All the Little Live Things Read Online Free PDF Page B
Author: Wallace Stegner
wouldn’t be cooking much, he ate mainly nuts and fruit.
“Boy oh boy,” I said. “What is it, a sanyasi withdrawal? You want to sit over there in a loincloth eating dates and raisins and say Om Tat Sat to the birds and squirrels?”
He looked at me, I thought, in surprise. Whatever his costume and the condition of his toilet, there was an elegance in the way one eyebrow went up. “You’ve been doing your homework.”
“Plain living and high thinking and a low protein diet.”
“Exactly.”
“And to hell with the air-conditioned junk yard.”
“Right.”
“God Almighty,” I said. “Do you mind if I summarize your case?”
“Go ahead.”
“Let’s see,” I said, and began counting him out on my fingers. “You’d go into your spiritual retirement in a factory-made, chemically waterproofed tent. You’d have a chemical john utilizing industrial quicklime. Your water would be made available, thanks to myself, by a two-horse electric pump, a product of industry. You’d boil your tea on a gasoline stove—borrowed, but still factory-made. You’d go to and fro on a motorcycle built in Japan and brought to you by a complicated system of international trade supported by a complicated system of political agreements and treaties. The raisins you would live on would be mass-produced. Likewise the salted peanuts. In the evenings you’d relax—I see you play the guitar—with an instrument made in the Martin or Gibson factory. That’s withdrawal?”
Caliban’s smile modified itself as I spoke, until I couldn’t help being reminded again how much lips surrounded by beard look like another sort of bodily opening. “Why does it bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me. I just wonder what you expect to teach the air-conditioned junk yard by a phony retirement.”
“I don’t expect to teach it anything. I get only one life. I’m not spending it teaching lessons to a shitty civilization.”
“Let it go to hell.”
“I’ve already said so.”
“So long as it furnishes your personal thirteen hundred pounds of steel, five hundred pounds of cement, two hundred pounds of salt, one hundred pounds of phosphate, and the rest of the twenty tons of stuff it takes to support one individual in this society for one year, even if he pretends to withdraw. You want your Walden with modern conveniences, is that it?”
“If they’re available, fine. If not, fine.”
Obviously he thought he meant It. I might have told him that in California in the 1960s even the land to squat on came high—the taxes on that acre of poison oak were probably seventy-five dollars a year. But he wearied me, standing there stubborn, provocative, and smiling, turning nonsense into reality by the simple refusal to listen to anything but the ticking of his own Ingersoll mind. Yet he spoke some of my opinions, in his incomparably crackbrained way, and I was uneasily aware that in putting him down I was pinning myself. I had retired from our overengineered society as surely as he wanted to, and I lived behind a PRIVATE ROAD sign on a dead-end lane. And our argument, including the half-exposed contempt and hostility in it, reminded me of too many hopeless arguments in the past.
“Well,” I said, “it’s an academic debate anyway.”
As she so often does, Ruth inserted a subject-changer just as I was closing the hall. She was still playing sweet old lady curious about youth, but it wasn’t all acting. She was curious about this one. Where was he from? Where was he living now, that made him want to move to the woods?
He told us, in his soft, modulated voice, watching us all the time, his elegant eyebrow lifting occasionally to prompt our astonishment or amusement. He was from Chicago. Living? Nowhere. Who needed the in-locoparentis university? A university was properly only students and teachers. So you put a toothbrush and an extra pair of socks and a sleeping bag in your knapsack, and you carried your housing with you, even to
“Boy oh boy,” I said. “What is it, a sanyasi withdrawal? You want to sit over there in a loincloth eating dates and raisins and say Om Tat Sat to the birds and squirrels?”
He looked at me, I thought, in surprise. Whatever his costume and the condition of his toilet, there was an elegance in the way one eyebrow went up. “You’ve been doing your homework.”
“Plain living and high thinking and a low protein diet.”
“Exactly.”
“And to hell with the air-conditioned junk yard.”
“Right.”
“God Almighty,” I said. “Do you mind if I summarize your case?”
“Go ahead.”
“Let’s see,” I said, and began counting him out on my fingers. “You’d go into your spiritual retirement in a factory-made, chemically waterproofed tent. You’d have a chemical john utilizing industrial quicklime. Your water would be made available, thanks to myself, by a two-horse electric pump, a product of industry. You’d boil your tea on a gasoline stove—borrowed, but still factory-made. You’d go to and fro on a motorcycle built in Japan and brought to you by a complicated system of international trade supported by a complicated system of political agreements and treaties. The raisins you would live on would be mass-produced. Likewise the salted peanuts. In the evenings you’d relax—I see you play the guitar—with an instrument made in the Martin or Gibson factory. That’s withdrawal?”
Caliban’s smile modified itself as I spoke, until I couldn’t help being reminded again how much lips surrounded by beard look like another sort of bodily opening. “Why does it bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me. I just wonder what you expect to teach the air-conditioned junk yard by a phony retirement.”
“I don’t expect to teach it anything. I get only one life. I’m not spending it teaching lessons to a shitty civilization.”
“Let it go to hell.”
“I’ve already said so.”
“So long as it furnishes your personal thirteen hundred pounds of steel, five hundred pounds of cement, two hundred pounds of salt, one hundred pounds of phosphate, and the rest of the twenty tons of stuff it takes to support one individual in this society for one year, even if he pretends to withdraw. You want your Walden with modern conveniences, is that it?”
“If they’re available, fine. If not, fine.”
Obviously he thought he meant It. I might have told him that in California in the 1960s even the land to squat on came high—the taxes on that acre of poison oak were probably seventy-five dollars a year. But he wearied me, standing there stubborn, provocative, and smiling, turning nonsense into reality by the simple refusal to listen to anything but the ticking of his own Ingersoll mind. Yet he spoke some of my opinions, in his incomparably crackbrained way, and I was uneasily aware that in putting him down I was pinning myself. I had retired from our overengineered society as surely as he wanted to, and I lived behind a PRIVATE ROAD sign on a dead-end lane. And our argument, including the half-exposed contempt and hostility in it, reminded me of too many hopeless arguments in the past.
“Well,” I said, “it’s an academic debate anyway.”
As she so often does, Ruth inserted a subject-changer just as I was closing the hall. She was still playing sweet old lady curious about youth, but it wasn’t all acting. She was curious about this one. Where was he from? Where was he living now, that made him want to move to the woods?
He told us, in his soft, modulated voice, watching us all the time, his elegant eyebrow lifting occasionally to prompt our astonishment or amusement. He was from Chicago. Living? Nowhere. Who needed the in-locoparentis university? A university was properly only students and teachers. So you put a toothbrush and an extra pair of socks and a sleeping bag in your knapsack, and you carried your housing with you, even to