THE PINE ISLAND PARADOX* BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE AN APPRECIATION - PART SEVEN

The final essay in The Pine Island Paradox

reprises the image of musical harmony we found in "The Moral Equivalent of Wildness." Moore remembers standing up to sing in church, her sister beside her. A couple hundred people rose with them:

"all open their mouths at the same time. Ordinary air sucks past lips red or wine or pallid, and when the air blows back out of all those lungs, it has become one amazing, beautiful thing."

If we can create such harmony out of thin air, why can't we live in harmony too, Moore wonders. We come so close, she says. "We almost find a way to live together like a song." And then:

"again and again, we fail: a small meanness or prolonged war, a lonely child or a poisoned river. This is the sorrow in the heart of all music."

In the final paragraph of that final essay, the final paragraph of The Pine Island Paradox, Moore recalls a time when she and that same sister were at the Oregon coast "in a wind so strong it almost flattens us." They fought their way to the top of the headland where someone had posted words from Tennyson's poem "Crossing the Bar:" Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark. How many years ago, Moore wonders, did we sing that song with the church choir?

"Do you remember?" I ask my sister, and of course she does. We stand in the protection of the lighthouse and try to sing, but cry instead in the perfect joining of headland and poetry, and wind and rain and sorrow, sisters and the surging sea.

*

Moore's prose sings. It swoops and soars and swings. It moves from image and experience, from the small things, the casual motions, through narrative and language to meaning: the meaning of what is, the connections between things, the implications for us as moral creatures. Is this philosophy? Only of the best sort, grounded in experience, in humankind's longings, in our noblest impulses. Is this "nature writing?" Yes, of the kind which includes us, rather than excludes us; we are part of the equation and, being the moral beings on this spinning mudball, we bear special responsibility, the responsibility to care and to care for. Moore's prose does not whine, but rejoices. She is not "preaching," but musing; this reads like meditation. Moore chews her words and chews her ideas; hers are the sinewy kind of sentences I like.

Let me urge you to beg, borrow, or buy a copy of The Pine Island Paradox, to listen carefully and to hear Moore out, to argue with her where you must, then to ruminate on these matters in your own fashion as fully as she did. Every morning the sun comes up and we have the opportunity to re-make ourselves, and hence to re-make the world. Pine Island would be a good place to start re-making oneself.

Let me urge you, indeed, to buy several copies of The Pine Island Paradox and give them away. The wisdom in Moore's prose cannot be scattered too widely.

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*Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox. Milkweed Editions, 2004. Order from Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55415; (800) 520-6455; www.milkweed.org . $20.00/hardcover.

Comments

[beth]

Remarkable and heartfelt appreciation, Tom. Sounds like a must-read book for me. I hope you sent a copy of this essay to Moore.