Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike; is one of the most amazing and thought provoking book, that flows like a river and the music touches our soul. 55th of 2021.
"Have you every paid attention to Tolstoy's language? Enormous sentences, one clause piled on top of another. Do not think this is accidental, that it is a flaw. It is art, and it is achieved through hard work. " - Anton Chekhov
This is a beautiful book. One that I will read over and over. Brian relishes in the wonder and beauty of everyday things. He find simple things, examines them fully and relates them to us as beautiful moments. Published after his untimely death at 60 years, the book is in six parts:
I. That the small is Huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love
This covers his children, and hummingbird, wales, shrew, tigers, leap, eating dirt, The Anchoviad, Illuminos.
II There was a kid who was and Isn't but is
This covers his childhood, his parents, the first kiss, typewriter.
III We can take off our Masks, or, if we can't do that, we can squawk through the holes in them. A Squawk is Better than Nothing
This covers his interview to himself, his regrets, and few notes and prayers, on not beating cancer, pants, The Hawk and many more.
IV This Blistering Perfect Terrible World
Beginning with 'Heartchitecture' - the architecture of heart, have many points to ponder, our daily murder, Irreconcilable dissonance, How its part of marriage, like death is part of life untill we die, on Leabarlann, the four gospel - the four books that was in the shelf of his wife, and the God.
V We are better than we think
God again, Cool things, Bird, beach, and many more
VI I walked Out so full of Hope I'm sure I spilled Some by the door
Last days and prayers
Few remarkable quotes from the book are:
“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”
“But you cannot control everything...All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference...You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow...That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.”
“Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their harts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold and they cease to be.”
“I pray that they would be happy. I pray that they will find work that is play. I pray that their hearts will not be stomped on overmuch—enough to form resilience, but not enough to crush their spirits. I pray that they will live long and be blessed by married love and be graced by children and maybe even grandchildren. I pray that their minds hum and sing and do not stutter and fail. I pray that they will not be savaged by illnesses, but be allowed to live healthy and happy for years beyond my ken and my own life. I still pray to die before they do. I still say thank you, every day, every single day, for being granted children at all”
“Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.”
“We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”
“Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.”
my Birthday gift to me.
One Long River of Song demonstrates what Doyle's writing has always demonstrated, that when you find the courage to pay attention and be open to love, you can trust that 'doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken.
Brian Doyle seems to have been a person who was in love with life, all aspects of life. And he seems to have lived his life fully. Doyle wrote novels and stories but essays, published in a variety of outlets, were his mainstay. Before his death in 2017, he agreed to having his friend David Duncan create this final collection of some of his essays.
The focus of many, if not most, of his essays, here and elsewhere, is the spiritual realm and the natural world. It appears that Doyle viewed the world through a spiritual lens so that even essays not overtly spiritual take on that tone. Not in any “heavy” or preaching manner, but more that of a constantly seeking, thankful and inquiring man.
Doyle loved the natural world, was especially fond of raptors and wrote about his interactions with glaring owls and swooping hawks. His sense of humor infiltrates his writing constantly, as does his love of family. All generations become subjects, lovingly. There is no meanness here, none at all. There may be unhappy or negative moments, but Doyle doesn’t deal in petty or repressive as so many do.
Watching Brian's heart songs pour out, relishing his whitewater sentences, in the Foreword titled 'A Mystical Project Born of joy and Desperation', DJD, Lolo say, " I witnessed a daring writer and friend embodying the sublime paradox that Dogen described in these words: 'The path of water is not noticed by water, it is realized by water....To study the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to awaken into the ten thousand things.' As much as any man or woman I've ever known, Brian James Patrick Doyle reveled in the act of awakening into the ten thousand things. " One Long River Of Song: Notes on Wonder was my 35th of 2021.
"When Brian Doyle unusually fast and proficient writer, passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty-first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon." This book is a collection of his Non-Fiction essays, published after his death.
At a moment when the world can sometimes feel darker than ever, Doyle's writing, which constantly evokes the humor and even bliss that life affords, is a balm. His essays manage to find, again and again, exquisite beauty in the quotidian, whether it's the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, or a husband's whiskers that a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every morning. Through Doyle's eyes, nothing is dull.
David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to quiet glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." A life's work, One Long River of Song invites readers to experience joy and wonder in ordinary moments that become, under Doyle's rapturous and exuberant gaze, extraordinary.
God
Blistering perfect terrible world.
"I am a guy who wanders around looking for nothing in particular, which is to say everything".
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