So Light and Wild: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard

I selected this book for First Son's senior year of geography as he was studying North America. Kansas Dad believes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of the most important (and beautifully written) books of nature essays by an American author, so it seemed a good choice. I'm pretty sure this is one of the books I did not read when it was assigned in college, so I read it just ahead of First Son.

Ms. Dillard wrote this collection of essays as she lived on Tinker Creek in Virginia, wandering the creek by day and night, through heat, rain, and winter cold, describing it through all four seasons and every kind of weather. 

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. (p. 69)

Her thoughts flow freely through the essays. They show clearly how becoming immersed in a real, physical landscape can allow it to become a part of you, and how you can be changed by it. As rare as such a life may have been in the 1970s when the book was first published, it is even more so today. Even those of us who live outside the cities find ourselves surrounded always by walls or separated from the world by metal and glass as we drive through the wind and weather. 

Is this where we live, I thought, in this place at this moment, with the air so light and wild? (p. 218)

There are frequent references to a creator, but not in a particularly religious way. 

I loved the slow pace and entrancing descriptions in the book, but First Son did not. I'm inclined to think most high schoolers will be more like First Son, but I will consider it as a geography book for my other kids. Perhaps I will choose to assign only one or two essays, rather than the whole book. I think it could work well that way. 

I have received nothing in exchange for this post. Links to Amazon and Bookshop are affiliate links. I received a copy from a member of PaperBackSwap.com (affiliate link). 

Economics for Land and People: What Matters?

What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

by Wendell Berry

Kansas Dad had this book on our shelf. I wasn't sure it would be something we could use in high school, but after skimming a bunch of books on economics and finally settling on a main text for our economics study, I decided we needed something to address how our Christian faith should influence our ideas on economics. Wendell Berry isn't Catholic, but his thoughts on economic policy are relatively close to my own though far more eloquent.

Because this is a book of essays, many published in other sources years apart, there is a bit of a disjointed feel to the book. It's also sometimes a little depressing to think of Mr. Berry speaking and writing and living his ideals for so many years in a society that is only ever so slightly changing.

In the first essay, "Money Versus Goods," postulates an economy rooted in the land and people rather than entirely focused on money and spending.

But spending is not an economic virtue. Miserliness is not an economic virtue either. Saving is. Not-wasting is. To encourage spending with no regard at all to what is being purchased may be pro-finance, but it is anti-economic. Finance, as opposed to economy, is always ready and eager to confuse wants with needs. From a financial point of view, it is good, even patriotic, to buy a new car whether you need one or not. From an economic point of view, however, it is wrong to buy anything you do not need. [...] In an authentic economy, we would ask what the land and the people need. People do need jobs, obviously. But they need jobs that serve natural and human communities, not arbitrarily "created" jobs that serve only the economy.

While I don't think is it wrong to buy something you want but don't need, I do think in our society, we buy far more of our wants than we should. Kansas Dad and I do that less than many because we have purposefully chosen a lifestyle that by its nature limits our spending money, but also because we generally carefully consider any purchase. I still buy far more books than we need.

In "Major in Homecoming," Mr. Berry addresses education.

Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations.

Those of us who homeschool are able to provide an education more focused on developing character and the ability to appreciate goodness and beauty, but we still live in the world. Our children will most likely go to college (Kansas Dad is a professor, after all) and we pray they are able to support themselves in adulthood, but we hope they will seek out the kind of education that makes them better people, not just better employees.

He touches on the same topic in "Economy and Pleasure."

The idea of the teacher and scholar as one called upon to preserve and pass on a common cultural and natural birthright has been almost entirely replaced by the idea of the teacher and scholar as a developer of "human capital" and a bestower of economic advantage.

Think about Wendell Berry the next time you see an advertisement for a college or university.

A number of the essays identify significant problems with the modern agricultural industry.

In addition to an array of labor-saving or people-replacing devices and potions, it has given us massive soil erosion and degradation, water pollution, maritime hypoxic zones, destroyed rural communities and cultures, a farming population dwindled almost to disappearance, toxic food, and an absolute dependence on a despised and exploited force of migrant workers.

