Human Nature

Mark Twain was being a contrarian when he said “great writing flatters all writers” because he knew that most writers are constitutionally incapable of this kind of largeness of spirit. Lesser writers—and we are all lesser writers—agree: That was easy for him to say.

Those of us who write for a living are often guilty of harboring vast reserves of schadenfreude. Almost to a person, we are a jealous, spiteful group who cannot abide the success of rivals. And we are all rivals.

Well, not all of us. There is a special class of artist who is so engaged in his own earnest philosophical and spiritual questions, that even the most jealous among us are powerless to feel anything but profound admiration. Paul Gruchow was one those selfless artists. He lived and worked and loved and wrote and despaired and died in Minnesota.

Despite modern restlessness, history works slowly. Gruchow’s influence and significance will not be fully known for decades, but we have long been convinced that he will, in due time, be shelved with John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey. In other words, he was among the English language’s finest essayists on nature and the environment and the value of place, and one could certainly make the argument that we need him more today than the world needed his predecessors.

Gruchow had agreed to write for The Rake a few months ago, but he took his own life on February 22. We’d been especially excited to have one of Minnesota’s finest (and least appreciated) essayists in these pages, but somewhere along the line we realized something was terribly wrong. When we last spoke to him about his assignment, Gruchow had just emerged from the hospital, and he was having trouble even remembering where he had been or what he had been doing before that. Much to our impoverishment, we were never close enough to the man to know that he’d suffered with depression for more than twenty years, and that this latest suicide attempt followed four previously unsuccessful ones.

It may be especially fitting that Gruchow’s final gift to the world is a book about his long journey into night. He had recently finished a collection of essays that considered the interior landscape of clinical depression. It is not clear whether this will be published at all; his agent realizes now that it is essentially a 300-page suicide note. But excerpts published in the Star Tribune suggest that this book, like all his previous books, gives a generous and transforming view of a subject as rife with stereotype and misunderstanding as mental illness.

Self-obsession is the fuel of writing. But there is too much writing that reflects the writer’s love of the writer. Gruchow loved the world, the thing-in-itself. His eloquent argument was that the natural world had a dignity and a reality sufficient unto itself; that it does not depend on humans for its innate value, that nature is in man as much as man is in nature. It is heartbreaking that this particularly bright and self-aware spark of nature has fallen on wet ground.