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Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
An urgent, deeply moving final work of nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams and Horizon, a literary icon whose writing, fieldwork, and mentorship inspired generations of writers and activists.
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--Lit Hub, BookPage
An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it--a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he'd long warned.
At once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder, this remarkable collection of essays adds indelibly to Lopez's legacy, and includes previously unpublished works, some written in the months before his death. They unspool memories both personal and political, among them tender, sometimes painful stories of his childhood in New York City and California, reports from expeditions to study animals and sea life, recollections of travels to Antarctica and other extraordinary places on earth, and meditations on finding oneself amid vast, dramatic landscapes. He reflects on those who taught him, including Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world. We witness poignant returns from his travels to the sanctuary of his Oregon backyard, adjacent to the McKenzie River. And in prose of searing candor, he reckons with the cycle of life, including his own, and--as he has done throughout his career--with the dangers the earth and its people are facing.
With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez's keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and souls to the importance of being wholly present for the beauty and complexity of life.
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--Lit Hub, BookPage
An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it--a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he'd long warned.
At once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder, this remarkable collection of essays adds indelibly to Lopez's legacy, and includes previously unpublished works, some written in the months before his death. They unspool memories both personal and political, among them tender, sometimes painful stories of his childhood in New York City and California, reports from expeditions to study animals and sea life, recollections of travels to Antarctica and other extraordinary places on earth, and meditations on finding oneself amid vast, dramatic landscapes. He reflects on those who taught him, including Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world. We witness poignant returns from his travels to the sanctuary of his Oregon backyard, adjacent to the McKenzie River. And in prose of searing candor, he reckons with the cycle of life, including his own, and--as he has done throughout his career--with the dangers the earth and its people are facing.
With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez's keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and souls to the importance of being wholly present for the beauty and complexity of life.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published May 31, 2022
359 people are currently reading
6622 people want to read
About the author
Barry Lopez
109 books898 followersBarry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 206 reviews
February 7, 2024
2 1/2 stars
It’s one thing to be aware and recognize need for change but another to be so negative and so pessimistic that you are frozen and unable to adapt, look for the possible and look for accommodation.
I was disappointed in this final book by Barry Lopez. I absolutely loved his book Arctic Dreams. I can’t help but feel this is the book of a dying man who has given up.
It’s one thing to be aware and recognize need for change but another to be so negative and so pessimistic that you are frozen and unable to adapt, look for the possible and look for accommodation.
I was disappointed in this final book by Barry Lopez. I absolutely loved his book Arctic Dreams. I can’t help but feel this is the book of a dying man who has given up.
April 20, 2022
When they first came out, I had read Barry Lopez’s award winning books Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape and Of Wolves and Men. I knew the beauty and insight of Lopez’s writing, but had not read him in decades.
Prepared by Lopez before his death, these essays include autobiographical accounts of his childhood that wrecked me. He endured years of sexual abuse by a family friend. And yet, his love of where he grew up never left him. I understand the longing for one’s first world, our natal landscape, and how it shapes us.
You can never have the childhood again though the desire for the innocence of those days overwhelms you from time to time to time. And then you learn to love what you have more than what you had. Or thought you had.
from Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World by Barry Lopez
Remarkably, he had considered entering the priesthood, inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, “leading a life of inquiry into secular and sacred mystery.” Then, he considered aeronautical engineering before turning to the arts as his major. For which I am thankful, for his writing combines a reverence and deep insight into our connection to the world and each other. His keen observation and scientific and historic and literary knowledge is married to spiritual depth and mysticism.
Lopez asks us to pay attention. “Each place it itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it and it’s gone,” he wrote. He traveled to eighty countries and in the essays he writes about how he went into the land to experience it wholly, becoming ‘intimate’ with the Earth. He warns that understanding should not be our goal as much as experiencing, being present. When I was young, when outdoors I would just stop and listen and watch, like an animal does. After paying attention, and being patient, he asks us to be attentive.
Lopez writes about ‘the failure to love’ evidenced all around us, the way we use and destroy the world and each other. In light of warfare and all the social and political ills of our world, in light of the degradation of the environment, Lopez queries, “is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
I was reminded again of the remarkable vision and gift of Barry Lopez.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
Prepared by Lopez before his death, these essays include autobiographical accounts of his childhood that wrecked me. He endured years of sexual abuse by a family friend. And yet, his love of where he grew up never left him. I understand the longing for one’s first world, our natal landscape, and how it shapes us.
You can never have the childhood again though the desire for the innocence of those days overwhelms you from time to time to time. And then you learn to love what you have more than what you had. Or thought you had.
from Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World by Barry Lopez
Remarkably, he had considered entering the priesthood, inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, “leading a life of inquiry into secular and sacred mystery.” Then, he considered aeronautical engineering before turning to the arts as his major. For which I am thankful, for his writing combines a reverence and deep insight into our connection to the world and each other. His keen observation and scientific and historic and literary knowledge is married to spiritual depth and mysticism.
Lopez asks us to pay attention. “Each place it itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it and it’s gone,” he wrote. He traveled to eighty countries and in the essays he writes about how he went into the land to experience it wholly, becoming ‘intimate’ with the Earth. He warns that understanding should not be our goal as much as experiencing, being present. When I was young, when outdoors I would just stop and listen and watch, like an animal does. After paying attention, and being patient, he asks us to be attentive.
Lopez writes about ‘the failure to love’ evidenced all around us, the way we use and destroy the world and each other. In light of warfare and all the social and political ills of our world, in light of the degradation of the environment, Lopez queries, “is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
I was reminded again of the remarkable vision and gift of Barry Lopez.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
July 30, 2022
Barry Lopez is one of those authors whose work I return to over and over again. His work is categorized as "nature writing" and it is true that he writes about places that I will never see, but after reading all his books (some more than once), I know that it is more than the description of exotic landscapes (and the creatures -human and non-human that live there) that brings me back to his work. Of course his work is filled with sadness for the damage we are doing to this earth given to us - a sadness that never rises to indictment. There is no need for him to add judgment or anger to the sadness that we grow to share with him as he describes what is and what once was. The "what will be" is clear enough and made more powerful by the reticence of the author. I think ultimately I return to his work for the faith that I find in it. Faith need not be belief in concepts or doctrines. Faith can also be a continuous search for value despite the constant devaluation of life by what is worst in humanity. Lopez shares with us early childhood memories that would have caused most of us to stop looking for the good in life. His search for the true and the beautiful took him to places of silence and solitude, of darkness and blinding light, and then he returned to humbly offer us whatever hope he found there.
May 17, 2022
Barry Lopez is one of my favorite writers. I remember how anxious I was when I learned about his illness, how devastated when I heard about the wildfire that destroyed his home, and how I grieved when the news of his death came. His Horizon is one of the most beautiful and profound books that I have ever read. I am glad that he lived long enough to leave it behind as a gift for us all. And here is another gift from him, the last one – this collection of his essays.
It is a pleasure to be able once more to accompany him on his travels and be inspired by his writing. I think that every fan of Barry Lopez will appreciate it but it can also be a good entry point for someone who doesn’t know his books and was perhaps intimidated by the sheer scale of Horizon, for example. Thanks to this volume a reader can begin with small doses, relishing his words and getting to know him as a human.
Thanks to the publisher, Random House, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
It is a pleasure to be able once more to accompany him on his travels and be inspired by his writing. I think that every fan of Barry Lopez will appreciate it but it can also be a good entry point for someone who doesn’t know his books and was perhaps intimidated by the sheer scale of Horizon, for example. Thanks to this volume a reader can begin with small doses, relishing his words and getting to know him as a human.
