2025 read #11: The Green Ages by Annette Kehnel.

The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel

Translated by Gesche Ipsen

281 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2024)

Read from January 29 to January 31

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I expected this to be a book about social ecology and its evolution through the centuries. The lovely cover, the title, and even the jacket flap copy certainly suggest an examination of crop rotation, coppicing, and common land, and how those traditional lifeways might be integrated with renewable energy for a wholesome solarpunk future. The book touches on some of that, but it isn’t Kehnel’s main focus.

Instead, Green Ages is mostly concerned with economics: communal abbeys, beguinages, microfinance, circular economies, and so on. Important things to think about, just not what I anticipated. And Kehnel does little more than introduce some ideas; she rarely digs deeper. A typical topic line: “Diogenes and the origins of the ‘tiny house’ movement.”

Like other academics with competent but uninspired prose, Kehnel writes in a faintly patronizing, “let’s learn about this together” voice directly out of a freshman textbook. (Or perhaps that’s just the style common to translations from German; I recall that Forest Walking had a remarkably similar vibe.) A typical sentence: “They were medieval influencers with a high impact factor.”

Overall, Green Ages was worthwhile, but didn’t quite deliver on the vibe of its packaging. I’m really not an economics girlie, so I can’t say for certain, but I feel like this book doesn’t offer much there beyond broad generalizations. Perhaps I’m merely disgruntled. Now, though, I want a book that actually documents the ecology of medieval lifeways.

2024 read #38: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

280 pages

Published 1974

Read from March 13 to March 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Classics of nature writing are haunted by the outlines of everything we’ve destroyed.

In the fifty years since Pilgrim was published, we’ve lost uncountable numbers of birds; insect populations have been in free fall; amphibians have collapsed. The very soil has become sterile, quenched by herbicides and pesticides. Where Dillard pondered the vastness of divinity and the cruel beauty of nature under troublesome clouds of starlings, you might be lucky to see a scatter of sparrows today. Most of Tinker Creek itself, Dillard’s “one great giver,” today seems a ghost watershed, squeezed between the culs-de-sac and fulfillment centers that sprawl out from Roanoke and the I-81 corridor.

The spirit of intellectual Christianity lurking throughout this book is also pretty much extinct. At least it is in America, where the loudest elements of the faith champion a skin-deep literalism, fully commercialized and dead inside. Atheism and Christlike Christianity alike are capable of transcendence, the ecstatic revelations of humility before the infinite; the greatest exaltation an American evangelist can know is browbeating a waitress on a Sunday afternoon.

At its heart, Pilgrim is a book-length consideration of the cruelty within nature’s beauty, a rumination on how any conception of a creator god must incorporate the blood-spill as well as the birdsong, the parasite alongside the petals:

For if God is in one sense the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God is also the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial as the atmosphere. 

From an atheist’s point of view, of course, the matter is much clearer, though no less awe-making. We are intelligent animals reliant on our deeply enmeshed social bonds; beauty (or rather the appreciation of it) is the newcomer, yet vital to us nonetheless, as vital as the sometimes bloody workings of mere survival. We are part of nature, inseparable, and that is glory.

I can respect intellectual Christianity, but it has died back faster than the insects have, these last fifty years. In contrast to either atheism or intellectual Christianity, contemporary evangelicalism presents a pop-up picture book understanding of the world, a paper cutout universe merely six thousand years deep, reducing us all to children play-acting for our abusive sky-dad’s jollies. Animals, plants, nature as a whole — all of it recedes into the background art from a Dick & Jane book. I can only imagine how many contemporary Southern Baptists in Dillard’s western Virginia would decry her spiritual masterpiece as evolutionist sacrilege.

I’m pretty sure Robert Macfarlane name-dropped this book in one or more of his tributes to the titans of nature writing past. It’s more than worthy of such notice. Every line jolts or shimmers with the mystery of language, scintillating or concealing in intricate patterns like cloud-shadow tumbling ahead of the wind. At least once a page, this book takes my breath away:

Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?

Like the best nature writing, Pilgrim is about learning to see; and, having seen, sensing how much else exists beyond our awareness. The present is elusive, recursive, a revelation quickly lost in other stimulation. I’m reminded of The Anthropology of Turquoise or A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A magnificent book.

2016 read #92: A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom.

A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom
340 pages
Published 2010
Read from November 15 to December 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

What we commonly understand to be the Enlightenment, declares Blom in a moving epilogue, is a bourgeois dilution of the radical ideas of the real thinkers of the Enlightenment -- a dilution that elevated the "moderate" sensibilities of Voltaire and Kant to better fit the ideals of a "rationalistic," industrial society, while discarding the inconvenient positions of Diderot, Holbach, Raynal, Helvétius, and others who frequented the philosophical discussions in Holbach's salon, who formed the core of the true Enlightenment. The philosophes at Holbach's dinner table advocated instinct, the drive for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, moderated and directed by reason and empathy -- a society without gods or priests or aristocrats, without imbalances in wealth or power, without exploitation of the poor or colonization of less-well-armed societies around the globe. This radical Enlightenment, says Blom, was snuffed out by the Revolution in the hands of Robespierre, who seized upon the rival philosophy of Rousseau, a philosophy that permitted autocratic tyranny and religious power in pursuit of some abstracted ideal of "natural man."

