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zalenaTimothy Egan blogs about Wallace Stegner's Centennial: I had the good fortune of discovering Wallace Stegner last year. I have not read his novels, but I am constantly returning to his essays and starting to give to people in the way of an evangelist. His sense of the West as an environmental totality shows not just a complex understanding of the subject, but an undeniable (and I think) American optimism that he entitled: the Geography of Hope.
I cited a lecture he gave on that topic in a write-up I did on one of the best books I read last year, which also happened to be set in the West: Jana Richman's The Last Cowgirl.
From Wallace Stegner's introduction to Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, adapted from a lecture he gave at CU in 1991, titled The Geography of Hope:
And yet I hope these essays do not say that western hopefulness is a cynical joke. For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing in western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers [speculators] but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in....
I believe that eventually, perhaps within a generation or two, they will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air, and water. I think they will learn to control corporate power and to dampen the excess that has always marked their region, and will arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on the resources they know how to cherish and renew. And looking at the western writers...I feel the surge of the inextinguishable hope. It is a civilization they are building, a history they are compiling, a way of looking at the world and humanities place in it. I think they will do it. The feeling it like the feeling in a football game when the momentum changes, when helplessness begins to give way to confidence, and what looked like sure defeat opens up to the possibility of victory. It has already begun. I hope I am around to see it fully arrive. (pxxiii)
I can't read that aloud without getting choked up.
On a related note: David Brooks on Denver.
I cited a lecture he gave on that topic in a write-up I did on one of the best books I read last year, which also happened to be set in the West: Jana Richman's The Last Cowgirl.
From Wallace Stegner's introduction to Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, adapted from a lecture he gave at CU in 1991, titled The Geography of Hope:
And yet I hope these essays do not say that western hopefulness is a cynical joke. For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing in western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers [speculators] but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in....
I believe that eventually, perhaps within a generation or two, they will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air, and water. I think they will learn to control corporate power and to dampen the excess that has always marked their region, and will arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on the resources they know how to cherish and renew. And looking at the western writers...I feel the surge of the inextinguishable hope. It is a civilization they are building, a history they are compiling, a way of looking at the world and humanities place in it. I think they will do it. The feeling it like the feeling in a football game when the momentum changes, when helplessness begins to give way to confidence, and what looked like sure defeat opens up to the possibility of victory. It has already begun. I hope I am around to see it fully arrive. (pxxiii)
I can't read that aloud without getting choked up.
On a related note: David Brooks on Denver.
