After reading the first few
chapters to him, I asked, “Does this just seem weird to you?”
Luca has autism and words do
not easily form on his tongue. But he gave me this look that said, “I can’t
believe you’re traumatizing me with stories of people having to carry guns
because they fear bears. Not to mention the descriptions of slaughtering hogs.”
Several days went by, though,
and when I presented him with a new book as well as this old gem, he clearly
chose the latter.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
So, on we went, and the
farther we got, the more I remembered why I had adored these books as a child.
They are, in fact, as strange as any science fiction.
In one early chapter, Ma, Laura,
and her sister Mary are churning butter (churning
butter???), and Laura talks about how Ma has assigned to each day a
different chore: the clothes washing, the housecleaning, the bathing of the
children. Come Sundays, no one does anything, which must have been a blessed
relief to mothers everywhere but was nothing but anathema to fidgety kids. The
family’s food is grown or hunted, then cooked, smoked, or otherwise preserved,
and then tucked away. Maple syrup and honey represent special delicacies, and
store candy is “too pretty to eat.” Snow banks against their log cabin, then
the “sugar snow” arrives, and later the snow with dents in it because what’s on
the trees falls in great, melting dollops. Every time a friend or a neighbor or
a family member shows up at the gate, a kind of holiday ensues.
More than a few times as I
reread the book aloud, I wondered to myself, How is this working? Why am I still engaged? There is really nothing happening here.
But I think that’s exactly
what kept me going: the quietness of it all, the little miracles, Laura and
Mary holding hands at the edge of their field and looking on with astonishment
at the new-fangled but to us primitive threshing machine doing the work of
three men in one day. Here, in one image, is the advancing industrial revolution,
pushing ever westward.
When I was a child, in the
late sixties and seventies, Laura’s world was already three generations
removed. For my son Luca, the distance is probably four or five generations,
but it may as well be a thousand. And it’s becoming more distant at an
ever-increasing speed.
The reason I write about this
is not to promote the book series, though I have enjoyed rereading the first
volume. I am definitely not some Luddite who shuns technological progress (I’m
writing this on a laptop in my air-conditioned kitchen). A part of me is certainly
remembering why I wrote and self-published a novel last fall (Dream of an Inland Sea) wherein the young
heroine embodies some of this over-the-shoulder longing for the unspoiled
American West.
But mostly, I find myself thinking
about our speed—about what has been gained, what lost.
My sense is that, collectively,
we have a pretty good idea about what’s been gained. Most of us do a little jig
every time Apple puts out a new iPhone, and no one—not even the most backward
among us—wishes his or her laptop would get larger or slower.
What’s harder to grasp is what’s
been lost. But Little House in the Woods
brought me face up to it. When I read Laura’s descriptions of foods, I can
really taste them. Some of that may
be my own pure brand of nostalgia, I admit, but a part of this sensation is
also my understanding of the toil the family invested in growing and cooking
everything they ate, brought forward by the writer’s evocations. A tree
stump—which ordinarily seems obnoxious—looks different after Laura talks about
it. Suddenly, it is less pesky, more tolerable, even desirable—let’s all have multiple tree stumps in our
yards, I think, so we can jump from
one to another. Perhaps—I think, after reading the chapters entitled “Sugar
Snow” and “Dance at Grandpa’s”—I have failed to see my cousins in the magical
light with which I should view them (and all other people, for that matter);
maybe I’m not looking at what’s around me and should travel more often by wagon
or sleigh, or in the very least, take more walks; and have I ever really learned to cook, shouldn’t I
start my own garden and make more meals from scratch?
Somehow—maybe by virtue of how
slowly Ms. Wilder’s life moved—I slowed down. And this simple act made me start
to question the ferocious speed at which everything in my own life was and is
traveling.
I suspect we all have sudden
premonitions that the human mind is incapable of keeping up with the rate of
change occurring around us. And if you question that premise, consider the fact that when I sat down to
write this essay, my computer—in the course of about three minutes—fixed itself of some internal systems
issue. Most of us cannot fathom how it did that, nor do we care, but this
occurrence is the sort of thing I’m talking about. Once upon a time (say, a
mere ten years ago?), I might have had to take it to a computer guru, but not
anymore. The computer “knew” it was sick, diagnosed itself, and then, a
physician unto itself, performed its own successful operation. Thirty years
ago, who could have imagined that? It’s uncanny, fantastical.
And at the same time,
confounding. If I can’t grasp these advances, understand the processes
involved, it’s as if Time itself is tricked. Of course, it isn’t really:
someone somewhere understands what’s occurring inside my computer; they coded
it to do just what it did. But I, the lowly un-tech-savvy consumer, don’t
entirely get it. If enough of these kinds of advances occur simultaneously, I
begin to feel as if I am being pulled willy-nilly over the clockwork. Even if I
let go, allow myself to advance at the rate of progress, I start to feel
somewhat “played,” confused. Time isn’t obviously what I thought it to be, and
that’s fine. But my body also cannot seem to catch up. I experience a kind of
technological hangover. It’s low-level, but it’s real.
Luca has not told me what he
liked about Little House in the Woods,
but I think Laura’s descriptions of various processes might be key—even if
those very processes are no longer central to how we live. How does Pa maintain
his firearm and make bullets? How does Ma create butter pats? How would they
smoke venison or tap a maple tree and process its syrup? The slow unwinding of “how”
holds intrigue for us humans, and it counteracts the effects of technology’s
onrush. Those descriptions are also a legacy of sorts; they tell us we matter,
that the world is complicated, but there are those who will take the time to
explain in a way our minds can grasp. All of us can appreciate that, but
children, especially.
So the question becomes: How
do I honor in myself both slowness and speed? Because to live without slowness
is to forget my hunger for nature, for the minuscule awakenings in my midst,
for the full satisfaction of my senses, all of which seem essential to my
humanity. And to reject speed is to banish myself from ordinary company, to be
dumb in the face of ingenuity, to spurn the amazing apparitions of the creative
mind. To somehow incorporate within ourselves these different speeds is to
become acquainted with Beauty in the broadest sense, isn’t it?
I haven’t been able to answer
that question about how to honor both slowness and speed, but I can feel myself
pivoting around an answer. If I can reread a children’s book, and suddenly
become aware of the plasticity of modern life, how I’m not altogether
registering what’s going on, if I naturally ride the wave of the “new” and
gather up speed because that is what most fully surrounds me, then I clearly
have some work to do.
I will think on this. But
first, I will stop, go outside, smell the air, and survey the sky.
