The Solace of Open Spaces

Product Information

The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.”

Loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”

Select Format

The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet...Sentence structure is shortened. Descriptive words are dropped, even verbs...What’s behind this laconic style is shyness. There is no vocabulary for the subject of feelings. It’s not a hangdog shyness, or anything coy— always there’s a robust spirit in evidence behind the restraint...The silence is profound. Instead of talking, we seem to share one eye. Keenly observed, the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.

I recently discovered Gretel Ehrlich, not that she isn’t well known by others. The discovery merely reflects my ignorance...and yet, I get great joy from finding new food—someone whose words I immediately want to absorb. I found the book in a used book store. The title alone intrigued me—one who thinks that soul nurturing places, solitude and silence are the final luxuries. And her essays are about Wyoming, my neighbor state and our least populated one—to me, a feature, not a bug. Also, two of my favorite authors, Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey, who I’ve re-read multiple times, gave her high praise. I expect to read more of Ehrlich. Keenly observed, the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient. The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.” Author papers (1960-2018) at Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there. OBITUARY One of the largest sheep ranches in northern Wyoming went under this week.” a series of essays as she escapes her history and city living, with its tragedies and comforts for a stripped down, eked out living

As the book continues, she writes of Wyoming’s history, the changes caused by fences and isolationist conservative people who believe that “honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.” She also tells us about hermits, madness, cabin fever, extended drunks, suicide, sheepherders as “outsiders,” and people so ornery that they’d “rather starve than agree on anything.” And yet this cosmic perspective, this sublime invitation to unselfing (to borrow once again Iris Murdoch’s splendid notion), is readily available everywhere we look, right here on Earth, so long as we are actually looking. A century after Hermann Hesse observed that “whoever has learned how to listen to trees… wants to be nothing except what he is,”, Ehrlich writes:Lovers, farmers and artists have one thing in common, at least – a fear of “dry spells”, dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize. All such matters are delicate of course. But a good irrigator knows this: too little water brings on the weeds while too much degrades the soil the way too much easy money can trivialize a person’s initiative. La caratteristica principale del paesaggio è quella che un imprenditore edile eufemisticamente descriverebbe come «robaccia indigena fin sotto la porta di casa», ossia un misto di assetati arbusti di pianta del sale, serpenti, lepri dalla coda nera, mosche dei cervi, polvere rossa ,ciuffi di fiori selvatici, greti di fiume e totale assenza di alberi. Se sulle Grandi Pianure il panorama è una sinfonia, un inno suonato dall’erba, il Wyoming sembra piuttosto scaturito dal delirio di un architetto: un gran ruzzolare e acciottolare di pietra infusa di colori tenui, esangui, un gigante di roccia che un rumore improvviso abba strappato un sonno profondo e gettato in piena luce.» The book is not about the “solace of open spaces”, as the title indicates. It is instead about the men and women who inhabit such places. Those not attuned to Wyoming’s inherent beauty may declare it to be empty and without interest. It is a matter of perspective. One’s attitude will influence one’s view of the book.