Desert Solitaire With Edward Abbey

In our culture, the Loner always gets the bum rap.  People doing very bad things are often labeled Loners.  Someone seeking solitude is running away from society; he is antisocial, prone to mental illness, existing outside the boundaries of what is wholesome and proper.  He does not play by the rules or cultivate friendships.  He forsakes his parents and siblings.  He was always a difficult child, according to those who once knew him.  Not a team player.  A puzzle, a person not easily read or figured out.  A wild card participant in the human endeavor, he is elliptical and ethereal, lofty and arrogant.

Today, we do not have Loners because we live in an age of communication and instant gratification, right?  Don’t be so sure.  When I get on the overfilled elevator at the college, I ride with five to ten people in dead silence except for the motor raising us up through the Humanities Building.  No one says a word; they are all looking down at their phone screens, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.  We are all together alone.  My students struggle with social skills, making small talk, making eye contact for that matter, and when I speak with them, they are hesitant to open up.  We are all not in a good place, socially, especially in an environment where engagement is necessary, required even, to pass a class.  But to engage may bring conflict, and we have been taught from an early age to avoid conflict.

A Loner may not be lonely, but he or she might crave solitude.  Loneliness and solitude are not the same thing.  One can be lonely with a crowd of people; someone who seeks solitude may not be a misanthrope.  Edward Abbey in his book, Desert Solitaire (Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1968 and 1990) is someone who decides to live his life deliberately, as Thoreau commanded, and experience Nature with a capital N in a pure, unadulterated form.  So he went to the Arches National Monument in southeastern Utah near the town of Moab three seasons running to work as a park ranger and revel in the silence, the heat, and of course, the incredible beauty of such an austere landscape.

Edward Abbey

Deserts play an intricate part in the history of humankind.  Great figures in human history sought the desert:  Moses and his people; Jesus, alone with evil; Mohammad receiving his revelations; Buddha and his asceticism; and Brigham Young, the American Moses, leading his people through the deserts of this country to the Promised Land of Utah, very close to Abbey’s stomping grounds over those three summers.  Deserts have a long tradition of purification for those who brave the heat, the animals, the lack of water.  They contain elements of the divine, the mystic, the hermitage.

Edward Abbey was born in 1927 in Pennsylvania.  He was drafted into the war in 1945, and although he applied for a clerical position, he wound up as a military police officer.  What followed were a series of promotions and demotions over the next two years.  He was honorably discharged and went to college on the G.I. Bill.  He became a sharp critic of culture and society, and advocated for a banishment of the draft.  His Master’s thesis focused on the morality of violence, and over the course of his life, Abbey advocated anarchy as a way to social change.

In the late 1950s and 60s, Abbey worked as a ranger in the National Park System.  Although the book focuses mainly on his adventures in and around the Arches National Monument, he served in other parks as well.  He not only spent a considerable portion of his life in the deserts and harsh landscapes of the western United States, he was buried there in Arizona.  It was a fitting end for a man who could be cantankerous, angry, and yes, often mystical.  He challenged oil companies and mining corporations who wished to destroy what he considered divinely sacred.  He fought to preserve these monuments and parks, and made their defense his life’s work.

Desert Solitaire gives us the difficulty Abbey encountered in his first foray into Arches.  He was not far from Moab, but he was isolated and had to rely on his wits to get by between deliveries of water, food and supplies.  He had several encounters with wild life:  desert mice in his dilapidated trailer; a rattlesnake who camped out right under the steps down from that trailer’s door; and, while off duty, livestock that needed herding and protecting to avoid predators.

He is not shy in the book about his point of view.  He speaks of the “solitary confinement of the mind,” as a theory that “solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for the brains) and conversation-clogged seminars.”  His prescription for all that ails humankind is a foray into Nature, a deep, immersive interaction that restores the perspective and the respect that should be afforded the natural world.

His observations are sharp and clear, and when he tells a story, especially the one about discovering a dead body with a crew searching for a lost person, he is riveting.  One does not need to decipher Abbey’s positions on environmental issues, and he does not romanticize the harsh landscape in which his story is set.  We taste the grit and sand in the wind; we see creatures, strange and delicate, as they flee the sun.  Throughout, Abbey is clear and factual in his rendering of the desert and his place in it.  He is a Loner here who opens the door for us and allows us insight into the nature of this universe.

In a time of climate change, and climate change deniers, we need to read Edward Abbey.  Through his pages, we access the natural world and discover our place in the universe.  We are but small fragments of star dust and fluid, part of the great Oversoul of which Emerson so nobly spoke.  Abbey’s story is set against the harsh and Martian-like landscape of Arches National Monument, a mystical and deeply moving world of evolved species that can survive the difficult environment where they live.  It is a world of plants that retain water from limited rains, and the bones of those who have dried out and turned to fossil or dust.

This book opened a door for me.  It changed the way I see the world, as all literature and art should.  However, what I am most thankful for, Edward Abbey led me to another great environmental writer and scientist:  John Muir.  More on him shortly.

Arches National Monument

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

Evocation:  the act of bringing or recalling a feeling, memory or image to the conscious mind; the action of invoking a spirit or a deity.

This is the summer I decided to read Proust.  Any reader worth his or her salt must face down this classic multi-volume behemoth.  Marcel Proust is one of the greatest novelists in all of literature, and In Search of Lost Time is his grand masterpiece.

Why now?  Why this summer?  Because I am aware that time is passing, that places I have come to know and love are gone, and no one lives forever.  In Proust, I hoped to find the way memory shadows us and enriches us and our experiences.  I wanted to find a way to provoke, and invoke, my own memories of what has gone or been lost to the years.  I read the first two volumes and was not disappointed:  the Madeleines, the sepia-colored scenes of 19^th century Paris, the memories, dreams and reflections—all there.