Thanks to the publisher, Random House, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
August 8, 2022
Rebecca Solnit prefaces her lovely and thoughtful introduction of Barry Lopez's posthumous essay collection with a quote from Simone Weil: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." To underscore this spiritual aspect of the author's work--recognizing that Lopez was not a congregant of any traditional religion--the introduction is titled "The Quest for the Holy Grail."
It is this aspect of Barry Lopez's writing, his absolutely unmixed attention to the natural world and all of the inhabitants--plant and and animal (including humans)-- that he encountered, in which he succeeds. Grandly. Lopez was a lifelong quester, and whether his travels took him to the far and remote corners of the this planet or simply outside the door of his home and through the woods to the banks of his beloved McKenzie River, it was this acute attentiveness that often reduced him to awe and became an idiosyncratic and rarefied form of communion, a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things and that this fertile Earth not only gives birth to all life, but nurtures and sustains it. Barry Lopez found his Holy Grail. It was in everything that presented itself to his absolutely unmixed attention. Therefore, his prayer was more expansive than "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It was something akin to "Love every living thing, because we're family, and without them we are not living things."
Returning to Solnit's introduction, she notes that "[t]he word 'essay' comes from the French essayer, to try." More expansively, the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb as "To put to proof, try (a person or thing), to test the nature, excellence, fitness, etc. of . . . Also to practice (an art, etc.) by way of trial." The almost universally recognized master of the art of the essay was also French, Michel de Montaigne, and his trials of different subjects offer and weigh evidence from myriad sources and then Montaigne cross-examines his own arguments for and against various propositions. It would be unfair to measure Barry Lopez, or practically anyone else, against Montaigne, but I think it bears mentioning that this collection falls short when measured against Lopez's own prior works, most recently his preceding magnum opus, Horizon. Many of the essays in Embrace Fearlessly feel truncated. While I respect the author and agree with much of what he says, these pieces often jump quickly from premise to conclusion and lack the breadth, focus, and 'finish' of his earlier works. This is both understandable and forgivable. Barry Lopez assembled this collection of essays, and attempted to write four of them, under punishing circumstances. He was in the final round of his fight against cancer, and he had had to move from his riverside home of many years, decades in fact, when forced from it by the Holiday Farm Fire of 2020, which burned over 170,000 acres, including those surrounding his house. One can think of it as the destruction of his favorite place of worship.
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World is a good book. I liked it for what I often admired in Barry Lopez's other works, his supple and assured prose, his expansive and note perfect diction, but I would recommend his other books over this one. Still, Embrace Fearlessly will compel me to visit the McKenzie River, on the date always noted by Lopez when the salmon run and their lives end and new lives begin. And I can only hope that I can pray as he did.
It is this aspect of Barry Lopez's writing, his absolutely unmixed attention to the natural world and all of the inhabitants--plant and and animal (including humans)-- that he encountered, in which he succeeds. Grandly. Lopez was a lifelong quester, and whether his travels took him to the far and remote corners of the this planet or simply outside the door of his home and through the woods to the banks of his beloved McKenzie River, it was this acute attentiveness that often reduced him to awe and became an idiosyncratic and rarefied form of communion, a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things and that this fertile Earth not only gives birth to all life, but nurtures and sustains it. Barry Lopez found his Holy Grail. It was in everything that presented itself to his absolutely unmixed attention. Therefore, his prayer was more expansive than "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It was something akin to "Love every living thing, because we're family, and without them we are not living things."
Returning to Solnit's introduction, she notes that "[t]he word 'essay' comes from the French essayer, to try." More expansively, the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb as "To put to proof, try (a person or thing), to test the nature, excellence, fitness, etc. of . . . Also to practice (an art, etc.) by way of trial." The almost universally recognized master of the art of the essay was also French, Michel de Montaigne, and his trials of different subjects offer and weigh evidence from myriad sources and then Montaigne cross-examines his own arguments for and against various propositions. It would be unfair to measure Barry Lopez, or practically anyone else, against Montaigne, but I think it bears mentioning that this collection falls short when measured against Lopez's own prior works, most recently his preceding magnum opus, Horizon. Many of the essays in Embrace Fearlessly feel truncated. While I respect the author and agree with much of what he says, these pieces often jump quickly from premise to conclusion and lack the breadth, focus, and 'finish' of his earlier works. This is both understandable and forgivable. Barry Lopez assembled this collection of essays, and attempted to write four of them, under punishing circumstances. He was in the final round of his fight against cancer, and he had had to move from his riverside home of many years, decades in fact, when forced from it by the Holiday Farm Fire of 2020, which burned over 170,000 acres, including those surrounding his house. One can think of it as the destruction of his favorite place of worship.
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World is a good book. I liked it for what I often admired in Barry Lopez's other works, his supple and assured prose, his expansive and note perfect diction, but I would recommend his other books over this one. Still, Embrace Fearlessly will compel me to visit the McKenzie River, on the date always noted by Lopez when the salmon run and their lives end and new lives begin. And I can only hope that I can pray as he did.
July 23, 2022
I find most essay collections uneven to some degree, and this one was the same, but there are some truly beautiful essays in here. Lopez comes across as a wise, gently sad elder exiting just before the storm arrives. He knows what’s coming and he wants us to be good to each other. I feel better after being in his presence for a while.
November 7, 2022
“We are all going to die, of course. And deaths remind us to live our lives fully, to take advantage of every opportunity to love and be loved.”
When I think of Lopez’ writing, my first inclination is to describe him as a nature writer, or someone who combines science with travel writing, focused heavily on the natural world. In reading this final collection of his essays, what really stood out was how much what he truly wrote about was love - love for those in our lives, love for those we encounter, love for the world around us. Lopez treated those he met with an immense respect, constantly taking the time to listen and learn from those who experiences were different than his. He was patient and thoughtful, and committed to seeking to understand before trying to describe or define. Many of the essays in this collection are centered around the natural world and his experiences in it, but there are also some deeply personal essays about the trauma of sexual abuse, the power of friendship, and the realities of aging. I marked a number of passages when reading this, but I’ll close the review with just one more.
“It’s in our way of life that we often teach best what we’re not conscious of, by the example of our lives. But I will always remember this about him (Wallace Stegner), what he encouraged. It is a good idea to love each other, and to love the Earth. . . .No one knows what human destiny is, but surely it must be our hope that it is something good, that it is striving toward what we call God. And we know, that it is love and all that love contains — passion, awe, allegiance, ecstasy, respect, selflessness — that carries us in that direction.”
When I think of Lopez’ writing, my first inclination is to describe him as a nature writer, or someone who combines science with travel writing, focused heavily on the natural world. In reading this final collection of his essays, what really stood out was how much what he truly wrote about was love - love for those in our lives, love for those we encounter, love for the world around us. Lopez treated those he met with an immense respect, constantly taking the time to listen and learn from those who experiences were different than his. He was patient and thoughtful, and committed to seeking to understand before trying to describe or define. Many of the essays in this collection are centered around the natural world and his experiences in it, but there are also some deeply personal essays about the trauma of sexual abuse, the power of friendship, and the realities of aging. I marked a number of passages when reading this, but I’ll close the review with just one more.
“It’s in our way of life that we often teach best what we’re not conscious of, by the example of our lives. But I will always remember this about him (Wallace Stegner), what he encouraged. It is a good idea to love each other, and to love the Earth. . . .No one knows what human destiny is, but surely it must be our hope that it is something good, that it is striving toward what we call God. And we know, that it is love and all that love contains — passion, awe, allegiance, ecstasy, respect, selflessness — that carries us in that direction.”
