About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Read Free

Robert Fitzgerald read from his new translation of
The Odyssey
. I’d heard the translation was brillnant; what was spellbinding about his reading, however, was the way the audience became galvanizedin beauty by his presentation. History, quest, longing, metered prose, moral consternation, and fantastic image all came together in that room. The feeling broadened and calmed us. Whatever Fitzgerald did in that hour, that’s what I wanted to do.
    I was driven to write, but of course anguished over my efforts. Who was I to speak? What had I to say? As a college student of nineteen, I was being encouraged in the idea that if I spoke I would be heard. The privilege that ensured this, however, was the accident of my mother’s third marriage. It was nothing I’d earned. And much of what seemed to me so worth addressing—the psychological draw of landscape, that profound mystery I sensed in wild animals (which reading Descartes had done nothing to dissuade)—was regarded as peculiar territory by other nascent writers at the university.
    In my senior year at Notre Dame, at bat in an intramural baseball game, I took a high inside pitch that shattered the stone in my senior ring. I left the setting empty. The emptiness came to symbolize doubts I’d developed about my education. I’d learned a lot, but I had not learned it in the presence of women or blacks or Jews or Koreans. Something important, those refinements and objections, had been omitted.
    When I departed the university in 1966 (with a degree in Communication Arts) I left in order to discover a voice and a subject, though this was not at all clear then. I floundered in two jobs for a year, married, finished a graduate degree with the thought that I would teach prep school, and then entered the master of fine arts program in writing at the University of Oregon. I left that program after only a semester, but matriculated at the university for more than a year, during which time I met a singular teacher in the English department, a man named Barre Toelken. He helped me frame the questions seething inside me then about how justice, education, and other Enlightenment ideals could be upheld against the depth of prejudice and the fields of ignorance I saw everywhere around me.
    Toelken pointed me toward anthropological research which demonstrated that other cultures approached questions of natural history and geography in the same way I preferred. Theydid not separate humanity and nature. They recognized the immanence of the divine in both. And they regarded landscape as a component as integral to the development of personality and social order as we take the Oedipus complex and codified law to be.
    As a guest in the Toelkens’ home, I frequently met scholars and other insightful people from outside white, orthodox, middle-class culture. I didn’t consider that these people spoke a truth no one else possessed; but, listening to them, I saw the inadequacy of my education. It lacked any suggestion that these voices were necessary, that they were relevant. Further, it became clear to me in the Toelkens’ home that their stories, despite the skilled dramatizing of human triumph and failure, were destined for quarantine in the society of which I was a part. I was not going to find these voices in American magazines.
    In the years after those first encounters with senior Native American men, itinerant Asian poets, black jazz musicians, and translators, I deliberately began to seek the company of people outside my own narrow cultural bounds. I was drawn especially to men and women who had not dissociated themselves from the passionate and spiritual realms of life, people for whom mystery was not a challenge to intelligence but a bosom.
    The effect of these encounters was not a belief that I was now able to speak for such people—a notion I find dangerous as well as absurd—but an understanding that my voice, steeped in Jung, Dante, Heisenberg, Melville, and Merton, was not the