Blom sketches a fascinating but often repetitive tale of these thinkers and philosophers as they cross paths with each other and with the wider scenes of history. His personal bias can be blatant at times, between his sustained character assassination of Rousseau and his obvious hero-worship of Baron Paul Thiry Holbach. A chapter detailing the frustrated sexual fetishes of Rousseau is entertaining, but makes for an overly reductive psychosexual case for Rousseau's philosophical convictions. While Rousseau deserves to be taken down quite a few pegs, I'm not sure that exploring his desire to be whipped and punished is entirely relevant to that task.

Rousseau, inadvertent father of the Romantics, holds a place in the philosophical foundations of conservationism and outdoor recreation, by crooked inspirational paths reaching through Muir and beyond, so it was startling to learn, for the first time, how ghastly his "social contract" really was, how reprehensible his personal and family life (siring four children with his mistress, and making her leave them as foundlings, all while writing his highflown ruminations on "proper" childrearing) were. That kind of character assassination -- using his actual positions and his handling of those in his power to portray his ugly character -- is a completely legitimate angle for Blom to take, and he handles it ably.

The overall impression left by A Wicked Company in this Age of Trumpism is a depressing realization of how many of the issues we face today -- ignorance, exploitation of the poor, dehumanization of women, religious and monetary power, colonialism, repression of empathy and compassion, suppression and distortion of healthy sexuality -- were recognized and debated over two centuries ago in a salon in Paris, and how little progress has been made toward realizing the free and happy state of brotherhood and equality dreamed by the philosophes. The Enlightenment ends in the suburbs, Diderot proclaims, and that is especially true in 2016.

2016 read #76: Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Translated by Lewis Galantière
229 pages
Published 1939
Read from September 30 to October 4
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

On one hand, it is fascinating to observe the enduring themes and imagery of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince -- childish openness to wonder and imagination, the delicate beauty and sorrow of mortality, individual beings adrift about the universe on isolated planets -- anticipated here in his memoirs, arising from his experiences in the air and on the ground in the years between the World Wars. On the other hand, Wind, Sand and Stars precipitates the inevitable disillusionment that comes from discovering that an author was the product of his time, mummified in the same casual racial and gendered prejudices of his contemporaries.

Stars is most engaging when Saint-Exupéry is in flight, with his precise descriptions of night navigation and the upper wilderness of clouds suggesting the universe of tiny planets explored by the Little Prince. The closing chapter, a series of sketches from the Spanish Civil War illustrating his philosophy of that ineffable "Spirit," the sense of wonderment and awareness, that turns men into men, is effective stuff as well -- even if his philosophy is little more than a weedy patch of Romanticism, blooming late in the Modernist age, decrying the soulless world of clerks and factories and extolling the virtues of science, art, and rural peasantry. What sets Saint-Exupéry apart from most romantics (in my admittedly meager experience) is his esthetic and philosophical appreciation for invention. An airplane or a locomotive or a factory is merely a tool, its value or its worthlessness determined by how well it serves a man and Man -- and to what ends.

The language is, of course, purposefully gendered: Women, in Saint-Exupéry's proto-Hemingwayan world, are coquettes and objects to be won, hearth-tenders to come home to, beacons for the lost adventurers to find their way home. Observing two women fortifying a Communist roadblock in Spain, he makes sure to note that they don't seem to know how to hold their rifles. The chapter on "Men of the Desert" indulges in some colonialist notions, including a long description of the "contentment" an enslaved Senegalese man feels. I take that a tiny bit out of context -- the passage is part of a larger philosophical musing on the "crippling" effects of a "humdrum life" and captivity, relating to depictions of commuting clerks at either end of the book -- but the stench of colonial power pervades the entire chapter.

2015 read #6: The Just City by Jo Walton.

The Just City by Jo Walton
368 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 31 to February 7
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Content warning: Discussion of rape depicted in the book.