March 18, 2025
Absolutely beautiful. But watch out for the “Sliver of Sky” essay. It will slap you in the face like a raw fish and leave a bad smell in the air. Lopez writes in his beautiful and raw way about his experience being sexually abused by a trusted adult as a child. It will make your blood boil and your stomach sick. Honestly I wish I had skipped it. But nevertheless I respect and admire the heck out of Lopez.
June 21, 2022
4.5 stars.
August 19, 2024
It is hard to find the words for how tender and beautiful this book is. The spectrum of emotions felt while reading it was wide but when taken together they could simply be described as love. Barry makes me want to listen, observe, learn, explore, take stock, expand, move towards and love this world and this life.
These essays hold in equal measure the fragility and worthiness of human striving with the complexity and inevitability of natural landscapes. The light of truth shines from these pages, and there is solace to be found here for any who seek it.
“In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
Thank you Barry.
These essays hold in equal measure the fragility and worthiness of human striving with the complexity and inevitability of natural landscapes. The light of truth shines from these pages, and there is solace to be found here for any who seek it.
“In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
Thank you Barry.
February 21, 2023
This is a collection of Barry Lopez's essays over the past 30 years, the oldest of which appears to be from 1989. There is some repetition since these pieces appeared in many different magazines, and Lopez died before he could edit them with his apparently customary thoroughness. I found some of the themes - his childhood molestation - pretty painful to get through, and certainly didn't want to keep encountering it again and again. I had been hearing for Lopez for a while, and in his nature pieces, I should say he delivers. Lopez, like Mary Oliver, is completely present to experiences of the world around him. He pays attention and in recording what he does, forces us to do the same. His concerns range from pre-war LA to Alaska to Dreamtime landscapes of Australia, and the depredations caused by humans. Lopez, after a life time of field work, doesn't seem to have any hope left that we can invent our way out of environmental degradation and "biological and economic problems associated with advancing climate breakdown." He has his reasons, but I find it hard to share his pessimism. As a new father, you can't help being optimistic about the world (after all, deciding to have children now is the most world affirming thing you could be doing). More than any other time in the past, we understand the urgency of the present moment. I think this is especially true for the young people - Greta Thunberg, the museum vandals, the rise to power of the green parties. So I am still hopeful.
June 14, 2022
While reading the last three pages of this powerful book, I learned that a lovely friend had just passed. I wasn't sure if I should write this review now or wait a few days until the emotions have settled in my heart. I have chosen to finish this review so that I can tell you two things: #1. It is a wonderful book, full of stories that made me want to always take a closer look at everything, just as I felt after reading "Arctic Dreams." #2 - A warning -- the subject matter in the chapter, "a Sliver of Sky" is quite serious and may not be suitable for all souls. It is about the sexual abuse he experienced as a child. My respect for him as a writer and person is more profound than ever.
October 19, 2022
Lopez, in all these essays, shows the insight I look for in him. But, more, some of these concern his mortality, his trauma survival, his exploits, but, most of all, his connection to human beings in real places. The last essay, a bittersweet kicker to me, describes his "Deterioration" with a prostate cancer spreading, that, nevertheless, portrays work together with neighbors on a familiar logging duty at home. God bless and keep our man Barry Holston Lopez.
Highly recommended.
Thanks, Fulton County Public Library, for the loan.
Highly recommended.
Thanks, Fulton County Public Library, for the loan.
April 6, 2025
Barry Lopez passed away in 2020, and this final collection of essays was published in 2022. This book has been sitting on my shelf since then; in some type of effort to prolong Lopez’s life in my mind, I have been holding off on reading this one. Lately I’ve found myself in dire need of wisdom & a source of grounding. Fortunately, this medicinal book was awaiting me; I knew it was time.
This collection is so raw and vulnerable. Lopez offers beautiful perspective, as always, and I am amazed by the connection he is able to cultivate with his reader through words. I am including some of my favorite quotes in this review so I can have them all in one place for future reference.
⭐️“The overriding goal in a gathering storm, many are convinced, is to commit to being firmly anchored in a known geography, within a familiar cultural space. Such an approach, they believe, will provide each person with a protective network of friendships and a deeper sense of personal identity, and it will strengthen in each individual the sense that they are living lives of significant purpose. In times of upheaval and social chaos, knowing exactly where one is standing seems imperative.
“Change is coming fast, though, on multiple fronts. Most of us begin the day now uncertain of exactly where we are. Once, we banked on knowing how to respond to all the important questions. Once, we assumed we’d be able to pass on to the next generation the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way - global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments - and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for boats we forgot to build.” pg. 187-188
⭐️“[I]n this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?” pg. 122
⭐️“In remote Antarctica a reflective mind can easily develop a great fondness for the human race, a wistful sense of its fate, & not dwell on its capacity for violence, for evil, for duplicity and self-aggrandizement. The most poignant words I know in Antarctic literature are the last words Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his journal: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’” pg. 165
⭐️”You can never have the childhood again, though the desire for the innocence of those days overwhelms you from time to time. And then you learn to love what you have more than what you had. Or thought you had.” pg. 209
This collection is so raw and vulnerable. Lopez offers beautiful perspective, as always, and I am amazed by the connection he is able to cultivate with his reader through words. I am including some of my favorite quotes in this review so I can have them all in one place for future reference.
⭐️“The overriding goal in a gathering storm, many are convinced, is to commit to being firmly anchored in a known geography, within a familiar cultural space. Such an approach, they believe, will provide each person with a protective network of friendships and a deeper sense of personal identity, and it will strengthen in each individual the sense that they are living lives of significant purpose. In times of upheaval and social chaos, knowing exactly where one is standing seems imperative.
“Change is coming fast, though, on multiple fronts. Most of us begin the day now uncertain of exactly where we are. Once, we banked on knowing how to respond to all the important questions. Once, we assumed we’d be able to pass on to the next generation the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way - global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments - and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for boats we forgot to build.” pg. 187-188
⭐️“[I]n this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?” pg. 122
⭐️“In remote Antarctica a reflective mind can easily develop a great fondness for the human race, a wistful sense of its fate, & not dwell on its capacity for violence, for evil, for duplicity and self-aggrandizement. The most poignant words I know in Antarctic literature are the last words Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his journal: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’” pg. 165
⭐️”You can never have the childhood again, though the desire for the innocence of those days overwhelms you from time to time. And then you learn to love what you have more than what you had. Or thought you had.” pg. 209
September 19, 2024
Oh boy, this was a grueling one to get through. Barry's writing is fantastic, but the details he chooses to focus on are very different from the details that interest me. Take, for example, "A Scary Abundance of Water." It's 36 pages of dry descriptions of regions of Southern California that I've never heard of, statistics about population density, and explanations of exactly how the agricultural landscape has changed in the past century.
I do, however, appreciate his approach to life and to people. He does not purport to have all the answers, and he spends a lot of time learning to be a good observer. He understands the value of indigenous knowledge and has a deep respect for nature. Seems like a great guy who lived a full life & knew to count his blessings.
3.5
I do, however, appreciate his approach to life and to people. He does not purport to have all the answers, and he spends a lot of time learning to be a good observer. He understands the value of indigenous knowledge and has a deep respect for nature. Seems like a great guy who lived a full life & knew to count his blessings.
