Literature Festival Extra Credit

Diane Ackerman: The Compassion of Observing

Literature Festival

            When I sat down in Baker Theatre I honestly assumed I would be quite bored for an hour or so while an honored author lectured about something I just either didn’t understand or couldn’t make any connection too. Diane Ackerman’s reading was quite the opposite of that. The lady whom introduced Ms. Ackerman talked of all the awards she had received and how much of a gift her writing was. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to sit down and read a book because I wanted too and had time too. When looking through the program of events for the week it showed her adorable picture with her bright smile. The introducer read one of her articles that were published in the New York Times about Pythons in Florida this past fall. I have never heard someone describe Pythons in such a way I felt like the Python was slithering around in front of me as I hold my breath. The introducer also read an excerpt from a novel in which she tells the story of rehabbing her husband from a stroke. This little excerpt from the novel was from deep within the book after her husband had his stroke and was working to gain back many years of knowledge the stroke had taken from his through elementary style workbooks. Ackerman chose to read several excerpts from different books. As she began to read these excerpts I realized she is one of the most diverse authors I’ve noticed in a long time. Not only because all of the different types of literature she publishes; novel, research, blog and articles. But also the topics about which she chooses to write about. Her article in the New York Times was discussing pythons and describing them like painting a picture in my head. Her novel, which is her own story of her and her husbands journey after his stroke. The first excerpt she read, Remembering Winter, an insightful and almost childlike outlook of not only winter but also summer and all the little thing we didn’t appreciate as children, but we should have. Her second excerpt, An Alchemy of Mind, discusses the brain as a complex, intrinsic thing. But not in a way that only scientist and doctors could understand. In such a way that everyone can understand and wants to understand, wants to learn. At this point in the readings I assumed I would have been bore to the point I could no longer sit still; not the case. Her third excerpt, Dawn Light, she described as an awakening to life. She then proceeded to talk about how she regularly stops reading and imagines herself as things such as slime mold and owls to see how the world would be in their shoes.

“An owl can read the bottom line of eye chart from a mile away.”

            She ended the reading with her stories from her trip to Patagonia when she went to observe the whale camps. Diane Ackerman is a marvelous author. This may be a biased opinion but I support this with the fact that she can write about so many different topics. Yet she is just as capable and intriguing with each topic that she writes about from pythons to whales, from slime mold to owls, from the story of her husbands stroke to the story of her childhood winters to the brain.