Sam Johnson was once asked how many books he had read.
"What, through?" was his reply.
Readers like him are very annoying to writers like me who like to go on and on and on and on about a favorite topic. It's so much fun, after all, to chew on a favorite topic, so we keep writing long after we've made the point.
Still, I read like Sam. Whatever is worth gleaning from most novels can be found in the first few pages. The rest is enjoyable the way waves on a beach are. Or, if the author is clever about plot, we find our selves driven to know what happens. Like good clickbait (the one thing all liars have in common; this one weird trick to losing weight fast; do this and women will find you irresistible, etc...), an unresolved opening drives us to the last page where we find "the answer." Jesus had children. Harry survives. Wowzers. I never would have guessed.
As of the other day, I’m 232 pages into Richard Powers’ 502 page novel The Overstory. For the first time in a year, I am reading a book that I almost want to finish. The waves are fun because they tease at a question I have about questions and answers
Last summer I had set The Overstory down with great annoyance after a few sentences. I found the opening coy, foreshadowy, grandiose, annoying, and pointing toward polemic. No particular thought or plot direction rustled my cynical heart enough to make me curious, or suggested that Powers would deliver anything more than “Trees are Smart and Good; People are Baaaaaad; Tree-Loving People are Good But Flawed”. Mind you, I believe that trees are Smart and Good, and People are Flawed. But I also believe that good and bad are about the most boring attributes of people.
Picking up The Overstory again last week, I soldiered past self-important (and previously terminal) clunkers such as “A chorus of living wood sings to the woman” towards the hope that he would deliver something beyond cliché, something insightful, or just something engaging. Stumbling on “Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering,” I found a reason to continue.
What Powers does with this idea, other than noting trees can live for a very long time, I don't know yet. But I have spent many years now trying hard to avoid answers as best I can. Socially. Politically. Emotionally. Even career-wise. If I'm tempted to settle on some answer, I try to tell myself "It's more complicated than that, isn't it?"
Yes there are problems with this approach to life. But they are fewer, I think, than finding, and sticking with, definitive answers.
Without cascading into arguments over definitions ending with doubt over the copulative, let me suggest, playfully, that Life might not be about Answers, but about Questions. Questions are Processes. Answers are Ends. Process is Life. Ends are Deaths.
And to channel Aria Stark, our only prayer to Death is "Not Today." I'll have all the answers tomorrow, and not before then.
By seeking and finding the right questions, I think, we all can thrive in life. Consider how many Solutions and Answers humanity has had over the millennia, how nearly all of them have been tossed to the wayside as wrong or partial. The New may look more appealing, but it is usually no better than the Old. It's just different. And when we get used to the New, the Old looks odious. The old looks foolish. The old looks wrong. It often is. But it is more complicated than that.
Maybe we need to be asking questions about things we already feel we have answers to? Answers and Solutions are what demagogues offer. To solve the drug problem, we need tougher laws. To solve the crime problem, longer sentences. To solve racism, we need ... How well have our solutions and answers worked so far? Some good yes, in some cases; but it's more complicated than that. Winning seems elusive. Our response remains a process.
We do have a sense of progress. Few of us would want to live in 15th century Europe, for example. No antibiotics or painkillers. No indoor plumbing. Death in childbirth was common. But are we any happier now? Is happiness truly the absence of pain? if so, why do we repeat "no pain no gain" when it comes to a career? Do we thrive better today? We certainly live a bit longer, have more opportunity for travel, and the wealthy have more toys. Our lives are more complex now: the one common vein in the progress of civilization.
Questions give us the spark to wake another day. Knowing which questions to ask, in which circumstances, and to which outcomes is the key process of life. When done with words, the result is the human soul. The answers we obtain from these questions may have momentary usefulness, but they are always partially wrong: this is the knowledge dividend that leads to the happiness of humility. Ending the question, having the answer, and asserting it is the core of pride and ignorance, the engines of the death of the soul.
Perhaps globally, we have become more certain about nearly everything. About what is wrong. About what should change. About who needs to do what and what words we should use to do it.
However, Certainty is inversely proportional to Agreement.
In this age of information overload, I rarely see an honest, open and humble request for dialog. We just already know the answers, don't we? We already have the solution: Our Team Must Win. And then what? Gulags for the losers? Until the losers rise up and take back the present, rewrite the past, and hurtle us towards another future based on predictions of what we can never guess? Lather, Rinse, Repeat? But I digress, out of the book and into the streets, where life is really led.
For Powers, the answer trees seem to offer to the question of sun and water is not a word salad (words are a human specialty, symbols used to represent reality as a structured dream), but cellulose, vast communities of living cambium cells, inter-species cooperation, and everything else that goes into a forest. Outside of humanity, wordless answers to wordless questions is how all life works. Lovely, simple, serene.
Water and sun are all that humanity has as well. (And ourselves. We seem obsesses with ourselves.)
What answers do we produce with our questions to sun and water?
By suggesting questions are the fabric of life, Powers makes me want to keep reading.
I’m curious to see if Powers bungles it all by ending with the message that Trees Have the Answer. Admittedly, tree-kind has been around for a lot longer than humanity. I would certainly agree they have been asking more time-tested, enduring questions than we have. But their questions can't be ours.
As a woodworker, I have been something of a tree coroner. I take their dead bodies and turn them into furniture. I love the dead bodies of trees—the beauty and usefulness of wood never ceases to enrich my life. A living tree is something else. I have questions for and about them.
Did you make it through to the end?
Posted by: Peter C | October 02, 2020 at 09:38 AM
Not yet.
Do the trees win?
Posted by: Strother | October 03, 2020 at 07:36 AM