A series of contemplative essays that demonstrate the enticing prose of Sven Birkerts. I have long enjoyed his literary criticism and this book shares some of the same attraction for readers like me. This is a great book to dip into from time to time just to relish the wonderful prose and the disparate insights. ( )

Many of these essays felt like responses to writing prompts given at the beginning of class. ( )

The majority of the essays in this collection are brief, not much more than a page, just long enough for Sven Birkerts to carefully elucidate a single observation perhaps, often with an ironic counter at the end to inflect the whole into a different key. They are personal in that they are principally about his own life and sometimes the lives of those in his family. They are professional in that they frequently take the writing life as their theme. The writing life of which, presumably, the essay at hand is a resultant. They are calm and calming, measured and incremental in their measurement of experience, not sad, exactly, but reflective, even wistful. They are consistently finely written and at home with themselves.

That said, I longed throughout the first half of the book for something longer, something with more substance, in which Birkerts perhaps would test himself, push himself to attain something that didn’t come so (apparently) easily. I wondered if he risked himself in fiction, or at least turned his hand to criticism, which can be an opportunity to risk something in stating an opinion, an opinion that itself might be challenged. He doesn’t, I’m sorry to say, in this set of essays but I believe he does so elsewhere. Towards the end of the book, however, there are a few significantly longer pieces, though still not very long. In these you can see Birkerts work a seam, an extended metaphor perhaps, tirelessly. Again, it is fine writing. Very readable. And yet it doesn’t take flight, even if it hints that flight is possible. ( )

A series of autobiographical pieces by the master of reflection and slow time
Throughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country’s foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms.
In this deeply appealing and engaging collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his own life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. We read how the writer witnesses his son’s frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from many years ago, how finding a cigarette lighter or a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him—old friends, remembered places—are excavated, their layers exposed.
But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but deeply loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children’s independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.