Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks

Robert Macfarlane's 2015 book, Landmarks, was the most important and most absorbing book I read in 2016. A writer, traveler, and hiker, Macfarlane was compelled to take up his pen for Landmarks by his perusal of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, in which "a sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature."

"Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood.  The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, board band, bullet-point, celebrity, chartroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail. 

"When the head of children's dictionaries at OUP was asked why the decision had been taken to delete those 'nature words,' she explained that the dictionary needed to reflect the consensus experience of modern-day childhood. 'When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance,' she said. 'that was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.' There is a realism in her response--but also an alarming acceptance of the idea that children might no longer see the seasons, or that the rural environment might be so unproblematically disposable. 

"The substitutions made in the dictionary--the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual--are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live."

Robert Macfarlane

From this opening, Macfarlane examines the life and work of nine landscape writers and naturalists, one chapter per writer, with a glossary attached to the end of each chapter of words or phrases in English, Gaelic, Welsh, and regional lexicons that describe detailed aspects of that landscape.

The types of lands covered are: flatlands--the moors of the Isle of Lewis; uplands--the mountains of Cairngorm Mountains of northeast Scotland; the inland waterlands of England; the coastlands of England; the northlands of Canada; the edge lands--vacant fields along the edges of London and its suburbs; the earthlands of England where one finds pebbles; and the woodlands--the forest of sequoias of California.

The underlying thesis is that if we forget or bury the words that we have for the world around us--a religious person would say, "the world that God has given us"--then we will lose our relationship to that world. Macfarlane does not seek to explore the consequences of that loss of connection. His book rather invites us to reconnect.

The glossaries bring to the surface the far more intimate relationship that our forebears had with their natural surroundings. To give some examples: snaw grimet--color of the ground when lying snow is partly melted (Shetland); scailp--cleft or fissure; sheltering place beneath a rock (Irish); glumag--deep pool in a river (Gaelic); fub--long withered grass on old pastures or meadows (Galloway); and na luin--fast-moving heat-haze on the moor (Gaelic).

Aside from stories and writings of the landscape hero or heroine of each chapter, Macfarlane points us to other literature or discoveries about the landscape in question, so that the book acts as an annotated bibliography--signposts if we would like to take up the journey.

Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), a lecturer in English, writer, and constant hiker of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, which she wondrously describes in The Living Mountain.

I had the added pleasure of reading this book while spending a week in the southern end of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a stretch of seashore with few urbanized distractions. It was the perfect place. I could switch back and forth from watching the ocean and sun and water and poking around to identify the sand dune vegetation or pick up shells and pebbles, to reading about other landscapes written about in Macfarlane's beautiful and highly informative prose. (Keep a dictionary close at hand.)

Macfarlane's book not only opened up a new world of thinking about our relationship to God's universe.  It also helped me to see--to more easily apprehend the beauty offered to us outside when we escape, however briefly for a walk, from our virtual man-made confines.

O Christ, Our Morning Star

O Christ, our Morning Star,
Splendour of Light Eternal,
shining with the glory of the rainbow,
come and waken us
from the greyness of our apathy,
and renew in us your gift of hope.

Amen.

A prayer of Saint Bede, 672-735

Ice-Stricken Lake Newport

Potages d'hiver

It's a bit late to talk about winter soups but we have more than another month before spring arrives. The picture shows a bowl of potage d'hiver I cooked up on our snow day last week. The idea of potage is to throw whatever you might have on hand in your fridge, sauté it, add water and some herbs as you like, and throw it in the blender. Perhaps it is a modernized version of the concoction referenced in the nursery rhyme "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old." In those days, they threw everything in the pot and ate from the pot, threw more stuff in the pot, and ate some more....

Potage d'hiver is apparently now a French soup, and I love to make it in winter. Usually I take onions, leeks, carrots, celery, turnips, a small red potato or two, and a parsnip. In this case, I couldn't find any turnips, so I used what I had on hand:  onions, leeks, celery, and carrots sautéed in the pot with olive oil, then plain frozen peas, cauliflower, and broccoli added with water, and some herbes de provence and a lot of freshly ground pepper. Let that simmer for an hour or more, and then blend it up. It's a good stick-to-your-ribs lunch. I usually eat it plain, but any kind of garnish would be fine: cheese or garlic croutons, shredded cheese,  a dollop of yogurt or sour cream.

Another very simple potage d'hiver is this cauliflower soup:

Slice an onion and sauté in 2 TB of olive oil and 2 TB of melted butter for 15 minutes on low heat til soft, but not darkened. Add a head of cauliflower cut up into pieces the size of the florets and 1 cup of water. Put the lid on the pot and simmer over medium low for another 10 or 15 minutes, then add another 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil. Season with salt and pepper and keep on heat til the cauliflower is completely soft. Cool a bit and then blend up. The result is a creamy and delicious soup, but without the cream. Garnish with shredded parmesan or croutons, or both if you are having guests and serve a cup of this soup as a first course.

