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A Book By Its Cover: What's in the Title?
I was asked by a reader how and why I chose the name What We Hold In Our Hands as the title for this book. I was happy for the question because it made me remember or realize the answers.
The most immediate answer is that the current book contains an earlier book that never happened and it would have had a similar name.
That earlier book concept which never passed draft stage would have been full color and targeted toward a readership of potential “nature guides”--the guides in this case not being a small field book of illustrative pictures but the parents or grandparents, teachers or guardians of children. The book was first tentatively titled “Bridging the Nature Gap” and had the picture of my grand daughter Abby crossing the icy board bridge with her arms outstretched in a balancing act. That image remains in What We Hold to illustrate the piece about allowing our children to face risks in the outdoors. It is called “Early Physics.”
The second name considered for that earlier almost-book and the title I would have used had it gone to print was “What They Hold in Their Hands.” The cover would have been a montage of four things held in my grand daughter’s hands--a box turtle, mushroom, millipede and newt. As I said, that book would have hoped to address the matter of “nature deficit disorder” including some natural history pieces as well, such as the “Ghost That Lives on Trees” piece, now in What We Hold. So, when for various reasons I did not proceed to complete and publish the earlier book, I incorporated its subject matter and broadened its name into the current title, and I am happy to have done so. This book that was delivered to Goose Creek on May 6, 2009, contains the message about our children’s denatured plight and some thoughts about how to reverse those problems. But the reach of the book in hand is wider than that, extending to grownup matters of stewardship, belonging to place and personal ecology.
In another perspective of the language of the title, I like it because it speaks of things tactile and near, intentional and personal.
I will never forget from physical therapy anatomy dissection how it was the hand, of all the features of the human body we worked on, that gave me shudders. THAT hand and wrist, that thumb, those fingertips had once been this deceased person’s most intimate contact with the world--not only an organ of perception but one of possession and control, of affection and force, of creative energy and interaction with thousands of other hands over a lifetime.
To hold is not a verb to be taken lightly. We of all the world’s creatures are specialized to grasp and manipulate with the dexterity it takes to play the violin, cut a diamond, pluck a wildflower--abilities that we owe to the anatomical miracle of the human hand.
Our grasp can be an aggressive and selfish holding fast or the gentlest and most generous affection and protection. Our grip has built civilizations. Too, there are things we chose to hold briefly and release when we realize they might do us or our children harm. What we hold is the antithesis of those things we have or should have let go of.
The holding spoken of in the title of this book is by and large of those good and true things within our own homes, just beyond our doors, out in our communities and in our global neighborhood that are dear and precious and often missed. In that sense, this book is a field guide, a most familiar and cherished form of teaching with which I am comfortable.
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, May 19 2009, 8:20 AM EDT
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