Conversations with Authors - Jane Hirshfield
Sunday, May 31st • 7:00pm ET/4:00pm PT
Jane Hirshfield
in conversation with Alison Gopnik
We are so grateful to all the people in the Book Passage community, longstanding and new, who tuned in to our conversation (or rather, to this latest installment of what's now become a 20-year conversation). And we are so grateful also to Book Passage, to Elaine and her staff, and to ExtendedSession for conceiving of and making possible this extraordinary series of writers' conversations and inviting us in.
It's the gift of literature to shape-shift, to find a something to say and ways to speak in any weather and circumstance. When people can't gather in person, we can gather in ink—and now, in pixels, on screens. And we do. Because that's how our lives become larger than they could ever be without the dialogue books bring, without this big table, into which new leaves keep being added, where we banquet together on words, ideas, images, inventions, questions; on our momentary, shared stays against confusion.
Here's some suggestions for further reading that came up, some in our public conversation Sunday, some in the conversations we had leading up to it—
Mentioned in our conversation, some only briefly or just alluded to:
- The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani (Vintage Classics):
- Ledger by Jane Hirshfield
- Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield
- The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik
- The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler
- Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
- The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
- Born to Be Good by Dacher Keltner
- The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht
- Candide by Voltaire
Jane's list:
A few other books that are foreground for me these days:
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- This is the book I reached for, in the hours immediately following George Floyd's death, and over the days of rising response to it. No voice, no thoughts, no fiercely accurate and capacious vision is more needed.
- Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
- One poem uncannily apt for this time of both pandemic and political division is “The Stare's Nest by My Window,” a section of a longer work, “Meditations in A Time of Civil War.” Also, “Easter, 1916.” Both poems warn of the hardening of the heart that comes with division into partisan sides.
- The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll.
- We're living in an age of extraordinary writing about scientific developments—I offer this book as one example of a work that brings scientific concepts, and their discoveries' stories (in this case about keystone species, lambda repressors, and the balancing act that allows living beings and ecosystems to flourish), into pages a layperson can both understand and be thrilled by.
- Figuring by Maria Popova
- Another unparalleled book conveying the lives and spirits and expansion of knowledge and life brought to us by scientists. The reminder in this book of Rachel Carson's life, eloquence, observation, and world-altering gift to us all would, on its own, be completely fulfilling. (In our conversation, we referred to her Brainpickings.org newsletter, one of the great, sustaining reminders of collective wisdom in our time.)
- Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel and The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in An Age of Extinctions by David Quammen, are the two final masterworks of discovery-communication I'll offer here.
- Selected Stories by Alice Munro
- This is the book I'm about to reread, since it's the next choice up for my 20-year-running book group, made up of research scientists and a few random others. We read only fiction, plays, and poetry, mostly classics— Gilgamesh, Sophocles, Conrad, Melville, Chekhov, Austen, Borges, Auden, Whitman, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Tomas Transtromer, Elizabeth Bishop, Orhan Pamuk, Colson Whitehead, Helen DeWitt, Toni Morrison... The group has lasted long enough and changed enough over time in participants that this will be our second session with Alice Munro's stories—but this time, on the must-read list is her tour de force novella-length story, “The Albanian Virgin.”
Finally, two other books I know of (there are probably others) that share with my own new book Ledger the distinction of having been published on March 10, the exact day that our life in the U.S. seemed, to me and others, to change.
- At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life by Fenton Johnson
- In the Lateness of the World: Poems by Carolyn Forche
Alison's list:
- Along with The Ink Dark Moon, another wonderful and surprisingly universal book from the same era, filled with observations as sharply true now as in Japan a thousand years ago is The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon:
- For other examples of what in our conversations I called Nerd Valentines—work that combines science, philosophy, fiction and poetry—Jane and I have just been talking about the stories of Ted Chiang, collected in two books, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation. “The Life Cycle of Software Objects,” in Exhalation, is among the best philosophical accounts of childhood and being a parent I know.
- Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska
- Among the poets Jane and I have talked of for years, the most frequent has been the great Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, whose work offers a model of work combining science, poetry, insight and politics across a long life, and troubled times.
- Finally, I'll mention The Philosophical Baby, the one book of my own that we didn't mention by title. It's the book where I talk the most about childhood “lantern consciousness” and the contrast with adult “spotlight consciousness," which we touched upon.
THANK YOU ALL, please keep safe and well,
—Jane Hirshfield and Alison Gopnik
Below, please find links to purchase all of the books recommended by Jane and Alison, as well as a selection of their own books.
These translated poems were written by 2 ladies of the Heian court of Japan between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. The poems speak intimately of their authors' sexual longing, fulfillment and disillusionment.
A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate, from the internationally renowned poet.
In this luminous and authoritative new collection, Jane Hirshfield presents an ever-deepening and altering comprehension of human existence in poems utterly unique, as William Matthews once wrote of her work, in their "praise of ceaseless mutability as life's central splendor."
This exciting book by three pioneers in the new field of cognitive science discusses important discoveries about how much babies and young children know and learn, and how much parents naturally teach them. It argues that evolution designed us both to teach and learn, and that the drive to learn is our most important instinct.
The Act of Creation begins where this view ceases to be true. Koestler affirms that all creatures have the capacity for creative activity, frequently suppressed by the automatic routines of thought and behavior that dominate their lives.
The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel "In Search of Lost Time," also known as "A Remembrance of Things Past," "Swann's Way" is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray.
"The Unnamable" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) - known as H.P. Lovecraft - was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction.
“A landmark book in the science of emotions and its implications for ethics and human universals.”—Library Journal, starred review
Times Literary Supplement • Books of the Year ("The most generous available English collection of Brecht’s poetry.")
A landmark literary event, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is the most extensive English translation of Brecht’s poetry to date.
Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today.
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.
Now the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film the New York Times calls spellbinding
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE AND BOOKPAGE
Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has crafted a biography that dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishments of a mythic figure whose early-seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion-the man Albert Einstein c
David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message -- a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world. It's also a book full of entertainment and wonders.
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(r)IN LITERATURE 2013
A profound meditation on accepting, and celebrating, one’s solitude.
“An undisputed literary event.” —NPR
“History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
The Pillow Book is a book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shonagon during her time as court lady to Empress Consort Teishi during the 990s and early 1000s in Heian Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002. In it she included lists of all kinds, personal thoughts, interesting events in court, poetry, and some opinions on her contemporaries.
An award-winning book from the author of Exhalation, this short story collection “blend[s] absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space. . . . raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human.” —The New York Times
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
“Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . [Szymborska’s] is the best of the Western mind—free, restless, questioning.” — New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
“Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end.
In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited.
An incandescent collection from one of American poetry's most distinctive and essential voices
A revelatory, indispensable collection of poems from Jane Hirshfield that centers on beauty, time, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms.
An investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with all existence, by one of the preeminent poets of her generation
A new volume of poems by the award-winning author of October Palace.
One of the world's leading child psychologists shatters the myth of "good parenting"