-
7. In a Treeless Landscape: A Research Narrative
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
66 In a Treeless Landscape A Research Narrative Kathleen Wider Because I am a philosopher by trade and training, most of my research begins in my head, first with an intuition and then with the development of rudimentary arguments to support that intuition. My reading of scholarly books and journal articles related to the issue I’m addressing follows these initial steps. Finally, I land back in my head using these sources as support or as counterarguments to whatever position I’m defending. It’s a closed circle from head to printed word to head and back to the printed page. This style of research suits me, as it is similar both to finding the puzzle pieces and figuring out how they go together, all this done in the abstract. Great intellectual exercise, and I love it! However, when my non-philosopher friends and relatives who bought my 1997 book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness complained that they could not understand a word of it, I decided that (even though their complaints were at least slightly overstated!) I did need to respond to them. I wanted to write a book that would be both philosophical and literary, one that would reach a broad, general audience. That is when I began a very different kind of research project. Since early in my philosophical career, I had been thinking about the nature of the self, the relationship of the self to the body and to the world, including other people, and the question of self-identity through time. Although I have a graduate degree in English, all my publications were in philosophy and addressed to a small, scholarly audience. That fact didn’t extinguish my growing desire to try my hand at literary writing. I didn’t have any luck with this when I threw a bit of it into my philosophical essays; the editors or reviewers almost always nixed it. So, given my training, my longstanding intentions, and the complaints, this seemed the moment of truth. I would bring my two areas of interest into equal partnership. I would explore the philosophical issues about the self that have always intrigued me, but this time I would do so within the context of a specific life, grounding my ideas and discoveries in the concrete details of that life. I chose the life of my paternal grandmother, Augusta Mercedes Maguire Wider, both In a Treeless Landscape 67 because it spanned a century and because it was an interesting life. She was part of a homesteading family that moved from a farm in Illinois to Dakota Territory to homestead. In 1882, her parents, Francis and Maggie Maguire, moved their family of two boys and five girls to a 360-acre homestead, nine miles northeast of Plankinton, in what would become the state of South Dakota seven years after their arrival. When Augusta was a teenager, the family left the farm and moved to the small city of Mitchell, forty miles east of Plankinton. She lived there until her death. From that small prairie town, Augusta created for herself a career as a speaker on the national lecture circuit. She lectured at teachers’ institutes, women’s clubs, and high school graduations. In small rural schoolhouses and in large university lecture halls, Augusta was at ease. She loved an audience, and the relationship was mutual. The subject of most of her talks was art and beauty and their relationship to the development of a person as an individual and as a citizen. When she died, she left behind several notebooks with outlines of her speeches, lists of hundreds of poems she knew by heart, and brochures she had developed as promotional material to secure speaking engagements across the country. The most important record she left for me to explore was a scrapbook filled with program notes, articles from newspapers reviewing her speeches, and, scattered throughout it, bits and pieces of her family’s life. My father had given this scrapbook to his mother when she was in her fifties, and she had noted in it that it should be returned to him after she died. That is how I first came into contact with it. The scrapbook was seductive, drawing me into a world of the past that each page brought alive again. Hearing about my interest in Augusta’s life, my aunt Virginia sent me the rest of the material related to her mother’s career. So I had found a fascinating life lived...