Creative But NonFiction

This week's reading in Tell It Slant and the Touchstone Anthology go well together, moving from the overtly spiritual and moving "Leap" to the serious humor of David Sedaris.

You will also read essays in the famous on-line journal Brevity. How what you read there matches with your readings in Tell It Slant should prove interesting.

As noted in this week's announcement, your next writing assignment is due at the conclusion of Week Five; you will have another longer essay due at the term's conclusion.

This week, you will have one video--it will be ready for your viewing early in the week, for the place where I post encounters some problems.

Writing the Spiritual Autobiography and Humor with some words about the revision process:

Welcome to Week Three. And thank you for your patience with respect to getting work back to you quickly. Suffice to say that matters--surprises and an irksome ear--precluded my plans.

You will get the first work back over the next couple days, and I will get caught up by the end of the week.

This week, I will post two short videos here, one over the reading assigned in the texts, including your essay, and another concerning the four essays from the anthology.

These videos should become available either later this afternoon and evening or

tomorrow morning, depending on uploading speed and ease.

If you like, you can download as a Word Document Wendell Berry's essay discussed in Chapter Three, "An Entrance to the Woods," which fits in well with the Berry essay listed in the assigned readings for this week.

(At the conclusion of this entry, you will find pasted a few paragraphs from the preceding title.)

And you will use what you read in our text and in our anthology to complete this week's writing assignment about a place, which need not occur in nature, such as happens in, for example, in the touching memoir about a pet Screech Owl, "The Beautiful City of Terzah" by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher.

Video One:

Video Two:

From "An Entrance to the Woods":

And then a heavy feeling of melancholy and lonesomeness comes over me. This does not surprise me, for I have felt it before when I have been alone at evening in wilderness places that I am not familiar with. But here it has a quality that I recognize as peculiar to the narrow hollows of the Red River Gorge. These are deeply shaded by the trees and by the valley walls, the sun rising on them late and setting early; they are more dark than light. And there will often be little rapids in the stream that will sound, at a certain distance, exactly like people talking. As I sit on my rock by the stream now, I could swear that there is a party of campers coming up the trail toward me, and for several minutes I stay alert, listening for them, their voices seeming to rise and fall, fade out and lift again, in happy conversation. When I finally realize that it is only the sound the creek is making, though I have not come here for company and do not want any, I am inexplicably sad.

These are haunted places or at least it is easy to feel haunted in them, alone at nightfall. As the air darkens and the cool of the night rises, one feels the immanence of the wraiths of the ancient tribesmen who used to inhabit the rock houses of the cliffs; of the white hunters from east of the mountains; of the farmers who accepted the isolation of these nearly inaccessible valleys to crop the narrow bottoms and ridges and pasture their cattle and hogs in the woods; of the seekers of quick wealth in timber and ore. For though this is a wilderness place, it bears its part of the burden of human history. If one spends much time here and feels much liking for the place, it is hard to escape the sense of one’s predecessors. If one has read of the prehistoric Indians whose flint arrowpoints and pottery and hominy holes and petroglyphs have been found here, then every rock shelter and clifty spring will suggest the presence of those dim people who have disappeared into the earth. Walking along the ridges and the stream bottoms, one will come upon the heaped stones of a chimney or the slowly filling depression of an old blooming in a thicket that used to be a dooryard. Wherever the land is level enough there are abandoned fields and pastures. And nearly always there is the evidence that one follows in the steps of the loggers.

That sense of the past is probably one reason for the melancholy that I feel. But I know that there are other reasons.

One is that, though I am here in body, my mind and my nerves too are not yet altogether here. We seem to grant to our high –speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported. That, as my own experience keeps proving to me, is through traffic to the freeway, and then for a solid hour or more I drove sixty or seventy miles an hour, hardly aware of the country I was passing through, because one may drive over it at seventy miles per hour without any concession whatsoever to one’s whereabouts. One might as well be flying. Though one is in Kentucky one is not experiencing Kentucky; one is experiencing the highway, which might be in nearly any hill country east of the Mississippi.

Once off the freeway, my pace gradually slowed, as the roads became progressively more primitive, from seventy miles an hour to a walk. And now, here at my camping place, I have stopped altogether. But my mind is still keyed to seventy miles an hour. And having come here so fast, it is still busy with the work I am usually doing. Having come here by the freeway, my mind is not so fully here as it would have been if I had come by the crookeder, slower state roads; it is incalculably farther away than it would have been if I had come all the way on foot, as my earliest predecessors came. When the Indians and the first white hunters entered and experienced fully everything between here and their starting place, and so the transition was gradual and articulate in their consciousness. Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds; and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt. The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over—and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything. Though the freeway passes through the very heart of this forest, the motorist remains several hours’ journey by foot from what is living at the edge of the right-of-way.

But I have not only come to this strangely haunted place in a short time and too fast, I have in that move made an enormous change: I have departed from my life as I am used to living it, and have come into the wilderness. It is not fear that I feel; I have learned to fear the everyday events of human history much more than I fear the everyday occurrences of the woods; in general, I would rather trust myself to the woods than to any government that I know of. I feel, instead, an uneasy awareness of severed connections, of being cut off from all familiar places and of being a stranger where I am. What is happening at home? I wonder, and I know I can’t find out very easily or very soon.