Nobody Home by Gary Snyder

Author:Gary Snyder [Snyder, Gary; Martin, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595342522
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A last question that I’ve been meaning to ask since I received the Sierra Club book about you. Of course I enjoyed reading it and looking at the pictures, and it is a beautiful tribute. I recognised in most of the pieces an acknowledgement of your role as teacher which I’ve often felt when considering the impact you’ve had on my life. And yet there’s something about it that I don’t feel comfortable with. The celebration of an individual life that the book presents, adds up, it seems to me, to a form of myth-making that tends to elevate, separate, rarify the personality in what is perhaps a characteristically American way. The effect isn’t to empower the reader to find his / her own way on the trail—as I think your own work often does—but rather to inscribe another hero in the text. Is this too harsh? I imagine your response would be to laugh about it all, and perhaps it isn’t that important after all. Still, I’d like to hear your response.

Michael has also been writing and making things. For our wedding anniversary he wrote a long poem (made up of eighty-nine short ones) which I think is wonderful. I’d like to send it to you because the things it’s concerned with—a playful-serious sense of dependent co-arising—probably won’t touch a vast readership, but I think you and Carole are among the people who would enjoy it. So, may I send the poem?

And now, end of letter. What a long one. I imagine it arriving as part of your daily wad of correspondence, and hope you can reply briefly sometime. You’re often in my mind, and even when I’m not thinking about your writing, I’m interested in your responses to things.

Give my warm love to Carole and to you.

June 6, 1992

Dear Julia,

A tardy response to your multifaceted letter. Gearing up for spring teaching took something of a toll on me. It is still very busy, but as soon as school work is wrapped up I have a date on the upper Colorado Plateau, so we’d best do it now.

I am very sorry to hear that Michael’s father died, and very much in sympathy with your plight, and the plight of your father. It is quite obvious to me now that there is no time in life, except perhaps in childhood, when we are not intricately involved in family obligations to our children, or to our parents, not to mention siblings. It really is part of our real life, and so I keep an eye on my eighty-six-year-old mother, try to see her once a week, and hope that she does not go in to some kind of disabling deterioration. So far she is feisty and well, and takes care of herself. (My father died in a bungled surgery in the Balearic Islands back in the sixties.) These family problems (and Michael’s new career) do not seem to have abated your creative and intellectual energies a bit, however.

And so I will

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