-page excellent read.
[1] I woke up one
morning in The Garden of Eden. My mother
was there and she told me to go outside and play all day while she unpacked our
things. It was already hot that day; 10:30
am and it was already 80° in San Jose.
Bulldozers had hurriedly scrapped the earth around our new tract house,
so right out the back door there was a thirty foot DMZ and then the
orchards. The nearby orchards had been
neglected for the year or so that it took to build the first wave of our
tract. They were doomed to go in the next
wave. Right on the edge of the plum
orchard directly behind our house was a mature broadly sweeping tree with huge
leaves that looked exotic, like I imagined palm fronds. The tree was heavily laden with dark purple
or black pear shaped fruit
…
…
Back
in the house my mother told me this thing was a fig and that it was okay to eat
if I washed it. Back at the fig tree, I
pulled a big fat one off and wiped it on my T-shirt. It was hot and when I bit in, it exploded in
my mouth, almost with effervescence, like it had been fermenting. Figs from the store are nothing like the ones
you pick straight from the tree on a hot summer day. Dried, they are too chewy because there's more
skin than pulp. Cold, they are too
fleshy and disgusting, like eating a piece of raw animal. But big and hot and ripe, the fig fills you
with a feeling of euphoria like the food of Gods.
From
http://brownbagdiscussiongroup.blogspot.com/2014/10/awake-in-garden-of-eden-by-peter-andrews.html
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