San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Seafaring trivia and brooding essays.
Upon first glance at the alluring cover of “On Lighthouses,” a number of thoughts might come to mind: tranquillity, solitude, wistful nostalgia, hope.
But while Ediciones Antílope cofounder and editor Jazmina Barrera’s collection appears on the surface to be six poignant personal essays littered with intriguing references to lighthouses, their keepers, and their myriad influences on literature and art throughout history, what comes through is a dark and often obsessive meditation on what it feels like to squirrel yourself away from the world and embrace isolation in the name of pursuing a passion.
“Yaquina Head” offers the first hint that the author might be aiming for something beyond just a goodnatured study of shipwrecks and their saviors. Housed alongside sporadic descriptions of her trip to the iconic lighthouse on the Oregon coast and lengthy musings on Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” Herman Melville’s “MobyDick” and other seafaring masterworks, she alludes to her mostly cloistered existence inside a gloomy New York City apartment, with her lighthouse map collection and lighthouserelated research as her only outlet for joy.
“If I concentrate hard on myself, I hurt. For instance, right now, as I write this,” she reflects. “By contrast, when I visit lighthouses, when I read or write about lighthouses, I leave myself behind.”
In “The Goury Lighthouse,” a meandering discourse that touches on the mating practices of Australian bowerbirds, Jonathan Franzen’s 2011 New Yorker essay about birdwatching while processing the death of author David Foster Wallace, and the 2007 Arcade Fire song “The Well and the Lighthouse,” Barrera crawls further down the metaanalysis rabbit hole to explain what it means to eschew human contact in favor of fostering an interest.
“Collecting is a form of escapism. By giving our attention — our desire, our will — to something outside ourselves, to its beauty, its order, its classification and accumulation, we’re distracted from lack and emptiness,” she writes.
“Blackwell,” a short essay about an excursion to see the storied lighthouse on Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island, completes the triad with an especially telling — and much more direct —examination of her mental state: “Since I came (to New York), I’ve been watching myself slowly transforming into a sealed tower. I move around in the calm of indistinguishable days. My routine is so precise, I feel so sane, that I must be losing my sanity. The danger lies in feeling too comfortable, becoming accustomed to the unchanging repetition of days, the minimal interaction with others. From here I can contemplate death as a calm ocean, imagine that I’m plunging into it without fear, even with pleasure.”
But “On Lighthouses” isn’t all circular thinking and introspection. The wellpaced
“Jeffrey’s Hook” offers a peek at the celebrated Little Red Lighthouse, located on a tip of Manhattan underneath the George Washington Bridge. Constructed in 1880 and gifted a new light in 2002, the landmark was saved from the chopping block thanks to Hildegarde Swift’s beloved 1942 children’s book, “The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.”
Perhaps my favorite and most clearsighted essay in the book, “Montauk Point,” details Barrera’s weekend road trip out to Long Island with a group of acquaintances. While staring up at the looming lighthouse from the rocky beach, she contemplates her trepidation surrounding the move from Mexico City to New York and the evolution of her connection to a dear childhood friend.
Though slight in stature, “On Lighthouses” is perhaps best read in more than one sitting. Given Barrera’s brooding and all the skipping about from topic to topic, too much in one dose might seem like overload.
But for readers lured in by the striking cover and looking for lighthouse trivia, there’s plenty of that to go around. For example, did you know that Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather Robert Stevenson was the first person to design and help construct a lighthouse on a marine rock?
It’s true. In fact, Bell Rock, off the coast of Angus, Scotland, is the oldest surviving offshore lighthouse in the world.
Alexis Burling’s reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Oregonian. Email: books@sfchronicle.com