Sep 15, · Essay Sample: Eco-defense by Edward Abbey is about a guy who is was tired of corporate executives in the world who wanted to destroy the wilderness. Edward Abbey writes, to the editor of a student newspaper, “What is the essence of the art of writing? Part one: Have something to say. Part two: Say it well.” Great advice, but hard to do most times. Abbey fought the good fight until he died in Who among us will stand up in his place? Oct 29, · Edward Abbey [], the late novelist, essayist, and environmental activist, was a confirmed political "liberal" (perhaps even an extremist), who believed that the degradation of the land and culture of the American Southwest was a crime against nature, and that the least any one of us could do was to try to defend it from the resource exploiters and population pressures which endangered it
Free Edward Abbey Essays and Papers | Help Me
Edward Abbey, who died in March at the age of 62, seemed, edward abbey essays, at his best, the nonpareil ''nature writer'' of recent decades. It was a term he came to detest, a term used to pigeonhole and marginalize some of the more intriguing American writers who are dealing with matters central to us - yet it can be a ticket to oblivion in the bookstores.
Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, in a slapdash though interesting essay called ''Against Nature,'' speaks of nature writers' ''painfully limited set of responses. REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS. He wrote with exceptional exactitude and an unusually honest and logical understanding of causes and consequences, edward abbey essays, but he also loved argument, churlishness and exaggeration, edward abbey essays.
Personally, he was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly and cowboy qualities, and even when silent he appeared bigger than life. He had hitchhiked from Appalachia for the first time at age 17 to what became an immediate love match with the West, and, I'm sure, slept out more nights under the stars than all of his current competitors combined.
He was uneven and self-indulgent as a writer and often scanted his talent by working too fast, edward abbey essays.
But he had about him an authenticity that springs from the page and is beloved by a rising generation of readers, who have enabled his early collection of rambles, edward abbey essays Solitaire''to run through 18 printings in mass-market paperback. His fine comic novel, ''The Monkey Wrench Gang''has sold half a million copies. Both books, indeed, have inspired a new eco-guerrilla environmental organization called Earth First!
Like many good writers, Abbey dreamed of producing ''the fat masterpiece,'' as he called the ''nubble'' that he had worked on for the past dozen years and that was supposed to boil everything down to a thousand edward abbey essays or so.
When edited in half, it came out last fall as ''The Fool's Progress,'' an autobiographical yarn that lunges cross-country several times, full of apt descriptions and antic fun - ''Ginger Man'' stuff - though not with the coherence or poignance he had hoped for. I do think he wrote masterpieces, but they were more slender: the essays in ''Desert Solitaire'' and an equivalent sampler that you might put together from subsequent collections like ''Down the River,'' ''Beyond the Wall'' and ''The Journey Home.
He loved the desert - ''red mountains like mangled iron'' - liked people in smallish clusters, edward abbey essays, and didn't mince words in saying that industrial rapine, glitz-malls and tract-sprawl were an abomination heralding more devastating events. While writing as handsomely as others do, he never lost sight of the fact that much of Creation is rapidly being destroyed.
And he adopted for a motto Walt Whitman's line: ''Resist much, obey little. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? Abbey traveled less than some writers, but it is not necessary to go dithering around our suffering planet, visiting the Amazon, Indonesia, edward abbey essays, Bhutan and East Africa.
The crisis is plain in anyone's neck of the woods, and the exoticism of globe-trotting may only blur one's vision. Nor do we need to become mystical Transcendentalists and commune with Edward abbey essays. On his hundreds of camping trips he tended to observe and enjoy the wilds rather than submerge his soul.
What is needed is honesty, a pair of eyes and a dollop of fortitude to spit the truth out, not genuflecting to Emersonian optimism, edward abbey essays, or journalistic traditions of staying deadpan, or the saccharine pressures of magazine editors who want their readers to feel good. Emerson would be roaring with heartbreak and Thoreau would be raging with grief in these 's. Where were you when the world burned? Get mad, for a change, for heaven's sake! I believe they would say to compatriots of Abbey's like Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez and John McPhee.
Abbey didn't sell to the big book clubs or reach best-sellerdom or collect major prizes. When, at 60, he was offered a smallish one by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he rejected it with a fanfare of rhetoric, probably because it had come too late.
So the success, wholly word-of-mouth, of ''The Monkey Wrench Gang'' edward abbey essays paperback pleased him more than anything else, and he delighted in telling friends who the real-life counterparts were for its characters, Seldom Seen Smith, Bonnie Abbzug and George Washington Hayduke.
They too had torn down billboards, yanked up survey stakes, poured sand into bulldozer gas tanks and sabotaged ''certain monstrosities'' in fragilely scenic regions. Robinson Jeffers, another regionalist, who made of the close examination of his home country at Big Sur in California a prism to look at the rest of the world, concluded in several poems that mankind had turned into a ''sick microbe,'' a ''deformed ape,'' a ''botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.
