On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted eight butterfly species there this summer and found a monarch chrysalis hanging from a tropical milkweed plant. Brown and green anoles have densely colonized the garden, which has never been so lush.  Because of the ample lighting I usually read while seated on the couch by the oversized front window. The garden is a comfort. Framed by the window, it’s like a slow-motion movie. The appeal is less aesthetic than – what? Metaphysical? I like to be reminded of life’s profusion and persistence, the opposite of sterility. There’s little difference between “weed” and “flower.” I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005): “What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”   A reminder that poets ought to know the names of wildflowers, according to Seamus Heaney. Not every poet would agree. I was looking for something in Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi’s 2,500-page commonplace book kept between 1817 and 1832, when I happened on a passage from April 1826 that only Leopardi could have written:   “Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems. Even in the mildest season of the year. You will not be able to look anywhere and not find suffering. That whole family of vegetation is in a state of souf-france [suffering], each in its own way to some degree. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts. There a lily is sucked cruelly by a bee, in its most sensitive, most life-giving parts.”   Leopardi’s understanding of biology is limited but his Zeitgeist remains consistent. He goes on for a full page turning a mini-Eden into a raging Hell:   “The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first go into this garden lifts your spirits. And that is why you think it is a joyful place. But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or rather, were to feel, surely not being would be better for them than being.” It's almost as though Leopardi had read the crackpot bestseller The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first encountered Leopardi more than half a century ago in Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1931). The Irishman refers to the Italian’s “wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Beckett quotes two lines from “A se stesso” (“To himself”): “In noi di cari inganni, / Non che la speme, il desiderio e ’spento.” (“Not only our hope / but our desire for dear illusions is gone.” Trans. Jonathan Galassi, Canti, 2010).   Melville, too, found a kindred spirit in Leopardi. In his 18,000-line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Part I, Section 14, “In the Glen,” he writes:   “If Savonarola’s zeal devout But with the fagot’s flame died out; If Leopardi, stoned by Grief, A young St. Stephen of the Doubt Might merit well the martyr’s leaf.”   [Zibaldone was edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, translated into English by seven translators, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013.]

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V.S. Pritchett is asked in his Paris Review interview, “Do you think living and writing conflict?” – a rather silly question -- and he replies: “I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.” Spoken like the kind of reader and writer I can respect. Escape reading is fine. I don’t have much instinct for it–science fiction, thrillers, romance—but I think I understand the attraction. Life is tough. Work and family responsibilities can be exhausting. Nice to get away for an hour or two and find refuge in a make-believe universe. Call it distraction or biding time – an innocent way to briefly forget about commitments, pain and life’s disappointments.  Pritchett’s statement above is a more eloquent way to articulate the founding slogan of Anecdotal Evidence: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” I formulated that in reaction to the revulsion I felt for a variety of literary dead-ends: dilettantism, propaganda, academic myopia, cheap fashion. Since I was a kid I’ve always assumed good books and life cannot be surgically separated without injuring one or both, often fatally. It’s not usually the prime reason I read a novel or poem, but the desire to learn something about the world, about humans and their motivations, is at least latent in my choice of book.   Pritchett published his first book, Marching Spain, in 1928. At age twenty-six, in the spring of 1927, he had walked three-hundred miles across Spain, from Badajoz to Vigo. Earlier, he had been sent to Spain to report on the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That’s when he taught himself the language and first read contemporary Spanish literature – Azorin, Pio Baroja, Perez de Ayala, Unamuno. In an introduction he wrote for a new edition of Marching Spain in 1988, Pritchett tells us: “Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life became my Bible.” (I can second that observation when I was even younger than Pritchett.) His comparison is not idle. Pritchett was a secular man with a strong interest in, but no formal attachment to, organized religion.   During his long walk across Spain, Pritchett made a pilgrimage to Salamanca, where Unamuno served as rector of the University of Salamanca from 1900 to 1924, and 1930 to 1936:   “I felt that in Salamanca,” Pritchett writes, “I should in some unexplained way breathe of the spirit of Unamuno, who in these days was exiled from Spain by the unutterably stupid dictatorship. The crassest of all pilgrimages this, walking two hundred miles to find a man who had been forced out of his country because he happened to prefer liberty to generals. ‘God give thee not peace, but glory,’ he writes at the end of The Tragic Sense of Life. One is always one’s own hero; if I did not find peace I might at least blunder into glory.”   He met both Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset. For Pritchett, travel and immersion in a foreign country serve as his literary apprenticeship. Two decades later he returned to Spain and in 1954 published a much better book, The Spanish Temper. This most English of writers came alive as a writer elsewhere. He had a reporter’s appetite for gossip, landscape, history and conversation, coupled with a non-cloistered bookishness.   It was Pritchett who introduced me to many previously unknown writers, including Spain’s Benito Pérez Galdós. (Guy Davenport played a similar role in my education, especially for urging me to read Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta). Pritchett writes in his introduction to the 1988 edition of Marching Spain:   “Now, when I re-read my first book, I forgive myself for the patches of rhetorical writing. After all, I reflect, the famous foot-sloggers, like Hazlitt, Stevenson, Meredith, not to mention the poets of the Open Road school, had always harangued the scenery and the people they met as they clumped along, talking and even declaiming to themselves.”   In the second volume of his memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), half a century after his first visits to Spain, Pritchett writes:   “[P]resently I saw that literature grows out of literature as much as out of a writer’s times. A work of art is a deposit left by the conflicts and contradictions a writer has in his own nature. I am not a scholarly man; and I am not interested for very long in the elaborate superstructures of criticism. Some of my critics speak of insights and intuitions; the compliment is often left-handed, for these are signs of the amateur’s luck; I had no choice in the matter. Anyone who has written a piece of imaginative prose knows how much a writer relies on instinct and intuition.”

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Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the sight of each dead animal in the streets between home and school — deaths I could not prevent and could not bear. To cope with the aching helplessness, I developed a private superstition: If I touched each of the vertical bars on every fence along my walk, no dog would die. Sometimes I ran to touch as many bars as possible in as little time as possible, the impact bruising and callusing my fingers. Dogs continued dying. I continued doing it.… read article