The “generous curiosity” of John McPhee
Craig Taylor names the key virtue of John McPhee:
So why is he interested in this telescoping rod? Why the 18-wheeled trucks of the title essay in his earlier book “Uncommon Carriers”? Why did he dedicate so many words to oranges in the brilliantly titled “Oranges”? “Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain,” McPhee admits in this new collection. Over the years, with generosity, he’s shared them. “I have never spent time with anyone who was more aware of the natural world.” This is how McPhee described a mineral engineer in one of his finest books, “Encounters With the Archdruid,” adding, “He seemed to find in the land and landscape … an expression of almost everything he had come to believe about that world.” With time, the description now shines back on its author.
“The Patch” is billed as a “covert memoir,” but McPhee has smuggled excerpts from his life into most of his books. “When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author,” he warned students in his recent writing memoir, “Draft No. 4.” “If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost.” Never a known prancer, McPhee has instead drifted gracefully alongside his interviewees, in motion and in communion, in canoes and the cabs of trucks, listening with an almost obsolete respect to both sides of our various divides: to the mineral engineer and the environmentalist. “The Patch” is just another chapter in an ongoing memoir of generous curiosity (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/books/review/patch-john-mcphee.html).
January 1, 2022 John McPhee curiosity