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Zusatztext "[A]n unpredictable magnum opus! a daring and poetic polemic that challenges at every turn." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Synthesizes a lifetime’s worth of fears and hopes for the planet." -- New Age "Fascinating and instructive." -- The Oregonian Informationen zum Autor William Kittredge lives in Missoula, Montana. Klappentext The Nature of Generosity is at once a natural sequel to the acclaimed memoir Hole in the Sky and an entirely unique masterwork from one of the finest writers of the American West. Taking as his topic the "ordinary yearning to take physical and emotional care," William Kittredge embarks upon a literary and philosophical grand tour that explores the very core of who we are. Whether he's recalling a childhood in Oregon, touring Europe, or studying photographs of Japanese gardens in a bookstore in New York City, Kittredge's connections are as unexpected as they are inspiring. Shattering the myth that survival of the fittest means "survival of the violent, or the cruelest, or the selfish," Kittredge imagines a world in which altruism dominates--and offers ample evidence that this is not an unreachable utopian ideal. Leseprobe Part One The Old Animal Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. --Mark Twain DUST LIFTED in slow streaks off the alkaline playa in the dry basin called Long Lake. Tiny orange and white flowers blossomed among boulders of black lava-flow basalt. Ten thousand years ago, when the first humans came to the Great Basin highlands where I stood, Long Lake was part of a sweep of swamps and vast watery basins fed by melting glaciers. Waterbirds lifted to wheel and settle, refolding their wings. Their movements, to my dreaming, are a flowering of momentum--in this, much like music. At the end of a rocky two-track road, Long Lake is lost among the ridges rising from the east side of Warner Valley into an enormous run of uninhabited lava-rock and sagebrush highlands. I grew up believing there was nothing in the vicinity of Long Lake but shimmering distances. Then, sixty-five years old, I found that I'd spent my boyhood near an ancient holy place. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the lava-flow ridge at my back had fragmented into intricate, smooth-sided boulders, which were everywhere inscribed--drawn on by ancient humans attempting to manage their luck and their fate. The inscriptions were particularly thick in places next to fractures, breaks where souls and spirits could be thought to have emerged from an underworld, and through which they might be fortunate enough to reenter. Thousands of designs and figures had been pecked into the basalt surfaces with stone or bone tools, ranging from entropic (behind the eye) patterns of the sort seen in trances--grids and dot complexes--to discernible figures metamorphosing from moss to fish to men and women. Some were colored with pigment; others were delineated by thin encrustations of yellow and greenish lichens. The oldest images reach back ten thousand years. Anthropologists suggest they were created by shamans, priests who thought all things, including stones, possess an innate soul. Animist cultures are a global phenomenon that seems to have lasted thirty thousand years or so, and still endure among people along the Yukon River lowlands of Alaska, in enclaves like the Kalahari Desert of southwestern Africa, and in central Australia. These cultures hold that their shamans talk to animals, that while the shaman's body remains locked in a trance, the soul takes flight through fissures in the rock (actuality) and goes down into the underworld in order to encourage the emergence of hunting animals, or even out to the Milky Way for instruction from gods and ancestors who live the...
