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This blog is the work of an educated civilian, not of an expert in the fields discussed.

Friday, March 06, 2009

Cross Creek

And Also: Baseball pre-season has begun, with the WBC extending things to early April, the latter games already begun being shown on ESPN2. A mostly minors Mets team barely won 3-2 vs. Italy in an exhibition game. John Maine, showing his Al Leiter side, walked the first three. Sox/Cubs match-ups also have been on WGN, Cubs making last night's game interesting with three in the ninth (4-3, Sox). A-Rod seems to be okay -- I'm really tired of him.


The author of The Yearling and other works, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, moved down to Florida to Cross Creek in the late 1920s. Her love of the area, one not shared by her first husband who divorced her a few years after they moved there, is suggested by this Thomas Jefferson-esque* discussion that provides a conclusion to her book on her time there:
Who owns Cross Creek? The redbirds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages. And after I am dead, who am childless, the human ownership of grove and field and hammock is hypothetical. But a long line of redbirds and whippoorwills and blue-jays and ground doves will descend from the present owners of nests in the orange trees, and their claim will be less subject to dispute than that of any human heirs. Houses are individual and can be owned, like nests, and fought for. But what of the land? It seems to me that the Earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers it seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.

I first learnt about her book Cross Creek by means of a movie for which it is loosely based. The fact her husband does not move down there with her is but one fact changed, though the general feel of the book remains, and some stories found in it are placed in the movie in some form. And, on its own, the movie is pretty good, with Rip Torn providing the best supporting role. The book is evocative of the land and people of Cross Creek, but for me personally a little bit of description of the fauna can go a long way. Helpfully, even some of the chapters focused on the land, such as the different seasons, often include some narrative to help things along. The book btw was published mid-WWII, and it is not surprising a special armed forces edition was established, many nostalgic for home.

For me, the book was worth reading for the characters that could talk, even if some of them are of the non-human variety. She might overdo the noble poverty thing a bit, and she even got in trouble via an invasion of privacy suit with one description of a friend as mannish (see here), but Rawlings draws some powerful and touching portraits here with an amused touch. This includes, with some biases of the time mixed with a form of progressive thought (she was friends with the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, whose Their Eyes Were Watching God, I found very good), a good amount of stuff about the local blacks including her trials and tribulations in finding a good maid. (The movie version takes the story of just one of them.) Rawlings provides a respectful portrait of them too, one of the key figures in the book a local black matriarch.

Both the book and movie are worth checking out, the latter on television of late, but both provided by any good library system. BTW, I caught a bit of The Yearling (with Gregory Peck) a few months back -- looked pretty good too. The movie version of Cross Creek mixes in a yearling like story that is not in the book, one of the sort of overdone touches that probably does the movie a disservice. But, even there, it comes off okay enough.

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* Jefferson believed that "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living," which can be compared to a type of life estate, "the right to make all the use and profit of a thing that can be made without injuring the substance of the thing itself." The application to modern environmentalism is evident, the responsibility of the current generation to the future ones not a foreign idea even then.

It in fact was a logical concern in an agricultural society, needing to protect your land for your children. This might even be seen as a natural sentiment, TJ speaking of "natural rights" here too, but selfishness along with short-sightedness are too. TJ should know.