A Couple Book Reactions...

because what else can you do if you've got a broken arm? Before it happened, I had been reading The Righteous Mind--Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, a moral philosopher using a lot of social psychology methods to look at the complicated issue of morality, and how it is constructed. 

However, you don't have to be a Ph.D in Philosophy (or anything else) to know that if you start out with a false premise, you will end up in a false place. Mind you, I totally buy his rationale that we react to stimulii and then justify what we did. But he is like most humans--too comfortable with the notion that whatever promotes the human agenda, human proliferation is acceptable/moral. I beg to differ, and of course, he's not writing about the environment, but that's the one aspect no writer can afford to ignore. I read to page 300 before I quit in disgust,  entranced by his methods and the discussion, disgusted with his conclusions.

I hate novels, esp. American ones. They seem to be the primary locus of the self-absorbed attitude that characterizes too many of us, that Kardasian "you-deserve-the-best" and the myriad varieties of self-pity that flow from it, that more and more animate public discussion. It is this inchoate whining rather than assessing and analyzing our systems and the weaknesses in them that are American literature.

So I was quite put-out that I ended up with a novel that I thought was a memoir of Murasaki, the Japanese woman who wrote The Tale of Genjii, the first novel in the world, in the 11th century. I got a a copy of it in the weed-outs of a school library where I was teaching in Korea or Turkey. And of course, it was very Japanese.

Though it is properly characterized as a historical novel, The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby

reads like an honest, intimate memoir. She is steeped in Japanese culture and history, and is the only American who has worked as a geisha. All these creds give the book its genuine sound, which I adored, and the fact that it doesn't have a happy-ever-after ending. What I loved most was the relationship all the characters in this book with the environment. Sometimes you find this in American Indian literature--this constant primal awareness of the environment as a reference point. She "quotes" a Chinese calendar she has which says things like: "In this week the monarch butterflies find a place suitable for cacooning." 

As so many of us live in cities and towns, we have little or no insight into a what a real relationship with the environment entails. Sorry, I am not likely to lend this book out though I got it free from the Cascade Library because I really must read it again.