A Provisional Introduction

I don’t think I ever took the mountains for granted. My earliest memories are saturated with the distant view of The Crazies, near Big Timber, Montana. In my adolescence and college years in Ennis and Dillon and Bozeman,  I consciously looked up at the mountains  every day and  went up into them every chance I got, hiking or skiing. In my Navy years, I steamed back and forth across the Pacific, but whenever I made a landfall, whether in Japan or California, I followed my nose uphill as far as I could go, to the foot of Mt. Fuji, even to the top of Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States.  In graduate school, I found ways to snowshoe in the Cascades, and when my employment took me to the prairies, I still went back to Montana every year to see my parents or drove west to the high country from my in-laws’ home near Denver. Now, well into my retirement, I drive every fall through Big Timber, where I was born, and up the Boulder River to spend time with friends I made 50 years ago when I lived in the mountains.

I still find mountains as I found them then:  remote and beckoning at the same time:. No reasonable person can see a mountain range without thinking “I want to be up there,” and at the same time, “I could die up there.” Nothing else on earth can bring death and victory together so intimately.  In the vast literature of mountains, mountains figure as sources and symbols of grandeur, solitude, retreat, purity, insight, transfiguration, danger and safety.

Given all that, it does not seem surprising that when, in 2003,  I began a short story about a boy riding a bicycle down a blacktop highway through the Rocky Mountains, carrying another boy on the handlebars, I suddenly saw that I could tell the whole story of my life in terms of the mountain ranges where I had lived. With a little cheating I could even work in the parts where I lived in the flatlands, for what are flatlands but a little rock, ground fine in the mountain streams and  washed down from the hills?

So I let the manuscript bump along.  Eventually  I began experimenting with short epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter. They are supposed to set the tone and resonate metaphorically with the events that follow. Some of those epigraphs are brief notes about historical figures associated with particular mountain ranges. Some are compressed accounts of the ancient geology of the region.

Much of the  geology comes from a work called  Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. My brother loaned me  this remarkable book which describes the geology of the North American continent as it reveals itself along Interstate 70,  from New York City to San Francisco. Of necessity, it deals with plate tectonics, which had fascinated me since I first head about it in 1972.

I found the geology working two ways: in general and in particular. In general, the processes of continental drift are a helpful, though by no means definitive, set of images for talking about how ideas and lives work. That is, everything we see out the window, that stable landscape of rocks and trees, sits on a fragile layer of the earth, the crust. The crust varies in thickness from 4 to 40 miles, but proportionately it is quite thin. If the earth were to shrink to the size of an orange, the average thickness of the crust would be about as thick as cellophane. Furthermore, the crust is not continuous but is broken up into plates (seven major ones, plus countless sub-divisions) which bob around a little like corks on the mantle of the earth, 1800 miles down of hot, putty-like rock surrounding the outer and inner cores, which are composed mostly of iron and nickel. The plates wander about, moving at roughly the speed your fingernails grow, following no pattern that anyone has been able to discern, driven by currents deep in the mantle, breaking apart and reattaching themselves over billions of years. At times the changes take place so slowly we can only infer them from existing structures. At other times, as with earthquakes and volcanoes, they are accompanied by great violence. This pattern—glacial change punctuated by periods of upheaval controlled by subterranean forces that we will never understand but which we can nevertheless study to our profit and delight—seems to me to suggest the kind of lives we lead.

The geologic time scale is also useful to contemplate. A man’s span, says the Bible, is 70 years, perhaps with luck even 80, so it is hard for us to grasp a scale where million years is the blink of an eyelid. Suppose the earth to be a 100-year-old man looking back on his life at midnight on last day of his 100th year. He would remember only devastating meteor showers for many years, then volcanic chaos and a giant deluge as the earth cooled enough so the water that had been trapped in the rock was released and condensed.  When he was 20 he discovered one-celled organisms floating in the seas of his body when, but no shelled animals until he was 90 (90!) and dinosaurs only two years ago. He would remember icing over a year and a half ago when shaggy hominoids began walking upright. The ice melted about noon, and only then did people start using tools. Those people lived in cities for only a few minutes. Everything since the Civil War happened in the last few seconds, perhaps as he was yawning.

