Collected in 2020—Recent Essay and Story Collections of Note

Abstract

Collected in 2020—Recent Essay and Story Collections of Note Sam Pickering (bio) Scott Russell Sanders, The Way of Imagination: Essays. Counterpoint, 2020, 259 pp., $16.95 (paperback). Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays. The University of Georgia Press, 2020, 171 pp., $22.95 (paperback). Gilbert Allen, The Beasts of Belladonna. Slant Books, 2020, 156 pp., $34 (hardcover), $19 (paperback). Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter. Doubleday, 2020, 299 pp., $27.95 (hardcover). Scott Russell Sanders, The Way of Imagination: Essays Counterpoint, 2020, 259 pp., $16.95 (paperback) Scott Russell Sanders knows how to frame houses and paragraphs. Since the early 1980s, he has raised a library of novels, children’s books, and essays. The Way of Imagination is a collection of sixteen wondrous and wondering essays. The subjects range from the misuse of words to the importance of beauty. Sanders has long advocated living by the Golden Rule, urging people to care for and love others and to treasure and protect place, the home of future others. He is a literate latitudinarian, eschewing doctrine and embracing the spirit of Christianity—that is, the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. In the eighteenth century, in her Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve praised the moral effects of literature, writing about novels of sensibility, “Such books cannot be too strongly recommended, as under the disguise of fiction, warm the heart with the love of virtue, and by that means, excite the reader to the practice of it.” In a conversation with Jay Parini described in Borges and Me, Jorge Luis Borges remarked, “Novels and works of nonfiction rub spines, even mirror each other. Anything that passes through memory becomes [End Page 177] fiction, you see. Fictio—in Latin it means to shape.” In his nonfiction, Sanders writes as a man of feeling, warming the heart and shaping appreciation. He also stirs anger. Only money-worshippers spreading the sorcery of consumerism would shave the tops off five hundred mountains in Appalachia, blasting the countryside and turning streams and rivers into Acherons. In 1801, Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed, “In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by likenesses, among men, too often by differences. Hence the soothing love-kindling effect of rural nature—the bad passions of human societies.” While musing about the deleterious effects of climate change, collective thinking, and golden manacles, Sanders becomes a modern Coleridge. He walks through a forest and, marveling at trout lilies, spring beauties, and toothwort, disappears “into the looking.” “My inner chatter ceased,” he writes. “For a spell there was only a communion of delicate blooms, fragrant soil, birdsong, sunlight, wind, breath, all suffused with an energy that might be joy, might be growth, might be the pulse of life.” “As we degenerate,” Emerson lamented, “the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us.” Sanders writes as a student of Emerson and Thoreau and cites Thoreau’s inspiriting second chapter of Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” For years reading Thoreau rejuvenated me. But I have aged, and although I’ve long celebrated the gift of life, I cannot explain what I lived for. Nowadays the world is too much with me. In hopes of luring development and in the process promoting the chain-saw ethic of sawing down and smothering with asphalt, my town, Mansfield, Connecticut, recently adopted “Your Place to Grow” as its slogan. “A Place for Cancers to Grow,” my friend Josh said, emending the slogan. The cancers to which Josh alluded were physical and mental, these last the material things that cause people to become addicted to acquiring. [End Page 178] In inspirational contrast to me, Sanders embodies the invigorating will to hope. For him, imagination can be a panacea enabling humanity to escape pathless ways. He draws upon the eighteenth-century Quaker John Woolman, who believed that within every person was an “inner light.” To Woolman, the light represented the presence of god, that is, decency and goodness, guiding one through...