Friday, January 15, 2021 (In 5 days, Biden’s inauguration!)
I’m reading a book by an excellent writer who touches my interests and inspires imagination.
Late Migrations, by Maregaret Renkl (2019), subtitled “A natural history of love and loss”, is a collection of essays, interwoven in patterns that cross-over between adulthood and childhood. For example, an essay describes a visual-thought process during adulthood related to nature, followed by an essay recalling a relevant experience from the author’s childhood.
This pattern is how our minds process. On tuning-in to something that interests us, our brains immediately make associations to past experiences and emotions. The author is an “opinion writer” for The New York Times, living in Nashville and writing often about the natural world. Her recent contribution to the Times, explaining her dismay over destructive events that deteriorate Nashville, carried me toward her book.
A wonderful writer, Renkl feels deeply about the natural world and observes it carefully. I’m caught by the beauty in which she writes experiences, memories, and above all, her prose style verging on sheer poetry. Her words, ideas, and images flow into my brain. The essays drift me into a world that sees what she’s seeing, and draw upon my own memories, similar to hers.
She speaks to two worlds–one natural, the other our own, and illustrates the steady interweaving in our minds of images connecting present and past.
Dear Friends: “A natural history of love and loss,” the essence of humankind. Diana
Diana's Morning Blog 