My first exposure to Plato was the PHI 101 course I took during my first semester as an undergrad. The professor was dynamic and engaging, but his weakness, appropriately enough, was for philosophical debate. Plato (and by proxy Socrates), together with the rest of the Classical Greek philosophers, was only supposed to occupy the first three weeks of the course, but Professor C. let the class get out of hand in their enthusiasm for going for Plato's jugular. Six weeks into the course -- almost halfway through the semester -- students were still standing up in the lecture hall to expostulate on Plato's errors and why he was just plain wrong about something. I was new to the classroom experience, and certainly contributed my share of derailment -- I thought I had a brilliant response to the question of whether any thinking being might choose the bad over the good, but found myself lost in a completely irrelevant (and public) description of my depression -- but even at the time I understood that there was no reason to argue so vehemently against Plato, because arguing against Plato is literally the history of the rest of Western philosophy, so we only had to wait for Professor C. to get around to teaching us the arguments that had already been made. Unfortunately, we spent so much time arguing with Plato ourselves that Professor C. had to cut substantial portions of the syllabus to get back on track; we never covered anything later than Nietzsche and William James, and we only touched on them because Professor C. had a fondness for James and used him for the capping lecture at the end of the term.

In all those endless weeks of undergrads pwning Plato, we never read a word of the Republic. We read selections from Crito, Phaedo, Meno, and possibly another dialogue, but the Republic was a chunk of our greatest-hits-of-philosophy reader that we never touched. I regret the spotty nature of my philosophical education, but until now I hadn't thought I'd missed much by not reading an additional Platonic dialogue -- it was that stuff that Professor C. had to cut to make room for all our Plato hate, everything in between the Stoics and Descartes, and again between Descartes and Nietzsche, and again after James, that I wish I'd learned. But when I heard that Jo Walton, one of my favorite authors, was about to publish a two-book science fantasy about Greek gods and the establishment of Plato's Just City, I counted down the days until my library's copy of the first book would arrive.

Walton says the idea of writing a novel about time travelers establishing the Just City occurred to her way back when she was 15, which makes all the dinosaur novels and Star Wars fan-fiction I was writing at 15 seem pretty silly. But whatever her original idea had been, she uses the trope of the Just City to explore, on multiple levels, issues of consent, autonomy, and the equal significance of persons. (Incidentally, I just used the word "trope" correctly, for perhaps the first time in the history of the internet. Suck it, TV Tropes. You changed the meaning of a perfectly good word, and frankly you aren't that interesting a website.) Unfortunately, as the god Apollo, incarnate as a young man named Pytheas in order to learn about these topics for himself, admits, "Explaining [these issues] to humans wouldn't be possible. I could try to inspire people to make art about it. Poems. Sculptures. But it's one of those things that doesn't go easily into the shapes of stories."

Consent, autonomy, and equal significance are vital issues, and throughout the book, one gets the sense that Walton is trying to do a public service in creating a science fantasy book (the sort of book, presumably, 15 year old Jo would have loved to read) that addresses them in a sensitive but direct and unswerving manner, a didactic correction to all those horrid genre books full of casual rape and misogyny. It makes for stiff and artificial reading at times. A scene in which one of the time-traveling masters of the city is raped by another is carefully written to demonstrate that arousal is not a token of consent, and to show how poisonous and predatory the idea of "But she really wanted it" is, but the dialogue between rapist and woman is as naturalistic as an undergraduate gender studies essay. I'd rather these issues be explored in any way possible, naturalism be damned, but I agree with the words Walton put in Apollo's mouth: it doesn't go easily into stories. It's important that authors address these issues, but The Just City shows that the art of explaining consent and equal significance is still in an awkward, fumbling phase. In time, I'm sure, genre authors will have a better grasp of how to discuss autonomy and consent (for all I know literary authors figured this out long ago). The Just City is an important step in that direction, but as art, I'd hardly call it inspired.

2014 read #89: Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
192 pages
Published 1937
Read from September 20 to September 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

In terms of scope and the sheer scale of imagination and audacity of conception, this book surpasses everything I've ever read or even heard of, outside the more esoteric and convoluted cosmologies of Hinduism, mystical Buddhism, and mystical Judaism. The career of our physical universe, from Big Bang to heat death, encompassing every stage of evolution and the evolution of intelligence -- from brutish, befuddled ol' Homo sapiens up to a universal cosmic mind united in contemplation of the eternal Star Maker -- is only the foundation of an ultimate revelation: a pantheistic conception of our universe as but one particle of creation "objectified" from the Star Maker in an eternal, cyclical act of self-creation (or "divine self-midwifery," in Stapledon's phrase), but one stage in a timeless process of creative growth from crude dimensionless bubbles of rhythm and music to some ultimate cosmos beyond our (or the author's) conception, in which universes such as ours were as mere atoms in its substance. It is a thrilling vista, a truly bold attempt to grapple with the possibilities of science fiction as a philosophical medium, and an equally bold effort to imbue the scientific scale and cold brilliant majesty of the universe with something like an essentially human spiritual framework.

As with all such attempts, Stapledon's conception of the creator remains pathetically anthropomorphic, despite his protests that he must describe in human terms what defies human understanding. I can't fault him for failing to describe the indescribable. Nor can I do anything but praise Stapledon's imagination, which again glosses over in mere paragraphs or bare lines breathtaking science fictional concepts that would produce whole volumes and subgenres in the hands of subsequent writers.

