We are here and now.
Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
I can at best report only from my own wilderness. The important thing is that each man possess such a wilderness and that he consider what marvels are to be observed there.
—Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey
‘Whole thing works on gravity. Heavy falls and the light flows away.’
–From William Kittredge’s “The Van Gogh Field,” in which a farmer explains a thresher
Dear Eddie,
It’s raining here, but that’ll come as no surprise to you, brother. The cold rain that camps out over these parts this time of year always did put you in a black frame of mind.
Your long silence has become like a bad tooth to me, Ed. The older I get the more it bothers me, and about now, just when I start hauling in the split wood and building big fires in the stove, is when I find myself brooding over our old disagreements. A fire in a damp, dark house on a rainy night can be a tough thing to stare into through the long hours.
The old man never did come to terms with what was eating you back in those bad days, and I don’t expect you ever thought he would. It might, however, surprise you to know that I feel like I’ve grown somehow closer to you in the years since you went away.
I’ll be square with you, Edster old boy, I’ve had my fill of plenty of things. Maybe I’ve finally had that crisis of faith you were always predicting, but all I know is that I’ve lost a good deal of steam over the last several years. I’m old, of course, and haven’t been in the best of health. That’ll certainly make a man mull some, and a lot of the old crowd is dead now, which only makes this sleepy little place feel even emptier.
Do you remember watching the thresher at work when we were boys, Eddie? It’s a powerful and damn useful metaphor in this part of the country. I like to imagine that even as a youngster I could see something symbolic in the steady, relentless work of that machine. I believe it was the thresher that put the fear of God in me, and it’ll likely disappoint you to know that I’ve never quite managed to be shook of it, even if there are increasingly days where there’s as much pure puzzlement as fear in my attitude towards the Creator. Puzzlement and fear, and also –I can’t help it, Ed– respect.
I know this is one area in which the way we’ve always seen the world strongly diverges. I remember, believe me, some of our arguments, and some of your dust-ups with pa. And I do wish from time to time (and I guess, if I’m going to be honest, more and more frequently) that I had a bit of your cocksureness about the meaninglessness of things.
The problem is, though, that I tend to find everything somehow meaningful, even if I can’t ever quite seem to divine to my satisfaction exactly what that meaning is.
Still, I believe it’s there all the same, Eddie. This place hasn’t managed to beat that notion out of me. And I do believe that things happen for a reason, and that even seemingly senseless tragedies have a significance that often eludes us.
What, I wonder, is more significant and more deserving of our careful attention than a terrible injustice or tragedy? And might that significance be reason enough to justify many of the things we can’t understand, and give some credence to the things we persist in believing?
Significance, of course, is a difficult thing to find and make sense of in the midst of despair, but surely that shouldn’t have to mean it’s not there.
I don’t know, Eddie, that thought –if, in fact, there’s a clear thought in there– gives me a sort of peace, and these days even a sort of peace has become precious to me.
I hope this finds you, brother, and finds you well. I’ve been thinking about you a good deal. That’s all I really wanted to say. Plenty of the memories of our years together are good enough that I pray I won’t have to part with a single one of them in the time that I have left.
I also pray that you’ve managed to hang onto a few of them as well, and that they give you as much comfort as they give me.
–A letter found in an old copy of Francis Parkman’s Pioneers of France in the New World
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