The Ends of the Earth Book

Better known for his poetry and translations, W.S. Merwin is a gifted essayist, with a distinctive style. Each of the diverse pieces in this collection begins slowly, almost meandering, but somewhere in the middle I would find myself deeply engaged, enveloped in the setting and mood of the essay. It's partly a function of Merwin's fine descriptions of physical settings and the people he meets. Merwin's sentences are heavy with colors, sounds, and textures. He doesn't generalize; he lets the specific speak for itself. Here's an example from deep in 'Reflections of a Mountain', a long essay about a walking trip Merwin took in 1974 on the peninsula of Mt. Athos in Greece:

On the way down from Koutloumousiou to the south there is a high arch over a rocky torrent, quiet in the autumn. Stone-covered runnels cross the path, the hidden water whispering and splashing like mice. Rags of clouds appeared up on the ridge, and washed over it. Bright sun on the slope to the south. Where the path followed the side of the valley, in sheltered woods, I came upon a monk down on all fours, gardening, clearing the weeds from the wall below a long bed of flowers that had been tended with love. His hat was off and it was clear he had been absorbed in his work since first light, and that his heart was in it. Wild dianthus were blooming along the path a few feet from the nodding yellow heads of campanulas. The soil was black and crumbly, and his hands and knees and cassock were covered with it. Just beyond him was a chapel newly painted reddish-brown and white, with painted tin cans full of basil plants around the door, and rosemary in bloom at the eastern end.[73]

When I first read it, I let myself be carried along in the flow; but re-reading it, realize how carefully constructed the passage is - the unexpected similes (hidden water skittering like mice), the order of the details (the nearby flowers mentioned first; the larger chapel raised almost as an afterthought), the choice to leave some details out altogether, such as his conversation with the monk (presumably, if they were close enough for Merwin to note the texture of the dirt on the cassock, they at least nodded to acknowledge each other's presence).

Merwin's deeper themes arise organically out of the details, especially in the longer pieces, like Reflections, and also 'Name in the Sand', a biographical sketch of the French explorer Jean-Francois Galaup de La Perouse, who attempted to circumnavigate the globe starting in the late 1780s. Some of Merwin's shorter works are more pointed: two essays on the threats to the winter habitat (in Mexico) of the monarch butterflies, and two essays on the destruction of Hawai'i's native ecosystems and cultures. The opening essay, 'In the Wake of the Blackfish', is (again) a slow-to-start but ultimately moving sketch of a friend and publisher; I'm not sure I've read a more thoughtful account of a close friendship between two men of different generations. The final, brief essay - 'the Stone Boat' -- manages to depict southern France, the character of a local nurseryman, the local discovery of a human skeleton in 1908, and the lifestyles of the Neanderthals who lived in the area 50,000 years ago -- all in twelve pages, and it all hangs together. It's a wonder.