In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact… Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite… Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to cecate a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. The remainder of the book consists of digressions and excursions into ideas and places that border in varied ways upon that central season in the canyonlands…Ībbey’s digressions, to be sure, are oases of meaning - he writes about the ideas that animate his spirit with unsentimental sincerity and deep respect for the aliveness of language itself: There was time enough for once to do nothing, or next to nothing, and most of the substance of this book is drawn, sometimes direct and unchanged, from the pages of the journals I kept and filled through the undivided, seamless days of those marvelous summers. The time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as the summers of childhood.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince. Between April and September, between the canyons and the pages of his journal, he found a great many of the things we spend our lives looking for - a Thoreau of the desert, mapping the maze of the interior landscape as he wanders the expanse of the exterior. “Why I went there no longer matters what I found there is the subject of this book,” he writes. In the late 1950s, Abbey took a job as a seasonal park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah’s Moab desert. (How right Laurence Sterne was to call digression “the sunshine of narrative,” and Calvino to consider it, even, a hedge against mortality.) “As the desert offers no tangible riches, as there is nothing to see or hear in the desert,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his exquisite memoir of what the Sahara Desert taught him about the meaning of life, “one is compelled to acknowledge, since the inner life, far from falling asleep, is fortified, that man is first animated by invisible solicitations.” No one captures this invisible animation of inner life more bewitchingly than Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) in Desert Solitaire ( public library) - a miraculously beautiful book, originally published in 1968, which I discovered through a passing mention by the wonderful Cheryl Strayed.

Edward abbey desert