Tag: richard powers

Miracle. All of it.

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A leatherback, she’d once read, must cry two gallons of water every hour, just to keep its blood less salty than the sea.

— Richard Powers, Playground: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company, September 24, 2024)

Notes:

  • Photo via Pexels: River Nelson-Esch
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”
  • Book Reviews:
    • NPR (July 7, 2024): “Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Powers plunges deep into the ocean in ‘Playground”
    • NY Times (Sept 22, 2024): “First He Spoke for the Trees; Now He Speaks for the Sea”
    • The Guardian (September, 29 2024): “Playground by Richard Powers review – an electrifyingly beautiful tale of tech and the ocean”
      • “That Powers is an outstanding writer is hardly news. But with Playground, he proves himself a wizard. This novel is one long, clever magic trick. You approach the end thinking you have everything figured out. But then the author does something quite extraordinary – a move it would be criminal of me to give away. Let’s just say the reader is left reeling as the book’s conceit is revealed and the novel ascends to the plane of true, indisputable greatness.”

Walking. On a spot with billions of years left to run.

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689 days, almost consecutive. Almost in a row. This daybreak walk at Cove Island Park.

I pause for a moment, looking up at those clouds, their reflection on that water, standing in this silence —  a sacred moment, on sacred ground, could it possibly be a religious experience? For a non-church goer? For one wobbling on a fence?

You’ve stood in this same exact spot over 100x in the past 2 years.

What is that you feel?

“Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.” Richard Powers, The Overstory.

 

DK Photo on Weed Ave, Stamford, CT. 5:54 a.m. March 25, 2022. More photos from this morning here.

Walking. Great Point & Hallowed Ground.

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Friday, September 17th, the streak was broken.

I hadn’t known the numerical significance of it at the time — I was only regretting that the day would eventually come.  So, when I ran the math this morning, it was startling.

Start date May, 5, 2020. End date September 17, 2021. 500 days. 500 consecutive days of morning walks at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row. 

500 days of Anything is Something.

A joke, sad, and tiresome that it is, swirls around the house that I get anxiety attacks when I’m outside of a 50 mile radius of home. So, between the breaking of the 500 day chain, and the Road Trip outside of the comfort zone, we were swimming against unease.

Eric (Son) drove. Susan was the co-Pilot.  And I sat in the back, quiet, moping, thumbing through my iPad.

Fast forward. To our last morning in Nantucket. Steve & Andrew (Rachel’s future Father-in-Law and Fiancé) drove me out to Great Point in Nantucket. To get to Great Point, it was 15 minutes on the road followed by a 30 minute drive on the beach. Continue reading “Walking. Great Point & Hallowed Ground.” →

Miracle. All of It.

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For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here? And what would that change in our sense of who we are and where we’ve been dropped down?

And they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger. And I wasn’t sure where I would go with this ultimately in the book. And one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.

Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.

— Richard Powers, from Ezra Klein’s Podcast Interview titled “This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift.” (September, 28, 2021, The New York Times)

Notes: (1) The podcast and/or transcript is long but worthy.  (2) Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. (3) Photo Credit

Bewilderment

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Forget the critics.  Read this book.

Richard Powers, Bewilderment: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company, September 21, 2021)

NY Times Book Review: “In ‘Bewilderment,’ Richard Powers Smothers Nature With Piety.