I like to make my own soups since they tend to taste far better than canned and lack the overdose of sodium and sugar canned soups tend to have.

Fine Arts Friday: The Miracle of Drawing

Untitled, by George Luks, 1920

To me, this drawing exemplifies the miracle of drawing and painting. I happened upon it when I was looking at George Luks' work in preparation for this post. We could easily COUNT the pencil strokes in this drawing. And yet, we know exactly what is going on. Two women who are neighbors in the city are talking. They are not affluent, as indicated by the kitchen chair on the stoop and the babe in arms. The one with the baby is doing the talking and the one who is sitting is listening but not in rapt attention, as she is not looking up at the talking woman. We feel that they are friends who know a lot about each other. More than likely the standing woman is talking of things that must be done--I have to go in now, only have this for supper, a comment about the husband and when he is coming? Yes, the sitting woman may tiredly nod in agreement, I know what you mean.

Meanwhile, sitting in front is a woman who seems younger, who hears their conversation in the background, and is not attentive. It is the background noise of her life. She sits in a condition of inwardness, even as she looks onto the street before her, watching children playing or women on the way to the store or peddlers calling out their goods or men on the way back from work. But she is not thinking of them. She is watching and waiting. She may be waiting for a man or for a friend or, more likely, simply for her future, and she waits in anxious hope.

My words are a reduction of the atmosphere conjured up by Luks' drawing. With his few quick strokes of the pencil, he has created a world, and we instantly know its tone--cares, tiredness, neighborliness, boredom, and hope. A whole world on a piece of paper.

"Like Some Billowing Crazy Quilt"

Chadds Ford Hills by N. C. Wyeth

I posted this painting first in 2010, noting that it was by N. C. Wyeth "of his beloved Chadd Ford Hills, for which I have no words at all."

But N. C. Wyeth had words, which he put down in a letter written on July 19, 1907, about Chadds Ford:

"From the hill...the country rolls back like some great billowing crazy quilt: patches of tender green corn interspersed with squares of ripe yellow wheat and the rich succulent greens of the woods. Great voluminous clouds boil up from hot, quivering horizons, blossoming in great bunches of ominous rain clouds."

N. C. Wyeth's letters are filled with beautiful passages like this. He was a great writer with the gift and willingness to lyrically pay homage to the people and land he loved. Note the gorgeous shimmering blue of the Brandywine River in the lower-center. 

Fine Arts Friday: Paintings of Family Life by Horace Pippin

Giving Thanks by Horace Pippin, 1942

Horace Pippin was an African-American painter, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania,  in 1888, 10 miles from the Brandywine River. When he was a small child, his family moved to Goshen, New York, but he returned to West Chester in 1920 and lived there with his wife until his death in 1946.

Pippin was an artist who proved what courage and perseverance can achieve. He was forced by the illness of his mother to leave school as a young teen and work to help support the family. When World War I came, he joined the renowned African-American 369th infantry, called Harlem's Hell Fighters, all of whom received France's Croix de Guerre honor. Pippin returned from the war with wounds that rendered his right arm useless. This did not stop him from becoming an artist. To paint, he learned to use his left arm to prop up and guide his right hand.

Horace Pippin marker outside 327 West Gay Street in West Chester, where Pippin and his wife lived. The marker says notes: "A self-taught black artist, he painted while living here such notable works as 'Domino Players,' 'John Brown Going to His Hanging,' and the 'Holy Mountain' series."

In 1937 at the behest of a local school principal, Pippin's work was shown in the Chester County Art Association show. N. C. Wyeth, a judge of the show, found his paintings impressive and began to open doors to Pippin. Wyeth introduced his work to the art historian, Christian Brinton, and from there Pippin's work began to be collected, including by Albert Barnes. His work also came to the attention of the pioneering New York City art dealer Edith Halpert. One year later, his work was being shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  In 1994, a retrospective of his work, with more than 100 paintings, was shown at the Metropolitan Art Museum, and in 2015, the Brandywine River Museum had a major exhibition of his work.

Pippin painted many kinds of subjects--historical, allegorical, religious, and scenes from life in the Brandywine River Valley. Here is a small selection from among his scenes of domestic life. All of these paintings were done in the last few years of his life. Some of them have quilts, and in Domino Players, a woman is sewing one! Pippin may have been thought of as a folk artist, but I find in his work a sophistication of color and composition that goes beyond folk art, and an emotional intensity with an economy of line that folk art often lacks.

Christmas Morning Breakfast, 1945

Domino Players, 1943

Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1943

Supper Time, 1940

Interior, 1944