Loving some Barbara Kingsolver prose

I've loved Barbara Kingsolver for decades now (wow, am I getting that old?!?!?).  I love how she writes and what she writes about.  I just read her book of essays High Tide in Tucson (available from amazon.com at link) .  As you know, I like to mark really poignant phrases or sentences in the writing I read in an effort to help cultivate my own writing style.  Here are just some of the phrases and sentences I marked:

- on most important occasions, I cannot think how to respond, I simply do (8)
- to follow internal rhythms (8)
        --> this strikes me more now as I retype this because of my recent discussion with a good friend about her beginning to track her fertility cycle.  it is astounding how many women don't know about their own bodies.
- If we resent being bound by these ropes, the best hope is to seize them out like snakes, by the throat, look them in the eye and own up to their venom. (9)
- We invent the most outlandish intellectual grounds to justify discrimination. (9)
- Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the ski.  But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. (13)
   --> this is a PERFECT quote for the ideas of wants v. needs that are where any policy discussion and conflict resolution should begin
- let me be a good animal today (13)
- what matter is that I do have sisters and tomato plants, the essential things (15)
- I have taught myself joy, over and over again. (15)
- "Female rain," it's called in the Navajo: the gentle, furtive rains that fall from overcast skies between November and March.  That was weather to drink and to grow on. (17)
- What we're waiting for now is male rain.  Big, booming wait-till-your-father-gets-home cloudbursts that bully up from Mexico and threaten to rip the sky. (18)
- thrillingly drenched (19)
- Where nature rubs belly to belly with subdivision and barrio, and coyotes take shortcuts through the back alleys. (20)
- What a relief, to relinquish ownership of unownable things. (33)
- Time and again I find myself writing love letters to my rural origins. (38)
- In the final accounting, a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address. (43)
- The crossing is worth the storm. (53)
- I'm very quickly remembering what school is about: two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind? (58)
- Homemaking is moot if you're homeless. (62)
- in every profession, homewifery included, the necessity of feeling needed is the mother of inventive rules (63)
- I have friends and colleagues who talk to me about interesting things, and never carry concealed reptiles. (93)
- Like driving, parenting is a skill you learn by doing. . . . The skills you have going into it are hardly the point. (102-03)
- Children deprived --- of love, money, attention, or moral guidance -- grow up to have large and powerful needs. (104)
- If we intend to cleave like stubborn barnacles to our great American ethic of every nuclear family for itself, then each of us had better raise and educate offspring enough to give us each day, in our old age, our daily bread.  If we don't wish to live by bread alone, we'll need not only a farmer and a cook in the family but also a home repair specialist, an auto mechanic, an accountant, an import-export broker, a forest ranger, a therapist, an engineer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a doctor, and at least three shifts of nurses.  If this seems impractical, then we can accept other people's kids into our lives, starting now. (105)
- Power, like space, it seemed to me, would always get used.  People expand and bloat to fill it.  (110)
- In the face of a thriving, particolored world, this narrow view is so picked and absurd I'm astonished that it gets airplay.  (136)
- To judge a family's value by its tidy symmetry is to purchase a book for its cover.  There's no moral authority there. (141)
- children love to run in packs (144)
- "books," as a category of papery things with the scent of mildew, are paddling up the same stream.  (153)
- A craving for adventure afflicts my restless bones like some mineral they are missing. (158)
- dark, leggy maple woods (170)
- Poverty rarely brings out the most generous human impulses, especially when it comes to environmental matters. (174)
- To love life, really, must mean caring not only for the garden plot but also the wilderness beyond the fence, beauty and mystery for their own sake, because of how meager a world would be without them. (205)

Children Born Out of Wedlock -- What Does It Mean?

This morning, MSNBC posted an article originally published in The New York Times.  It centered on the rise of out-of-wedlock births, and specifically, the new measurement that over half of births to American women under age thirty are out of marriage.  The article coincides with a couple of recent studies and the publication of a new book written by a conservative critic of out-of-wedlock births.  Points of note include that marriage is becoming a new class divide:  it is only for those who have the most education.  Relatedly, 92% of college-educated women are married when they give birth.  Compare that with 62% of women with some post-high school education and only 43% of women who have only a high school education.  That's a difference of nearly 50%!  Astounding.

Besides the "luxury of marriage," the authors name some other possible reasons for the rise in children born out of marriage:  loss of single motherhood stigma, sexual revolution has reduced incentive to wed, increased safety net programs that decrease financial needs, thinner ranks of marriageable men (especially due to the job losses from the recession), women supporting themselves financially, and women not wanting to repeat the "marriage because of baby" they saw their parents have.

A particularly interesting point I noticed was the description that, for these women who are having children out of wedlock, "children happen."  I cannot imagine thinking in this vein.  Children are people who you will raise and who will interact with millions of people in their lifetimes.  They will go and do things and effect the world and everyone they touch.  Creating and raising a child takes incredible amounts of effort, and I cannot fathom being so apathetic about having a child.  While this sounds like the rant of a conservative, let me point out that one of the reasons I ardently support the right to choose is because I believe that people should carefully and intentionally have and raise a child.  If you aren't committed in that fashion, then don't have the child.  Having a child is a commitment of a lifetime, and I wish that more people took it as seriously as I see it.

On a similar note of judgment of how people "fail to appropriately invest themselves", this article points out that Americans are now looking to marriage for emotional fulfillment more than considering it as a practical way to support a family.  Thinking more on this idea, it seems that this expectation would be in line with why Americans have such a high rate of divorce (and general relationship failure).  There is this expectation (often unrealistic) that "you" need to make "me" happy, fulfilled, eternally walking on sunshine, etc., and when "you" fail at that, we need to leave each other.  There is a failure on our own parts to recognize the role we need to fill for ourselves in making ourselves content and that someone else is not responsible for our own happiness.  In addition, there seems to be a general lack of any sort of commitment in the sense that as soon as a couple hits a rough spot, they begin to look elsewhere to feel on that high again.  Of course these are not new ideas, but when  there are children involved, such continual changes and instability are very detrimental.  I'm wondering if the children of this very laissez-faire generation will actually swing back the other way towards very long-term commitments in order to have the stability we need to succeed . . .  or are we damaging society to come to exist in a perpetual search for the next best thing and to consider children as something that "happen."


See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46438194/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/#