Proust was a 38 year-old man when he began writing the novel.  He had been a sickly child who grew up to be a fragile adult, and much of his work was done in bed at night while all of France slept.  Ultimately, the novel was published after his death in 1922, and he did not get to do the extensive revisions that he performed on the early volumes even when they were typeset and in printer’s proofs.  Long sentences abound throughout, but it is quite simply exquisite writing.  I will probably not finish the 4,300 pages for a while, so this is really a discussion in progress and on-going.

At heart, Proust is a mystical atheist with loose ties to the Catholic Church, a faith he did not practice.  It is in his writing about memory and what triggers us to fall into the past that he excels.  His writing is beautiful, haunting, moving, and at times flowery and serpentine.  The characters and plot running through all the volumes is boilerplate Victorian drawing room drama with a touch of humor and a hint of sex.  The evocative nature of his work is what casts the golden beams of autumnal reflection on the past.  With close to 2000 characters, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of one when he or she may appear in the first volume and may not come back again until the fourth or fifth.  But these are minor complaints and not relevant to the longer journey of the books.  Reading Proust is its own reward for any reader with the gumption to see it through to the end.

Proust’s gift is to show us that memories, as we age, are our prized possessions.  They console us and make the present more bearable.  Through memory, we keep those who have passed on alive.  We remember holidays and food and the way things used to be, often a romanticized notion of how we wish they were.  In shaping our memories, we comfort ourselves; these seemingly innocuous moments in our lives—the smell of fresh bread baking, the perfume of our mothers, the scent of evergreen in December—remind us of the days we’ve lived and the strands of experience we embody.

Memory, though, often comes with a twin, the yin and yang of us:  regret.  Can we remember the past without regret?  Why is it that human beings always see the past as better than it was?  If only we could do things over again.  Yet, when asked, no one wants to go back to their teenage years, or feel the shame and embarrassment over saying the wrong thing or acting foolishly in youth.

Memories are the things we carry.  They give us a sense of linear time, even though time may not be constant or linear.  In present moments are the moments of the past and the future, like mirrors reflecting each other through eternal prisms that go, back and forth, to infinity.  Proust in his cork-lined bedroom, scribbling away, knew the persistence of memory.  He wrote against the day he would be gone and only his novel would remain.  In this way, his memory is incandescent and always with us.  He inspires us to catch the scent, the touch, the warmth of a voice, and remember.

Proust's notebook pages

Rise Up

Toni Morrison died a few days ago at the ripe old age of 88.  That’s a good, long life, but I am greedy and I wanted her to keep telling stories, to keep telling us what it means to be human in all its messy and bloody atrocities.  Nobel Prize winner; Pulitzer Prize winner; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2016.  She will be missed; may her voice ever echo down the mountain from sea to shining sea.

Morrison was no stranger to tragedy and loss.  Her family home was burned to the ground by the landlord for late rent; she was two years old at the time.

It happened again when she was 62.  This time, the fire was ignited by a fireplace ember, but most of Morrison’s priceless papers and manuscripts were saved.

Her son, Slade Morrison, died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the age of 45, which stopped her work on her novel, Home (Vintage International, 2013), until she realized he would expect his mother to go forward with her writing.  And so she did.

Her voice became a clarion call against injustice, words of protest flowing from her pen, calling the world’s attention to the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott, unarmed black men killed by white police officers.

She addressed white privilege and fear in her essay published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker after Donald Trump was elected president.  I can only imagine what she would have to say about the bloody days of murder and mayhem in California, Texas and Ohio, and the 255 incidents of mass murder that have occurred already this year.

Critic John Leonard in his office

In reading the numerous tributes and obituaries online for Morrison, one name leapt off the page at me.  He was the first white critic to trumpet Toni Morrison’s extraordinary voice and talent:  John Leonard, book and cultural critic for publications as diverse as CBS News, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Boston Globe, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Times.  John Leonard inspired me to read and write, one of many critical influences in my life.  His book, The Last Innocent White Man in America (The New Press, 1993), made me want to read and write about books and culture.  He turned criticism into poetry, and raised such writing to its own exalted place in the pantheon of belles-lettres. He, too, is gone now, eleven years ago.

Something clicked over in my head.  It was time.

I dusted off The Teacher’s View and On The Street Where I Live, my online essays about literature, culture and the life of the mind, and about living in Los Angeles.  We have a culture in crisis.  We have a country in crisis.  We face enormous, heart-breaking and dangerous challenges.  This is not the time to keep silent but to raise one’s voice, as Toni Morrison and John Leonard did.  This is the crucible where we determine what we’re made of and what we value most.  This is the time when we must, finally, institute a culture of equality, respect, and love.  There is no other way forward.

A long time ago, my first mentor-teacher told me that real teachers never fully walk away from the classroom; they will always find their way back.  Teachers, writers, philosophers, or students—human beings always find their way.  The path is not easy, and there will be tragedies and failures.  Trial and error, feeling demoralized and empty, lost and alone—this is what we are experiencing now, even as we stare at our phone screens and try to lose ourselves while carrying the overwhelming burden of anxiety and fear.  But as Socrates once said:  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  Only through intense and relentless self-examination can we come to understand ourselves and others.  We rise to meet the challenges of brutality and racism.  We pick up the torch and carry on.  This is not the time to retreat but to reach out and find the truth and humanity in the immigrant, the neighbor, the human being living on the street.  As Toni Morrison and John Leonard taught us, in the face of aggression, oppression, and rage, we must rise up whatever way we can, and be very, very brave.