Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

Zodiac Cottage, Grass Valley, California, April 12, 1970.

Rodman, like most sociologists and most of his generation, was born without the sense of history. To him it is only an aborted social science. The world has changed, Pop, he tells me. The past isn’t going to teach us anything about what we’ve got ahead of us. Maybe it did once, or seemed to. It doesn’t any more.

The Lyman Ward who married Ellen Hammond and begot Rodman Ward and taught history and

My wife turns out after a quarter of a century to be someone I never knew, my son starts all fresh from his own premises.

My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

The truth about my son is that despite his good nature, his intelligence, his extensive education, and his bulldozer energy, he is as blunt as a kick in the shins.

Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”?

But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

It came to you secondhand in the letters of Augusta Hudson.

Ada Hawkes.

He had an air of quiet such as she had known in men like her father, men who worked with animals.

Oliver Ward

Miss Morrow.

Shelly Rasmussen.”

Thomas Hudson.

Augusta and Thomas told her about their engagement,

Susan Burling.

Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.

Don’t you know how we lose the sense of our own individuality when there is nothing to reflect it back upon us?

In thirty or forty years the accumulated deposits would turn my cultivated, ladylike, lively, talkative, talented, innocently snobbish grandmother into a Western woman in spite of herself.

Starling,

Marian Prouse arrived on April 22,

February 1879

George Hearst

It has apparently never occurred to him that he has the loudest voice in the entire world, and that when he wants to be confidential he ought to retreat two miles.

What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.

She could infuse with her own special emotion anything she could draw, but she could draw only what she had seen.

Don Gustavo Walkenhorst.

Ysabel, the coachman,

Boise City, June 16, 1882

Arrow Rock,

September 1883.

Passing sheep bands had trampled and half ruined it, and now there was a dug well with a windmill mounted on it which was supposed, when the wind blew, to pump water onto a home-made waterwheel which poured it down a sluice into a hydraulic ram which boosted it into a higher sluice which ran into a ditch high enough

Worthless sentence and a run on

1887.

Major John Wesley Powell,

United States Geological Survey. It said that the Survey, recently charged by Congress with surveying all the rivers of the West, designating irrigable lands and spotting reservoir sites, could use his help.

“In the same old dress

I left in?” she said. “Eight years out of style, with dams in the elbows?”

This is NOT in keeping with transcendentalism.

Lyman Ward

Betsy

Victoria, May 14, 1889

Mr. Harvey,

Actually, I’d just as soon leave out the judgment entirely. I don’t feel at ease judging people.

This guy judges everyone!

The twelve-foot banks slope back at the “angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.

She did not put her left foot to the ground, but turned the end in three quick hops, three pats, and came back hopping, still with her left foot withered upward, carefully patting wall, window sill, doorframe, and made it back to him and patted his hip, home free, and fell around his leg again.

Worthless sentence

She came walking alone through the yard from the orchard, strolling in and out of the shade on a bright afternoon-June, probably, since all the roses were loaded with blooms. She strolled along the cross path to the greenhouse, stooping to sniff, snapping off a blossom, walking with it under her nose, her eyes searching and abstract.

I would suggest cutting all of this.

“Can’t I be allowed a little curiosity about you?”

Sounds like she doesn't understand boundaries