3.5
January 1, 2025
My last book of 2024 and I hold it close to my heart. This being Barry Lopez’s final book and reading what feels like parting words in the last chapter moved me. I felt a connection to this book in the same way I felt a connection to the McKenzie River and the home of Mr. Lopez when I visited in the summer of 2022. Every passage describing that wonderful place made my heart pang, knowing that I have only known it in the aftermath of the 2020 Wildfires and Lopez’s death. The standout essay for me in this book is “Love in a Time of Terror” which reads:
“In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the ocean from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, it is still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
“In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the ocean from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, it is still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
November 20, 2023
I actually did not finish it. I think if there’s no magic, AI, or gays involved I simply don’t care. Too many descriptions and conversation around obscure works of art.
abandoned
February 16, 2023DNF, it started out promising but was a bit dry even for me...
July 24, 2023
This was an incredible, heavy read. Would have been five stars for me but I had difficulty getting into things at the start of the book.
July 24, 2022
“Witness, not achievement, is what I was after. From the beginning, I wanted to understand how very different each stretch of landscape, each boulevard, each cultural aspiration was. The human epistemologies, the six thousand spoken ways of knowing God, are like the six thousand ways a river can run down from high country to low, like the six thousand ways dawn might break over the Atacama, the Tanami, the Gobi, or the Sonoran.”
“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.”
What a beautiful last gift of this departed author. He wasn’t the swashbuckling adventurer high on adrenaline, he was a thoughtful listener and researcher, on adventures to places we may never see but came alive through his writing. As a collection of essays, there was less of a theme than his gigantic hearted books, and there was the thread of his survival of sexual rape and molestation as a boy of 6 for 5 years which was so very hard to read but felt like hope for other survivors and understanding more of what it does to children. Despite it all, the abuse, the instability of childhood, the negative narrative of the global emergency, Lopez was one of the most observant and open hearted of writers that has have graced our planet.
Intimacy with the physical Earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional as well as our biological attachments to physical landscapes. Based on my own inquiries, my impression is that we experience this primal connection regularly as a diffuse, ineffable pleasure, experience it as the easing of a particular kind of longing.
The Jack Hills in Western Australia lie about four hundred miles north-northeast of Perth. There, in the 1980s, scientists found a lode of zircon crystals that at the time represented the oldest known bits of the Earth’s crust. One of these extremely hard and durable crystals was dated at 4.27 billion years, about 250 million years after the formation of the planet…I just wanted, if I could, to become for a moment a part of the flow of time there.
What I want to know, what I look for as a writer, is what good was a person capable of, how did love flourish around him or her? How did what they do help? How did a person love? That’s the news we’re eager to hear. That is what we want to know.
Where is the art to help us deal with these actions (Native American genocide) and with the long silence that persists? Is what has been offered so far, mostly by Native American artists, so offensive to the nation’s sense of self, so inconsequential when put up against the mythology of a chosen people, that it can’t be accommodated? The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote that it was impossible for his country and the United States to have a productive conversation. Mexico, he said, is so burdened by its past it cannot easily imagine a future. The United States, he said, is so intent on imagining its future it isn’t troubled by rewriting its past to serve that future.
For the Navajo, beauty is not about perception, is not in the eye of the beholder, but is the outcome of the artist’s relationship to the world… The creation of beauty is simultaneously intellectual (the creation, maintenance, and restoration of order), emotional (of happiness), moral (of good), aesthetic (of balance and harmony), and biological (of health). Art is integral to life, and hózhó, distinctly different from Aristotle’s “beauty,” is the goal of art—and life.
In that southern (Antarctic) winter of 1992 I embarked on a routine of evening strolls because I wanted to stride across the frozen membrane of that isolated planetary heartbeat, so far from anything man-made except the ship; there, docked at night, came the opportunity to walk that pellicle, beneath a vault of starlight so intense you could read your shadow in the snow.
Still, something in me has long been drawn almost exclusively to the classic lines of a desert, to the open ocean and the receding tundra plain—something almost genetic in me, which grows restive in the baroque mazes of a city or in a jungle.
Some consider it unsophisticated to explore the nonhuman world for clues to solving human dilemmas, and wisdom’s oldest tool, metaphor, is often regarded with wariness, or even suspicion, in my culture. But abandoning metaphor entirely only paves the way to the rigidity of fundamentalism. To my way of thinking, to prefer to live a metaphorical life—that is, to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance—as opposed to living a literal life, where most things mean in only one way, is the norm among traditional people like the Warlpiri.
The linchpin of my existence as a California boy was the ever-forgiving, ever-soothing light, the way it so beautifully bathed everything around it, the slender leaves of gum trees, the pale surfaces of adobe buildings, the surfaces of moving water. That, and for me the flocks of birds that pulled me into the sky, pulled me up and out of myself—and gave me what in my life I would call hope.
Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc- ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war- we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas- the crushing immorality of maintaining a nation state, the life destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is to be foolish- can have no future with us.
It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. It is more important to bring E.O. Wilson’s biophilia into our daily conversations than it is to remain compliant in a time of extinction, ethnic cleansing, and rising seas. It is more important to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost.
The day of illumination I had in the plain west of Willowra [in Australia] about a word generated by the failure to love…grew out of a certain knowledge that, years before, I had experienced what it meant to love, on those summer days with friends in the Brooks Range in Alaska, [watching and talking about wildlife and nature.] The experience delivered me into the central project of my life as a writer, which is to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others to do the same.
In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to endure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it [it is] still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world? [my additions]
Rebecca Solnit in the introduction: The love of place can sustain a life, and we usually talk as though it’s an unreciprocated love, a one-way street. These essays show why that is wrong. The places love us back in how they steady and sustain us, teach us, shelter us, guide us, feed us, and that old image of the Earth itself as a mother is a reminder that we depend upon the unearned bounty of the biosphere.
The Grail is the journey, the search for something, and the something is outside oneself—musk oxen in a blizzard or algae flourishing under Antarctic ice…and in Barry Lopez’s writing, this cosmology…the Grail is not just the travel to these places but the stillness and patience after arrival. It is also the act of paying attention to these things, of entering a state of concentration, of focus, a state of being open to these, of entering a state of concentration, of focus, a state of being open to epiphany and rapture and communion.
You arrive at a place, then you arrive at an awareness, then perhaps at an understanding, which opens up the world to you and opens you up to the world.
DUSK
for Barry Lopez
Horizon fades from blue to black
with infinite tenderness in London
tonight. Yet even at full dusk a smear
of cobalt rings the tree line. Maybe
endless love awaits us. I know you believed
so, even as forests and rivers turned to fire,
libraries to ash. Now that you’re not here
to tend them, I see the lamps you lit for us.
Sometimes it’s important to see the darkness,
you would say, to regard one another other,
and our trembling. Or on other nights, like
now: we must look up. How is this same
moon in my sky hanging over Eugene these
small hours? Do you feel its comforts?
As you sleep through this final stretch
how badly I want you to know we have
the torches now, my friend, we’ll protect the flame,
you are free to be the wind again.
John Freeman
“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.”
What a beautiful last gift of this departed author. He wasn’t the swashbuckling adventurer high on adrenaline, he was a thoughtful listener and researcher, on adventures to places we may never see but came alive through his writing. As a collection of essays, there was less of a theme than his gigantic hearted books, and there was the thread of his survival of sexual rape and molestation as a boy of 6 for 5 years which was so very hard to read but felt like hope for other survivors and understanding more of what it does to children. Despite it all, the abuse, the instability of childhood, the negative narrative of the global emergency, Lopez was one of the most observant and open hearted of writers that has have graced our planet.
Intimacy with the physical Earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional as well as our biological attachments to physical landscapes. Based on my own inquiries, my impression is that we experience this primal connection regularly as a diffuse, ineffable pleasure, experience it as the easing of a particular kind of longing.
