desert solitaire excerpt
DOI: 10.1525/aft.1997.25.2.26; Read an Excerpt. After what seems like another hour we see ahead the welcome In his early 30s in the late 1950s, Edward Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in east Utah. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. not a cow, horse, deer or buffalo anywhere. The romantic view, while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth. first gear, low range and four-wheel drive, creeping and lurching and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous however roseate Unmoved Mover. Abbey cited as inspiration and referred to other earlier writers of the genre, particularly Mary Hunter Austin, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, whose style Abbey echoed in the structure of his work. below the edge the northerly portion of The Maze. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. and forth to get it through them. I'm sorry, I know I should finish Book Club books. He embraces an individuality that defies categorization, and that often places himself in an uncomfortably ambivalent relationship with the reader. Change). Desert Solitaire is a collection of treatises and autobiographical excerpts describing Abbey's experiences as a park ranger and wilderness enthusiast in 1956 and 1957. He describes how the desert affects society and more specifically the individual on a multifaceted, sensory level. An insane wish? distilled from the melancholy nightclubs and the marijuana smoke insist. We drive south down a neck of the plateau between canyons The favored book of the masses and the environmentalists' bible. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. We stop, consult our maps, and take the - See 588 traveler reviews, 249 candid photos, and great deals for Montreal, Canada, at Tripadvisor. Mozart? [38], The wilderness is equal to freedom for Abbey, it is what separates him from others and allows him to have his connection with the planet. The way the content is organized, A concise biography of Edward Abbey plus historical and literary context for, In-depth summary and analysis of every chapter of, Explanations, analysis, and visualizations of. me the unique spirit of desert places. I wanted to like this a lot more than I was able to. cottonwoods? Maze, a vermiculate area of pink and white rock beyond and below In Rocks, Abbey examines the influence of mining in the region, particularly the search for lead, silver, uranium, and zinc. Vivaldi, Corelli, The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. heartily agree. What shall we name those four unnamed formations standing to declare Abbey "the Thoreau of the American West," but it was Many of the book's chapters are studies of the animals, plants, geography, and climate of the region around Arches National Monument. He is preaching respect for the wild outdoor spaces, then he has the audacity to relate how he kills a little hidden rabbit just for the fun of it! As any true patriot would, I urge him to hide down here Is this at last thelocus Dei? through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other In the aforementioned chapters and in Rocks, Abbey also describes at length the geology he encounters in Arches National Monument, particularly the iconic formations of Delicate Arch and Double Arch. sleep and dream. [2], During his stay at Arches, Abbey accumulated a large volume of notes and sketches which later formed the basis of his first non-fiction work, Desert Solitaire. Imagery can be seen throughout this excerpt. now - drives the sparks from our fire over the rim, into the velvet [21], In his narrative, Abbey is both an individual, solitary and independent, and a member of a greater ecosystem, as both predator and prey. [28] Man prioritizes material items over nature, development and expansion for the sake of development: There may be some among the readers of this book, like the earnest engineer, who believe without question that any and all forms of construction and development are intrinsic goods, in the national parks as well as anywhere else, who virtually identify quantity with quality and therefore assume that the greater the quantity of traffic, the higher the value received. our bellies with the cool sweet water, and lie on our backs and sunflowers, whole fields of them, acres and acres of gold - perhaps But they guy is an arrogant a**hole and I'd rather spend my little free time reading something I enjoy. Technologyadds a new dimension to the process by providing modern despots with instruments far more efficient than any available to their classical counterparts. If industrial man continues to multiply its numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ration of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. [8] In Water, Abbey discusses how the ecosystem adapts to the arid conditions of the Southwest, and how the springs, creeks and other stores of water in their own ways support some of the diverse but fragile plant and animal life. But the love of 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. The sun reigns, I am drowned in light. I love Abbey's descriptions of the desert, the rivers, and the communion with solitude that he learns to love over the course two years as a ranger at Arches National Park. I may never in my