Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” — Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow The second world — the world of literature — offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart. Illustration from The Book of Memory Gaps by Cecilia Ruiz Oliver terms this the “intimate interrupter” and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too. Nature was her first language and she managed to translate it into words on paper that make me step outside and look up at the trees in awe. Her appreciation of the world and its quiet miracles never fails to stun me. There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived as fully,” Proust wrote in contemplating why we read, “as the days we think we left behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favourite book.” And yet childhoods come in varied hues, some much darker than others; some children only survive by leaving the anguish of the real world behind and seeking shelter in the world of books.I've discovered a kindred spirit in Mary, and felt like she was speaking to me alone while I read. To read about a renowned poet who shares similar thoughts and dreams as my own was a comfort I never knew I was looking for. This book and Mary herself has given me hope, in my dreams, and in the possibilities of the world. but i was dearly mistaken. the way oliver writes about nature in such a descriptive and beautiful way makes me love it so much more. the way she writes about art and literature and what that means to her is so heartfelt and subjective and beautiful. how she wrote about whitman and poe and blake and other acclaimed poets and what they meant to hear felt so personal and amazingly written. In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny." I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple-or a green field-a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing-an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness-wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak, to be company. I become engrossed in every leafy, creepy or flying inhabitant of the wood," wrote Emma Mitchell in her regular sojourns into the mending powers of nature,"And with each detail that draws my attention, with each metre I walk, the incessant clamor of daily concerns seems to become more muffled."

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

And because of the commonalities that beautiful language and inspired thoughts have with poetry, (and because she’s Mary Oliver) people fawn over them as if they mean something. And yet they don’t. Folks, I love nature, but I love it the way E.B. White loved it, the way that Larry McMurtry and his characters love nature. As in. . . Damn, would you just look at that view?! New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1983, pp. 10, 22; November 25, 1990, p. 24; December 13, 1992, p. 12. I received this book in exchange from an honest review from NetGalley. Thank you to the author, Mary Oliver, and the publisher, Penguin Press, for this opportunity.