Graceful landing
My ultimate compliment to a book is that it made me forget I had a review to write and convinced me to read it for pure pleasure. And more: that I need what the author has to say. Philip Simmons is a middle-aged writer who, because he has ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neuron disease, as many ill people and medical dictionaries prefer to call it), left his university job in the Midwest and moved back to New Hampshire, where he grew up. Simmons never writes the full name of his disease, perhaps because he wants illness to be, in a Zen sense, nothing special: "just a particular form of the universal human malady." Though he does not discuss ALS much, it is the ever-present background to how he experiences his family, his small town (including the town dump, which he memorably describes), and a variety of sacred texts.
Most people with ALS die within a decade--though some, notably physicist Stephen Hawking, do not--and that prospect makes Simmons too serious about his writing to think much about pleasing reviewers. Reviewers want a clearly summarizable argument, some one-line quotations that sound good out of context, and a few easily described flaws. Simmons gives us a collection of essays that take no overarching position, and many of which began as talks to church groups. He explores and savors life, treasured for each moment. "Life is not a problem to be solved," he observes.
I did note some quotable one-liners: "Wanting human suffering to fit some divine plan is like wanting to fly an airplane above tornado wreckage and see that it spells out song lyrics or a cure for acne." But good as that is alone, it's better in its context of a discussion of Job. Or this: "The world itself is the child's cathedral, and so it may be for us adults, if we can relearn our childlike openness to it." Again the pleasure of reading this is greatest in context, at the end of Simmons's account of his boyhood moonlit sledding adventure--and that in turn is embedded in the context of a reflection on emptiness.