No one can think like God, but still we are urged to try and encouraged by the statement that we are made in His image. The attempt to grasp a time scale beyond our imagination is one way to move toward the eternal, one way to see ourselves, We can be humbled by that effort. We need not be dwarfed unless we choose to be.

Furthermore, I found that, without really planning it, the geology in each case, seemed to resonate with the events in that chapter. For example, in the last chapter, I talk about geological formations abutting one another at a place called Contact, about water eating tunnels into limestone in such a way that a stream of water may disappear and then reappear downstream, about meteors hitting the earth to produce mineral deposits, about mountainsides sloughing away. In that same chapter, intellectual forces are brought into contact, time and events tunnel into lives so that what we might call our spiritual lives disappear and then reappear, violent and unpredictable forces strike our lives and leave rich deposits.
 
Writing autobiography is very satisfying. The research is easy—it consists mostly of remembering. A little work on the internet or even the library fills in the gaps and supplies background, and that too is satisfying. The chronology unfolds almost as easy as the King made it sound in Alice in Wonderland: begin at the beginning and go on until the end, then stop. There are few complications I  didn’t anticipate. For example, when I came across an issue or a person, or a place in the process of telling my story (my father, or the poems of T.S. Eliot), I was drawn to comment on it, drawing from the perspective generated by all my later contacts with that person or place or issue. Thus I soon found myself having to decide how much of what to put where, and recording a series of digressions tied loosely to progress of my body through time. I don’t see how it can work any other way.

Besides being seduced by its deceptive simplicity, we write autobiography to leave a record. It’s an immortality thing. We know we are going to be gone soon enough. We know the place where we stand is going to be empty, and we want to leave something in that spot. We want an archive. We want to say, I existed. And we want to say this not just for ourselves. We want to say these things happened, these times existed. At certain times and places, life felt like that. It will never feel like that again, and so it is important that we try to render those times and places, as a kind of homage to creation.

Beyond that, we want to discover some significance in our lives. We want to see our lives in some larger pattern. We want to “sort things out,” to group things, to say that some things were more important than other things. We want to confess our mistakes, to share the hard lessons we have learned—hoping, no doubt, to spare others some of the pain we suffered. Less nobly, we want to excuse ourselves, to justify ourselves, or even to settle old scores, though certainly we can and should try to suppress those more tawdry motivations.

Everyone’s early life is much colored by their family, so in the early parts, I found myself talking about my parents, especially my father. In my youth, I was bookish, and moody, and relatively pious, so much of what I had to say was about reading, and adolescent angst, and religion. Thus four themes emerged pretty much of themselves: Family, the Written Word, Mental Anguish, and God.

I could sense these themes were related, so as I went on, I began to highlight and connect them more self-consciously. My own mental suffering seemed connected to similar patterns in my father’s behavior. People who are suffering will, if they can read, bring that reading to bear on their discomfort, seeking relief or at least meaning. And, if they have any kind of religious training, they will seek to reconcile religious ideas with their pain and eventually with the problem of pain in general. Thus the four themes became intertwined and grew more interesting—at least to me--as they wove themselves into and out of what I called The Modern.

Early on—as early as my freshman year of college--I found myself fascinated by the art of High Modernism, the cultural movement that flourished in the 1920’s. Particularly I was  drawn to  the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Certain images from Eliot’s “The Wasteland” embedded themselves in my mind the first time I read them when I was 18 years old:


He said, Marie, Marie,
hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free
I read much of the night and go south in the winter.

To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
I had no clue was Eliot was talking about in any of his poems, but I knew immediately what I later read in Eliot himself: great poetry can communicate before it is understood. Initially, I was drawn to the poetry of  Eliot and Pound, and to the art of Picasso and the music of Dave Brubeck and later Stravinsky because I saw in it the same things I saw in the mountains: grandeur, and difficulty and remoteness—a way to escape what I saw as the clinging mediocrity of my life, a way to climb  into some higher and purer realm.  

