The Flames.

May all of you reach such heights, if you come back to earth and are re-born as a tree. That is what I wish for myself, if that is to be the case post-mortem.

Edward Abbey, the curmudgeonly-but-honest writer, wanted to come back as a vulture.

Honesty in a dishonest age
Helps placate one's intemperate rage
Over critics' who cannot engage
The truth as it appears on the page
Of one's latest literary outrage.


"Why book reviewers hate my books:
Because the books are really no good? Perhaps. But I think I've got a better explanation.

Almost all reviewers, these days, are members of and adherents to some anxious particular sect or faction.
I.e., they are lesbians and New Agers or fem-libbers or (even worse) male fem-libbers or
technophiles or self-hating white liberals or right wing conservatives or Growth maniacs
or Negroes or female Negroes or Third-World lesbian militant Negro poetesses or closet Marxists (Marxoids)
or futurologists or academical specialists or Chicano idealogues or ballerinas or Kowboy Kultists
or Kerouac Kultists or Henry James Minimalist Perfectionists or one-tenth Chippewa "Native American" Indians
or at very least and all-inclusive Official Chickenshit Correct-Thinking Liberals etc. etc.

"As such, any member of any one of those majority minorities is going to find for certain
a few remarks in any of my books that will offend/enrage "s/he" to the marrow, leading inevitably in turn,
on the part of such sectarian book reviewers, to a denunciation not merely of the offending passage,
but of the entire book, and not merely of the book, but of the author too."

--This passage is one of Edward Abbey's last diary entries before his death on March 2, 1989, in Tucson, AZ.

They do not think for themselves but are steered in the direction of P.C. by others, in short.

By and large, in my opinion, critics do little good and much harm.

I see no sense in arguing about why or how someone acts, writes, speaks, draws, sculpts, or how they engage in any form of self-expression.

I see some sense in dissing politicians, judicial decisions, business practices, and bolting in most of its forms.



Yes -- even after my death
you shall not escape me
I'll follow you
in the eyes of every hawk,
every falcon, vulture, eagle
that soars in whatever sky
you walk beneath,
all the earth over,
everywhere.

Yes -- and when you die too,
and follow me into that deep
dark burning delicious blue
and become like me --
a kind of bird, a feathered thing --
why, then I'll seek you out
ten thousand feet above the sea;
and far beyond the world's rim
we'll meet and clasp and couple
close to the flaming sun
and scream the joy of our love
into the blaze of death
and burn like angels
down through the stars
past all the suns
to the world's beginning again.
--from Earth Apples: Collected Poems, by Edward Abbey