Earth Works: Selected Essays

Notes and Acknowledgments

345 Notes and Acknowledgments These notes record, for each essay, when it was composed, where it was first published , and a few of the intellectual and practical circumstances that influenced the writing. I also list the sources of selected quotations, and the names of magazine editors who have been especially supportive of my work. When identifying previous books of mine in which some of these essays were collected, I use the following abbreviations: FOS The Force of Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000) HFH Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journeys (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) POB The Paradise of Bombs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) SOU Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) SP Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) WFTC Writing from the Center (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) “The Singular First Person” was composed in June 1987 for delivery at a conference on the art of the essay. Although I had been publishing essays for nine years, this was my first attempt to describe my practice or the tradition in which I saw myself working. I note with dismay that the U.S. population, cited here from 1987 as roughly 250 million, has grown by February of 2011, when I write this note, to 346 notes and acknowledgments 312 million, an increase of 62 million or 25 percent. My gloomy comments on the state of American fiction were made during the heyday of minimalism, an impoverished mode that has been succeeded by several richer ones. I now see much to admire in contemporary fiction from the United States and the Anglophone world. Montaigne’s practice of inserting layered revisions into his essays is clearly delineated in Donald M. Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958). Lewis Thomas’s essay on Montaigne appears in his The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking, 1979). The essay was first published in The Sewanee Review 96, no. 4 (Fall 1988) and was collected in SOU. “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs,” written in July 1983, was one in a series of essays I contributed to North American Review between 1981 and 1992, at the invitation of the editor, Robley Wilson, Jr. I owe a great deal to his encouragement of my work and to the hospitality of this venerable magazine (Thomas Jefferson was an early subscriber). Of all my essays, this one comes closest to expressing a primal myth—the struggle, within myself and within the world, between the wild energies of nature and the ingenious, often murderous, works of humankind . The Ravenna Arsenal, now used by the Ohio National Guard for training, is a real place, but it is viewed in these pages through the wide eyes of a child, with corresponding exaggeration of incident and metaphor. First published in North American Review 268, no. 3 (September 1983), pp. 53–58, this became the title essay in POB. One of the shortest of my essays, “The Men We Carry in Our Minds” is also one of the most frequently reprinted—in part because of that brevity, handy for classrooms, but also, I suspect, because it enlarges the typical discussion of gender roles to include the issue of class. It was composed in May 1984; first published in Milkweed Chronicle 5, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1984), pp. 34–35; and collected in POB. During the trial recounted in “Doing Time in the Thirteenth Chair,” I took detailed notes on the proceedings, using legal pads provided by the bailiff, and each night I elaborated the day’s notes into a narrative. The resulting essay, composed in the last week of 1982 and the first week of 1983, has been used in seminars for federal judges. Against my usual practice, I told the story in present tense, in order to reproduce for the reader the juror’s experience of watching the parade of witnesses, hearing testimony, and struggling to decide whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. The weighing of evidence and searching for patterns in a trial is akin to the inquiring method of the essay. Under the title of “The Thirteenth Chair,” it was first published in North American Review 268, no. 1 (March 1983), pp. 47–53, and it was collected in POB. 347 notes and acknowledgments My father died in February...