There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language...I need a moment away from unceasing word drip of debates about the election, about whether Elena Ferrante has the right to privacy, about whether Bob Dylan writes 'Literature.' I need a moment, more than a moment, in the steady and profound company of Mary Oliver and I think you might need one too.From her reflections on walks in the woods to incredible illuminations of her favorite authors, Oliver's collected essays of Upstream offer a writing for everyone.
"The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute," she says, "But to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament" (69). A poetic description of reading if ever I've read one. She continues in the same paragraph, of Emerson: "The one thing he is adamant about is that we should look [at things for ourselves]--we must look--for that is the liquor of life, that brooding upon issues, that attention to thought even as we weed the garden or milk the cow" (69).
Observations like the one above abound in Oliver's work, and I would put her nature reflections on par with Emerson or Thoreau, though not as earth-shattering (pun intended) as their writings were for their time. As she says in her writing "Let me be who I am, and then some," she certainly offers who she is, and then some. I, as her reader, am thankful for the experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment