Upstream (2019)
Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
178 pages
Recently, my sister-in-law recommended Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars to me. She mentioned that she had read The Little Prince a number of times over the years, but reading it this past summer to a nephew had prompted her to seek out other of Saint-Exupéry’s works, leading her to discover that wonderful collection of essays. When I told her that I had already read it, she asked for my review of it.
It turns out, however, I read it many years ago, long before I started writing these blog reviews. But, I told her, I do remember being deeply moved by it and, after rereading some of the quotes from it that I had noted down, that I recall finding in Saint-Exupéry’s writings, here and in his other work, a reminder of how to live as a part of nature rather than separate from it – how to open one’s eyes and heart to the wonder of the world, to its moments of transcendent beauty as well as unsparing harshness.
In one of those serendipitous moments that animate a reader’s life, I had just started into Mary Oliver’s selection of essays Upstream. At first glance, Saint-Exupéry and Oliver could hardly be more different: the former a life-long pilot who flew throughout Europe, northern Africa and the Americas before serving France in World War II; the latter, a poet and teacher, apparently never happier than when meandering through the landscape near her home in quiet observation and contemplation. Both, however, demonstrate in their writings a profound wonder about the world, a seemingly inexhaustible desire to explore and experience nature, and an openness to accept what they encountered, in all its variations.
Oliver found inspiration in her engagement with the natural world as it presented itself in her immediate surroundings. Thus, in Swoon, she writes about watching a spider in her house as it finishes its web. What shines through in the essay is not just the facts Oliver learns about the spider or the wonder of its ways, but rather the patience and intensity she brings to observing this small piece of life she clearly finds remarkable:
All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery in which I am, truly, Copernicus. (125)
This passion for engaging deeply with a subject, whether a spider on the cellar stairs, an owl or fox in the surrounding woods, or a favorite poet or writer whose work she had read and reread, runs through all the essays here. Already in the opening section of pieces, as Oliver touches on her childhood up through young adulthood, it becomes evident that she has always been powerfully drawn to the natural world.
But she also found in nature an escape from a world of adults and peers that she obliquely hints at as being too often an environment of “sorrow and mischance and rage.” (14) In an essay on Edgar Allan Poe, she makes a connection to this desire to escape, finding in one of his stories “sleep as Poe most sought and valued it – not for the sake of rest, but for escape. Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world,” (89) And here that word, swoon, again – her longing to lose herself into the natural world.
Before coming to this collection, I read a book of Oliver’s poems (my review linked to at right). The essays here are very much a kind of prose version of her poetry. In both, Oliver’s engagement with and wonder at the natural world shine through, profoundly effecting in a reader the desire to go out and explore, and so discover the world outside their door.
Other notes and information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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