There Is a Garden in the Mind by Paul A. Lee

Author:Paul A. Lee [Lee, Paul A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-577-3
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

University Services Agency (USA) and Earth Day

A colleague of mine committed suicide. He was a fellow philosopher. I was the only one to care for him when he suffered a nervous breakdown before his suicide. I thought he was trying to tell me my career was over by putting a pistol to his head and pulling the trigger. I took it personally. I didn’t know if it was his blood or mine. If I thought I could ignore the handwriting on the wall, or if I held out any hope that my career would be saved by some miracle, it stopped there and then. I gave up and died with him. In the late summer of 1969, I had to return to Santa Cruz from northern Wisconsin, where we were on a six-month sabbatical, to conduct his funeral. At the service, I quoted Dylan Thomas, “oh you who could not cry on to the ground … now break a giant tear for this little known fall.…”

Before the funeral, I went up to the garden to see Alan. He didn’t know I had returned. He saw me coming up the garden path and ran down pell-mell and jumped into my arms, full force, locking his legs around my waist. I don’t know how I stayed upright. I just managed to keep my balance, assisted, I guess, by our friendship, as if it were a kind of prop. When I told him what I had come back for, he gazed at me for a long time—a very long time. I have never forgotten that long moment of silent communion and shared comradeship, as he penetrated my depth with his gaze. It was one of the few times when I thought someone had looked into my soul.

After the funeral I returned to northern Wisconsin to lick my wounds, suffering a mild nervous breakdown, exacerbated by a call from the philosophy chairman saying it was too late to turn anything in. So why bother? My goose was cooked. I thought the sabbatical was my chance to do some writing, but I was wrong.

Little did I know that in my despair there were historical forces at work that would renew hope in the human spirit and its ability to resist the forces of destruction on a national and even an international level. Earth Day One was being planned, and our garden would be a place of celebration, when the entire country would be seized by an agony of despair over the ravages of industrial society and by the hope for a renewed affirmation of organic nature and even the environment as such.

It amazes me even now that during that summer I had the opportunity to take a wilderness canoe trip in northern Wisconsin with Senator Gaylord Nelson as part of his wild river legislative efforts and then that months later I watched him on the Today Show announce the plan for the first Earth Day the following April. I jumped in my seat.

Nothing else could have confirmed what we had done in our university garden.

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