Oh, The Weather Outside is frightful .....

We here in Indiana are caught in an unexpected blast of frigid arctic air, and I'm all for staying inside by the fire with a cup of steaming hot tea and a good book (or the computer). Right now I'm
enjoying the pleasures of a down comforter and a properly prepared cup of Lapsang Souchong - it is a smokey, black tea who's fragrance is earthy and reminds me of primal woodland living ...

On days like this, when a person is able to indulge in the luxury of "staying in by the fire" the best comforts are often old friends, and in the case of books some of my favorite and familiar reads are those whose authors can carry a person off to another place and time with the power of description. One of my favorite descriptive passages comes from the pages of Hugh Lofting's "Dr. Dolittle," and centers about the ability of Jip, the dog, to interpret the world around him by using his super powers of scent:

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"Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he
started muttering to himself,

'Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed
laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my
mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of
'em--cubs; and--'

'Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?'
asked the Doctor.

'Why, of course!' said Jip. 'And those are only a few of the easy
smells--the strong ones. Any mongrel could smell those with a cold in
the head. Wait now, and I'll tell you some of the harder scents that
are coming on this wind--a few of the dainty ones.'

Then the dog shut his eyes tight, poked his nose straight up in the air
and sniffed hard with his mouth half-open.

For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He
hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak,
it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream.

'Bricks,' he whispered, very low--'old yellow bricks, crumbling with
age in a garden-wall; the sweet breath of young cows standing in a
mountain-stream; the lead roof of a dove-cote--or perhaps a
granary--with the mid-day sun on it; black kid gloves lying in a
bureau-drawer of walnut-wood; a dusty road with a horses'
drinking-trough beneath the sycamores; little mushrooms bursting
through the rotting leaves; and--and--and--'

'Any parsnips?' asked Gub-Gub.

'No," said Jip. "You always think of things to eat. No parsnips
whatever.'

The Story of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofton


Another author who's powers of description often catch my imagination is Anne Rice.
I found the following passage on line as an excerpt from the book, "The Servant of the Bones."
The description of this mountain house, fitted out for survival through a winter of writing caught my attention for two reasons; first, I am terribly fond of cabin living, particularly when the cabin is surrounded by tall pine forest and nestled in the mountains, and I was especially captured by the completeness with which the author had inventoried the supplies needed to sustain survival of both body and soul. I like the idea of roasting sweet potatoes over hot coals, and I loved the idea of all the writing and computer supplies ... though the list of essentials is now dated by the technical advances in computers and their accessories - my daughter has a 500 gig external hard drive for the computers which she shares with me, and I'm sure I couldn't find a drive for a small floppy disk in any of my new machines. Never-the-less, I was fascinated by the thinking .... "in my perfect world what would I need to have in order to survive and be content?" In the instance of Anne Rice's mountain refuge, I adore the idea of duplicate copies of all her books lining the walls, but I would also want some sort of media center which would afford me the delight of listening to favorite music and the pleasure of watching favorite motion pictures. I might want a the company of a cherished friend to toss ideas around with, and there is nothing like a nice warm dog to keep one's bed cozy and toasty on a chilly mountain night.

For Anne Rice's character, the madness of the modern world was an environment to be escaped; I can understand that desire, but having been isolated in mountain wilderness with only a very small and inefficient radio at hand, I find that I at least want to know what is going on in the world, and how I should prepare to cope with it. That last bit of nagging insecurity may be a result of 9/11, and my sense of isolation and helplessness over the shock of awakening to "pentagon attacked, FAA has shut down all air traffic." I was thankful enough for phone calls from my friends, and the coverage of television news to tell me what my sense of survival needed to know. The Rice book describes a set of actual news events, things which seem so insane one can understand the desire to escape hearing about them - I've often wondered how Ms. Rice would have fit 9/11 into the fabric of her story:

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"Understand I am not insane or even eccentric by nature, and have never been self-destructive. I didn't go to the mountains to die. It had seemed a fine idea to seek out the absolute solitude of my northern house, unconnected to the world by phone, fax, television, or electricity. I had a book to complete which had taken me some ten years, and it was in this self-imposed exile that I meant to finish it.

The house is mine, and was then, as always, well stocked with plenty of bottled water for drinking, the oil and kerosene for its lamps, candles by the crate and electric batteries of every conceivable size for the small tape recorder I use and the laptop computers on which I work, and an enormous shed of dried oak for the fires I would need throughout my stay there.

I had the few medical necessaries a man can carry in a metal box. I had the simple food I eat and can cook by fire: rice, hominy, cans upon cans of saltless chicken broth, and also a few barrels of apples which should have lasted me the winter. A sack or two of yams I'd also brought , discovering I could wrap these in foil and roast them in my coal-and-oak fire.

I liked the bright orange color of yams. And please be assured, I was not proud of this diet, or seeking to write a magazine article on it. I'm simply tired of rich food; tired of crowded fashionable New York restaurants and glittering party buffets, and even the often wonderful meals offered me weekly by colleagues at their own tables. I am merely trying to explain. I wanted fuel for the body and the mind.

I brought what I needed so that I might write in peace. There was nothing peculiar about all of this. The place was already lined in books, its old barn wood walls fully insulated and then shelved to the ceiling. There was a duplicate here of every important text I ever consulted at home, and the few books of poetry I read over and over for ecstasy,

My spare computers, all small and very powerful beyond any understanding I ever hope to acquire of hard drives, bytes, megabytes of memory, or 486 chips, had been delivered earlier, along with a ludicrous supply of diskettes on which to "back up" or copy my work.

Truth is, I worked mostly by hand, on yellow legal pads. I had cartons of pens, the very fine-point kind, with black ink.

Everything was perfect.
And I should add here that the world I had left behind seemed just a little more mad than usual."

Servant of the Bones, Anne Rice, 1996