Later, I came to see Modernism (with an s) as a response to and extension of a grand movement of intellectual history called Modernity (with a t).  Though some writers confuse the issue by using modernity and Modernism interchangeably, Modernity is generally name for the worldview dominated by science. It is often dated from 1650, though my own favorite date was 1610, the year Galileo looked through his telescope and saw bumps on the moon. If there were bumps on the moon, Aristotle, who held that heavenly bodies had to be perfectly round, was wrong. The Church had a lot of money bet on Aristotle, and if the church could be wrong about that, perhaps it could be wrong about other things. The implications took a long time to work out, but helped along by Darwin and Freud, science prevailed, and a new worldview, called scientific materialism, came, in the minds of most literate people,  to replace the sacramental worldview of the church as their default explanatory system.  

As I worked my way through the decades of my life, simultaneously recalling and enlarging my reading in the vast literature of modernism and modernity (and their companion terms, postmodernism and postmodernity), a pattern began to emerge that I thought might well have implications beyond my own life. In my years as a chemistry major, I had abandoned my adolescent piety and made a deliberate and conscious commitment to science as my ultimate answer for how things worked. I made a commitment, in other words, to Modernity. I abandoned an admittedly shallow sacramental worldview replacing it with an even more shallow version of science. I can date that decision fairly specifically.

After I finished my undergraduate studies in chemistry and began to earn a living, first as a navy officer and then (after some more school) as a professor of English, my adolescent angst expanded steadily into episodic depression. In my late 30’s, I investigated—and eventually embraced--a mature version of the Christian faith. Within two weeks, the episodes of depression began to decrease in frequency and intensity. Eventually they disappeared. The connection between what I believed—or committed myself to believe—and my mental health was unmistakable. It could not have been a coincidence. I had to conclude that an inherited tendency to neurosis had been made worse by a materialist, skeptical philosophy and that I had been healed by embracing a sacramental view of ultimate reality that I learned to call sacramental.  That much seemed incontrovertible fact.

But the plot thickened. Every since the Enlightenment, and increasingly today, a small but articulate band of cultural historians have been arguing that the turn to scientific materialism impoverished Western Culture and that we must somehow find our way back to a worldview that recognizes the reality and the benefits of science but recovers a universe created and sustained by a loving God. I began to see that my fall from grace was roughly analogous to the ways some writers think Western Culture has fallen, and that I recovered in the same way some thinkers think Western Culture must recover. Thus I began to see my own life as a way of understanding an important phenomenon of intellectual history.

Also, I began to see that in exploring these four themes, Family, Pain, The Written Word, and God, I had drawn on three literary traditions: confession literature, quest literature, and wisdom literature.

St. Augustine is usually given credit for inventing the confession narrative in the early 5th century. Other famous examples are Rousseau’s Confessions and C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy. Most examples proceed in four phases: innocence, rebellion, conversion, and rehabilitation. This one likewise. Roughly, the first five chapters describe a time of innocence. I hasten to add that innocence in my case does not mean happiness. (Does it ever?) it simply describes a time when reflection was not available as an aid. Clueless, I passed from one small town to another, in ebullient joy or in adolescent agony, enduring moods as they came, discerning no pattern. Then in chapter 6, I describe my “fall” in 1958, when I deliberately turned my back on religious faith and embraced scientific materialism as a comprehensive explanatory system. This is what, incredibly, I take to be a microcosm of western intellectual history from, say, 1650. Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, describe a long period in the moral wilderness, when my inner life deteriorated until, in desperation, I undertook (our underwent) a religious conversion symmetrical in many ways to my apostasy in 1958. I can date both turning points fairly precisely, especially the second one. In both cases, I was reading a book, on the second floor of a public building, seated on a soft couch, in a room with spacious windows. Chapters 11,12, 13 and 14 describe my attempts to reconstitute my life on different grounds. I do not mean to talk about 350 years of Western intellectual history as The Life of George Slanger writ large. I mean only  to talk about my own life as that of Western culture writ small. I only mean to suggest analogies between my path and the path that some writers think culture should seek and is seeking. So much for confession.

