In the water I am beautiful
Brecht, Steinbeck, Didion, Ehrlich, Chiang, Schomburg, Abram, Byatt, Le Guin, Nix, Vonnegut, Lewis, Mander, Stein, Rowling, Maugham
This is the first installment of Cairns, a monthly shortlist of titles (with quotes) that form auspicious piles on this bookseller’s desk.1 Like the stone mounds with which people have marked landscapes for thousands of years, these cairns mark mysterious points and paths of human interest.
Back in August of 2021, Perelandra’s first reader in residence
spoke beautifully to the heaps of literature always forming and reforming in his household. It’s a magic to which many of us are attuned: there is some strange power in the way titles gather, some philosophical tension; a given reader is central, but the literary gravity at work is irreducible to a set of principles.How many hands, we find ourselves asking, have previously touched—have sought and held—these works, and for how many reasons and unreasons, and to what measureless effects? Where do the cairns suggest we are headed? Always somewhere together.
One Hundred Modern Poems ed. by Selden Rodman
You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking.
Think—
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.
— Bertolt Brecht, from “To Posterity” (trans. by H. R. Hays)
A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck
“In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's job is to encourage, to celebrate, to explain, and in every way to carry forward the Soviet system. Whereas in America, and in England, a good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize its faults. And this is the reason that in America neither society nor government is very fond of writers. The two are completely opposite approaches toward literature.”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich
“The past is fiction, the future dream. I stopped trying to establish a firm floor under myself where there was none. We might die or we might live. Both were good. But I felt lost, like an eye that had flown out of a head, falling through the world, wondering what it would see. Was this constant gliding and falling a beginning or an end?”
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
“My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”
Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg
“I climb the trees
through 1000 rooms.
I look for you
in each of them.”
— from “The Abandoned Hotel”
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
“As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences.”
The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt
“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time, the children in this world had their own separate, largely independent lives, as children.”
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
Abhorsen by Garth Nix
“When the cat finished, she looked up at the red-washed sky above and the glittering stars beyond the Wall and a single tear ran down her cheek, leaving a trail of silver, caught by the last moments of evening light.”
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.”
Letters of C. S. Lewis ed. by Walter Hooper
“I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing. It is not faith, it is not reason—just a ‘feeling’. ‘Feelings’ are in the long run a pretty good match for what we call our beliefs.”
In the Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander
“As we will see, the idea that technology is neutral is itself not neutral — it directly serves the interests of the people who benefit from our inability to see where the juggernaut is headed.”
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
“It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.”
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows by J. K. Rowling
“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”
Collected Short Stories 4 by W. Somerset Maugham
“Besides, as we all know from our own experience, it is never unpleasant to talk about oneself.”
I was just thinking of this same thing the other day. Seeing the different piles of books in different rooms of my house and how every time I put them away in the bookcase they will eventually find their way back into a pile on my table or in the bathroom or next to my bed like they are drawn to each other. The bathroom pile is always different than the bedside pile. Like an evolving sculpture of where my mind is at a certain time. Great stuff Joe!