As the time for his retirement from university teaching nears, Quinney (Borderland
) uses the experiences of everyday life—reading the newspaper, going to the village to post some letters, walking in the yard around the house, observing the passing seasons—as springboards for meditations on everything from Wordsworth to Fauré's Requiem
, the thoughts of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the sensation of being "moved to the edges of things." Living in a northern Illinois town that lacks museums, theaters and other cultural amenities, surrounded by a spare Midwestern landscape of cornfields and an expanse of prairie, he experiences a solitude that imbues the spare manner of his writing and the pure, clean lines of his photographs, some of which are included here. This unembellished style is well suited to the record of mundane affairs he presents as he searches for meaning in a commonplace life. Quinney, who has studied and practiced Buddhism, tries to connect to all things by living from moment to moment, believing that oneness with the sacred can be obtained by being fully engaged with and finding wonder in even the most prosaic experiences. His deceptively simple musings attest to the fulfillment of this goal. (Apr.)
