For My Green-Thumbed Friends...

     For those of my friends and family who find peace and refreshment by digging in the dirt: here are Nathaniel Hawthorne's thoughts on gardening.  When he and his wife were newly married, and had rented an old parsonage owned by the Emerson family, Henry David Thoreau planted a kitchen garden for a wedding gift.  Hawthorne really, really liked it...

     Not that it can be disputed, that the light toil, requisite to cultivate a moderately sized garden, imparts such zest to kitchen-vegetables as is never found in those of the market-gardener.  Childless men, if the would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed...should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy to maturity, altogether by their own care...An hour or two of morning labor, was all that it required.  But I used to visit and re-visit it, a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny, with a love that nobody could share nor conceive of, who had never taken part in the process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world...

     Gazing at them, I felt that, by my agency, something worth living for had been done.  A new substance as borne into the world.  They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of and rejoice in.

--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

"I recline upon the still unwithered grass, and whisper to myself: -- 'Oh, perfect day! -- Oh, beautiful world! -- Oh, beneficent God!' And it is the promise of a blissful Eternity; for our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It beams through the gates of Paradise, and shows us glimpses far inward." 

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse

Book Review: Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss

Very nice book for what it is: a children's story (though many children of our age wouldn't have the patience for a 472 page-long story.) It is a very good vocabulary-booster for one's young ones as well. The details of geography, flora and fauna were hilariously outlandish, and the wrecked ship that carried the family must have been an ancient supertanker, given the fact that it had EVERYTHING KNOWN TO MANKIND in its hold, including a supply of shot and gunpowder that would last the family more than a decade. But other than the humorously impossible bits, it was a good children's adventure. I was glad to spend the time with my ten year old son as we read it together. His frequent outbursts, comments and speculations proved that the book had thoroughly grabbed his imagination. For that I am grateful!

I might add a friendly warning for those of a squeamish nature with regards to animals, guns and hunting: the book might have appropriately been subtitled "SHOOT IT!" Every time the boys see a new and interesting animal, their immediate and automatic response is to shoot it dead. One needs to keep in mind that this was a book written in the 19th century, and sensibilities were much different back then. If one reads the book with tolerance, a good story is still very much in store.

Book Review: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

Obviously, this book is significantly dated, people of the time just on the verge of imagining some amazing things.  Very little of what we'd currently call science fiction is in this book; the scifi elements are mostly the backdrop against some incisive social commentary which is very relevant for both that time and this.  Purely as scifi I'd score this only 3/4 stars, but it's what the authors are saying as social criticism that pushes it higher.

Though this book was written in the early '50s, my mind couldn't help but go forward more than a decade, to the set of television's "Bewitched."  I watched that show a lot as a kid.  You'll recall that the husband, Darren Stevens, worked as an advertising executive.  I got nearly as many laughs from the zany ad campaigns Darren and Samantha cooked up as from any of the magic-related hijinks I saw.

Push the McMann & Tate ad firm into the future, and make them sinister.  Now you have a picture of Fowler Schoken Associates.  This ad agency goes beyond the art of punchy slogans; they employ psychological manipulation and drugs in their products which make you addicted to them, and to other products they sell.  Culture, literature, and true education are deviant and blasphemous; decent people just consume and they're content with it.  The advertising elite have the real power in society; even the President of the United States defers to them.  They have enslaved a consuming underclass that lives in brutish conditions and virtual slavery.  What's worse is that the elite has convinced them to be more or less happy in their slavery, except for a few, like the "Consies" (conservationists), that dare to see beyond the illusion and call for a richer, simpler, more purposeful life.

I couldn't help but think about a few mega-retailers in our own time who seem to have permeated every aspect of our lives.  The movie "WALL-E" also forced itself into my memory, as a mega-conglomerate so corrupted the public and the earth that the planet was made uninhabitable by enormous mountains of trash.  This book apparently sounded the warning first, a call to seriously re-examine our materialism before it's too late.  Well, actually, Thoreau was saying this sort of thing long before, but this is the first time I know of that the warning was presented in the scifi genre.

All in all, a very worthwhile book to read; I see why Library of America (I read this book in their "American Science Fiction": vol. 1) published it as a classic.  For our time, it's really archaic, but for the '50s it was great scifi and timeless social commentary.