New books.

This week I read Prodigal Summer (Barbara Kingsolver; 2000), this month’s SciFri Book Club selection. Although it began compellingly, by the midpoint it had grown wearingly didactic. Still, moments delighted me, including one in which Deanna, an introvert and solitary forest ranger, meets the colleague who brings her supplies. He expresses surprise that she doesn’t want a television, doesn’t listen to the radio. A big news event could occur, he chides, “and you wouldn’t know it for a month.” She asks what would be different because he knew that same news. Nothing, it turns out. She replies, “Why I like my life, Jerry. I watch birds. They do something different every fifteen minutes.” These days, I share some of that sensibility.

Related: In Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), which I finished reading over the weekend, Naomi Klein mentions Iris Murdoch’s ideas about “unselfing.” At The Marginalian, I learned more. In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch writes:

Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.