The Jack Hills in Western Australia lie about four hundred miles north-northeast of Perth. There, in the 1980s, scientists found a lode of zircon crystals that at the time represented the oldest known bits of the Earth’s crust. One of these extremely hard and durable crystals was dated at 4.27 billion years, about 250 million years after the formation of the planet…I just wanted, if I could, to become for a moment a part of the flow of time there.
What I want to know, what I look for as a writer, is what good was a person capable of, how did love flourish around him or her? How did what they do help? How did a person love? That’s the news we’re eager to hear. That is what we want to know.
Where is the art to help us deal with these actions (Native American genocide) and with the long silence that persists? Is what has been offered so far, mostly by Native American artists, so offensive to the nation’s sense of self, so inconsequential when put up against the mythology of a chosen people, that it can’t be accommodated? The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote that it was impossible for his country and the United States to have a productive conversation. Mexico, he said, is so burdened by its past it cannot easily imagine a future. The United States, he said, is so intent on imagining its future it isn’t troubled by rewriting its past to serve that future.
For the Navajo, beauty is not about perception, is not in the eye of the beholder, but is the outcome of the artist’s relationship to the world… The creation of beauty is simultaneously intellectual (the creation, maintenance, and restoration of order), emotional (of happiness), moral (of good), aesthetic (of balance and harmony), and biological (of health). Art is integral to life, and hózhó, distinctly different from Aristotle’s “beauty,” is the goal of art—and life.
In that southern (Antarctic) winter of 1992 I embarked on a routine of evening strolls because I wanted to stride across the frozen membrane of that isolated planetary heartbeat, so far from anything man-made except the ship; there, docked at night, came the opportunity to walk that pellicle, beneath a vault of starlight so intense you could read your shadow in the snow.
Still, something in me has long been drawn almost exclusively to the classic lines of a desert, to the open ocean and the receding tundra plain—something almost genetic in me, which grows restive in the baroque mazes of a city or in a jungle.
Some consider it unsophisticated to explore the nonhuman world for clues to solving human dilemmas, and wisdom’s oldest tool, metaphor, is often regarded with wariness, or even suspicion, in my culture. But abandoning metaphor entirely only paves the way to the rigidity of fundamentalism. To my way of thinking, to prefer to live a metaphorical life—that is, to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance—as opposed to living a literal life, where most things mean in only one way, is the norm among traditional people like the Warlpiri.
The linchpin of my existence as a California boy was the ever-forgiving, ever-soothing light, the way it so beautifully bathed everything around it, the slender leaves of gum trees, the pale surfaces of adobe buildings, the surfaces of moving water. That, and for me the flocks of birds that pulled me into the sky, pulled me up and out of myself—and gave me what in my life I would call hope.
Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc- ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war- we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas- the crushing immorality of maintaining a nation state, the life destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is to be foolish- can have no future with us.
It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. It is more important to bring E.O. Wilson’s biophilia into our daily conversations than it is to remain compliant in a time of extinction, ethnic cleansing, and rising seas. It is more important to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost.
The day of illumination I had in the plain west of Willowra [in Australia] about a word generated by the failure to love…grew out of a certain knowledge that, years before, I had experienced what it meant to love, on those summer days with friends in the Brooks Range in Alaska, [watching and talking about wildlife and nature.] The experience delivered me into the central project of my life as a writer, which is to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others to do the same.
In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to endure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it [it is] still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world? [my additions]
Rebecca Solnit in the introduction: The love of place can sustain a life, and we usually talk as though it’s an unreciprocated love, a one-way street. These essays show why that is wrong. The places love us back in how they steady and sustain us, teach us, shelter us, guide us, feed us, and that old image of the Earth itself as a mother is a reminder that we depend upon the unearned bounty of the biosphere.
The Grail is the journey, the search for something, and the something is outside oneself—musk oxen in a blizzard or algae flourishing under Antarctic ice…and in Barry Lopez’s writing, this cosmology…the Grail is not just the travel to these places but the stillness and patience after arrival. It is also the act of paying attention to these things, of entering a state of concentration, of focus, a state of being open to these, of entering a state of concentration, of focus, a state of being open to epiphany and rapture and communion.
You arrive at a place, then you arrive at an awareness, then perhaps at an understanding, which opens up the world to you and opens you up to the world.
DUSK
for Barry Lopez
Horizon fades from blue to black
with infinite tenderness in London
tonight. Yet even at full dusk a smear
of cobalt rings the tree line. Maybe
endless love awaits us. I know you believed
so, even as forests and rivers turned to fire,
libraries to ash. Now that you’re not here
to tend them, I see the lamps you lit for us.
Sometimes it’s important to see the darkness,
you would say, to regard one another other,
and our trembling. Or on other nights, like
now: we must look up. How is this same
moon in my sky hanging over Eugene these
small hours? Do you feel its comforts?
As you sleep through this final stretch
how badly I want you to know we have
the torches now, my friend, we’ll protect the flame,
you are free to be the wind again.
John Freeman
March 27, 2023
Like pretty much all collections of essays, some were great, some were boring and some were ok but nothing special. The main similarity is that all the essays were heavy/serious/downbeat. I had to force myself to get through the book (read for book club). This is not a book I would have ever picked up in the first place, the title alone is enough to dissuade me. I live in the burning world. I don't want to read about it, too.
My favorite essay was the one about the cruise ship to Antarctica. I found the dichotomy between the harsh nature of that continent and the luxury of the boat to make for compelling reading. I kept thinking about the movie Triangle of Sadness and imagining the boat/people in that movie to be the boat/people Lopez was writing about. I also kept thinking about the viral video from a while ago, showing a rogue wave hitting a cruise ship in the waters around Antarctica. OMG. It's a terrifying video. Go google it. I have absolutely zero desire to ever take a cruise/be trapped without a way off and absolutely zero desire to ever go to Antarctica. Zero. This essay served to cement that lack of desire.
Lopez was drawn to my least favorite types of biomes - tundra and desert. I guess I'm more of a forest gal, myself. It was a struggle to read his detailed descriptions of what to me are ugly landscapes. He wasn't selling it to me, lol. To be honest, I'm not inclined to be interested in wildlife/nature/adventure travels. Occasionally I'll find books with that subject matter compelling but only very occasionally. Beryl Markham's West with Night comes to mind as a great book about the natural world. I also enjoy Bill Bryson's travel books. Hmmmm....can't think of others.
I appreciate that reading this caused me to think about my preferences for people over land. For portraits over landscape. For urban over rural. For fiction over nonfiction. I would like to be the type of person throwing some belongings in a backpack before gallivanting off to some isolated locale. To be the type of person who wants to scuba dive under Antarctic ice, to be the type of person who is ok with living weeks in a harsh climate under difficult conditions. But if I am being honest with myself, those things sound awful and deeply deeply unpleasant.
I struggled some with Lopez's sense of entitlement and his unawareness of how his lifestyle was dependent on things out of reach for many people. One of my favorite essays was the final one about him aging and getting cancer and being unable to live the life he had lived for so many years. His recognized that his youth and strength and health had paved the way for how he had lived his life. I wonder if he understood that when he was 30?
I wasn't sure what to make of the essay that spoke about several privileged incidents in his past. They put him in a bad light, which I found brave of him to do. However, he didn't reflect on the stories, just told them. What was the point of including these incidents? One was about being pulled over for speeding. He got out of his car(!) to plead against getting a ticket and instead of shooting him or beating him up & arresting him, the cop just noted his Notre Dame jacket and they then had a cozy chat about football before he was let off with a warning. The other was about him trying to check into the NY Athletic Club, a very posh private club that didn't allow women as members until 1989(after a lawsuit) and also had a history of racism (no black people or Jewish people allowed as members either). Lopez had messed up and made his reservation for the wrong day. When a staff member told him he couldn't check in until his actual reservation he played the "Do you know who I am?!" card because his dad and granddad were apparently big shots in the club. Why did he write these? I don't know. Maybe in my upcoming book club meeting, someone can explain it to me. Maybe it's to show how he has grown as a person?
