The shimmering Maya, and other essays

With the thirteen reflective pieces in The Shimmering Maya and Other Essays, Catharine Savage Brosman embellishes a genre. Witty, profound, and forthright, they reveal the texture of the mind and history of a singular twentieth-century woman - who nonetheless reminds us of ourselves, our mothers, and our grandmothers. At once narrative, commentary and intellectual autobiography, these essays take some of the central questions of human experience and bring to them answers that are both personal and general. Brosman touches upon topics as varied as higher education, why we remember the past (or, history), ecology, travel, men and women (not versus, she insists), grace, and the good life. But she moors her musings to specific places, people, and events, sharing with us stories of herself and the individuals who have influenced her - parents, relatives, lovers, husbands, teachers, writers, and philosophers. She moves with entertaining ease from abstract, philosophical considerations to immediate, pragmatic ones. . If only one theme may be attributed to this rich collection it is that the metaphysical is necessarily rooted in the physical. In her final essay Brosman recalls a recent camping trip back to the mountains and desert of her childhood. She writes: "What I have had, I believe, is an intimation of order. Notwithstanding theories of physics that emphasize randomness, and the strain of epistemological thought that insists that categories come from us, not from the world, I find order in nature. . . . I cannot believe that in the order of this landscape there is not an order of the spirit." Brosman - poet, scholar, professor, wife and mother - has a rare blend of salty good sense and exalted sensibility. In giving us the pleasure of making her acquaintance through these essays, she somehow leads us to rejoin the origins that order our own lives.