Morning Revisionings

Seeing beauty

Autumn is here in Tallahassee. Have I already told you that? It feels like I have. Maybe because I keep thinking about autumn, and how different it feels when you’re far away from the place you’ve been before.

It’s strange, because I have spent many autumns in new places, but this autumn feels different, knowing I’ll be in Tallahassee for several years. Knowing that this autumn will be one of many. Right now, I am sitting inside the sheer embrace of the screened-in back porch. The sun inches itself to apes, winking through the branches of the giant trees in our backyard. I’ve tried to identify the trees. One is a kind of maple. The broad, green leaves of the other two are subtly different, and one of the trees is bearing clusters of little round fruit, each gathered like tiny bouquets on its branches. Giants lengths of ropy kudzu hammock themselves across an expanse of blank space; its leaves are turning yellow.

In this place the daytime temperatures climb into the eighties, but unlike summer, mornings and evenings are cool. I’ve been walking in the mornings. There are two solid loops in my neighborhood, which equal two miles if I do them right. No sidewalks. Lots of dogs behind fences.

This morning I encountered a black woman watering the rose bush near her mailbox. I’d stopped at the rose bush the day before and taken a picture of the bright pink flowers decorating the spindly branches like stylish buttons. I told her so, and she pointed out the dead stalks; a fungus. I’ve been thinking of cutting it down and starting over.

Something different about my neighborhood is its racial and economic diversity. Everyone lives here. Some of the houses look expensive, others run down. One set of neighbors is a black family with a young child, the other an older white couple who recently dug up their perfectly good lawn in order to replace it with thick pelts of new lawn, identical to the lawn they had dug up. Three houses down is a big white family with a hound dog who sometimes escapes his rope and greets me on my walks. If he’s tied up when I pass him, he bays forlornly, which sets off all the dogs within hearing distance. There’s a basketball hoop up in the street, and the neighborhood kids play ball there in the afternoons.

When I first moved here, and for a couple months after, I missed my Seattle neighborhood, with its landscaped native gardens and ample sidewalks. I don’t miss it much anymore. I can’t walk to a store from my house, or a coffee shop, nor can I access a beautiful waterfront view by walking six blocks south. There aren’t little patches of blooming flowers, each labeled carefully so passerby can learn their names. In Seattle I was assaulted by beauty on my walks. I loved it, for sure, but I also felt like an outsider economically. I knew I’d never be able to buy a house there, or really settle into a home. On my walks I also passed so many dug-up lots or half-built or almost-completed boxy new builds, each of a them a signal to me that the city was changing irrevocably, and the old houses were making way for new dwellings which promised more housing but denied fair rent prices. More housing for whom?

On my daily walks now, I am reminded

of the power of presence, and the constant presence of beauty. Beauty is everywhere. There is nowhere I haven’t been able to find some sort of beauty. Here, it is often auditory— the constant sounds of birds, which increases in volume as new species arrive to their wintering home. The breathy sigh of the wind as it funnels through dry-leafed branches. The fluttering of leaves as they float down to the ground. The squawk of a stellar jay, croak of a frog, and flitting chirps of warblers and cardinals.

Beauty doesn’t have to be pristine or manicured or even cultivated. It just happens. It is always here, ready to be seen and adored and to evoke emotion and feeling. Beauty isn’t always happy or pretty. Prettiness and beauty are not linked. Beauty can be ugly.

From the trees behind my house comes a strange guttural sound. I don’t know what it is, and that’s part of my beauty right now— not knowing what things are. That process of discovery is something I cherish.

So, I ask. What is beautiful where you are? I invite you to take a little walk or stroll or wheel or whatever mode of movement transports you, to go outside and smell the air and open your ears and listen. What is there? What is beautiful in the moment? Is there something you’ve been missing? What is simple and easy? What is changing? How do you feel inside?

Go, and report back.

STUFF

gwen e. kirby @gwenekirby

Fellow writer Twitter people! What are your favorite short novels? Like, under 200 pages-ish. I'm particularly interested in recent examples!

Last week, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Adam Gopnik wrote about it for The New Yorker. I haven’t read Ernaux’s work yet. Ironically (only for me), one of her books, The Possession, came up in my queue via the Libby app the day after I learned of her Nobel Prize. She was on my list, to read. A list that grows long as I am inundated with workshop readings and class readings in my PhD.

The thing is, Ernaux’s work is short. She writes short works. I’d reserved The Possession as an audiobook, and its length is only two hours. I could listen to the entire thing on one long walk. I will listen to it and get back to you about her, specifically.

Annie Ernaux

But really, I am here to say that short books are undervalued, I think. Novellas should be a genre distinct from novels. I love me a short book, and sometimes I think it takes more work to make something short than to write a tomb of 1,000 words (I’m wrong; both are hard).

The tweet a few paragraphs above is a treasure trove of short book suggestions, but I’ll drop a few here as well— Dorthe Nars’s Karate Chop is one of my favorite book of short works, but doesn’t really count as a short work because it’s a compiled collection, I think. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is in my top five favorite short books. As is Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. Albertine Sarrazine’s Astragal is another favorite. Then there’s Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and James’ The Turn of the Screw. Oh, and Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea, which stuns me with every read but overshadows another excellent short book she wrote, Good Morning, Midnight.

Wow, I could really go on here. For a very long time. Many, many of the books I adore are on the short side. Short works force a writer to really think about how their sentences are working. How much a sentence can hold within it. I think that’s one of the reasons I love them— in am excellent short book, there is rarely anything that isn’t doing something for the story. Every sentence, paragraph, white space; they are all working together to create something. Whereas with a longer work, there’s room for dead weight.

Don’t get me wrong here; I love a long book, too. Anna Karenina is one of my all time favorites, and 1Q84, which was denigrated for its length, was a joy to read (though there are a few scenes that are, well, drawn out).

Another ask: tell me what your favorite short book is. Or several of your favorites? I want to hear all about them.