“(…) literature – (…) wants and strives to be a true part of the composite human record – that is, not words but a reality.”
“Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight.”
Upstream by the American poet, Mary Oliver is a collection of essays in which she reflects on the connection between her life and the natural world as well as the world of literature. Throughout this collection she ruminates on the phases of human life: childhood, adulthood, and ageing. Marked by questions as to how we choose the life from among all the lives possible to us, Upstream is such a heartwarming collection of thoughts and profoundly moving observations on life by one of the greatest contemporary poets.
The natural world and literature “were the gates through which [Mary Oliver] vanished from a difficult place.” The nature “was full of beauty and interest and mystery (…) and – the world of literature offered [her] (…) the sustentation of empathy”. For the author “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”.
Oliver’s best friends lived in their writings; writers whose booked she voraciously read were her closest friends.
“(…) how could these makers of so many books that have given so much to my life – how could they possibly be strangers?”
Reminiscing on the importance of books in her life, Mary Oliver reminds us about her ability to build bookshelves in her room wherever she lived in order to surround herself with works of literature. She read constantly, by day and into the night from her early childhood until older age. She read her books with diligence, she read the way “a person might swim, to save his or her life”.
Walt Whitman, for whom, as Olver noted, loneliness was his constant companion, “his necessary Other”, had a special meaning in Mary Oliver’s childhood – she referred to him as her brother she did not have. In her childhood she spent time in the woods always carrying books in her knapsack among which there had to be always work by Whitman. Oliver learnt from Whitman that “the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter and in which to feel. The poem is company.” Literature was Oliver’s lifelong companion.
The thoughtfulness in writers’ writings was particularly appreciated by Oliver, especially in works of Shelley, Fabre, Wordsworth, Poe, Blake, Emerson, Carson. Through their written words, she lived her life with these writers and referred to them as dreamers who “lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace (…); they were thoughtful”. In one of her essays on Emerson who himself was touched deeply by the magnificence of the past seen in European cities, Oliver admits that her literary and emotional life was impoverished by his absence.
When it comes Edgar Allan Poe whose life was deeply shaped by life-grief, Oliver points out in another essay dedicated to him that “the subject of Poe’s work is the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within in”.
Reading her thoughts it is apparent that Mary Oliver could not be a poet without the natural world. For her the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Both the world of literature and natural world are an integral part of her whole existence.
Throughout her essays she also delves into the meaning of passage of time, when our parents are gone, our childhood home is sold or lost, books we gathered are lost. Growing old and the irreversibility of ageing for which, Oliver observes, “people have no readiness, no empathy” is discussed at length in this collection.
Burden by anxiety, “anxiety for her own soul”, Mary Oliver also explores the importance of child-like curiosity, solitude, and ordinariness and their impact on her creative work. For Oliver solitude is a paramount to her writing and “the ordinariness is the surety of the world”, the world inhabited, as she observes, by “dreamers and shoemakers”.
This collection of essays is very soul-soothing to read. Oliver’s observations on the nature and literature are reflective and subtle. I very much enjoyed this collection, especially reading Oliver’s essays during time of heightened anxiety helped me calm my tired heart and mind.
“Knowledge has entertained me, and it has shaped me, and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I/ think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.”
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