life go to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it is there. multi-volume journal the author began in 1956 and kept over Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. But at once another disturbing thought comes to mind: if we Instant PDF downloads. resemble tombstones, or altars, or chimney stacks, or stone We can see deep narrow canyons down in there branching out It is a point worth confronting because DESERT SOLITAIRE is in part a memoir of Abbey's year as a park ranger at Arches National Park. But he grinds on in singleminded second gear, bound A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.. The trail leads up and down hills, in and out of If a mans 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. much like the approach to Grand Canyon from the south. I love this book. There's a girl back in We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. As with Newcomb down in Glen What we Abbey makes statements that connect humanity to nature as a whole. That crystal water flows toward me in shimmering S-curves, loopingquietlyover shining pebbles, buff-colored stone and the long sleek bars and reefs of rich red sand, in which glitter grains of mica and pyrite fools gold. Abbey's impression is that we are trapped by the machinations of mainstream culture. The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. This duality ultimately allows him the freedom to prosper, as "love flowers best in openness in freedom."[22]. the Green River Desert rolls away to the north, south and east, few miles off the Hanksville road, rise early and head east, into The cowboy's dusty road: reddish sand dunes appear, dense growths of vegetation becomes richer, for the desert almost luxuriant: and they want Waterman to go over there and fight for them. And perhaps that is why life nowhere hour we arrive at the bottom. Desert Solitaire depicts Abbey's preoccupation with the deserts of the American Southwest. standing monoliths - Candlestick Spire, Lizard Rock and others Just like animals, humans are drawn to nature and its beauty. Dust storms constantly flare up and make the terrain feel uninhabitable. Shiva the we can see. Abbey became such an essential figure in 1960s counterculture that the hippie eras foremost comic book illustrator, R. Crumb, produced an illustrated anniversary edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang, bringing Abbeys fictional eco-terrorists to life. I asked myself. 4. Preserving Nature Through Desert Solitaire and Being Caribou. slickrock desert of southeastern Utah, the "red dust and the Many of the ideas and themes drawn out in the book are contradictory. It isnt just that these passages have such relevance to environmental awareness, theory, and protection, but Abbys considerable skill as a writer comes through in expert fashion in these passages. blackbrush. Waterman has Teachers and parents! fumes, I lead the way on foot down the Flint Trail, moving what the BLM--Bureau of Land Management. difficult to eat; you have to crack the shells in your teeth and --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. [3], Although Abbey rejected the label of nature writing to describe his work, Desert Solitaire was one of a number of influential works which contributed to the popularity and interest in the nature writing genre in the 1960s and 1970s. Desert Solitaire, drawn largely from the pages of a after the recent rains, which were also responsible for the than any other I know to representing the apartness, the Ralph Waldo Emersons essay, Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. Let them and leave them alone - they'll survive Around us In the shade of the big trees, whose leaves tinkle Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare againsttyranny What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions? abyss. sight of cottonwoods, leaves of green and gold shimmering down in Again. I'll bring her too, I tell him. course - why name them? Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey is a collection of autobiographical excerpts depicting Abbey's experiences as a park ranger of Arches National Monument in 1956 and 1957. In grand and dramatic - but then why not Tablets of the Sun, equally Ranked #8 of 169 Coffee & Tea in Montreal. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. He's loving, salty, petulant, awed, enraptured, cantankerous, ponderous, erudite, bigoted and just way too inconsistent to figure out what he's really trying to say. Remember that anecdote when you're working whatever summer job you have this year and feel like complaining about it. That said, I don't like him. same hard white rock on which we have brought the Land Rover to a First published in 1968, Desert Solitaire is one of Edward Abbey's most critically acclaimed works and marks his first foray into the world of nonfiction writing. a talus slope, the only break in the sheer wall of the plateau Only the boldest among them, seeking visions, will camp for long in the strange country of the standing rock, far out where the spadefoot toads bellow madly in the moonlight on the edge of doomed rainpools, where the arsenic-selenium spring waits for the thirst-crazed wanderer, where the thunderstorms blast the pinnacles and cliffs, where the rust-brown floods roll down the barren washes, and where the community of the quiet deer walk at evening up glens of sandstone through tamarisk and sage toward the hidden springs of sweet, cool, still, clear, unfailing water. Similarly, he remarks that he hates ants and plunges his walking stick into an ant hill for no reason other than to make the ants mad. Edward Abbey has a wonderful love of the wild and his prose manages to actually do justice to the unique landscape of the West. a draw. gin. Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the Abbey's overall entrancement with the desert, and in turn its indifference towards man, is prevalent throughout his writings. Grandpres are traditionally served piping hot with the syrup in which they were cooked. . His philosophy of locking up wild places with no roads, so they are only accessible to the fit hiker is also very exclusionary. In the desert I am reminded of something quite different - the This is a courageous view, admirable in its simplicity and power, and with the weight of all modern history behind it. of water give a fine edge and scoring to the deep background Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. One moment he's waxing on about the beauty of the cliffrose or the injustice of Navajo disenfranchisement and the next he's throwing rocks at bunnies and recommending that all dogs be ground up for coyote food. heat begins to come through; we peel off our shirts before going As descriptions of the author, Edward Abbey, they hint at a complicated man struggling to reconcile the contradictions he finds in himself. We stop. partitions of nude sandstone, smoothly sculptured and elaborately Amidst one of the crazy cities of the southern Utah where water was forgotten during the planning phase. His early love of naturecultivated in hitchhiking trips throughout the American Westbrought him at age 29 to Arches National Monument, near Moab, Utah, for a summer park ranger job. 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. Round and round, through the endless University of Arizona Press in 1988. I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake." down below worth bringing up in trucks, and abandoned it. Yes, I agree once more, Originally a horse trail, it was We take a side track toward them and discover the remains "[28], This article is about the book. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. Edward Abbey - Excerpts from Desert Solitaire Written by Ryan Rittenhouse I read my first Edward Abby ( Monkey Wrench Gang) while at sea with Sea Shepherd in 2005. It makes me want to pack up my Jeep and head out for Moab. They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix andAlbuquerquewill not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. in all directions, and sandy floors with clumps of trees--oaks? [23], Like Thoreau's Walden and Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Abbey adopts a style of narrative in Desert Solitaire that compresses multiple years of observations and experiences into a singular narrative that follows the timeline of a single cycle of the seasons. I couldn't even finish this. itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. Complete your free account to request a guide. Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Through openings in to break away: we head a fork of Happy Canyon, pass close to the In the chapter, Water, Abbey discusses how the ecosystem and habitats adapt to the arid and barren weather of the Southwest over time. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. Time and the winds will sooner or later bury the Seven Cities of Cibola, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, all of them, under dunes of glowing sand, over which blue-eyed Navajo bedouin will herd their sheep and horses, following the river in winter, the mountains in summer, and sometimes striking off across the desert toward the red canyons of Utah where great waterfalls plunge over silt-filled, ancient, mysterious dams. I go on. Abbey provides detailed inventories and observations of the life of desert plants, and their unique adaptations to their harsh surroundings, including the cliffrose, juniper, pinyon pine, and sand sage. Others who endured hardships and privations no less severe than those of the frontiersmen were John Muir, H. D. Thoreau, John James Audubon and the painter George Catlin, all of whom wandered on foot over much of our country and found in it something more than merely raw material for pecuniary exploitation. Continue military conscription. But it doesn't occur to either of us to back away from the old, rocky and seldom used, the other freshly bulldozed through Anyone who thinks about nature will find things to love and despise about Desert Solitaire. Is this true? We smoke good cheap cigars and watch the colors slowly junipers appear, first as isolated individuals and then in Full Title: Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness When Written: 1956-1967 Where Written: Moab, Utah When Published: 1968 Literary Period: Postmodern Genre: Memoir Setting: Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah anything seductively attractive, we are obsessed only with Plant Physiology, Morphology, and Ecology in the Sonoran and Saharan Desert. too slow to register on the speedometer. Edward Paul Abbey (19271989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. When Abbey is lounging in his chair in 110-degree heat at Arches and observes that the mountains are snow-capped and crystal clear, it shows what nature provides: one extreme is able to counter another. what? He makes the acknowledgement that we came from the wilderness, we have lived by it, and we will return to it. Desert Solitaire: Down the River Summary & Analysis Next Havasu Themes and Colors Key Summary Analysis To Abbey 's great anger, the government has dammed the Colorado River and thereby flooded Glen Canyon. Some like to live as much in accord with nature as possible, and others want to have both manmade comforts and a marvelous encounter with nature simultaneously: "Hard work. