Books and Ideas

Books are like people in an airport. They come in all sizes, shapes and colours, arrive and depart by the thousands. Writers of books are frequently asked “now ‘which book influenced you the most?” Or “what is your favourite book?” The question is always irritating on many levels, not the least of it is the absurdity for it assumes it is possible to reduce the thousands of books that have traveled with you to one or two ‘essentials’ and that somehow the rest don’t quite count. Just as an airport would be an empty building without passengers, it is the same way with literature and books. Books, the whole raucous, pushing, howling, ugly, beautiful, whining, sniveling, laughing, smiling, romantic, historical, terrible astonishing pile of them are needed to give meaning to a reading life.

Each one has its own important, irreplaceable place and together form the library of life. I look down the bookcases of memory and remember the adventure of my childhood. They are adventure books about children being brave and resourceful without an adult in sight. Some of them even have the word ‘adventure’ in the title. Enid Blyton wrote a whole series with the word ‘adventure’ smack in the middle of the title, The Castle of Adventure, The Mountain of Adventure and so on. I loved them all and read them until my eyes grew sore and my body stiff from stillness.

Down another bookcase, there are the first books where I discovered Acadie. La Sagouine, (the Washerwoman) by Antonine Maillet, Mourrir a Scoudouc (Death at Scoudouc) by Hermeningilde Chiasson made me reflect on and understand the experiences and feelings of my grandfather and grandmother were not isolated but belonged to the history of a people. But these are only small corners of my airport of books.

Two of the books which preoccupy me right now are as different again as Enid Blyton is from Antonine Maillet. Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas and The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Both authors are gone. Lewis Thomas in 1993 and Jane Jacobs recently. Lives of a Cell was first published as a series of essays in the New England Journal of Medicine between 1971 and 1973; The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961.

I’ve been wondering why these two books have suddenly jumped out of the passing crowd to remind me that they exist. There’s always a reason. Reading doesn’t happen by accident and usually has as much to do with what’s happening in the world as what’s happening between the pages.

Lewis Thomas begins his book with this small, elegant statement about man’s exalted place in the natural world. “…it is an illusion to think there is anything fragile about the life of the earth, surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia.”

The planetary paradigm shift which confronts us at the beginning of the 21st century is summed up in those few words. The great empires of human civilization, from Aztec to Soviet to American, have always behaved as if the natural world existed in one immutable place and the human existed in another. This has been the dominant view since someone penned the Genesis section of the Bible and remains so today in the halls of both the White House and the House of Commons.

Lewis Thomas, in the space of 148 pages, demolishes the idea without every exhibiting anything more violent than the Christian virtues of gentleness, tolerance and love. Jane Jacobs holds the same opinion on the intimate and irrevocable connections of the natural world to the human. Her perspective, however, is not from the mitochondria but from a much more familiar one, the lives of people and their greatest habitations, cities. Her thesis expressed in Death and Life... is the same as that of Thomas at the cellular level. Human beings, if they wish to continue, need to rethink how they live.

Unlike Thomas who died before the extent and power of the climate crisis presently upon us had been revealed. Jacobs died in full and complete awareness as her last book Dark Age Ahead makes clear. But what makes Lives of a Cell and Death and Life... so attractive is that they are not glum. They vibrate with confidence. Both are written with the calm and clear assurance of writers at the height of their physical and intellectual powers. Jacobs has a more pedestrian style and writes from a social science perspective rather than a physical but each constructs and deconstructs the world around them with the aplomb of a Charles Dickens taking dictation from God. 

It is this vast confidence that draws me to the books. So often today, books dealing with the biological and social consequences of humanity’s ‘me first’ approach to dealing with all other living species reek with the wail of Cassandra.  These books are graced with such intelligence, yet unflinching confrontation of reality that it is impossible not to feel, as Thomas and Jacobs must have when they first wrote them, that humans can overcome anything. They just need to think a little.

This is a good thing to feel at a time when great empires are fracturing and climate change headlines bark from the front pages of our newspapers.