Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

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.

As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I’d rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.”

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything–though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly’s crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she’s a long way from wise.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can’t remodel society by day after tomorrow–haven’t the wisdom to and shouldn’t be permitted to–I’d have more respect for them. Revolutionaries and sociologists. God, those sociologists! They’re always trying to reclaim a tropical jungle with a sprinkling can full of weed killer. Civilizations grow and change and decline-they aren’t remade.”