Quote:
“EMERSON WROTE THAT IF THERE WERE GOOD MEN, we would not go into such raptures over nature. He cited an old proverb, one I've never heard elsewhere: “When the king is in the palace, no one looks at the walls.”
By “king” he did not mean someone unknown to us. He meant himself and each one of us. After five years of work on the soil––looking at these “walls” for their beauty, usefulness, strength––I have come to the conclusion that I ought to start all over again. I ought to write about the man the soil suggests.
Hans Jenny is as close as I have found. He was a man of deep integrity. With seven decades of hard-won knowledge, he confessed his ignorance. He insisted on seeing whole, when others made a virtue of seeing in slices. He knew science as a form of prayer.
Even Hans is not enough, though. Each of us is made of stardust, as my boss, Jim Morton, preaches every year. We have each, then, the stuff in us and the bound-up energy that might launch a beam of light.
Soil is only the darkest and coldest of all living things. The most widespread. And the most receptive. Warmed, it blooms. So may I in my darkest moments be attentive to the penetrating rays of the sun that finds the seed.
Work, motion, life. All rise from the dirt and stand upon it as a launching pad. At the outer edge of the atmosphere, the thin air continually gives off hydrogen ions that join the solar wind. To what end and what stars might this lightest, quickest dust be bound?”
Chapter: Stardust (p. 202) Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan
Background:
This is the entire last chapter of the book. I like it because it sums up the book and wraps it up nicely. It also answers just about every question for the fourth entry.
For example, aside from the easy question of the point of view (which is first person as shown in the quote), the chapter name itself helps me to answer the first question: How is the book organized? Well, it should be obvious just from reading my various quotes from previous journal entries, but the book is organized in short stories all based around dirt. One thing that I find to be very interesting is that both the first and last chapter are titled "Stardust". I believe that this is based on the saying "Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust."––a saying that means that everything returns to the soil to bring life to others. In this case, the book is from "Stardust to stardust" since the book opens by stating that dirt comes from the stars since Helium and Hydrogen are the only two elements that are native to our solar system.
How would you define the author's style?
I would define his style as both friendly––in that he tells stories as a friend would tell stories to you and gives away information that is more personalized (see my third entry for more details on this)––and scholarly in that he supplies a large amount of information in a short amount of time. He also separates the two styles (friendly and scholarly) in chunks so that he will alternate. This allows the reader to easily find the "dirt" or information if they need to.
Quote:
"AT CHRISTMAS, I was out on the prairie again. Third time in a year. It seems like I can't stay away. This time, I came up out of Council Grove, Kansas, at seven A.M., just around sunrise. For about a minute and a half, I saw the sun and the full moon balanced evenly at the opposite ends of the sky. And her was I, riding along the bald and slightly arched surface of the earth, halfway between the two.
What are we doing on this planet, and how did we get here? It took only a glance to tell that there would not be anything like us found on the yellow sun or the fast-paling moon. The Earth has one thing that neither the sun nor moon has ever had.
And that one thing is clay.
I stopped by the Spring Hill Ranch, where there's a break in the fence. I like to walk the erosion gullies on the virgin prairie. There are fossils in the lower strata, as thick as nuts in an almond bar. But that morning, I found clay. I dug it out with a stone and formed it into small flutes and bowls. It was almost greasy to the touch, it had a sheen about it, and you could shape it into anything."
Chapter: Clay and Life (p. 123) Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan
Background:
After reading my 50 or so pages for the week, I took a look at the questions to post answers to for today. They all seemed to have to do with tone and voice, what persona the author takes on. I figured that the whole book could be used as an example of my answer to this question, so I randomly moved to one of the chapters that were fresh in my head. When I read the quote above, this song popped into my head and so I went with it.
In this chapter and many many others, the author adopts the persona of a friend; a very descriptive friend, but a friend nonetheless. He treats the beginnings of his chapters like the beginning of a casual conversation "At Christmas I was out on the prairie again. Third time this year." He leaks otherwise personal seeming information to you as if you cared. As a reader, you don't care about his addiction to visiting the prairie ("It seems like I can't stay away.") or that he "saw the sun and the full moon balanced evenly at the opposite ends of the sky". We don't care about any of these things. When we pick up a nonfictional book, we read it for information, not for an author's life experiences, yet it is those useless details and bits of unimportant information that keep me interested as a reader. It makes it feel like I know the author as a friend and that he is really talking to me rather than writing a boring book for me to read.
What is the intended audience and how does he tailor his writing to the audience?
Considering the subject of the book, level of vocabulary, and assumed understanding of certain concepts prior to reading the book, I think William wrote the book with the intention of college students, maybe seniors in high school, and adults reading this book. If he wrote it for students, he definitely did his job well. He writes descriptively to keep the student slightly entertained, but he also is sure to not hide his important information underneath all the description. "I found clay. I dug it out with a stone and formed it into flutes and bowls. It was almost greasy to the touch, it had a sheen about it, and you could shape it into anything." In this section of the quote, he places nothing but information about clay. He starts by nonchalantly showing the historical and traditional uses of clay which are shaping it into "flutes and bowls". He then moves on to describe its texture as "almost greasy to the touch", its look as having "a sheen about it" and its physical properties as being able to "shape it into anything." He then moves on to give hard facts about clay after the quote above. If a college or high school student was reading this book, they would easily be able to obtain the information. If an adult was reading this, they would be entertained by the amount of personalization in what would seem at first like a dull and boring nonfiction book.
