What He Writes
This book has the same history. All three of these books – an accidental trilogy, I guess, though I find the word trilogy unappealing – are one continuous book and they all flow from a single question and a single hunger: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? And by death I do not mean something symbolic or metaphoric, I mean the actual death of other peoples and other living things. My life has been spent inside a culture of constant war and of vast slaughter of the beasts of the field and the grasses and forests of the land and of the fish in the sea and of the blue sky I was born under at the tail end of one of those wars. I am of the that culture and yet I am against that culture. I am of my time and yet out of my time. I drive fast down freeways but I have no belief that these roads lead to a future. Nor do I fear or dread the future. But I do fear for my culture and the human beings within and the beasts and plants without it that suffer in silence.
-Charles Bowden
October 23rd, 2009 at 8:38 am
(excerpted from an email to Yessa)
By the way, I very much appreciated your last post over at LC. Took me years to whittle away at the programmed idealism and American upbeat-ness that did battle with this idea, and I could still never put it as eloquently or clearly, but I have been stewing on that fundamental truth…trying to digest it for what feels like a lifetime.
I blame you of course…and Amy’s pizzas…;-)
Actually, it reminds me of a my (still) favorite fantasy book of all time: The Sword of Shannara (which you’ve heard me talk about over the years) by Terry Brooks. You might recall, the central character is a hobbit-like fellow from a shire-like hamlet who helps run an Inn with his family, and enjoys a cozy, parochial, if often industrious, life of routine. By the time he finishes his quest against the ultimate evil, with that world’s greatest warriors and Gandalf-like druids at his side, that he gets dragged into with decidely mixed feelings, his ultimate challenge, and the one that laid waste previous heirs to the ancient talisman that gives the book its name, as well as the bad guys it has been used against, was simply to face the unvarnished truth or essence about what he was: fears, warts and all. A scared little dude, who wants some hot porridge, an ale, and a fire, the world be damned. The power of the sword is not as a blade per se, but as a talisman that lays that non-fiction on the wielder and the foe, and generally, the evil dude crumbles as the morsels of his humanity are re-revealed in his own mind and the depths of his douchebaggery are too much to handle.
The point being that you lay out a Sword of Shannara like, unspun truth in that quote and I appreciate it for its accuracy despite the fact that it is inherently uncomfortable to anyone slightly “better adjusted” than say…Ted Kacscynski to our current modus operandi. Or to paraphrase Nicholson from the famous scene in A Few Good Men: most people ‘can’t handle the truth’. Present company possible included…
October 23rd, 2009 at 8:38 am
“possibly” included.