Earth Works

Scott Russell Sanders

Description

An Englewood Review of Books best book of 2012

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In the hands of award-winning writer Scott Russell Sanders, the essay becomes an inquisitive and revelatory form of art. In 30 of his finest essays—nine never before collected—Sanders examines his Midwestern background, his father's drinking, his opposition to war, his literary inheritance, and his feeling for wildness. He also tackles such vital issues as the disruption of Earth's climate, the impact of technology, the mystique of money, the ideology of consumerism, and the meaning of sustainability. Throughout, he asks perennial questions: What is a good life? How do family and culture shape a person's character? How should we treat one another and the Earth? What is our role in the cosmos? Readers and writers alike will find wisdom and inspiration in Sanders's luminous and thought-provoking prose.

Preface
The Singular First Person
At Play in the Paradise of Bombs
The Men We Carry in Our Minds
Doing Time in the Thirteenth Chair
The Inheritance of Tools
Under the Influence
Looking at Women
Reasons of the Body
After the Flood
House and Home
Staying Put
Wayland
Letter to a Reader
Buckeye
The Common Life
Voyageurs
Mountain Music
Wildness
Beauty
Silence
The Force of Spirit
The Uses of Muscle
A Private History of Awe
A Road into Chaos and Old Night
Words Addressed to Our Condition Exactly
Honoring the Ordinary
Speaking for the Land
The Mystique of Money
Buffalo Eddy
Mind in the Forest
Notes and Acknowledgements

Sujets

• Essays
• América
• General officer
• General
• American

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253007124
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALSO BY SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS
NONFICTION
A Conservationist Manifesto
A Private History of Awe
The Force of Spirit
The Country of Language
Hunting for Hope
Writing from the Center
Staying Put
Secrets of the Universe
The Paradise of Bombs
In Limestone Country
FICTION
The Invisible Company
The Engineer of Beasts
Bad Man Ballad
Terrarium
Wonders Hidden
Fetching the Dead
Hear the Wind Blow
Wilderness Plots
earth works