The most difficult essay to read is the one about him being sexually molested as a little boy. Oooof, what a tough, tough read. I kept wondering how this abuse impacted his choice of a career. Being drawn away from people and towards animals/the land. Putting himself in tough 'manly' situations over and over again. Pushing himself to the limit and controlling the experience. I think the abuse explains his initial attraction to becoming a monk or priest. Wanting to be close to God, to be in a powerful relationship with God. To me, so aware of the long history of child abuse in the Catholic Church, the idea of him joining the church was appalling. Out of the frying pan and into the fire! Good thing he pivoted to writing.
He never discussed how being a man made his chosen lifestyle easier. I thought of the excellent memoir by wartime photographer Lynsey Addario called It's What I Do. The memoir opens with her in Afghanistan during a battle, realizing she has started her period and is out of tampons. This! I was thrilled to finally be reading about how you manage stuff like that while also living an adventurous lifestyle. She wrote about how on top of the constant fear of danger that all the journalists experienced, she had to deal with the sexual harassment and the threat of rape that came from being a woman in that situation. It's not as easy for a woman to go alone to an isolated part of the world as it is a man. When Lopez was writing about living in an isolated Inuit village in Alaska, near the North Pole, I kept thinking about the disturbingly high rate of child molestation, rape and spousal abuse that occur in those isolated villages. Lopez wrote of the beauty of the landscape, the interactions with wild animals, with the traditions surrounding the native people with the landscape. I see other things first.
While I am glad I was exposed to these essays, I am happy to be done with the book.
Random Quotes I highlighted:
Concentration eventually reveals what at first was not apparent. It is as though the act of concentration itself draws out something latent, or, if time becomes a dimension like width, something that was there all along.
We've lost a sense of geographical vastness, of the unique and inaccessible, the too far. What was once vast we have now reduced to patterns of swift movement so ingrained, so routine, that much of the land's guiding specificity has fallen away.
the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuouslv attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later...to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening-resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand.
Existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.
A continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world
I'm boarding a plane for Denver at the municipal airport in Amarillo, following a recent upgrade of TSA security rules. One of the inspectors questions the bottle of ink."It's ink. For a fountain pen," I say. "Less than three ounces." ...The men share a look of amused disbelief. One fellow displays a ballpoint pen for me. He says that, in the future, I should consider using one of these.
My goal that day was intimacy-the tactile, olfactory, visual, and sonic details of what, to most people in my culture, would appear to be a wasteland.
It strikes me often on our journey that a distracted life, a life strung between competing desires, has now become ordinary life for many people in Western cultures. Conscientious devotion to a single task such as Murphy's to the study of oceanic birds not only seems tedious to many, it's even disparaged now as obsessive.
It proceeds with the tacit understanding that the real world is the ship, with its impeccably served six-course dinners, its always-fresh linens, its au courant boutique. The landscape through which we pass, with its great compass of wild animals, its unscheduled weather, its ghosts of Shackleton and Otto Nordenskjöld, its smoldering volcanoes, is enthralling, but it also lies eerily outside the rhythms and confines of modernity.
Hardly a sybaritic dinner passes, however, when I do not glance out the long window rows of the Marco Polo Restaurant at the evening sea or the glacier-cracked land and think of the enduring privation, despair, and death that impinged on everyday life for the first sailors to explore here. As I consume my elegant dinner, the possibility for detachment is scary.
Local time, I believe, was a little after seven in the morning, Buenos Aires time; we were keeping New Zealand time-a little after ten at night. However one might decide it (we took for our time the time of the people who waited to hear from us each day by radio), the crush of meridians at this spot, the absence of any event even approaching a sunset, made the issue of determining the hour only a vaguely foreboding curiosity.
Antarctica, until recently, was an exclusively male domain. The male naval tradition became deeply entrenched in Antarctica after World War II. American women were kept off the continent, largely at the insistence of the U.S. Navy, until 1969
You get in the right frame of mind to drop through that narrow hole in the ice by recalling the love you bear your friends, and that they bear you; by stimulating the professional need to make thorough, accurate notes; and by appreciating an opportunity to give curiosity its full rein.
You can enter that place inside yourself where you privately meet your fears and say, "Yes. I know. But please, come with me. What we're about to see is greater than the thing you're running from."
We were middle-class white youths, being taught to perpetuate our religious and economic values throughout the world. We were largely innocent of the world, however, so innocent it should have scared us.
My favorite essay was the one about the cruise ship to Antarctica. I found the dichotomy between the harsh nature of that continent and the luxury of the boat to make for compelling reading. I kept thinking about the movie Triangle of Sadness and imagining the boat/people in that movie to be the boat/people Lopez was writing about. I also kept thinking about the viral video from a while ago, showing a rogue wave hitting a cruise ship in the waters around Antarctica. OMG. It's a terrifying video. Go google it. I have absolutely zero desire to ever take a cruise/be trapped without a way off and absolutely zero desire to ever go to Antarctica. Zero. This essay served to cement that lack of desire.
Lopez was drawn to my least favorite types of biomes - tundra and desert. I guess I'm more of a forest gal, myself. It was a struggle to read his detailed descriptions of what to me are ugly landscapes. He wasn't selling it to me, lol. To be honest, I'm not inclined to be interested in wildlife/nature/adventure travels. Occasionally I'll find books with that subject matter compelling but only very occasionally. Beryl Markham's West with Night comes to mind as a great book about the natural world. I also enjoy Bill Bryson's travel books. Hmmmm....can't think of others.
I appreciate that reading this caused me to think about my preferences for people over land. For portraits over landscape. For urban over rural. For fiction over nonfiction. I would like to be the type of person throwing some belongings in a backpack before gallivanting off to some isolated locale. To be the type of person who wants to scuba dive under Antarctic ice, to be the type of person who is ok with living weeks in a harsh climate under difficult conditions. But if I am being honest with myself, those things sound awful and deeply deeply unpleasant.
I struggled some with Lopez's sense of entitlement and his unawareness of how his lifestyle was dependent on things out of reach for many people. One of my favorite essays was the final one about him aging and getting cancer and being unable to live the life he had lived for so many years. His recognized that his youth and strength and health had paved the way for how he had lived his life. I wonder if he understood that when he was 30?
I wasn't sure what to make of the essay that spoke about several privileged incidents in his past. They put him in a bad light, which I found brave of him to do. However, he didn't reflect on the stories, just told them. What was the point of including these incidents? One was about being pulled over for speeding. He got out of his car(!) to plead against getting a ticket and instead of shooting him or beating him up & arresting him, the cop just noted his Notre Dame jacket and they then had a cozy chat about football before he was let off with a warning. The other was about him trying to check into the NY Athletic Club, a very posh private club that didn't allow women as members until 1989(after a lawsuit) and also had a history of racism (no black people or Jewish people allowed as members either). Lopez had messed up and made his reservation for the wrong day. When a staff member told him he couldn't check in until his actual reservation he played the "Do you know who I am?!" card because his dad and granddad were apparently big shots in the club. Why did he write these? I don't know. Maybe in my upcoming book club meeting, someone can explain it to me. Maybe it's to show how he has grown as a person?
