East of Eden

John Steinbeck

He was born in a fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar--if he is financially fortunate.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deepdrawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and tress of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

Caleb and Aaron--now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.

Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery and they were bracketed in battens of cowardice.

Thou mayest rule over sin, Lee. That's it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles--only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. Thou mayest, Thou mayest! What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before. Do you see now why I told Adam tonight? I exercised the choice. Maybe I was wrong, but by telling him I also force him to live or get off the pot. What is that word, Lee?

You're pretty full of yourself. You're marveling at the tragic spectacle of Caleb Trask--Caleb the magnificent, the unique. Caleb whose suffering should have its Homer. Did you ever think of yourself as a snot-nose kid--mean sometimes, incredibly generous sometimes? Dirty in your habits and curiously pure in your mind. Maybe you have a little more energy than most, just energy, but outside of that you're very like all the other snot-nose kids. Are you trying to attract dignity and tragedy to yourself because your mother was a whore? And if anything should have happened to your brother, will you be able to sneak for yourself the eminence of being a murderer,snot-nose?

Do you know where your brother is?

I'm not going to say anything about this book because it is the best book I have ever read.

Nothing Venture, Nothing Win

Edmund Hillary

I still lose my temper at times, but I've learnt a lot since then...

Which in all honesty, didn't look terribly difficult.

Well we knocked the bastard off!

My God, I thought, I'll have to get a new pair of overalls.

It certainly proved the most sensible action I've ever taken.

There is much in America that was stimulating and exciting, yet so much that puzzled and distressed me. I disliked the constant appeal to my baser instincts, the pressure to do things and buy things and read things which would be of little real use to me. The great American machine was churning out so much wealth and useless luxuries--it seemed too materialistic, pleasure seeking, and aggressive--even the few churches I visited had facilities and philosophies that put little strain on body or conscience.

Edmund Hillary was only twenty years old when he climbed Mt. Olivier.

Perelandra

C S Lewis

Now he had come to a part of the wood where great globes of yellow fruit hung from the trees--clustered as toy-balloons are clustered on the back of the balloon-man and about the same size. He picked one of them and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment's hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. "Not like that" was all he could ever say to such inquires. As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favour of tasting this miracle again; the childlike innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. Yet something seemed opposed to this "reason." It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete repetition would be a vulgarity--like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

If a naked man and a wise dragon were indeed the sole inhabitants of this floating paradise, then this also was fitting, for at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth. To be the figure that he was in this unearthly pattern appeared sufficient.

Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial--was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that earth-men would call it mythological. All the darkness, never before so formidable, was putting these truths into his hands, like terrible jewels.

It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.

Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity.

The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own.

It seems there are too many new words in the air. I had thought these things were coming out of your mind into mine, and lo! you have not thought them at all. Yet I think Maleldil passed them to me through you, none the less. I will show you images, I will show you houses. It may be that in this matter our natures are reversed and it is you who beget and I who bear. But let us speak of plainer matters. We will fill this world with our children. We will know this world to the centre. We will make the nobler of the beasts so wise that they will become hnau and speak: their lives shall awake to a new life in us as we awake in Maleldil. When the time is ripe for it and the ten thousand circlings are nearly at an end we will tear the sky curtain and Deep Heaven shall become familiar to the eyes of our sons as the trees and the waves to ours.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes--I mean Amen.

Lewis is one of the alive people. He sees the world as clear as it can be seen by us and his response, wondrous joy, is proper. Reading Perelandra will hopefully spread a bit of this vision into your own heart. See the trees and the your friends and the grass and bits of rock by the roadside and the tingle of sound in your ears and the echoes as they are brothers of rhyme and cousins of reflections. Recognize that the whole universe is a playground but grander in purpose and you might even say that playgrounds if they could be played on by adults in the manner of children, might come close to this grander purpose. Perelandra will inspire you to catch the same beauty you read in this world around you and also twinge your heart with the beauty you know you must wait for, and live up to.
Topsy turvy are words you might catch in a literature class, especially if you happen to be reading Shakespeare. But they are also reality, especially in the way we--our culture--look at the world. Go climb a mountain or get on your knees and pray for a while and you can catch a whiff of the same excitement that is in Perelandra. There are a billion other things, not the least of which is fluttering leaves on a tree in the distance.