First Son will be reading more about the agribusiness model in The Omnivore's Dilemma as part of his Health and Happiness course of study. (We'll be using the Young Reader's Edition because he'll be able to read it faster.)

Mr. Berry argues for a local economy designed to benefit the local people. He recommends economic policies and business practices that favor industries that are smaller, more diverse, and more comfortably nestled into communities. In "An Argument for Diversity:"

Two facts are immediately apparent. One is that the present local economy, based like the economics of most rural places exclusively on the export of raw materials, is ruinous. Another is that the influence of a complex, aggressive national economy upon a simple, passive local economy will also be ruinous.

More than once, Mr. Berry reminds us that the "solutions" for modern-day problems carry a future cost that may be as great or greater than the problems they purportedly solve.

But the industrial use of any "resource" implies its exhaustion. It is for this reason that the industrial economy has been accompanied by an ever-increasing hurry of research and exploration, the motive of which is not "free enterprise" or "the spirit of free inquiry," as industrial scientists and apologists would have us believe, but the desperation that naturally and logically accompanies gluttony.

One of the longer essays is "Conserving Forest Communities." I'd like First Son to read this one, despite it's length. In in, Mr. Berry uses a model of managing a forest for the well-being of a community while considering first of all the future of the forest to imagine how such an economy might work on a grander scale. While there are still many questions about how we might shift our nation toward such an economy, the idea of the ideal is a hopeful note in what may otherwise be a somber book.

The ideal of the industrial economy is to shorten as much as possible the interval separating investment and payoff; it wants to make things fast, especially money. But even the slightest acquaintance with the vital statistics of trees places us in another kind of world. A forest makes things slowly; a good forest economy would therefore be a patient economy. It would also be an unselfish one, for good foresters must always look toward harvests that they will not live to reap. 

The last essay, "The Total Economy," looks critically at the "free-market" economy and it's underlying assumptions. I think this essay is one of the most important for our study of economics as it directly addresses the kinds of arguments we find beneath and behind every economic report in America.

I'm still thinking about what our economics study will look like, but some of these essays will be included. Here are the ones I'm considering:

• Money Versus Goods
• An Argument for Diversity
• Waste
• Conserving Forest Communities (perhaps only part of this one)
• The Total Economy 

I could have written a post about every essay in the book. It's wonderful, if slightly depressing. Highly recommended.

All opinions are my own. I have received nothing in exchange for writing this post. Links to Amazon are affiliate links.

Invitation to Observation: Nature's Everyday Mysteries

Nature's Everyday Mysteries

by Sy Montgomery (The Curious Naturalist)

This is one of the supplemental reading books for nature suggested by the Mater Amabilis™ beta plan for Level 5 (first two years of high school). It's a series of essays that (I think) originally appeared in a regular newspaper column, organized around the seasons of the year. Written by a New England author, they focus mainly on the wildlife of that area like porcupines, beavers, turkeys, and mushrooms.

Each essay is full of delightful comments and information on the natural world. There were plenty of humorous descriptions which will appeal to a high school reader. The subject matter and tone of the essays are inviting, encouraging to someone who will be heading out into the world for nature study every now and then.

The essays are fairly short and, while enjoyable and well-written, will not be difficult to understand, making the book a good complement to more focused study of the natural world.

Be aware there are a few descriptions of reproduction that might require explanations if the reader doesn't know the general facts of life.

I purchased this book used and received nothing for this post. Any links to Amazon are affiliate links.

From Darkness to Light: Quite Early One Morning

Quite Early One Morning

by Dylan Thomas

This is a collection of essays, stories, and transcripts of pieces Dylan Thomas created for the BBC. They range from memories of his childhood to an overview of Welsh poetry and poets. I'm not sure how it ended up on my list of books to read (it was added in 2013), but I was delighted to see A Child's Christmas in Wales in the table of contents, and a little surprised that it was slightly different than the one I read earlier this year. Apparently he edited it in different ways over the years.

Most of the essays contained lyrical prose, as to be expected from a poet. I often wondered what Thomas himself must have sounded like when reading these words for documentaries or radio shows, as many of them were. There are quite a few recordings available online.