I remember the farther Future, and the last man dying Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars. Yet he was a bold, complex man who had five wives and five children by the end of his life; and although he spilled too much energy into feuds with his allies and friends, he was often a jubilant writer, a regular gleeman, not just a threnodist, and he wanted to be remembered as a writer of ''that letter which is never finished'' - literature - as ''Desert Solitaire'' is.
We corresponded occasionally for 20 years, wanting to go for a lengthy sail on the Sea of Cortez or go camping somewhere in the hundred-mile Air Force gunnery range that for its isolation eventually became another favorite redoubt of his. I hoped we could drift down the Yukon River together and compile a dual diary. He had lived in Hoboken, N. On his way home to Oracle, Ariz. Debs in his youth and has toured Cuba and still cuts hickory fence posts in the woods for a living. Abbey was a writer who liked to play poker with cowboys, while continuing to ridicule the ranch owners who overgraze the West's ravaged grasslands.
The memorial picnic for him in Saguaro National Monument outside Tucson, Edward abbey essays. The potluck stew was from two ''slow elk,'' as he liked to call beef cattle poached from particularly greedy entrepreneurs on the public's wildlands.
He was an egalitarian, he said - by which he meant that he believed all wildlife and the full panoply of natural vegetation have a right to live equal to man's - and these beeves had belonged to a cowman who specialized in hounding Arizona's scarce mountain lions.
Abbey died of internal bleeding from a circulatory disorder, with a few week's notice of how sick he was. Two days before the event he decided to leave the hospital, wishing to die in the desert; at sunup he had himself disconnected from the tubes and machinery. His wife Clarke and three friends drove him as far out of town as his condition allowed. They built a edward abbey essays for him to look at, until, feeling death at hand, he crawled into his sleeping bag with Clarke.
But by noon, finding he was still alive and possibly better, he asked to be taken home and placed on a mattress on the floor of his writing cabin. There he said his gentle goodbyes. His written instructions were that he should be ''transported in the bed of a pickup truck'' deep into the desert and buried anonymously, wrapped in his sleeping bag, in the beautiful spot where his grave would never be found, with ''lots of rocks'' piled on top to keep the coyotes off.
Abbey of course loved coyotes and, for that matter, buzzards and had played his flute to answer their howls during the many years he had earned his living watching for fires from Government towers on the Grand Canyon's North Rim, on Aztec Peak in Tonto National Forest and in Glacier National Park, before he finally won tenure as a ''fool professor'' at the University of Arizona. His friend who was the model for G.
Hayduke in ''The Monkey Wrench Gang'' was squatting beside him on the floor as his life ebbed away. The last smile that crossed Abbey's face was when ''Hayduke'' told him where he would be put. The place is, inevitably, edward abbey essays, a location where mountain lions, antelope, bighorn sheep, deer and javelinas leave tracks, where owls, poor-wills and coyotes hoot and cacomistles scratch, with a range of stiff terrain overhead and greasewood, rabbitbrush, ocotillo and noble old cactuses about.
First seven, then ten buzzards gathered while the grave was being dug; as he edward abbey essays wished, it was a rocky spot. One man jumped into the hole to be sure it felt O. before laying Abbey in, and afterward in a kind of reprise of the antic spirit that animates ''The Monkey Wrench Gang,'' and that should make anybody but a developer laugh out loud, went around heaping up false rockpiles at ideal gravesites throughout the Southwest, because this last peaceful act of outlawry of Abbey's was the gesture of legend and there will be seekers for years to come, edward abbey essays.
The stuff of legend: like Thoreau's serene passage from life muttering the edward abbey essays ''moose'' and ''Indian'' and John Muir's thousand-mile walks to Georgia or in the Sierras. Can Edward Abbey be compared to them? Muir, after all, bullied the Catskills naturalist John Burroughs from edward abbey essays orneriness, as Abbey, the controversialist, regularly blistered his colleagues with vitriol through the mails, and Thoreau - a stark individual in his own way - orated vehemently on behalf of the reviled ''terrorist'' John Brown.
That Edward abbey essays of witticisms such as what a pearl was: ''the hardened tear of a diseased clam, murdered in its old age. It was the building of Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park now thought to have been unnecessary for San Francisco's water needs that finally embittered Muir; and the unfinished business of ''monkeywrenching'' in ''The Monkey Wrench Gang'' is to blow up Glen Canyon Dam, a structure that, before Abbey's eyes, had drowned a whole stretch of the Colorado River's most pristine, precious canyons.
