Whitman & Books

I have noticed a curious correlation with Whitman between his broadened capacity to roam & his sudden interest in books. With Ada, reading was always an obsession. We started every day with a pile of books strewn about us & worked our way through, the dogs nuzzling their soft noses against us or circling & settling in leaned against us both, the crackle of the woodstove punctuating our reading. She delighted in the kaleidoscopic worlds they presented, so I forgave for the most part with all of the restraint I could muster the almost ubiquitous disregard for proper metrics & rhythm throughout her extensive library. & at night, under the soft glow of a headlamp, we struggled against her protestations to abide by our own rule of no more than three books at bed time. 

Whitman, until very recently, seemed to weigh the merits of any book by either aerodynamic or demolition-oriented principles. Pages were there for ripping, board books for use as projectiles. & then he started walking, & exploring, & climbing hills & pointing past fences & through copses of thick cedar. His map whirled beyond its borders & spilled into the diaphanous thrills that discovery of every sort ushers along. He started pointing to cardinals, to airplanes. His wandering permitted him to wonder, & suddenly, curiously, he has started to devour books, to gaze at the pages with that countenance of reverent awe that I see still in his sister, like someone standing before the sea for the first time. As if the rippling circumference of his witness of the world permitted him to understand each page as another part of his perceptual broadening. 

I like this relationship for obvious reasons. I had worried that my son would continue in his disdain for books, which, while it would be unfortunate, is hardly a lamentation for the ages. What I like considering though is how in his case it was the expansion of his physical interaction with the world that opened the door to the conceptual magic of his books. I think of how longingly as a kid I would read Jack London without having the smell of spruce in my nose, without the touch of real cold upon my flesh. & then to return to Alaskana from afar, from the unrelenting heat of a place like Texas, & to find in books like Raven’s Witness or The Island Within the swelling empathy of my body reading along with my mind. To find a harmony of empathy with the feeling of embarking on a long trail that I find in Raynor Winn or Robert Macfarlane. To reread The Peregrine, obsessively conjuring the feeling of beautiful paralysis in watching something so simple as a bird in all of its goings on, & to find in the watching more  torsion & violence & beauty & grace than I could hope to read on any page. To feel bodily the sorrow in departing a loved landscape in Beryl Markham, a kind of chthonic grief, however solipsistic that sounds. 

& then what happens after enough living & reading, wherein the two recognize one another’s value & utility & urge you toward expansion, toward a widening aperture. Knowing the sensations of discovery, carrying their remembrance with us, urges their fellow feeling in navigating the blank spots extant on our own maps. Suddenly I need to see the Outer Hebrides, & Iceland, & who knows where else. But suddenly too the craving for a local phenology, again, as ever. I know I could live in one place & never know it fully over a lifetime, that its curriculum is living & given to depths of time I cannot conceive. Page by page, though. It’s never the whole world. There’s always what came before to filter it & call its seeing our own. But we can’t call it anything without finding an edge & walking over it, again & again & again. 

  

Whitman gathers his board books beside me on the couch, juts one into my hand while pointing, & starts to wriggle his way into my lap, his face a bright light shining.