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Schreiber, the first woman editor of the New York Times sports section, later Deputy Editor of the New York Times Book Review, comes to terms with loss slowly, her graceful prose circling losses that left her at age 40 childless and unfamilied. These essays record a journey toward truth through concreteness, daily event. Her Emersonian epigraph notes that "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth."
For her personal "hieroglyphic" she takes notions about light. The first four essays, "Particles," recount stages in her conversion from urban professional to country dweller. The second four, "Waves," summarize her growing sense of life's pattern, flow and ebb, surge and retreat.
All of which makes Light Years sound much more solemn than it reads. The intricacy and tensile strength of Schreiber's metaphor does not impose itself self-consciously on a reader bent on taking pleasure in her lyrical, humorous prose. Each essay can stand alone. Taken together, they form a satisfying boxed set of images, stories, dialogues, insights shaped by light.
"The Long Light" develops Schreiber's reluctant adoption of her father's hobby, fly-fishing. Though her father has given her fishing equipment when she moves to trout country, she edges gingerly toward knowledge, passion, mastery of the sport. As her parents age, sicken, grow frail in Wisconsin, her phone calls to her father about fly-fishing become an important link to home: "Our phones seemed connected not by fiber optics, but by the most delicately tapered of leaders."
The essays press toward Schreiber's concluding "light." Life brings us inevitably to "a certain irreducible degree of aloneness." She finds at last "a deep satisfaction in living without illusions," comforted by country skies full of stars. Galaxies connect us all at the expense of individual significance. "But," she concludes, "there are other open horizons, only light years away."
Joanne Lewis Sears is a writer who divides her time between Montecito, California, and France.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.