Of Landscape and Longing: Finding a Home at the Water's Edge (The World As Home)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.56 (692 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1571312382 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 198 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-07-09 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Using memoir as a means of meditation, Servid writes about connections to the land and the ways our love of a place can lead us to see it as an adversary, as she once felt during an ascent in Glacier Bay; as something to be consumed, as in the sprouting of mansions in the valleys of Colorado; or as a lover, as in her intimate, abiding knowledge of the shore near her home, where her greatest pleasure is to row her Banks dory among the whales and nearby islands.. Though Americans move frequently and often live far from the place they were born, they retain a memory of the landscape of childhood. For Carolyn Servid, and for others who love shorelines and boats, this imprinted place is where water meets trees
"Home IS where the heart is." according to James Hugh Drury. In her several essays on the landscapes through which Carolyn Servid has traveled, from India to Alaska, she lets us understand her secret longing, the drive of her restlessness and her seeking for something outside herself. She also takes us into the journey with memories and descriptions that are powerful and simple. She describes India so you feel the heat and hear the music. She gives us Alaska as close to the way it is, which is impossible to capture completely, but Carolyn comes as close as anyone I know.The economy in Southeast Alaska depended for a long time
America seemed to her, she writes in Of Landscape and Longing, "a world apart," a foreign country in which she could never quite fit. --Gregory McNamee. And while Servid sometimes lapses into sentimentality--you might not guess, reading her, that humpback whales sing for their own purposes, and not strictly to awaken noble and loving thoughts in the humans who happen to overhear them--her exaltation at living at the water's edge, close to wild animals and the wild ocean, rings true. A keen, spiritually inclined observer of the natural world, and a committed defender of the untamed forests that surround her, she writes easily of salmon and eagles, of clouds and spruce trees. Small wonder, then, that she chose to settle in a once-remote and distant pocket of America, in the little Alaskan town of Sitka, to work as a writer and teach