The Storyteller

Mario Vargas Llosa

Most likely not. The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others--who would never grant it--until it is at last put into practice. I imagine in the process--the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action--the saint, visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others.

And before the moon could escape, she'd rubbed his face with the shit she'd just shat.

Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors. It means being, in the most profound way possible, a rooted Machiguenga, one of that ancient lineage who--in the period in which this Firenze, where I am writing, produced its dazzling effervescence of ideas, paintings, buildings, crimes, and intrigues--roamed the forests of my country, bringing and bearing away those tales, lies, fictions, gossip, and jokes that make a community of that people of scattered beings, keeping alive among them the feeling of oneness, of constituting something fraternal and solid.

I was reminded of Sixpence and the Moon a little when I read this. It's the story of a man who believes what so many others simply espouse. It's the story of a life that takes seriously the things it reads and talks of and wonders about.
Since words are so easy to use and so pleasant to slosh about many people do a good deal more using and sloshing than is good for them. Words are also powerful and sometimes they can do things to you that you don't reckon on. There is a disconnect in all the world about us, especially our culture, of using words--and they are all powerful--and failing to align our realities with those words. We say we love this thing or we believe in that ideal and in moments or sometimes the same breath move with our hands against the very object of our belief. How dare we.
But in the Storyteller there is a reverence for words and their use. What else would we expect from a culture held together by words alone?
Think for a second though and wonder if we are any different.

The Sunlight Dialogues

John Gardner

Don't be fooled by clever hands, sir, the Sunlight Man said. He'd be lying with the back of his head on his hands, as he always lay. Entertainment's all very well, but the world is serious. it's exceedingly amusing, when you think about it: nothing in life is as startling or shocking or mysterious as a good magician's trick. That's what makes stagecraft deadly. Listen closely, friend. You see great marvels performed on the stage--the lady sawed in half, the fat man supported by empty air, the Hindu vanishing with the folding of a cloth--and the subtlest of poisons drifts into your brain: you think the earth dead because the sky is full of spirits, you think the hall drab because the stage is adazzle with dimestore gilt. So King Lear rages, and the audience grows meek, and tomorrow, in the gray of old groceries, the housewife will weep for Cordelia and despair for herself. They weren't fools, those old sages who called all art the Devil's work. It eats the soul."

When you think about it, the voice said, infinitely weary, the world is more like a jailhouse than like a hospital. No matter how cynical we try to be, the food is never what we secretly expected; the beds rob us of our sleep and health; the company lacks zest, not to mention how it smells; the toilets are a cruel, cold shock; and at the end of it all, instead of the justice we have a right to expect, as feeling creatures--fzzzt! the electric chair. If we had any sense we'd hang ourselves and be done with it.

But intelligence is not the world's strong point.

But sunlight in the morning shows things as they are: it was faded and threadbare in that hard, steady light: as ruined as the dead thing inside it. I saw everything, that morning, as clear as something you see in your childhood: like a vision of death.

Surely we must not forget, dear lady, that there is pleasure in our self-sacrifice. Our kindness has been tainted with masochism since the world began, and it is not to our best interest to forget it. Think better of yourself, my dear Mrs. Clumly. No man was ever perfect but Jesus Christ. Do you think it doesn't give you pleasure--if only a drop of pleasure--tell me that you are unworthy of being alive? And, on the other hand, do you think I don't find some touch of pleasure in suggesting that your husband is less than he seems--no better than yourself, in fact? Perhaps worse?

