A Gathering of Leaves, livre ebook

A lively and wide-ranging collection from David Bentley Hart, A Gathering of Leaves invites readers to rediscover the sheer joy of reading.

David Bentley Hart brings together reflections on everything from literature and music to baseball and tortoises in his newest book. The pieces roam freely in subject and tone—sometimes serious, sometimes playful—but are united by Hart’s distinctive voice: witty, attentive, and unafraid of digression.

Rather than advancing a single argument or theme, Hart lets each essay follow its own path. Short notes sit alongside longer meditations; close readings give way to cultural commentary or unexpected enthusiasms. Hart focuses on the joys of style, observation, and thought in motion. A Gathering of Leaves is a book for readers who enjoy the art of the word—writing that informs and entertains, wanders and returns, and reminds us why reading itself remains a pleasure.

How important it is, on the journey of life, to rely upon the power of animals to point the way toward spiritual wisdom and liberation. No depression is so deep that it cannot be at least somewhat alleviated by the sight of a dog behaving like a dog or a cat behaving like a cat, or of a squirrel, groundhog, or chipmunk pursuing its high vocation to be a squirrel, groundhog, or chipmunk. No state of spiritual bondage is so redoubtable that the song of a bird cannot slightly loosen its fetters. And then, of course, there are our testudinate friends . . .

Every few years or so I re-read Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. There are any number of reasons to do so. It is, of course, a masterpiece of nature writing, a glorious specimen of refined eighteenth-century English prose, at once lyrical and punctiliously precise. It is also a crucial text in the history of modern natural science (or “natural philosophy”), remarkable for the exactitude of its observations and the insight of many of its theoretical proposals (White was the first naturalist, for instance, to deduce and describe the vital role of earthworms in fertilizing, renewing, and harrowing the soil). And, needless to say, it is the greatest literary monument to the honorable tribe of British parson-naturalists, to whom the modern life-sciences owe more than can be said.

And yet, all this being granted, for me a great part of the appeal of the book is the knowledge that, as I read it, I shall once again make the acquaintance of a certain tortoise who is one of the more prominent figures in the text—a creature White describes with a mixture of mock-severity and all too obvious affection. For most of the book, the tortoise is presented as a male—he goes by the name of Timothy—but it seems that even as scrupulous and observant a naturalist as White could be deceived by the innate pudency of a carapaced anatomy. Timothy, it turns out, was actually a Timothea.

Anyway, there are some delightful passages dedicated to this noble reptile. One appears in the Natural History proper:

SELBORNE, April 21, 1780.

DEAR SIR,

THE old Sussex tortoise, that I have mentioned to you so often, is become my property. I dug it out of its winter dormitory in *March *last, when it was enough awakened to express its resentments by hissing; and, packing it in a box with earth, carried it eighty miles in post-chaises. The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I turned it out on a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden; however, in the evening, the weather being cold, it buried itself in the loose mould, and continues still concealed.

As it will be under my eye, I shall now have an opportunity of enlarging my observations on its mode of life, and propensities; and perceive already that, towards the time of coming forth, it opens a breathing place in the ground near its head, requiring, I conclude, a freer respiration as it becomes more alive. This creature not only goes under the earth from the middle of November to the middle of April, but sleeps a great part of the summer; for it goes to bed in the longest days at four in the afternoon, and often does not stir in the morning till late. Besides, it retires to rest for every shower; and does not move at all in wet days.

When one reflects on the state of this strange being, it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together in the profoundest of slumbers.

While I was writing this letter, a moist and warm afternoon, with the thermometer at 50, brought forth troops of shell-snails; and, at the same juncture, the tortoise heaved up the mould and put out its head; and the next morning came forth, as it were raised from the dead; and walked about till four in the afternoon. This was a curious coincidence—a very amusing occurrence—to see such a similarity of feelings between the two Φερεοικοι—for so the Greeks called both the shell-snail and the tortoise.

(excerpted from chapter 10)

A Brief Introduction

1. Non Compos: Extracts from the Court Record

2. America’s Team (or: The New York Yankees Are a Moral Abomination)

3. On Writing English Prose: Ideals, Exemplars, Rules

4. Birthday Greetings for Marcel

5. Goethe’s “Orientalism”

6. ​​The Georgia Peach

7. Nabokovian Ruminations: Four Notes

8. The Peach Blossom Spring: A Translation (and apologia)

9. The Saint James Bible

10. Encomium for a Tortoise

11. By Sea-Girls Wreathed

12. Nothing at the Bottom: Four Notes on AI

13. Wings of Light: On Translating Proust

14. La règle du jeu: Five Notes on the Great American Pastime

15. Organism and Paradigm: Six Notes on Mind and Matter

16. Frank: The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole

17. Revenants: Five Notes on Photography and the Deep Past

18. O Divine Monkey!

19. Echoes From the Past: Four Notes Mostly on the Beatles

20. On Yūrei, Jibakurei, and Phone Booths: Four Notes on Ghostly Japan

21. A Tale Told by an Idiot

22. The Ethos of the Ants

23. Mr Toad and the Judge: On the Relative Merits of Kenneth Grahame and Cormac McCarthy

24. Thoughts on The Hindus: Wendy Doniger and the Rise of Indian Nationalism

25. "Dream-Journey to Mount Tian-Mu: A Sigh of Farewell"

26. Noli Episcopari: Four Notes on Political Power

27. Dispatches from the Antipodes

28. The Net of Indra

29. The Cunning of History: Seven Notes on Chance and Fate

30. Scattered Reflections: On Themes Cinematic and Televisual

31. Dispatches from the Flowering Fenlands

32. The State of Exception

33. Slouching Towards DC

34. L’Ébauche d’un homme civilisé: On Paul Valéry

35. Neither Wilt Thou Suffer Thine Holy One to See Corruption

36. On The Feast of Stephen: Six Notes on Boxing Day

37. Gods of the Wayside

38. Leave at Once, or I Shall Set the Dogs on You: Mon Doppelgänger, Moi-Même