The most difficult essay to read is the one about him being sexually molested as a little boy. Oooof, what a tough, tough read. I kept wondering how this abuse impacted his choice of a career. Being drawn away from people and towards animals/the land. Putting himself in tough 'manly' situations over and over again. Pushing himself to the limit and controlling the experience. I think the abuse explains his initial attraction to becoming a monk or priest. Wanting to be close to God, to be in a powerful relationship with God. To me, so aware of the long history of child abuse in the Catholic Church, the idea of him joining the church was appalling. Out of the frying pan and into the fire! Good thing he pivoted to writing.
He never discussed how being a man made his chosen lifestyle easier. I thought of the excellent memoir by wartime photographer Lynsey Addario called It's What I Do. The memoir opens with her in Afghanistan during a battle, realizing she has started her period and is out of tampons. This! I was thrilled to finally be reading about how you manage stuff like that while also living an adventurous lifestyle. She wrote about how on top of the constant fear of danger that all the journalists experienced, she had to deal with the sexual harassment and the threat of rape that came from being a woman in that situation. It's not as easy for a woman to go alone to an isolated part of the world as it is a man. When Lopez was writing about living in an isolated Inuit village in Alaska, near the North Pole, I kept thinking about the disturbingly high rate of child molestation, rape and spousal abuse that occur in those isolated villages. Lopez wrote of the beauty of the landscape, the interactions with wild animals, with the traditions surrounding the native people with the landscape. I see other things first.
While I am glad I was exposed to these essays, I am happy to be done with the book.
Random Quotes I highlighted:
Concentration eventually reveals what at first was not apparent. It is as though the act of concentration itself draws out something latent, or, if time becomes a dimension like width, something that was there all along.
We've lost a sense of geographical vastness, of the unique and inaccessible, the too far. What was once vast we have now reduced to patterns of swift movement so ingrained, so routine, that much of the land's guiding specificity has fallen away.
the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuouslv attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later...to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening-resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand.
Existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.
A continually refreshed sense of the endless complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermines the feeling that one is alone in the world
I'm boarding a plane for Denver at the municipal airport in Amarillo, following a recent upgrade of TSA security rules. One of the inspectors questions the bottle of ink."It's ink. For a fountain pen," I say. "Less than three ounces." ...The men share a look of amused disbelief. One fellow displays a ballpoint pen for me. He says that, in the future, I should consider using one of these.
My goal that day was intimacy-the tactile, olfactory, visual, and sonic details of what, to most people in my culture, would appear to be a wasteland.
It strikes me often on our journey that a distracted life, a life strung between competing desires, has now become ordinary life for many people in Western cultures. Conscientious devotion to a single task such as Murphy's to the study of oceanic birds not only seems tedious to many, it's even disparaged now as obsessive.
It proceeds with the tacit understanding that the real world is the ship, with its impeccably served six-course dinners, its always-fresh linens, its au courant boutique. The landscape through which we pass, with its great compass of wild animals, its unscheduled weather, its ghosts of Shackleton and Otto Nordenskjöld, its smoldering volcanoes, is enthralling, but it also lies eerily outside the rhythms and confines of modernity.
Hardly a sybaritic dinner passes, however, when I do not glance out the long window rows of the Marco Polo Restaurant at the evening sea or the glacier-cracked land and think of the enduring privation, despair, and death that impinged on everyday life for the first sailors to explore here. As I consume my elegant dinner, the possibility for detachment is scary.
Local time, I believe, was a little after seven in the morning, Buenos Aires time; we were keeping New Zealand time-a little after ten at night. However one might decide it (we took for our time the time of the people who waited to hear from us each day by radio), the crush of meridians at this spot, the absence of any event even approaching a sunset, made the issue of determining the hour only a vaguely foreboding curiosity.
Antarctica, until recently, was an exclusively male domain. The male naval tradition became deeply entrenched in Antarctica after World War II. American women were kept off the continent, largely at the insistence of the U.S. Navy, until 1969
You get in the right frame of mind to drop through that narrow hole in the ice by recalling the love you bear your friends, and that they bear you; by stimulating the professional need to make thorough, accurate notes; and by appreciating an opportunity to give curiosity its full rein.
You can enter that place inside yourself where you privately meet your fears and say, "Yes. I know. But please, come with me. What we're about to see is greater than the thing you're running from."
We were middle-class white youths, being taught to perpetuate our religious and economic values throughout the world. We were largely innocent of the world, however, so innocent it should have scared us.
April 18, 2022
I recall Of Wolves and Men as one of the earliest contemporary books which helped strengthen my strong interest in the natural world. That said, Barry Lopez never became one of my very favorite writers. I usually found his style a little dry, and I also never really embraced the constant world travel aspect of some nature writing.
But this is a good collection including pieces published from 1989 to after his death. The essay from 1989 was a little dated in some of its environmental concerns, but otherwise good. The essays which had the strongest effect on me were about the Arctic and Antarctic, his childhood sexual abuse, and the deterioration of his aging body including his cancer diagnosis.
The introduction by Rebecca Solnit and the closing words from Lopez’s wife Debra Gwartney are also strong, and made me appreciate Lopez more.
Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the early copy to review.
But this is a good collection including pieces published from 1989 to after his death. The essay from 1989 was a little dated in some of its environmental concerns, but otherwise good. The essays which had the strongest effect on me were about the Arctic and Antarctic, his childhood sexual abuse, and the deterioration of his aging body including his cancer diagnosis.
The introduction by Rebecca Solnit and the closing words from Lopez’s wife Debra Gwartney are also strong, and made me appreciate Lopez more.
Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the early copy to review.
August 23, 2024
I was pleasantly surprised by the tenderness and humanity in this collection of short essays by a long-lived naturalist and conservationist. Barry Lopez touches on things from childhood trauma, lonelinss, solitude, to existenialism and dread. But also, it's filled with hope and excitement. The way he talks about the natural world and it's connection to our lives is something I aspire to relate to, someday, if even a little.
January 10, 2024
4.5 stars. Thank you to Net Galley and Random House for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This is my first Barry Lopez book although I've heard about his writing for many years. If you haven't read him before, this a lovely place to start as it's a bit of everything. As it was published after his death in 2020, it contains many previously published essays as well as some recently written months before his death. Some of the essays are personal about his upbringing, the sexual assaults he experienced by a trusted doctor/family friend and others are about nature, conservation, experiencing other cultures and their relationship to nature, global warming and openness to everything. The book opens with a lovely introduction by Rebecca Solnit. I highly recommend his wonderful writing about places and things that I and most people are probably unlikely to experience first-hand but we can learn and be better from going on the journey with him.
June 10, 2022
Barry Lopez is a masterful writer. You get drawn to his beautiful prose that kindles and stirs your feelings in a profound and meaningful way
This, his last collection of essays is as clear-eyed and passionate and full of writing skills as anything he ever wrote.
Barry Lopez will be really, really missed
This, his last collection of essays is as clear-eyed and passionate and full of writing skills as anything he ever wrote.
Barry Lopez will be really, really missed
October 28, 2022
Read more than half the essays in this book and kept wanting to love it but did not connect with any of these pieces. Typically I really enjoy Lopez’s work but this just did not hit.
