This Side of the Mountain: River of Earth: Thoughts On the Fiftieth Year Of Its Publication

This Side of the Mountain River of Earth: Thoughts On the Fiftieth Year Of Its Publication by John Stephenson Southern Appalachian Archives/Berea College Southern Appalachian Archives/Berea College River of Earth: Thoughts On the Fiftieth Year Of Its Publication If we had not the benefit of the information on the flyleaf, how would we know fifty years have passed since the first publication of James Still's great novel, River of Earth? Cutting clean as a new-whetted knife, dappling light like sun through spring willows, removing us to a familiar time we never knew, showing us tomorrow unmasked and true as this morning, James Still's words recreate in us his world. It is a world of predicament and pain, humor and helplessness, prescience and possibility. At times Still can be considered a kind of cultural recorder. He records in the way an artist records: through the recreation of reality. He reports nothing which is not true, yet most of what is true is purposely omitted. The art lies in what is not said. His reports are highly selective of detail; the sense of accuracy, completeness, aesthetic balance spring from the imagination of the reader. Still gives us as little as possible, but what he gives us is perfection. He expects us to work his gift through to fullness by the exercise of our mind's senses, our feelings , our experience. The thought comes before the word, but before the thought comes the feeling. We cannot say before we know, before we feel. We have a clue about what Still Earl Palmer 4 felt before he wrapped his thoughts in the words of the novel, River of Earth. The clue can be found in "River of Earth," the poem. "The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs." The Bible provides the text from which both novel and poem are derived. The earth is not changeless, but everchanging. It moves; it is liquid. It ripples, flows, casts waves into the future. "These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity." If time were compassed, one could see the movement more clearly, and one could appreciate the hapless maneuverings of humans, one could read in proper perspective the pitiful and humorous stories which take place on the surface of these epochal heavings. Southern Appalachian Archives/Berea College Who can understand these things? Who can read eons of time and change? Who can weigh the ultimate success of the attempts of humans to control their own fortunes, let alone to influence the tides of history, of geologic time? The answer Still gives in his poem is that the teller, the speaker cannot. Presumably the narrator is Still himself. But in his Socratic admission of ignorance lies the beginning of his-and our-knowledge. As he says, he least of all can understand these things; all he knows is that he is constrained to remain here watching the river of earth flow, watching the waves of hills travelling "down the strident centuries." The poet can see what others do not. We do not control time and destiny but are caught in the wash of history. To confess the limits of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. Who among the members of the Baldridge family understands the changing tides of his/her personal history? The mother, Alpha (the first), comes close, and the nameless narrator, seven years old, also tries to stake out a different future for himself from the one others have defined for him. It seems doubtful he will have any greater success in swimming against the currents of the river than has his mother. And yet Still never leaves us without hope. At the end of the novel, just as the boy says goodbye to the past ("Grandma . . . where have you gone?"), he hears the voice of the future. How far can one really see into the beyond? The poet confesses he cannot, and that is when vision begins. The child in the novel grabs stubbornly, tries to see beyond, wondering "how it would be to know square to the end of everything ." He thinks "If I could see as far for my size as an ant...