Thomas was born just at the end of World War I, which placed him in the generation of young men who fought and died on the battlefields of World War II. These kinds of experiences appear throughout the book, but the most powerful was Return Journey. He seeks all over his hometown for his own self as a youth and finds everyone remembering young men as boys and all the lessons and playing and music-making and climbing and swimming and yelling that young boys do.

Park-keeper [the last of many to respond to his questions]: Oh yes, I knew him well. I think he was happy all the time. I've known him by the thousands.

Narrator: We had reached the last gate. Dusk drew around us and the town. I said: What has become of him now?

And the park-keeper answers, as the bell rings:

 Dead...Dead...Dead...Dead...Dead...Dead

Much of the book concerns poetry and I found it enlightening to read Thomas's thoughts on poetry. I often enjoy reading poetry, but I appreciate learning from people who have thought about and struggled with and written poetry. When asked if he intended poetry to be useful to himself or others, Thomas responded both:

My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light, and what of the individual struggle is still to come benefits by the sight and knowledge of the faults and fewer merits in that concrete record. My poetry is, or should be, useful to others for its individual recording of that same struggle with which they are necessarily acquainted.

An essay On Poetry is a series of excerpts from a discussion on poetry with James Stephens. Thomas said:

Poetry, to a poet, is the most rewarding work in the world. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him...

The essay is only two pages, but it's marvelous. Thomas also says, at the end of it:

What's more, a poet is a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as much as he can, all that is moving around and within him, so that his poetry, when he comes to write it, can be his attempt at an expression of the summit of man's experience on this very peculiar and, in 1946, this apparently hell-bent earth.

 I'd read very little of Dylan Thomas's prose before this book, so I'm glad I read it. I enjoyed it, though I did find it most enjoyable when I read it slowly. Otherwise it was too easy to read the words without really paying attention to the meaning.

I checked this book out of the library to read it. All opinions in this post are my own. Any links to Amazon are affiliate links.

Chesterton on Nothing and Everything: Tremendous Trifles

Tremendous Trifles

by G. K. Chesterton

This book was recommended as a good one for those new to Chesterton on the Mater Amabilis™ ™facebook page. It's a collection of essays Chesterton originally wrote for a newspaper and selected, for no identifiable reason, to publish as a group. There are lovely descriptions, grand-sounding declarations, and plenty of self-deprecating humor.


In "The Red Angel," Chesterton waxes eloquently on the importance of fairy tales.

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of the bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these strong enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and strong than strong fear. 

An afternoon in the country in "Some Policemen and a Moral" leads Chesterton to ponder the moral significance of unequal prosecution. While walking through a wood, he is suddenly seized with an impish desire to throw a knife a the trees. A few policeman respond and inform him it's illegal to do so. Instead of fining him, however, they send him on his way when they learn he's staying with a local lord. Chesterton considers what becomes of a society that lets the rich and powerful (and their friends) off when they do something wrong.

The power of wealth, and that power at its vilest, is increasing in the modern world. A very good and just people, without this temptation, might not need, perhaps, to make clear rules and systems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers. But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago, from mere native good feeling.

He considers voting in "A Glimpse of My Country:"

A man ought to vote with the whole of himself as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross.

In "The Ballade of a Strange Town," Chesterton and a friend are traveling. After an impulsive jaunt on a train, they discover they've caught the wrong train to get back and are instead somewhere else entirely. After racing around frantically to right their mistake (all of which Chesterton enjoys immensely), he says:

"That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that we don't fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way." 

I tried to buy a copy of this book. I enjoyed the first handful of essays and wanted to take my time with the rest. (Everyone knows three months' loan from the library is insufficient.) After much searching, I finally decided on the edition of Tremendous Trifles from the On series and picked up a used copy. I was shocked to realize after looking through it for the quotations I wanted to copy into my commonplace book that it only contains 21 of the 39 essays. As it says in the introduction:

Yet in a pretty devastating review, The Times Literary Supplement said that while some of the individual essays 'are often as provocative as they are charming,' their parts 'might be transposed almost indefinitely without detection.' That there is some truth in this charge means we need not be unduly concerned that this volume contains twenty-one essays from the original selection of thirty-nine.