But he had not known that yet and would not make it out until too late, after he had won by destroying her, had sapped her mind because he would not learn what his father's life taught: stop, listen, wait.
It takes strength to listen and wait, and neither one of us was strong. To desire too much, to think oneself unfit--
Not a circle, a spiral inward (introversion) to a madness of cool objectivity.
Nothing passes belief when a god's intention
We weren't ready yet, either of us; we loved each other and were at war for fear that we didn't deserve what we took. Withdrew by separate paths. You forward to madness, and as for me--

I did not want it left to me, and it was not fair.
I wanted--what?
No, words again. Large gestures.
I wanted to be beautiful.
I wanted to be loved for myself alone, as God loves even giraffes.
There is a moral to this. There is no such thing in this world as love. Until the day we go to Heaven, there is only childish infatuation and jealousy, duty, despair.
A sickly moral, admittedly, but better than endless burning. I wanted him to make me feel pretty. Isn't that sad?

Do you know what it's like to grow up on a Reservation? I don't mean pity him. I don't mean sob. I mean your laws are irrelevant, stupid, inhuman. I mean you support civilization by a kind of averaging. All crimes are equal, because you define the crime, not the criminal. It's effective, I admit it. But it has nothing to do with reality. There is good and evil in the world, but they have nothing to do with your courts. I know better than anyone, believe me! I have been the victim. But that's in the past. Assault and battery is always the same, no matter who does the assaulting and battering. That's your Jewish law. Well I reject your law!
Have you really missed the point? Listen! How can you act for what you don't believe in? And don't tell me "That's democracy." Don't take me for a fool. If I accepted democracy I'd put up with the majority opinion until I could muster the voting power to change it. But I don't! Who in his right mind does? Take a look at the world! Are the demonstrators accepting majority opinion? Are they setting up an alternative? A demonstrator is a Hell's Angel without brains. Or put it this way. You say accept majority opinion, work lawfully to change it. Suppose the majority favors anarchism, or suppose the majority goes Nazi. Will you quietly pass pamphlets soberly arguing for a change of opinion? It comes to this: I don't say I can beat you. I'm not interested in beating you. I say only that the will of the gods is with me. Your side will win, eventually. You've got the votes. But meanwhile I will kill you. The gods will rumble on, indifferent to your theories, and your house will in due time fall around your ears.

Story of a king who waited and waited for some word from the gods but got nothing, absolute silence, no matter what form of divination he tried. Very well, said teh king. Has a lion ever performed extispicy? Has a wolf ever asked advice from any interpreter of dreams? Like a robber, I shall proceed according to my will! Ah, then they spoke! They smashed that poor devil like an ant! You see the point. You never know when the gods may speak, you never know what your luck is. You can only wait, and if they say act, act.

Let us make a distinction. Omen-watching, divination, has nothing whatever to do with magic. Divination is man's attempt to find out what the universe is doing. Magic is man's ridiculous attempt to make the gods behave as mortals. Divination asserts passivity, not for spiritual fulfillment, as in the Far East, but for practical and spiritual life. After divination one acts with the gods. You discover which way things are flowing and you swim in the same direction.

He of all people, trapped in an allegory.

And which way will you go my child? He whispered. No answer came. The Sunlight Man nodded. Either way, you have my blessing. He made a cross in the air, then sadly shook his head. So much revolution in you, he said, so much hatred for order, so much hatred for anarchy--and so much love. How terrible! Where can you run to? I tremble for your soul.

She had underestimated love.

Love is revolt, someone had told her--Stanley Burrish, when they met in San Francisco three years ago--and it was true. A flight from the humdrum, from reality: you shucked off all you had been before and the world that went with it, you became the enemy of the universe and imagined your lover to be another just like you, and so for a moment the two of you were free, lifted out of all ordinary dullness, out of the old vulnerability, became godlike or childlike or a little of both, and the world, no longer a fence around you, was beautiful. So that love was doomed, the new world sickened like the old.

