I read a lot, not as much as I have in the past, but sometimes several books a week. I am also a re-reader, as is my daughter. For a decade or so around the 70s I re-read Tolkien’s trilogy every year. I suppose the proper genre is high fantasy but that long and painful fight against an evil — once tolerated and even collaborated with — resonated with me. I think the fact that evil had to be fought with actions which had consequences and with real sacrifice rather than mere words — cf. Chief Justice John Roberts facile and Orwellian “the way to fight discrimination is to stop discriminating”— gave me a measure of hope. That I had to read and re-read it probably says a little about the world I felt I was living in. I am now ambling through my daughter’s copy – all the songs are flagged – writing down the aphorisms or wisdom sayings. A task she calls impossible because any criteria other than “I like this” is too slippery to be effective. Nonetheless it is a good exercise in bed at night before I fall asleep. Cheering.
People often ask me what I am reading hoping, I suppose, for some ideas as to what they might enjoy or perhaps just wondering what I am spending my time on since I don’t watch television or Youtube. I learned long ago the folly of thinking my enthusiasms were contagious so I don’t recommend books to people very often. I do however take some people’s recommendations seriously. Not too long ago a friend told me a book by Tim Winton was about the best thing he had ever read. I went on to read several novels by that brilliant young Australian.
Another friend is a big fan of Wallace Stegner — especially of Stegner’s late novel Crossing to Safety. An amazingly good mature novel written by a man at the height of his powers who had something useful to pass along to his readers about life and relationship. I went on to read Big Rock Candy Mountain, a family saga of great depth and wisdom which has made me want to re-read Larry Woiwode’s second book — Beyond the Bedroom Wall — the saga of the Neumiller family. I am sure Woiwode must have read Stegner as well as Tolstoy, of course.
I just finished Stegner’s All the Little Live Things published in 1967. I’m not sure I would have started it if I knew a main character died of breast cancer but once begun I couldn’t put it down. The narrator is a 64-year-old retired literary agent living in the wilds of Northern California. He is not a happy man for a variety of good reasons and he is working on two projects that run counter to each other — burying his regrets and grief in the day-to-day life of the beautiful place he lives in and trying to reach some understanding of or find some meaning for it all. One of the things I like so much about Stegner especially in his later first-person novels is that his characters are very thoughtful, very decent and yet can behave badly or make mistakes for a number of understandable reasons. I also like his deep sense of place and history.
Wendell Berry, in an essay about Stegner who was his teacher at Stanford, calls him a regional writer who has transcended regionalism. Berry quotes from an essay of Stegner’s — “The Book and the Great Community”:
“Thought is neither instant nor noisy. . .It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to re-assert some aspect of it, or attack it.”It is true that what is so remarkable about Stegner is his quiet deep thoughtfulness. He does not proselytize or pontificate, he doesn’t try to dazzle with the acuity and cleverness of his observations — though his observations are both close and accurate.
Berry calls Stegner a re-readable writer and goes on to say that we read out of interest or curiosity but that we re-read for surprises. I’m not in total agreement with Berry. I think that sometimes we re-read for comfort or affirmation but I know what he means by surprises. I recently re-read some of the Russians and I know I got more out of them at almost 60 than I did at far under 20. I intend to re-read Proust soon and know that I will be surprised in ways I was not in the long-ago summer of 1969. Maturity I suppose is the issue — that deep quiet thinking Stegner talks about, that looking forward but also always looking back.
Joe Allston, the narrator of All the Little Live Things, sees things through a particular set of filters created by his pain and experience but his heart is not completely closed and therein lies his salvation — if deeply feeling a terrible loss is salvation and I happen to think it might be. One of the things Joe Allston observes closely through a particular filter is the youth culture of the 60s. I was involved enough with that culture — its hopes and illusions — to be very interested in Allston’s observations which went beyond decrying any movement against the status quo or an objection to intoxicants and loud music. Allston brought his understanding of the past into his condemnation of the activities and aspirations of youth culture along with a certain sense of Stoic hopelessness. At one point he aptly and humorously mentions the Oneida Community, a reference that could not have meant much outside of an American Studies course in 1967 or even today. Underneath all of the close observation was a deep sense of disappointment perhaps with the callowness of youth. Allston/Stegner understood what the young were after and that the means they had chosen had been tried and had failed again and again; that there seem to be no shortcuts on the road to human freedom, that the very nature of our finite lives inhabited by infinite spirit creates our pain and shackles, and that a too simple or superficial victory over those intrinsic fetters is likely to be Pyrrhic. Or as the photographer Keith Carter once said to a student wanting some tips on success, “There is no substitute for the work.” To which Berry and Stegner might add: or in knowing where we’ve come from and where we’ve been. Allston’s take at the end of one journey and the beginning of the next is two-fold:
“…it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others’.”I talk quite bit about human freedom in these essays and one might be tempted to ask me for a definition. I think Joe Allston would recognize it if he saw it — vis a vis Potter Stewart on pornography — but it is easier to recognize its opposite or to be aware of the myriad of forces that work against it. Simon Ley, in a recent review of a collection of George Orwell’s letters and diaries, says that the salient features of Orwell’s political attitude were: an intuitive grasp of concrete realities, a non-doctrinaire approach to politics, and a sense of the absolute primacy of the human dimension.
“If every particle in the universe has both consciousness and choice. . .then it also has responsibility, including the responsibility to understand.”
Those characteristics seem to me to go a long way toward what I mean by human freedom. Leys goes on to quote Orwell about the source of his strength which was simply: “. . .the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in.” Freedom starts there I believe.
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