Some INTRIGUING QUOTATIONS from EDWARD ABBEY'S _DESERT_SOLITAIRE_ (1968) --page #'s refer to 1990 Touchstone Edition ======== **"WILDERNESS" VS. "CIVILIZATION": We need the wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. . . . We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis. (129-130) * * * * * * No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and the principle of civilization itself. (169) * * * * * * Cutting the bloody cord, that's what we feel, the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty . . . . That's what the first taste of the wild does to a man, after having been too long penned up in the city. No wonder the Authorities are so anxious to smother the wilderness under asphalt and reservoirs. They know what they're doing; their lives depend on it, and all their rotten institutions. Play safe. Ski only in a clockwise direction. Let's all have fun together. (155-156) * * * * * * . . . we need coyotes, need them badly, in Arches National Monument. As does the nation as a whole, for that matter. We need coyotes more than we need, let us say, more people, of whom we have already an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling. (209) * * * * * * I was accused of being against civilization, against science, against humanity. . . . I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, and to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture. (244) * * * * * * They [the tourists] have left me alone here in the wilderness, at the center of things, where all that is most significant takes place. (Sunset and moonrise, moaning winds and stillness, cloud transformations, the metamorphosis of sunlight, yellowing leaf and the indolent, soaring vulture. . . .) (264-265) * * * * * * In any case, when a man must be afraid to drink freely from his own country's rivers and streams that country is no longer fit to live in. (162) * * * * * * There are no vacant lots in nature. (166) * * * * * * How difficult to imagine this place without a human presence; how necessary. I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land will be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourists, will breathe metaphorically a sigh of relief--like a whisper of wind--when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man. (267) ======== **BIO-EGALITARIANISM: We are obliged . . . to spread the news, painful and bitter as it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred. (21) * * * * * * We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth! (34) * * * * * * For myself I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. (Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!) (24) * * * * * * I'd rather kill a _man_ than a snake. (17) ======== **ANTI-ANTHROPOMORPHISM, ANTI-ANTHROPOCENTRISM, ANTI-ESSENTIALISM, ANTI-PROJECTION, etc.: A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature . . . has the curious ability to remind us . . . that _out_there_ is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. (37) * * * * * * The essence of the juniper continues to elude me unless, as I presently suspect, its surface is also the essence. Two living things on the same earth, respiring in a common medium, we contact one another but without direct communication. Intuition, sympathy, empathy, all fail to guide me into the heart of this being--if it has a heart. (27) * * * * * * Each stone, each plant, each grain of sand exists in and for itself with a clarity that is undimmed by any suggestion of a different realm. . . . the desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly, with no meaning but its own existence. (135) * * * * * * Alone in the silence, I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the ante-human, that _other_world_ which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse--its implacable difference. (191) * * * * * * Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear--the earth remains . . . . Turning Plato and Hegel on their heads I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun. (94) * * * * * * . . . what is the peculiar quality or character of the desert that distinguishes it, in spiritual appeal, from other forms of landscape? In trying to isolate this peculiarity, if it exists at all and is not simply an illusion, we must beware of a danger well known to explorers of both the micro- and macrocosmic--that of confusing the thing observed with the mind of the observer, of constructing not a picture of external reality but simply a mirror of the thinker. Can this danger be avoided without falling into an opposite but related error, that of separating too deeply the observer and the thing observed, subject and object, and again falsifying our view of the world? There is no way out of these difficulties . . . . (240) * * * * * * I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness. (243) * * * * * * . . . why name them [rock formations]? . . . Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone--they'll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us. . . . Through naming comes knowing . . . . And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains . . . and it is we who are lost. (256-257) ======== **"NATURISM" vs. CHRISTIANITY/METAPHYSICS God? . . . who the hell is _he_? There is nothing here, at the moment, but me and the desert. And that's the truth. Why confuse the issue by dragging in a superfluous entity? Occam's razor. Beyond atheism, nontheism. I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth. (184) * * * * * * But the love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need--if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us--if only we were worthy of it. (167) * * * * * * If a man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams. (177) * * * * * * Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. . . . What does it [the desert] mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime. (194) ======== **BIRDS: An early evening breeze rustles through the willows ashore and we hear again the tinkling music of canyon wrens--like little silver bells falling across a glockenspiel--no, like wilderness lorelei--calling down to us from the rimrock, sweetest of all bird songs in the canyon country. (158) ======== ======== ADDENDUM: from Abbey's _The_Monkey_Wrench_Gang_: He [Dr. Sarvis] watched the news. Same as yesterday's. The General Crisis coming along nicely. Nothing new except the commercials full of sly art and eco-porn. Scenes of the Louisiana bayous, strange birds in slow-motion flight, cypress trees bearded with Spanish moss. Above the primeval scene the voice of Power spoke, reeking with sincerity, in praise of itself, the Exxon Oil Company--its tidiness, its fastidious care for all things wild, its concern for human needs. ======== ======== | --:--tcg, 6/02 )