Perhaps every novel—or even every story--is in some way a quest story, though the King Arthur stories are generally held up as the prime example. In those stories, a group of men seek the holy grail, generally taken to be the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. They never find it, of course, though one, Galahad, is granted a glimpse of it shimmering in the forest. In my case, there were two quests: First, the misguided one for fame and fortune which ended very nearly in disaster, and then the more reasonable one for something more modest: for sanity, for the grace to live through an ordinary day free from the burden of self-loathing, for the feeling of having a place in the world, for the opportunity to do work that I was equipped to do, for the simple satisfactions of family, home, and hearth, for the peace that passes understanding —in short for those things which many people take for granted and acquire simply by modeling their behavior on ancient and well-accepted patterns.

Wisdom literature, the third tradition from which these pages draw, could be described as coping literature—literature that helps ordinary people get through an ordinary day. The obstacles to living through an ordinary day are of two kinds. There are, first, the eternal questions that nag at us at 3:00 in the morning: what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Why do people suffer? What shall we do to be saved? Literature that addresses these kinds of questions is called Speculative Wisdom. In the Bible, the prime examples are Job and the book of Ecclesiastes, But there is another kind of wisdom literature, called Practical Wisdom. It is often expressed in advice and generalizations so obvious they should not need saying at all, but they do: you will stumble less if you tie your shoes. If you stay up late watching television, you will be miserable the next morning when you have to go to work. In the Bible the most well-known example is Proverbs. Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Sirach are not as well known because they are in the apocrypha—books omitted from some editions of the Bible, though not from the original King James. There are always one or two books of Practical Wisdom on the best seller lists: Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Tuesdays with Morey. Generally I flee the room when I see this kind of literature coming, and I am rather embarrassed to have written some of it. Still, it is something writerly types do as they age. We must try to forgive them.

Along the way I was encouraged by family and friends. Especially I was encouraged by my wife, Joanne, who always believes, who never relents. I heard supportive noises back on the internet in response to early drafts I posed on my website. Also, I am fortunate enough to be part of a circle of four college friends that have found ways to stay in touch since we graduated at the end of the Eisenhower years. They are Steve Foster, George Mattson and Paul Wylie. Since we all read a lot and write a little or a lot, and because we have gathered every fall at Paul’s  cabin on the Boulder River, we call ourselves the Boulder River Literary Society. Paul has a published book! I talk more about them in the last chapter. Some days I kept this project going just so I would not have to appear before the Society empty handed.  

As 2008 was winding down and as I was approaching my 71st year, I found myself with about 110,000 words—a book-length manuscript. What had begun a act of self-indulgence had become, I hoped, an exercise of reflection and connection that I thought  might, with a little work, be potentially interesting or useful to the family and friends that had encouraged me.

As an English teacher I had always dutifully taught that writing is rewriting, so I began going back through what I had, filling in gaps, highlighting connections, checking details, adding material. That work could well go on for as long as I can draw breath and sit in front of the keyboard. You can always remember one more thing, always make one more connection. But this is how it stands for now.

Whatever develops, I am grateful I had the time, energy, and residual mental capacity to have brought the project this far. A long writing project is a blessing--most of the time. It provides the content for most of what I think about when I’m folding laundry or doing dishes or walking the dog.  It is fun to be doing something else and have sentences and paragraphs drafting themselves in your head. What do people who are not working on a manuscript think about in slow times? I am sorry to say, however, that some of this internal drafting goes on when I’m driving. or when Joanne is talking to me.

God bless Joanne. I am more grateful for her companionship and support than I can say. And bless Jimmy Carpenter too. I have recently learned that he is doing fine, retired from a careeer as a public school administrator.   I assume that he has a whole drawer full of socks now. That story is in chapter four.

George Slanger
November, 2008