Another illusion. Nothing prospers but the soul. The universe is a great machine gun, and all things physical are riddled sooner or later with bleeding holes. You're bombarded by atoms, colors, smells, textures; torn apart by ancient ideas, appeals for compassion; you twist wither, try to make sense of things, you force your riddled world into order, but it collapses, riddled as fast as you build, and you build it all over again. You put up bird-houses and cities, for instance, but cats eat the birds and cyclones eat the cities, and nothing is left but the fruitless searching which is otherwise called the soul.

Do not say that thou art weary, O my soul, do not say, This Life is grief, the Strife is grim

All this, though some may consider it strange, mere fiction, is the truth.

I haven't any words to add to this, so Gardner will have to provide the last words:

He read one more time the poem about friendship and suddenly, ardently, Benson wished he had a friend so he could mail the poem to him.

Giles Goat-Boy or The Revised New Syllabus

John Barth

Gratituditynesshoodshipcy!

Something I don't understand is this, I said carefully. How can a person stand it, not to be...marvelous?

Failed, failed, failed! I look about me, and everywhere see failure. Old moralists, young bootlickers, unsuccessful writers; has-beens, would-bes, never-weres; failed artists, failed editors, failed scholars and critics; failed husbands, fathers, lovers; failed minds, failed bodies, hearts, and souls--none of us is Passed, we all are Failed!
It no longer matters to me whether the Revised New Syllabus is published, by this house or any other. What does the Answer care, whether anyone "finds" it? It wasn't lost! The gold doesn't ask to be mined, or the medicine beg to be taken; it's not eh medicine that's worse off when the patient rejects it. As for the Doctor--who cares whether he starves or prospers? Let him go hungry, maybe he'll prescribe again! Or let him die, we have prescription enough!
Let him laugh, even, that I've swallowed in good faith the pill he made up as a hoax: I'm cured, the joke's on him! One comes to understand that a certain hermit of the woods is no eccentric, but a Graduate, a Grand Tutor. From all the busy millions a handful seek him out, thinking to honor and sustain him; we bring him cash and frankincense, sing out his praises in four-part harmony, fetch him champagne and scares off the locusts he'd have suppered on; the wine makes him woozy, he upchucks the soup; he can't smell the flowers for our perfume or hear the birds for our music, and there's not a thing to spend his money on. No wonder he curses us under his breath, once he's sober again! And thinking to revenge himself with a trick, he puts on a false face to scare us away. We had asked for revelations; he palms off his maddest dreams. "Show us Beauty," we plead; he bares his rump to us. "Show us Goodness," we beg, and he mounts our wives and daughters. "Ah, sir!" we implore him, "Give us the Truth!" He thrusts up a forefinger from each temple and declares, "You are cuckolds all."
And yet I say the guller is gulled, hoist is the engineer: the joke's on the joker, that's the joker's joke. Better victimized by Knowledge than succored by Ignorance; to be Wisdom's prey is to be its ward. Deceived, we see our self-deception; suffering the lie, we come to truth, and in the knowledge of our failure hope to Pass.
Publish the Revised New Syllabus or reject it; call it art or artifice, fiction, fact, or fraud: it doesn't care, its author doesn't care, and neither any longer do I. I don't praise it, I don't condemn it; I don't ask who wrote it or whether it will sell or what the critics may make of it. My judgment is not upon the book but upon myself. I have read it. I here resign from my position in this house.

However I was not supposed to infer that because all lenses distorted ("Your own included" he said, perhaps unable to see that I wore none), nothing could be truly seen; all that was necessary was to compensate for optical error, and for this he relied, in his own work, on the lens in his hand, which he knew to be accurate.

