Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

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

I’d like to live in their clothes a while, if only so I don’t have to live in my own.

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.

The daily gorgeousness of Augusta’s social obligations lighted your strenuous poverty in the way you liked to illuminate your drawings, with a wash of light from above and to one side.

you had gentility in your eye like a cinder, and there would be a lot of rubbing, reddening, and irritation before your tears flooded it out.

She was some sort of cross between a hummingbird and an earth mover.

This is the way I feel when Oliver is in S.F. When he comes down, it is like high tide along the shore–all the wet muddy places sparkle with life and motion.

And in the process of framing the West and her husband in words, she began to leave them behind.

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.

The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.

The air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs. Rising in her stirrup to get her face and chest full of it, she gave, as it were, a standing ovation to the rim cut out against the blue.

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called “merely cultural,” not even living in traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

Out there the dry hillside shimmered with tears and summer, the aspens flashed light off their incessant leaves, the grasshoppers whirred and arched. A mourning dove was who-whoing off in the timber. In the blinking of a tear it would be fall. She had missed the spring and half the summer, the home that they had bragged they would make at the edge of timberline was a disaster.

Her tone, she recognized, was the intimate tone that would normally have brought the Quaker “thee” to her tongue. Yet she called him “you.” Perhaps he noticed, perhaps he didn’t.

Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.

In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up.

Gladness and guilt hit her like waves meeting at an angle on a beach.

I feel as stiff and frozen and ungainly as the sagebrush out there in the wind.

It is a bruised and careful truce; we walk in bandages and try not to bump our wounds.

A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.

Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.