Today's TravelinOma assignment.
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
(I first read this paragraph when I was sixteen. I carried a tattered copy of Ralph Waldo Emmerson's Essays the way the preteens carry their copy of Twilight through middle school halls... tucked up tight, close to the heart, like it was the world's last copy and they alone will see it to Mordor.)
Yes! Yes, that's exactly how I feel! That's exactly what I've been thinking while reading all of these essays! Emmerson's words about thoughts of others coming back to us with a certain alienated majesty was at that instant coming back to me with a certain alienated majesty! I had thought this just moments before and here it was on the page. But he wrote it down, over a century ago. It was deja-vu. It was infinite regression. I was dreaming in a dream of a dream of a dream.
_________
Thoreau the spinster-poet. In the year 1850, when Henry reached the age of thirty-three, Emily Dickinson in nearby Amherst became twenty. Somebody should have brought the two together. They might have hit it off. I imagine this scene, however, immediately following the honeymoon:
EMILY (raising her pen)
Henry, you haven't taken out the garbage.
HENRY (raising his flute)
Take it out yourself.
-Edward Abbey, Down the River
Edward Abbey's Down the River is another book I tuck up tight, close to my heart. HENRY, in this excerpt is Henry David Thoreau. He and Emily Dickinson could have hit it off, right? Soul mates even? Well, this excerpt comically shouts, NO! No existential poet, philosopher, romantic will ever find true union. This thought came back to me with a certain alienated majesty. I recognize in Abbey's writing my own loneliness. I recognize in Abbey himself, my own eternal loneliness.
I know who I married and I knew what I was doing when I did it. And I love him more than anything. I even love him for his oblivion to me, of my strandedness. I really believe he's the world's last good man.
I struggled a lot in early adulthood, grappling with this. I clamored around everyone, trying to reach their core. I tried to connect with everyone on the level I wanted. I tried and tried and ultimately gave up. Thoreau chose isolation. Abbey chose rivers. I chose someone I truly appreciate and love. Totally soul-fulfilling? No. Is anything? We get what we can get. Still sometimes, I wonder if I couldn't do just as well wandering my canyon alone.
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Those who love it call it "The Canyon"---the canyon--- as if there were no other such topographical feature on the earth's face.
... Meanwhile, there it is, in my own backyard, waiting for me all these millions of years--- the Canyon. I am tempted to write "my canyon," so possessive can that place make on feel. But the canyon is not mine, nor anyone's; the Canyon belongs to us all- and to no one...
...To know the Canyon is to love it? Not necessarily. Crawling up the Tanner Trial some moonlight night in August, without food or water, you will hate the canyon. Bitterly. That pale rim so far above, higher than five Empire State Buildings piled one upon another, seems inaccessible as heaven, remote as salvation. But if you survive, if you make it, you learn not to despise the Canyon but your own fear and foolishness, in being unprepared and return again and again...
... To die in the act of love- every lover's fondest fantasy...
... Even so I hope now, as I have always hoped, that my own last vision, through fading eyes, will not be a window in a strange room, nor even the face of friend or lover, but the spectacle of distant canyon walls, the profile of a mesa against the sky, the gleam of a river far below. Those are the things I want to take with me in my dying moments, if I too must die, and taking them with and within me, all the way, become a part of them.
-Edward Abbey, Down the River.
The Canyon brings me as close as I can get to the last good man alive. He loves it too. Yet like some sick triangle, my jealousy says I love the canyon more than he does. He loves it like money, a means to an end. I love its very fabric, the way it crinkles up when thrown in the wash, then dries crisp in the sun.
I recently handed him my Down the River copy to read. He and Precious took things downstairs for an hour, me feeling jealous all the while, then returned.
BRANDON (gesturing with book)
I think it's good but I don't really get it. I don't have a big enough... what do you call it when there are a lot of big words?
ALANA (furrowing her brow)
Vocabulary?
They didn't even make it to first base... in an hour! I thought our passion for canyons and rivers stood a good chance of building a bridge. But he handed it back. I write it off as another tributary canyon of my soul he will never explore, enjoy, feel the fabric of. I return repeatedly to desert. To wind. To rock.
And that's okay. Abbey understands. I told my Mom once that the Grand Canyon was My Canyon. She laughed and said my father called the Mojave, "Alan's desert." My dad, the drag-ass land surveyor with sand in his blood, understood. The lonely understand. The only problem is, we'll never connect. Only briefly through words and books and poems and second-hand stories of our dead fathers.
...But this is morbid, idle talk. Better to think DO NOT LITTER, neither the Canyon nor the trails, with gum wrappers, beer cans, emergency underwear, frazzled socks, or the bodies of worn-out decrepit useless literary romantics seeking a picturesque death with a view. Dead bodies sprawled along the Hermit Trail would soon become a public nuisance, leading to more Park Service regulations. PERMIT REQUIRED FOR DYING HERE. ADVANCE RESERVATIONS NECESSARY. Therefore let us be discreet, considerate of others, and do our untidy final business well away from any trail, on some little pinched-out dead end ledge where only the lizards will ever find you.
Seeking true unity with a human being has become a personal nuisance. Discreetly and considerate of the Last Good Man, I do my untidy business here. In black on white. Hoping someone is reading. Hoping someone will recognize their own rejected thoughts returning to them with a certain alienated majesty. Hoping someone will understand.