A magazine recently published Abbey's account of his last trip by horseback through Utah's slick-rock canyons, and it's got the hop of a knuckleball on it, unmistakably Abbey, as briny with personality as his heyday essays. Nor had 20 years changed him. Thoreau, by contrast, in a brief incandescent burst of work, vaulted from the relatively conventional ''Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers'' to the vision of ''Walden,'' but soon fell back into dutiful natural science.
And Muir went from being a lone-wolf geologist to a passionate advocate skillfully lobbying Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft on behalf of Yosemite, until, late in life, when he was finished with localism, he wandered rather disconsolately to Africa, Asia and South America in celebrity guise. Abbey was consistent but, unlike Thoreau, he was not self-contained; some compulsive agenda unknown to him blunted his efforts to surpass himself.
And his ambitions were confined to truth-telling, rhapsody and the lambasting of villains. As an essayist he did not aspire to the grandeur of versatility, or try edward abbey essays to turn into a man of letters edward abbey essays - his novels can seem flat or foreshortened next to Peter Matthiessen's, for example, and his literary pronouncements were scattershot, edward abbey essays, bilious or cursory.
Like most conservationists, edward abbey essays, he was a political radical but a social conservative, going so far as to aver the old-fashioned idea that there are two sexes, not simply one - which, expressed with his customary crowing, abrasive overstatement, offended people.
Yet he wrote in a love letter edward abbey essays a woman friend after a break-up, ''If you ever need me in any way I will cross continents and oceans to help you,'' a sentiment even his favorite bete noire, Gloria Steinem, might have appreciated.
There's a saying that life gets better once you have outlived the bastards - which would certainly be true except that as you do, you are also outliving your friends. Sitting in silence with him in restaurants as our twinned melancholy groped for expression, edward abbey essays, or talking with him of hoodoo stone pillars and red rock canyons, edward abbey essays, I've seldom felt closer to anybody.
Honesty is a key to essay-writing: not just ''a room of one's own,'' but a view of one's own. The lack of it sinks more talented people into chatterbox hackwork than anything else. And Abbey aspired to speak for himself in all honesty - X: His Mark - and died telling friends he had done what he could and was ready.
He didn't buzz off to Antarctica or the Galapagos Islands, yet no one will ever wonder what he really saw as the edward abbey essays burned. He said it; he didn't sweeten it or blink at it or water it down or hope the web of catastrophes might just go away. He felt homesick for the desert when he went to Alaska, and turned back, yet if you travel much there edward abbey essays is Abbey's words you will see tacked on the wall again and again in remote homestead cabins in the Brooks Range or edward abbey essays in Juneau, because he had already written of greed, of human brutality and howling despair, better than writers who write books on Alaska have.
Last year a paean to Abbey's work in National Review finished edward abbey essays a quote from a passage in Faulkner: ''Oleh, Chief.
But instead let's close with a bit of Ed Abbey, from a minor book called ''Appalachian Wilderness''which foretold why he chose that lost grave where he lies:.
how utterly edward abbey essays and wild. Yet some among us have the nerve, the insolence, the brass, the gall to whine about the limitations of our earthbound fate and yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky.
We are none of us good enough for the world we have. On the lookout for your next book to read, but not sure where to start? We can help. Books EDWARD ABBEY: STANDING TOUGH IN THE DESERT. What to Read A Edward abbey essays of Reading New Books for May 25 Book Review Greats Listen: The Book Review Podcast. See the article in its original context from May 7,edward abbey essays, Section 7, Page 44 Buy Reprints, edward abbey essays.
View on timesmachine. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. But instead let's close with a bit of Ed Abbey, from a minor book called ''Appalachian Wilderness''edward abbey essays, which foretold why he chose that lost grave where he lies: ''How edward abbey essays and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through fog, the furry grass, edward abbey essays, the scaly seas.
Here are the 10 Best Books ofalong with Notable Books of the year. Or try any of these new books that our editors recommend. Our editors wrote about their favorite comfort edward abbey essays — and we asked celebrated authorslike Celeste Ng, Ann Patchett and others, about theirs.
Feeling goal-oriented?
Stages Of A Man's Life, Edward Abbey
, time: 6:55Reading: Edward Abbey's Last Rant | Essay | Chicago Reader
Words4 Pages “Thinking like a mountain” by Aldo Leopold, “Serpents of Paradise” by Edward Abbey, but one of these essays focuses more on the hunting aspects of life. They both care about the environment. Abbey tries to find out how to avoid thought of killing an animal but to find any way to keep the wildlife calm and maintained Apr 26, · What makes Abbey's work worth reading is that he kept that honest and vituperative tone in the essays and books he published. He was never Author: Peter Friederici Edward Abbey writes, to the editor of a student newspaper, “What is the essence of the art of writing? Part one: Have something to say. Part two: Say it well.” Great advice, but hard to do most times. Abbey fought the good fight until he died in Who among us will stand up in his place?
No comments:
Post a Comment