Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

I realize that it isn’t backward I want to go, but downward. I want to touch once more the ground I have been maimed away from.

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.

Routine work, that best of all anodynes which the twentieth century has tried its best to deprive itself of—that is what I most want.

I feel deeply grateful that these mountains do not close all round us. Across the valley we can look out into a vague misty distance, which is the way back to all we left behind.

I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull.

Wan and Nellie, even the children. It is made of rock hauled by stoneboat from the rockslide just back of us, held together with cement that Oliver made of the

I will install a gymnasium, with a whirlpool bath and a sauna, and spend my principal on a battery of nurses and an athletic director, before I let them persuade or force me off my mountain into some place where they can back me against the wall and thumbscrew Christian forgiveness out of me.

dented and bruised palm. Somehow the sight of his

It was harder to get words from him than it was to get gold from rock. He tortured her with his silence.

the “angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.

I think he never got over being ashamed, and never found the words to say so.

the oppression of her soundless inescapable unspeaking presence grew on me,

Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept.

I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.