Essayist Amy Leach grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist dwelling and church, and her third e book is devoted to unpacking that private historical past in the identical winsome model with which she unpacks the habits of peas and platypuses in Issues That Are and with the identical advert hoc, devil-may-care perspective that marks The Everyone Ensemble.
Leach playfully fills The Salt of the Universe with contrasts between the apocalyptic, fundamentalist worldviews of her childhood and the teeming abundance of life that she discovered later. “Whereas the apocalypse is horny short-term, long-term it’s a slog,” she writes. She contrasts William Miller, who spent his life ready for the tip of the world, with composer Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn “was not a kind of piners for the tip: he had a concerto in his head. My concept is that the apocalypse appeals primarily to individuals who don’t have any concerto of their heads.”
She contrasts Seventh-day Adventist prophet and persnickety dictator of on a regular basis life Ellen G. White with wild lady of the phrase Emily Dickinson. Dickinson is at all times making an attempt to set herself free, whereas White is at all times locking folks up in little rule cages. However Leach additionally notes that she got here to Dickinson via the strictures of White’s worldview. She was educating literature at an Adventist faculty and was prevented from educating fiction, so she began educating poetry, and that led her to a ardour for Dickinson.
The e book opens with two epigraphs: “Don’t eat largely of salt; surrender bottled pickles,” says White. “Salt is nice, but when it loses its saltiness, how are you going to make it salty once more?” says Jesus. The disciples of Jesus had been nothing, Leach writes, if not salty. These had been individuals who pushed life to its edges. “As a result of once they fished, they fished all night time rattling it, and once they washed his ft with fragrance, they spent all their cash on the best fragrance they may discover rattling it, and once they adopted Jesus, they adopted him rattling it even onto the floor of the water. These disciples had been headlong.”
Simply as White led Leach to Dickinson, the Bible led Leach out of her Adventist worldview. The reality of the Bible, she writes, is “too giant, its knowledge too manifold, its questions too actual.” And the individuals who populate the Bible have little in frequent with White. They drink wine and eat salt. They embrace Job, who insisted on the reality of his personal expertise with none dogma. Leach left Adventism when she heard an Adventist preacher say in a sermon, “The person is nothing—the establishment is every part.” “‘I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs,’” she quotes Dickinson. “That was the day I left the Establishment,” she explains, “and joined the People, like Jesus, Rahab, Job, and Abraham, and that pink fox, that actual fox, skirting the churchyard on her option to discover contemporary chilly streams of water.”
Leach’s contrasts are humorous and provoking and construct a lot of the e book’s humorous move, however these essays are usually not actually about Adventism. Sprinkled with Adventism, they’re about no matter sweeps Leach up exuberantly within the second: Stravinsky and willows, Montana and singing in church. She doesn’t stick with any topic for lengthy, aside from life itself and the way it unfolds with none needed reference to apocalypticism.
The e book is punctuated by notes, as if she couldn’t convey herself to delete any of her jokes. Every essay ends with mini-elaborations on phrases from that essay. For instance, on the finish of the essay “Thanks for Nothing,” she features a word elaborating on the phrase “violin propaganda,” which seems halfway via the essay. She writes, “It’s due to my expertise with violin propaganda that I’m not completely towards propaganda. I’m all for violin propaganda, bongo propaganda, panda propaganda, and likewise vegetable propaganda like I see on Sesame Avenue.” With a purpose to recognize this e book, it’s a must to calm down and be prepared to snigger as you see phrases like panda and propaganda line up subsequent to one another for no motive in any respect.
That is the present of Leach’s writing: she makes use of language to make magic out of the world. Time spent together with her is time spent dancing with lilies and geese, pickles and prairie canines, in a world stuffed with humor and items too treasured to be destroyed or denied.