And that's all it says, as if all the essays are interchangeable. I was quite concerned! An editor may want to make an argument for abridging the selection of essays, but it seems a little presumptuous to declare it isn't of any consequence at all. I read the unabridged version, even if it did mean returning it to the library after three months and requesting it again to finish it.

August 2017 Book Reports

Stories of Karol: The Unknown Life of John Paul II by Gian Franco Svidercoschi - link to my post (purchased used)

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf - Woolf says if you want to write a good book, you need peace, quiet, and security; that makes sense. Many of the statements she makes of women writers in her time apply to those who, of any gender or any race, today suffer from a lack of economic resources. (purchased used at a library book sale)

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge - link to my post (purchased new)

Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings selected and with commentary by Wendy M. Wright - link to my post (interlibrary loan copy)

The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig - This is another possible book listed for further reading in the Level 4 history program at Mater Amabilis™for World War II. Esther was a young child in Poland when she and her parents were forcibly relocated to Siberia. There, they endured hunger, freezing weather, uncertainty, and hard labor. Esther learned Russian and enrolled at an excellent (for Siberia) school, thanks to the patronage of a family friend. As much as she loved her parents, she experiences some trepidation when it is time to return to Poland. This is a lovely story of family and thriving in a harsh environment but there a great shock when they finally learn what has befallen all the family they left behind. This would be an excellent choice for additional reading material. I don't think First Son will bother to read it, but First Daughter certainly will when she's in Level 4. (library copy)


The Shadow of His Wings: The True Story of Fr. Gereon Goldmann by Gereon Goldmann - link to my post (library copy)

If All the Swords in England by Barbara Willard - link to my post (purchased new)

Enemy Brothers by Constance Savery - link to my post (purchased new, probably from the publisher)

D-Day: 24 Hours that Saved the World from the editors of TIME - link to my post (library copy, but I then requested a copy from another member at PaperBackSwap.com)

Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy by Andrea Warren - link to my post (library copy)

Skellig by David Almond - I picked up this book while perusing the library's new books shelf. It's an almost lyrical book telling a kind of modern-day fairy tale. A family moves, the baby came early and is sick, and the boy discovers a creature. Is it an angel? He and a nonconforming neighbor girl (who is homeschooled) befriend the creature and nurse him back to health. It certainly doesn't reflect strictly Catholic doctrine on angels, but I wouldn't stop my children from reading it. Apparently, it's a kind of sequel to My Name Is Mina, but I haven't read that one. (library copy)

All the Broken Pieces by Ann E. Burg - link to my post (library copy)

Redwall by Brian Jacques is a thrilling tale of a mouse who fulfills his destiny and helps to defend his abbey. The children loved every minute of it. We had to slow the recording down to about 0.85 so we could understand the narrator's accent, but it was worth it. Having multiple readers handling all the characters helped keep them separate for us as we listened. We listened to this in the van when Kansas Dad was with us. There were quite a few humorous parts that appeal to kids and dads. (full-cast production available on Audible)


Books in Progress (and date started)

• Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 (sixth edition) (August 2014)
• A Century of Sonnets edited by Feldman and Robinson (May 2017)
• The Complete Ramona books by Beverly Cleary (July 2017), listening with the kids
• History's Greatest Voyages of Exploration from The Great Courses (July 2017), listening with the kids
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (July 2017), listening on my own
• No Fear Shakespeare: Henry V (July 2017)
• Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (August 2017)
• The Shepherd Who Didn't Run: Fr. Stanley Rother, Martyr from Oklahoma by Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda (August 2017)
• John Paul II: A Personal Portrait of the Pope and the Man by Ray Flynn (August 2017)
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again by Frank Cottrell Boyce (August 2017), listening with Kansas Dad and the children 

The italic print: Links to Amazon are affiliate links. As an affiliate with Amazon, I receive a small commission if you follow one of my links, add something to your cart, and complete the purchase (in that order). Try Audible - another affiliate link.

Links to RC History and PaperBackSwap.com are affiliate links. Other links (like those to Bethlehem Books) are not affiliate links.

These reports are my honest opinions.