Giles Goat-Boy, in addition to everything else, is about lenses. If you understand the last quote about lenses, you grasp as much of Giles Goat-Boy as is possible. We'll dismantle it: All lenses do distort. It is the nature of lenses. Is it the nature of sight? Do we distort things in order to see them? Is the conversion of photons into the visual imagery we have in our minds distortion?
Your own included.
perhaps unable to see that I wore none.
Does the boy wear a lens? Barth phrases it very carefully, and only in terms of sight. "Unable to see that I wore none." What lens could make the sight of other lenses impossible? What lens could make you see lenses where there aren't any?
We are presented with two possibilities: either the boy is wearing a lens and cannot see his own lens and the old man speaking can see his lens or the old man's lens is distorted and he truly cannot see that the boy is not wearing a lens.
Is this getting to be a bit much what with all the lenses and wearings and distortions? Maybe you should switch to a new pair of glasses. I guarantee there is one pair out there that will make what I'm saying here sound like pure genius. There are also pairs to make you think it's drivel, ludicrous, foolishness, insanity, wisdom, common sense, nothing special, everything special...
The calibration of these delicate little things we call eyes (which are nothing less than lenses) is a process we have had very little to do with on the overt level.

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

I hope there are others also who don't mind trees.

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things--trout as well as eternal salvation--come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

The storm came on a wild horse and rode over us.

Actually, I was feeling lordly with love and several times broke into laughter that I can't explain otherwise, but he could have thought I was trying to be brace about having made a mess of my life.

Woman, I asked, can't I love you without liking him?
She just stood looking at me, so I went on talking and saying more than I had intended. I said things she already knew, but possibly one thing she wanted to hear again. Jessie, I said, you know I don't know any card tricks. I don't like him. I never will. But I love you. Don't keep testing me, though, by giving me no choices. Jessie, don't let him...I stopped from going on because I knew I should have found a shorter way to say what I had already said.
Don't let him what? She asked. What were you going to say?
I can't remember what I was going to say, I replied, except that I feel I have lost touch with you.

He tried to tell me. He spoke in the abstract, but he had spent his life fitting abstractions to listeners so that listeners would have no trouble fitting his abstractions to the particulars of their lives.
You are too young to help anybody and I am too old, he said. By help I don't mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.
Help, he said, is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
So it is, he said, using an old homiletic transition, that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, Sorry we are just out of that part.
I told him, You make it too tough. Help doesn't have to be anything that big.

All there is to thinking, he said, is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

Then he told me, In the part I was reading it says the Word was in the beginning, and that's right. I used to think water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water.

He almost reached the door then turned back for reassurance. Are you sure that the bones in his hand were broken? he asked. I repeated, Nearly all the bones in his hand were broken. In which hand? he asked. In his right hand, I answered.

Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting.

You like to tell true stories, don't you? he asked, and I answered, Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.
Then he asked, After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?
Only then will you understand what happened and why.
It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. One some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.

In his preface to A River Runs Through It, Maclean said his story was a story full of trees. This is true. There are quite a few trees in A River Runs Through It. There are more bushes and brush, and even more fish. But I think what he meant was that his story was full of people who are trees. Norman and Paul and their father, Jessie and her brother, the mother, Old Rawhide and Paul's Cherokee girlfriend, these people are not so much characters as they are trees. Rooted deep in the land, they reach with many branches waving in the wind for things they see and hear. To go places and see what may be seen or visited, but the roots...
Maclean's tree people are towering. Old trees with long histories--the rings are what make them, not the height of their highest branches nor the width of their trunks. And the rings are like the words that run under water. The rings are like the Word that was there in the beginning. The rings are the words written by Maclean on his pages. The rings are these words.
The problems of A River Runs Through It startled me. I was expecting a story about fishing with problems no greater than a lack of fish or inner turmoil (about the same level of gravity). But all the trees in A River Runs Through It are on fire. They are burning down in terrible heat, they are scorched, they are turning to ash, solid ash, before eyes (yours, mine, Maclean's). How could this surprise me? Trees grow tall to catch the wind and be broken, or taller still so they may attract lightning and be twisted. Trees grow to fall. We live to die.
This isn't meant to be morbid. All life is climbing a cliff to jump off. The higher you climb while you are alive, the better the jump is going to be. Death is no end; it's the most exciting thing you'll do with your life--provided you climb high while you're here.
The waters we all will dive into are the waters that haunt us.