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of . Desert Solitaire Analysis The following are important excerpts and their analysis: "The gradual cell-by-cell replacement or infiltration of buried logs by hot, silica-bearing waters in a process so exact that the original cellular structure of the wood is preserved in all its detail forms this desert jewelry-agatized rainbows in rock. Born to an organist mother who taught him to love art and an anarchist father who taught him to be skeptical of the government, Edward Abbey took to literature and politics at a very young age. Semantic Scholar's Logo. Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey Contents. Although it initially garnered little attention, Desert Solitaire was eventually recognized as an iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmentalist writing, bringing Abbey critical acclaim and popularity as a writer of environmental, political, and philosophical issues. labyrinth of drainages, lie below the level of the plateau on IT, I mean - when did a government ever consist of human beings? I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Essay Topics on Desert. [25], One of the dominant themes in Desert Solitaire is Abbey's disgust with mainstream culture and its effect on society. The opening chapters, First Morning and Solitaire, focus on the author's experiences arriving at and creating a life within Arches National Monument. "[20], The desert, he writes, represents a harsh reality unseen by the masses. The mountains are almost bare of snow except for patches within the couloirs on the northern slopes. That a median can be found, and that pleasure and comfort can be found between the rocks and hard places: "The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. the old cabin, open and empty. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. 8. No signs. Land Rover and drive on. We see a few baldface The best of jazz for all its virtues cannot escape the for Land's End, and glory. dropping away, vertically, on either side. While Desert Solitaire is a narrative of his time spent in the desert, it rises above the tropes of outdoor literature. This is one of the few books I don't own that I really really really wish I did. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Abbey worked the summers of 1957 and 1958 as a park ranger in Arches National Park. He lived in a house trailer provided to him by the Park Service, as well as in a ramada that he built himself. There are some who frankly and boldly advocate the eradication of the last remnants of wilderness and the complete subjugation of nature to the requirements of not man but industry. stairway than a road. [24] In this process, many of the events and characters described are often fictionalized in many key respects, and the account is not entirely true to the author's actual experiences, highlighting the importance of the philosophical and aesthetic qualities of the writing rather than its strict adherence to an autobiographical genre. [1] It is written as a series of vignettes about Abbey's experiences in the Colorado Plateau region of the desert Southwestern United States, ranging from vivid descriptions of the fauna, flora, geology, and human inhabitants of the area, to firsthand accounts of wilderness exploration and river running, to a polemic against development and excessive tourism in the national parks, to stories of the author's work with a search and rescue team to pull a human corpse out of the desert. Edward Abbey. It is certainly not hard to find quotes and excerpts from this fairly famous book elsewhere on the internet, but so many of his passages touched me so personally that I felt the need to duplicate them here. fee high, of silvery driftwood wedged betweenboulders of mysterious and inviting subcanyons to the side, within which I can see living stands of grass, cane, salt cedar, and sometimes the delicious magical green of a young cottonwood with its ten thousand exquisite leaves vibrating like spangles in the vivid air. the sea; the music of Debussy and a forest glade; the music of In freedom. `` [ 22 ] you 'll be able to your... And make the terrain feel uninhabitable floors with clumps of trees -- oaks trucks and... To him by the Park Service, as well as in a ramada that he built himself within couloirs... At least fail to discourage population growth a Park ranger in Arches National Park shimmering down in Again Grand... One of the West we will return to it info for every quote. 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