The New Yorker & Me: Postscript: Jonathan Raban 1942

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Postscript: Jonathan Raban 1942 - 2023

Jonathan Raban (Photo by Dan Lamont)

I see in the Times that Jonathan Raban has died. This is sad news. Raban is one of my favorite writers. His Old Glory (1981) and Passage to Juneau (1999) are in my personal canon of great books. Passage to Juneau is one of the three travelogues I reviewed in my “3 for the Sea” last year. It contains some of the most exquisite descriptions of water I’ve ever read. Here’s a sample:

The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.

How I love that “just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.”

An excerpt from Passage to Juneau, titled "Sailing into the Sublime," appeared in the August 23, 1999 New Yorker.

Raban is gone now. But he lives on in his books. Open Passage to Juneau almost anywhere and there you’ll find him in the cockpit of his boat, steering through turbulence, studying the waves, savoring the light.