Edward Abbey
(1927-1989)

HONESTY IN A DISHONEST AGE

The following is one of the last entries in Abbey's diary,
written shortly before his death on March 2, 1989, in Tucson, Arizona.

"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."

 

drawing by Michael McCurdy

the below poem is from "Earth Apples: Collected Poems," by Edward Abbey

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.