Down Another Path Every Summer
Summer Chronicles #7*
By Jim Miller
There is nothing quite as beautiful, foreboding, and mysterious as a path through the deep woods. As a child, I had the good fortune to hike on trails everywhere from the forests of Northern Michigan to the California Redwoods. During those wonderful times, I was intoxicated with the richness of the world, drunk on the deep green, the dense smells, the thrilling sightings of an animal track, a waterfall, or some other unexpected marvel.
Nothing has more capacity to spark my sense of wonder and imagination than a passage through thick woods lined with ferns or wildflowers, twisting and turning its way forward into the unknown. The sound of the wind moving amidst pines, how your feet feel on damp or dry earth—every little detail of the lush landscape fills me with deep joy and reverence.
That way beauty and adventure lie. That way risk and danger. That way the beginning of something.
As I grew up, I revisited many of the sites of my childhood wanders and saw the landscape with new eyes. It was a different path as a teenager than it was in my childhood or what it was again in my forties as I guided my own son along the way.
In In Praise of Paths: Walking through Time and Nature Torbjorn Ekelund observes that:
We think of a path as the way to something else, toward the future and whatever lies ahead. But a path also points backward, to the time and the place we came from. When we walk on it, we are taking part in a universal and timeless act. We walk through the landscape that has formed us and the people who have formed us and those who came before us, through work and leisure time, curiosity, and escape.
The essential truth that Ekelund is onto here is that the path truly traveled is less instrumental than it is elemental. It does not get us someplace; it IS the place. Our traveling on it is the point. On paths we join the steps of countless others who have tread there. To walk a path is to walk through history. It connects us with nameless others across time.
Paths stand in contrast to roads built across an untamed landscape or in cities that have obliterated nature in that they are formed and reformed by nature over time. They can be washed out by floods or buried by mud or denuded by fires. Some, however, have been with us for centuries, used by indigenous peoples and colonizers, loggers, naturalists, tourists, hunters, or random wanderers. Hence, in a way, the path belongs to no one and everyone.
Coming back to the personal, I think of paths I have tread across the journey of my life as parts of myself, places where I was a certain person with my father, my brother and sister, my friends, my wife, my son, and others. And upon each return visit another self pays homage to the present self and with each step another person is born anew, carrying with it the traces of a myriad of moments that piece together to make the next one of becoming possible.
Step by step, moment by moment we go as we pass through whatever time we have left.
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Summer Chronicles #7*
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.