Tag: quotation

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved – as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds – because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity is can bring to us when we are old simply because it is there – important, that is, simply as idea.

Wallace Stegner, from a letter to David E. Pesonen of the UCBerkley Wildland Research Center in December, 1960. In it Stegner decries the imminent start of construction on the Glen Canyon Dam. The letter was later appended to Stegner’s essay “Glen Canyon Submersus,” in The Sound of Mountain Water, published in 1967, which more fully develops his ideas on wilderness. Stegner was a fierce and outspoken opponent of the Glen Canyon Dam project, writing eloquently of the loss of this incomparable wilderness. His disdain for the recreational elements of the project at the expense of wilderness was legendary. 

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved – as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds – because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity is can bring to us when we are old simply because it is there – important, that is, simply as idea.

Wallace Stegner, from a letter to David E. Pesonen of the UCBerkley Wildland Research Center in December, 1960. In it Stegner decries the imminent start of construction on the Glen Canyon Dam. The letter was later appended to Stegner’s essay “Glen Canyon Submersus,” in The Sound of Mountain Water, published in 1967, which more fully develops his ideas on wilderness. Stegner was a fierce and outspoken opponent of the Glen Canyon Dam project, writing eloquently of the loss of this incomparable wilderness. His disdain for the recreational elements of the project at the expense of wilderness was legendary. 

“A tattoo merges the act of writing with the act of etching, that act of ink put to vellum (a skin prepared for use as parchment) and engraving. The ink is inscribed beneath the skin and, through that thinnest epidermal layer, shows forth – often a symbol, a word of symbolic weight, a hieroglyph. The tattoo makes of the body a book, a library of lived experience, and the marks inked into skin serve both to communicate that experience emblematically as well as to remind the bearer of the tattoo of the event lived through. To bear the mark of such memory on the skin means that the memory cannot settle merely into the past tense, a matter of the mind. Rather, the lived experience is borne always in the living present – and, written on the body, such experience confronts all experience to come, establishes relation with what the body bears as its content, and fosters awareness of the apparent fact the we approach no new experience as a blank slate. The body actualizes translation.”

From A Whaler’s Dictionary, by Dan Beachy-Quick, 2008.

“A tattoo merges the act of writing with the act of etching, that act of ink put to vellum (a skin prepared for use as parchment) and engraving. The ink is inscribed beneath the skin and, through that thinnest epidermal layer, shows forth – often a symbol, a word of symbolic weight, a hieroglyph. The tattoo makes of the body a book, a library of lived experience, and the marks inked into skin serve both to communicate that experience emblematically as well as to remind the bearer of the tattoo of the event lived through. To bear the mark of such memory on the skin means that the memory cannot settle merely into the past tense, a matter of the mind. Rather, the lived experience is borne always in the living present – and, written on the body, such experience confronts all experience to come, establishes relation with what the body bears as its content, and fosters awareness of the apparent fact the we approach no new experience as a blank slate. The body actualizes translation.”

From A Whaler’s Dictionary, by Dan Beachy-Quick, 2008.

In the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

In the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick.