Simplify, Simplify
For years Gail and I have been trying to simplify our lives, but we haven’t made much headway. The effort always makes me think of Thoreau, who famously scolded us to “simplify, simplify,” then set to work weaving a deliciously intricate tapestry of a book. It’s as it should be. Books are like natural communities and human cultures: their complexity makes them strong. Those thousands of words in intricate and seemingly infinite arrangement magnify our view of the world and remind us that we’re surrounded every moment by an unimaginable abundance of stars in the sky, of snowflakes and falling leaves, of swarms of insects, pollen, people, ideas.

Of course we turn to the spare and elemental to give ourselves a rest, seeking quiet moments in nature and at home for the same reason the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis reads poetry: “He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.”

Those words thrill me every time I read them. The white space around the words is why I read poetry. And why I need to walk so often in woods, fields, along Lake Michigan, under the stars.

But we are not simple creatures. Bare moments can’t hold us for long. Eventually most of us require more than white space and cloud spout; more than the twice-warming flames in a fireplace; more than the monkish austerity of a single room, a candle, and a few books. Henry’s enthusiasm is infectious — “Think of our life in nature. Daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!” – but I suspect that his passion and the complexity of his mind and the boldness of his assertions interest us more than the simple life he espoused. It could be that the louder Thoreau crows in praise of simplicity, the more convincing becomes his argument against it.
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Thanks to everyone who has written in recent weeks with comments and observations. I’ve been working long hours to put a new book to bed, so these postings will continue to be intermittent.

The new book, by the way, is titled The Windward Shore, and is about a winter I spent living in other people’s houses, from a log cabin on Lake Superior to a 20-million-dollar mansion on Lake Michigan. During those months I took note of time, weather, waves, snow and ice, agates, birds, books, our place in nature, and much more. In a way, I guess, I was siting my life in white space and becoming conscious of my breathing. It’ll be out in September from the University of Michigan Press.