October 3, 2024
I'm currently in the raw process of mourning Barry Lopez. He is a man I never met that found me on the middle edge of an entry way bookshelf in Cannon Beach, Oregon. I had been vacationing and wanted to do my due-diligence to Oregon authors, so I picked up this book eager to learn and admire the state they call home, and the lessons a place like that can teach you. What I did not expect was to be impacted so profoundly, with coasts and landscapes far more exotic and brutal than the Pacific shore. Antartica, Alaska, Poland, Chile, Australia. As Martha Nussbaum likes to say, Barry "has done his work." He was a fantastic writer, and an even better vulnerable being who took the time, the courage, and the attention to put himself in the vulnerable positions of other beings, those such as trapped seals, hurt wolves, and native Indians. He is right in that the United States does a disgraceful job at acknowledging the massacres of Native Americans. He is right in that nature, when "participating" in it, as he says, is raw and profound, and makes us better people. He is right in that the world is a sacred place full of miracles and we must act now to protect it, both animals and humans alike.
Was this the best book ever written? No. But it has impacted me forever. And that's the question with art sometimes- does something have to be perfect to leave a profound impact on you?
For Barry, and the harsh Arctic ice he savored in isolation- no. It does not.
Thank you Barry, for all the doors you have opened for myself and your life's work taking care of those that call this planet home. You will not be forgotten.
[Quotes for the Archive (beautiful ones at that)]
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with a place."
"...the aim of all Navajo art is the creation, maintenance, and restoration of hozho, which he translates as "beauty" and that for the Navajo, beauty is not about perception, is not in the eye of the beholder, but is the outcome of the artist's relationship to the world."
"Successfully locating the proper frame of mind and then acting is not, I think, about refusing to accommodate fear. It's about the cultivation of love."
Was this the best book ever written? No. But it has impacted me forever. And that's the question with art sometimes- does something have to be perfect to leave a profound impact on you?
For Barry, and the harsh Arctic ice he savored in isolation- no. It does not.
Thank you Barry, for all the doors you have opened for myself and your life's work taking care of those that call this planet home. You will not be forgotten.
[Quotes for the Archive (beautiful ones at that)]
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one's life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with a place."
"...the aim of all Navajo art is the creation, maintenance, and restoration of hozho, which he translates as "beauty" and that for the Navajo, beauty is not about perception, is not in the eye of the beholder, but is the outcome of the artist's relationship to the world."
"Successfully locating the proper frame of mind and then acting is not, I think, about refusing to accommodate fear. It's about the cultivation of love."
February 19, 2024
Like the rest of my generation, I’ve grown up during the climate crisis, with discussions of urbanization, pollution, and extinction underscoring most of my memories. My earliest recollections of watching the news include videos of the flooding in New Orleans as Katrina rolled through. I remember reading about species hunted to extinction from the time I was about 7, and seeing the videos of animals drowning in the oil after the deepwater horizon oil spill.
But this is not unique to me or my generation. Lopez’s message to me was still ultimately hopeful, and deeply human. He recorded reflections of some of the most traumatic experiences of his own life, but it was never without reason. His record of Southern California changing around him, his experience surviving sexual assault, traveling to some of the most remote places in the world and experiencing life as it is changing around him was ultimately a deeply vulnerable account of how one man relates to the environment around him - socially and physically.
The strongest messages I got from Lopez’s collection was that environmental causes are not lost causes. This was emphasized in his thoughts about river protection in one of the final essays of the collection.
We humans persist in spite of the challenges set before us. We cause harm to the natural world, intentionally and unintentionally, but we are also part of it. And more than that, as our understanding of the world around us changes, we become more active in trying to save it from the consequences of our own actions.
Though this is my first experience reading Lopez’s work, I am saddened by his loss.
But this is not unique to me or my generation. Lopez’s message to me was still ultimately hopeful, and deeply human. He recorded reflections of some of the most traumatic experiences of his own life, but it was never without reason. His record of Southern California changing around him, his experience surviving sexual assault, traveling to some of the most remote places in the world and experiencing life as it is changing around him was ultimately a deeply vulnerable account of how one man relates to the environment around him - socially and physically.
The strongest messages I got from Lopez’s collection was that environmental causes are not lost causes. This was emphasized in his thoughts about river protection in one of the final essays of the collection.
We humans persist in spite of the challenges set before us. We cause harm to the natural world, intentionally and unintentionally, but we are also part of it. And more than that, as our understanding of the world around us changes, we become more active in trying to save it from the consequences of our own actions.
Though this is my first experience reading Lopez’s work, I am saddened by his loss.
January 29, 2024
"Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World" is the first Barry Lopez I've read and I'm hooked. Lopez' writing is personal, powerful, honest, and rooted in the Western Oregon of my youth. It was a sure thing I would enjoy his writing.
A world traveler and perceptive writer Lopez' environmental themes blend well with his humor and humility. A story about Chinook salmon on the McKenzie River on the Western front of the Cascades becomes a mesmerizing story of our deep connection to the natural world. Likewise, his youthful summers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, just over the pass from where I write this, provides a poetic ode to a time in our youth when physical frailty or weakness was not only distant, unknown problems far from our minds, but, indeed, did not exist in our world.
Lopez' writing is not always easy. He discusses at some length the abuse he suffered as a child and its impact on his whole life. It is not easy reading. But Lopez' writing makes it impossible to look away as much as one may want to. The story is disturbing and the pain deep and life long yet the reader comes away with a feeling of some sort of resolution. Such is the power of Lopez' pen.
I foresee much more of Barry Lopez' work in my future.
A world traveler and perceptive writer Lopez' environmental themes blend well with his humor and humility. A story about Chinook salmon on the McKenzie River on the Western front of the Cascades becomes a mesmerizing story of our deep connection to the natural world. Likewise, his youthful summers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, just over the pass from where I write this, provides a poetic ode to a time in our youth when physical frailty or weakness was not only distant, unknown problems far from our minds, but, indeed, did not exist in our world.
Lopez' writing is not always easy. He discusses at some length the abuse he suffered as a child and its impact on his whole life. It is not easy reading. But Lopez' writing makes it impossible to look away as much as one may want to. The story is disturbing and the pain deep and life long yet the reader comes away with a feeling of some sort of resolution. Such is the power of Lopez' pen.
I foresee much more of Barry Lopez' work in my future.
January 15, 2025
“Intimacy with the physical earth apparently awakens in us at some wordless level a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional and biological attachments to physical landscapes.”
The central theme in this collection is our and the author’s relationship with place.
Some perceive his attitude in this collection as “a man who has given up” - but that is not at all accurate. These were the words of a dying man who wanted to impart the only hope and wisdom that he could - to love other humans better and develop intimate relationships with the only planet we have been given. Can we face the gathering darkness - embrace fearlessly the burning world? To endure we will have to stretch our imaginations and learn to trust each other as we search for the boats we forgot to build! He encourages us not to give in to despair, but to face our fear unflinchingly.
In his essay on the scary abundance of water, it was difficult to read of his childhood belief that Pacific Palisades would always endure as I watch that area burn to the ground on the news. His great fears realized.
His recollection of childhood sexual abuse held nothing back and was, honestly, difficult to read - but it was such a profound and thoughtful take on trauma.
A fantastic conclusion to his writing career!
The central theme in this collection is our and the author’s relationship with place.
Some perceive his attitude in this collection as “a man who has given up” - but that is not at all accurate. These were the words of a dying man who wanted to impart the only hope and wisdom that he could - to love other humans better and develop intimate relationships with the only planet we have been given. Can we face the gathering darkness - embrace fearlessly the burning world? To endure we will have to stretch our imaginations and learn to trust each other as we search for the boats we forgot to build! He encourages us not to give in to despair, but to face our fear unflinchingly.
In his essay on the scary abundance of water, it was difficult to read of his childhood belief that Pacific Palisades would always endure as I watch that area burn to the ground on the news. His great fears realized.
His recollection of childhood sexual abuse held nothing back and was, honestly, difficult to read - but it was such a profound and thoughtful take on trauma.
A fantastic conclusion to his writing career!
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