No, my problem with Stapledon (beyond the taint of eugenics and flawed "race theory" of his time) is how dreadfully dull and dry it all is. Those mere lines and paragraphs, bold though they may be, carry the emotional intensity of a graphing calculator or a slide rule. "Immensity itself is not a good thing," Stapledon admonishes, yet seems to ignore that dictum in his own storytelling -- if such a word even applies to an antiseptic examination of countless eons, scarcely interrupted by so much as a pulse of life or character. The early going is positively Swiftian in character, lampooning certain ideological follies by exaggerating them into alien cultures. But nothing approaching a "story" is evident, beyond the story of the evolution of cosmical consciousness itself, which makes for dreary reading.

2014 read #88: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Foreword by Gregory Benford; afterword by Doris Lessing
324 pages
Published 1930
Read from September 16 to September 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Within the last year or so, I read words from some recently famous sci-fi writer or editor, to the effect that Olaf Stapledon had been an enormous influence on the Grand Masters of science fiction, and his modern-day obscurity is a shame. Such words nudged me toward checking him out, together with the prospect of learning something -- anything at all -- about the evolution of genre fiction between the heyday of Wells and the first stirrings of the New Wave. Some say Star Maker is his masterwork, and I'll be reading that soon enough. Others say Last and First Men was his crowning achievement. If this is true... well, there were times during the last few days when I thought it might be better that Stapledon be forgotten.

Last and First Men is a bizarre book, fragments of brilliance and Siddhartha-esque spirituality scattered through a dry-as-dust narrative recounting the next 2,000,000,000 or so years of human evolution. On one hand it's fascinating to observe early appearances of themes and imagery that would be staples over the next two generations of speculative fiction: sentient virus clouds predating Star Trek, metapsychic unity long before Julian May, grisly and outré scenes of far-future ecology that would do Dougal Dixon proud. On the other hand, the book makes heavy use of then-current "race theory" and eugenics, as well as repugnant notions of "racial senescence" and the supposed vitiating effect of tropical ecosystems (dreamed up as a posthoc "theory" for why the "Nordic races" conquered the world, I imagine). And just think -- this Stapledon guy was progressive for his time. There's a description early on in Last and First Men, depicting the crude and appalling "Americanized" near-future, which features a ritualized Sacred Lynching -- all portrayed with anthropological detachment. In 1930, this would have been a scathing criticism of American culture and de facto politics. Reading it now, the effect is merely horrifying.

Gregory Benford, writing perhaps in the flush of the "Tear down this wall!" speech, advises in his foreword to skip the early chapters, eliminating the "antique quality" of Stapledon's interwar prognostications. Skipping the Americanized Planet, however, glosses over some sharp commentary and unexpectedly perceptive extrapolations of America's inevitable failure. I won't type out extensive quotations, so I'll share one of my favorite pages as two pictures, here and here. Stapledon's thoughts on the world's immediate future are certainly quaint, but what he gets right is startling from seventy years' distance.

Boring, horribly racist, full of stuffy pseudo-Buddhist philosophy -- why did I rate it so highly? I don't know. I guess the ending passages got to me despite my cynicism. And it's hard to entirely hate a book that incorporates both a Lindberghian cult of the airplane and a race of monkeys using posthuman "submen" as beasts of burden and of warfare. Plus -- one last thought, I swear -- it's fascinating to see how many eons Stapledon assumed would pass before any human descendant fashioned workable interplanetary travel (almost half a billion years before the first attempt to travel to the moon, and only then when instigated by planetary catastrophe). Not that that deserves a higher rating on its own, but I love the historical interest of it all.

2013 read #90: Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire.

Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
166 pages
Published 1759
Read July 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I love cynical, bleakly funny works written in the faux-naive voice of Enlightenment satire. Not that I've read many, mind you, but Gulliver's Travels -- once I was old enough to seek out and somewhat digest the unexpurgated version -- was an early favorite, and Candide turns out to be pretty darn good too. At least, the "actual" Candide was satisfyingly acerbic. My edition also had a "Part II," which according to Wikipedia is variously attributed to Thorel de Campigneulles or Henri Joseph Du Laurens. That extra bit of fan-fiction, the authenticity of which is never questioned in my copy, was noticeably inferior, blunting the edge of Voltaire's nasty hilarity and introducing an anti-Enlightenment message in the person of Zenoida, which even as I was reading it felt at odds with Voltaire's attitude in "Part I." I can't entirely despise the non-canon fan service, as the chapter "Candide Meditates Suicide" was one of the funniest portions of the entire book, but on the whole "Part II" was still an odd interlude that diminished the overall effect of the novella.