When Books Move You to the Core

Musings about “The Overstory” by Richard Powers (and Gravity's Rainbow)

“There are books... which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

So far, there has been only one book which made me feel the way Emerson’s quote suggests, and that is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It was part of the syllabus of a class I took at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where I studied for a Master’s Degree. The first 30 or so pages were confusing and didn’t make much sense, but I stuck with it and soon I was completely immersed. I felt it entered my blood and it certainly accompanied my dreams. I became part of the book and lost myself for a short while in a particular episode, but the next moment I was thrown back again, confused - what is going on? Who is this now? Where did this come up before? Or: This is incredible - how can he say this so well... Sometimes, the painstakingly selected words make me gasp and reflect, read again... laugh and cry…

By NASA/U.S. Army - NIX 66P-0631, GPN-2000-000613; http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?IM_ID=385, Public Domain

I was totally shocked to discover that none of my fellow students – we were about 40 or so – shared my enthusiasm. Most of them had given up after a few pages. There were some that hadn’t given up yet, but they struggled to stick with it and found the book tedious. I sympathize: Gravity’s Rainbow is way up on the list of difficult-to-read books, right next to Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Infinite Jest (which I haven’t been able to finish), but also Moby Dick, The Divine Comedy, and War and Peace which I all loved. Clearly, it’s an individual choice. What makes Gravity’s Rainbow hard for some is its sheer volume, 730 pages; for some people, that’s a deal-breaker right there. There’s an enormous amount of individual characters: over 400 of them; some appear at the beginning and then they turn up again in the last quarter of the book. “Who is this now?” And the plot is complex, to say the least. It’s a challenge – unless you somehow go with the flow, and then the beauty and uniqueness of the book will sweep you along.

Old Growth Forest near Mt. Rainier, WA. Photo: Jessica Rath

There are some parallels in terms of difficulty with The Overstory by Richard Powers. With 500 pages it’s quite long. Some characters are being introduced at the beginning and then one doesn’t meet them again until much later. Maybe that’s why a few people I know who tried to read the book told me that they didn’t get very far. Well, they certainly miss out. The Overstory is the only other book besides Gravity’s Rainbow  that I can apply the above Emerson quote to, and I say this  after  many years as a prodigious reader. The first time I read War and Peace I was 12 (skipped a lot of War).

Of course there are other books I intensely love; some for their message, some for their exquisite choice of words, some for their wild imagery. But Gravity’s Rainbow and The Overstory did something more: they penetrated my core and my blood. They merged with something inside of me. And they confirmed some beliefs I had already, and the overlap made them stronger. 

Old Growth Forest near Mt. Rainier, WA. Photo: Jessica Rath

Gravity’s Rainbow deals with humans: how they fool and exploit each other (Giant corporations love nothing better than wars because it makes them rich. Soldiers are manipulated cannon fodder). People’s tendency for tribalism creates Us versus Them and is at the root of almost all the evil in society. Nothing new, of course, but Gravity’s Rainbow made this solidly clear to me.

The scope of The Overstory is wider and deeper: it focuses on the relationship of humans to trees, plants, and all other wildlife. It warns us of the destructive hubris which assumes that humans should dominate all other life forms, that we can use and abuse nature because it’s our property. 

The book tells us of our kinship with trees: 

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor... A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways... But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

While the humans in The Overstory are fascinating and seem to stand in the limelight, the real protagonists are the trees, I believe. Their age, life experience, and wisdom far exceeds that of the humans who try to save them. These humans – a colorful mix of nine characters who connect with each other at various points in their lives – are the mediators between the trees and a culture that wants to destroy them. The profit-driven logging industry on the one side and the Earth’s old growth forests on the other symbolize the archetypal dichotomy that is driving us ever closer towards a catastrophic point of no return. 

Tree near Mt. Rainier, WA. Photo: Jessica Rath

One tree becomes the prime focus: Mimas, a giant tree almost 2,000 years old. Tree-sitters established a treehouse platform at about 200 feet above the ground, where two people stayed for over one year. Experiencing the tree (which rises almost another 100 feet above the camp) through their eyes, the reader becomes intimately familiar with the tree. When this majestic living being eventually gets cut down, is killed, it is truly devastating and painful.

The book helps to establish a kinship with trees and forests that I for one want to deepen and develop further. As with Gravity’s Rainbow, this isn’t a new revelation. I believe that trees communicate, we just can’t understand it because they’re so much slower than we humans are. But the book confirms my conviction that we’re all cut from the same cloth, so to speak – that many of our genes are the same. I’m committed to deepening this connection, to see them as equal partners. 

Incidentally, February 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow. Serendipity – I had no idea when I started this piece!