If your main exposure to Delany came—as mine did—from the documentary The Polymath, you may have been left with the impression that Delany’s life has been completely dominated by anonymous sex, with the writing of a few books shoehorned in.

It’s true that the man has had an extraordinary amount of sex. In fact, despite being (primarily) gay, he has probably had more sex with women than most straight men have. But reading The Motion of Light in Water makes it clear that he cares about people more than sex—he recalls some of his many men in great detail years later, including their clothes and hair and hands (Delany is attracted to nail-biters) and the occasional slighting remarks that wounded him. And he cares about writing perhaps most of all.

Here and there in the book (sections 10, 38.11, 65.6, and 85, if you’re writing a paper), Delany uses the theme of light in water to express the difficulty of capturing all these aspects of existence. This is from section 65.6.

Consider two accounts of a life.

They seem as if they take place on different planets.

Yet the narrator, through all that surrounds them both, insists the parallel columns write of one person—even more, insists that the gap between them, the split, the flickering correlations between, as evanescent as light-shot water, as insubstantial as moonstruck cloud, are really all that constitutes the subject: not the content, if you will, but the relationships that can be drawn out of that content, and which finally that content can be analyzed down into.

Delany has been not only a writer but an actor and singer. One of the more amusing anecdotes in the book describes the night when Delany nearly ended up headlining a double bill with the then-unknown Bob Dylan. When the “breathless young man, in a denim jacket and on the fleshy side,” rushed in and seated himself onstage, Delany’s friend Billy, the club manager, explained he would have to wait his turn. A disagreement ensued.

“...well, then, don’t come back!” Billy said, at last, a little loudly, a little flustered.

And with his case, Dylan rushed out the door as breathlessly as he’d come in.

Shaking his head, Billy put his hands on his hips, looked at us, and really said, “Bob Dylan! Who does he think he is ...?”

There are a few possibilities. You would expect the Trailer Park restaurant to be cheap and unpretentious. No need to dress up, or even refrain from burping.

The lady next to the sign, with her cutoffs, tattoo, and baseball cap, offers another not-so-subliminal signal, suggesting that a trailer park is where you might find young, unemployed women with time on their hands and few inhibitions. (There are actually two women reclining on either side of the sign, in an inadvertent—I would guess—parody of the tomb of the Medici in Florence.)

Get close enough and you can see that the clothes have actually been painted onto a naked mannequin, producing an effectively trashy look.

Do you really think you picked the best name for your business?

It was only when I got closer that I noticed that sign actually read HOMEST STEAKHOUSE, and that this was because the last three neon letters of HOMESTYLE had burned out. Which, I suppose, is another illustration of the idea that you only see what you are prepared to see. 

Along with the Obama golf balls, there are Obama golf towels and divot replacement tools. There are Obama grilling aprons and spatulas for the barbecue, and tumblers and martini glasses for the party at the country club.

Martini glasses? Really?

On the other hand, I like the in-your-face Made in America mug and the Cats for Obama cat collar. If Dudley were willing to tolerate a collar (he’s not), we might consider it. 

The framework, which looks three-dimensional but is actually flat, can be seen from the High Line. I passed it many times before I realized it wasn’t the real thing.

Robert Kuhn McGregor argues convincingly that before his sojourn at Walden Pond, Thoreau’s knowledge of nature went not much further than the utilitarian know-how of the local farmers. Even the first draft of Walden itself had remarkably little in it about nature. Chapters such as “Brute Neighbors” and “Winter Animals” came only later. Yet when he discovered nature, he did it with a vengeance, and in the last decade of his short life he was a true authority.

Kuhn has delved into his subject far enough to know that when Thoreau refers to “clams” in the Concord River, he is referring to freshwater mussels. “Crow blackbirds” are grackles, and when Thoreau writes about seeing “lizards” swimming in a ditch, he meant newts. (Lizards, I noticed some time ago, are missing from the index of the 1906 edition of the Journal—perhaps to avoid drawing attention to an embarrassing slip.)

The best reference for Thoreau’s intellectual development remains Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, but Kuhn’s summary of what Thoreau was writing at different points in his life is a helpful contribution. And his chapter “The River” is an exceptional achievement.

Kuhn describes this chapter as “a compound descriptive analysis of a year in the life of the river during the 1850s, as derived from Henry Thoreau’s journals.” At first he seems to have done nothing more than to narrate an impressionistic description of the change of the seasons in Thoreau’s Concord.

Fast-flying migratory green-winged teal passed through in March, as did goldeneye ducks driven inland from the Atlantic Coast by heavy storms. Blue-winged teal flew past Concord a month later, resting briefly in marshes and shallow pools. Herring gulls visited briefly in March and April, feeding on newly hatched shellfish, fresh fish, and berries.

As you continue reading, though, you notice an impressive specificity in the description.

As the sun rose higher in the spring sky, plants responded to the increasing light. In the river shallows, common naiads appeared. Greenish sweetflag blossoms opened in marshy grounds along the shores, and meadow saxifrage bloomed on the higher banks. Not many varieties of flowers emerged that early, however. The greatest activity was among the river shrubs. In the shallow water, sweetgales bloomed. In marshy thickets, winterberries, black currants, leatherleafs, slender willows, and common elders came to life. On the banks, the buds of a variety of willows, alders, and maples began to expand.

But it is only in the notes at the end of the book that you comprehend the research and rigor that went into the easy flow of the chapter.

In organizing the material for this chapter, I have in some ways mirrored approaches undertaken by Thoreau himself. Working with the whole of the journals, I have abstracted his nature observations and organized them according to geographic location, particular habitat, species classifications, time of year, and so forth. The result was a series of phenological tables describing the typical behaviors of nature in the various Concord habitats as Thoreau found them. This material is far too voluminous to recreate in these pages, or even to reference. The pages of this chapter are a narrative presentation of the essence of this material; the reference notes reflect major (but not all) sources in the journals where information was derived.