This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2012 by Scott Russell Sanders
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sanders, Scott R. (Scott Russell), 1945-
Earth works : selected essays / Scott Russell Sanders.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-253-00094-1 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00095-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS 3569. A 5137 E 26 2012 814 .54- DC 23
2011030599
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
For the community of writers, readers, editors, artists, scientists, activists, and Earth lovers gathered by Orion magazine .
Sometimes I think that is all we are really here for: to look at the world, and to see as much as we can.
JOHN HAINES
CONTENTS
Preface
The Singular First Person
At Play in the Paradise of Bombs
The Men We Carry in Our Minds
Doing Time in the Thirteenth Chair
The Inheritance of Tools
Under the Influence
Looking at Women
Reasons of the Body
After the Flood
House and Home
Staying Put
Wayland
Letter to a Reader
Buckeye
The Common Life
Voyageurs
Mountain Music
Wildness
Beauty
Silence
The Force of Spirit
The Uses of Muscle
A Private History of Awe
A Road into Chaos and Old Night
Words Addressed to Our Condition Exactly
Honoring the Ordinary
Speaking for the Land
The Mystique of Money
Buffalo Eddy
Mind in the Forest
Notes and Acknowledgments
PREFACE
All of us ponder our lives, more or less often, more or less deeply, and all of us likewise reflect on the larger webs in which our lives are enmeshed, from families and communities to nations and nature, and on out to the farthest reaches of imagination. Essayists choose to do such reflecting, remembering, and imagining in public, on the page. They differ from scholars in claiming no expertise, from journalists in disclosing their opinions, and from novelists in refusing to make things up.
I have gathered here thirty essays that best represent what I have tried to do in this versatile, inquisitive, and sometimes revelatory art form over the past three decades. Twenty-one of the essays have appeared in my previous books; nine are collected here for the first time. In revisiting them, I have made small deletions, for the sake of economy, and slight changes in wording, for the sake of clarity. But I have refrained from making significant revisions, allowing the essays to remain, for better or worse, essentially as they first appeared in print. They are arranged in roughly chronological order, by date of composition. Where I have varied that order, I have done so in order to juxtapose certain essays that cast what seems to me an interesting light on one another. The Notes and Acknowledgments section at the back of this volume records, for each essay, when it was composed and where it was first published, along with a few of the circumstances and concerns that influenced the writing. I also list there the chief sources of quotations, and the names of editors who have been especially supportive of my work.
The writing of an essay usually begins for me in a state of strong emotion and equally strong puzzlement. Some event, recollection, journey, or notion bewilders me, distresses me, fascinates me, or otherwise provokes me, and sets me asking questions that drive the writing forward. Such answers as I come up with are always partial and tentative, subject to rethinking in light of new knowledge or further reflection-just like the findings of science, my first intellectual love.
Although the answers vary from essay to essay, certain questions have persisted over the years. Some of them pertain to my own life-my midwestern background, my father s drinking, my resistance to war, my literary debts, my feeling for wildness. But most of the questions that drive my essays are impersonal, for they must occur to every inquisitive soul: What is a good life, and how might one come closer to leading such a life? What is a good society, and how might we shift our society in that direction? How do family and culture shape a person s character? Why are humans so violent, toward one another and toward Earth? What is our place in nature? What role, if any, do humans play in the universe? What is this inwardness we call mind, which fills our awareness, and what is it good for? Are we connected, through the core of our being, to anything eternal? These are perennial human questions, and my response to them is only one among a host of responses. That they can never be definitively answered does not mean one can avoid asking them.
We humans are exceedingly clever animals, but we are animals nonetheless. Along with our millions of fellow species, we carry an evolutionary inheritance that stretches back billions of years, and we are wholly dependent for our well-being on the health of this planet. Because my essays embody this awareness, I am sometimes asked if I am a nature writer, as if paying attention to our membership in the web of life were a specialized interest, like following sports or fashion or cuisine. What I am is an Earth writer: I m interested in life on this planet-all life. Since I know most about my own species, I think mostly about human affairs, but I do so while seeking to understand how our kind arises from and affects the living world. Hence the title of this book. Works serves here as both noun and verb. Like all works of art, my essays are products of Earth, as are you, as am I, and we are able to make books and babies, to wonder and sing, to spend our brief time under the sun, only because Earth works miraculously well, providing us a benign habitation in the void of space.
Scott Russell Sanders BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA JANUARY 2012
earth works
The Singular First Person
T he first soapbox orator I ever saw was haranguing a crowd beside the Greyhound station in Providence, Rhode Island, about the evils of fluoridated water. What the man stood on was actually an up-turned milk crate, all the genuine soapboxes presumably having been snapped up by antique dealers. He wore an orange plaid sport coat and matching bow tie and held aloft a bottle filled with mossy green liquid. I don t remember the details of his spiel, except his warning that fluoride was an invention of the Communists designed to weaken our bones and thereby make us pushovers for a Red invasion. What amazed me, as a tongue-tied kid of seventeen newly arrived in the city from the boondocks, was not his message but his courage in delivering it to a mob of strangers. I figured it would have been easier for me to jump straight over the Greyhound station than to stand there on that milk crate and utter my thoughts.
To this day, when I read or when I compose one of those curious monologues we call the personal essay, I often think of that soapbox orator. Nobody had asked him for his two cents worth, but there he was declaring it with all the eloquence he could muster. The essay, although enacted in private, is no less arrogant a performance. Unlike novelists and playwrights, who lurk behind the scenes while distracting our attention with the puppet show of imaginary characters; unlike scholars and journalists, who quote the opinions of others and shelter behind the hedges of neutrality, the essayist has nowhere to hide. While the poet can lean back on a several-thousand-year-old legacy of ecstatic speech, the essayist inherits a much briefer and skimpier tradition. The poet is allowed to quit after a few lines, but the essayist must hold our attention for pages and pages. It is a brash and foolhardy form, this one-man or one-woman circus, which relies on the tricks of anecdote, conjecture, memory, and wit to enthrall us.

Addressing a monologue to the world seems all the more brazen or preposterous an act when you consider what a tiny fraction of the human chorus any single voice is. At Boston s Museum of Science an electronic meter records with flashing lights the population of the United States. Figuring in the rate of births and deaths, emigrants leaving the country and immigrants arriving, the meter calculates that we add one fellow citizen every twenty-one seconds. When I looked at it one day in 1987, the count stood at 249,958,483. As I wrote that figure in my notebook, the final number jumped from 3 to 4. Another mouth, another set of ears and eyes, another brain.