Moment of Clarity: Refuse To Chaperone a Trip to Santa Claus, Indiana

"...at that time I did not know what kind of influence I was going to need."

Wendell Berry "spoke" these words in reference to Wallace Stegner, author and Stanford professor whose subtle, yet inevitably, profound, impact shaped the man, the writer, and the conservationist that Berry has become. In "The Momentum of Clarity," an essay reprinted in Imagination in Place, Stegner's influence is reflected in Berry's masterful, but unassuming, literary style, just as his appreciation for and acknowledgment of "place" is central to Berry's understanding of "a good life" (and of more philosophical concepts of "self," "truth," and "rationality"). If you have a few minutes, I encourage you to read the excerpt below, taken from the part of the essay that I find most thought-provoking and in some sense, inexplicably redeeming (I say "inexplicably" because "redeeming" admittedly seems an odd choice of word for an essay that traces neither moral conflict nor emotional catharsis; it nonetheless seems an accurate descriptor of what I felt while reading - as someone who has both found significance in retrospect and who has become unacknowledged bits and pieces of people whom I have never thanked, I take comfort in being in the company of Wendell Berry).
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"Though I remain certain in memory and feeling of the impression this Mr. Stegner made on me, I have a hard time describing it, perhaps because he was not in any sense a 'type.' He was a fine-looking man of about fifty, gray-haired, courteous, generous, smiling (though perhaps not at something we knew), neatly and even elegantly but never ostentatiously dressed; sometimes; as the class carried on its business of reading and talking, he would smoke meditatively a cigar. He did not seem to be a professor at all, and when he was in it the Jones Room did not seem part of a school. He had, of course, been to school, but one could tell that to a very considerable extent he had not been made by school. He managed somehow to imply that the work and the interest that had brought us together were matters in some respects practical. He did not deal in infallible recipes, or guarantee results. He did not suggest that all our problems were solvable. But there was in his presence and bearing the implication that we could work at our problems, and that we should. I thought, and think still, that he was a good teacher. When I sit at my worktable now I am aware of certain attitudes, hesitations, and insistences that I think are traceable to that seminar thirty-five years ago.

I wish I could say that I then understood him as an influence - that I saw what he was about, or saw how to apply his example to my own life. But the fact is that at that time I did not understand him as an influence, and the reason was that at that time I did not know what kind of influence I was going to need. At that time I wanted only to be a writer; beyond that, I had little self-knowledge, and not an inkling of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to do it. I was living outside my life.

I got back inside my life in 1964 when I returned to my own part of the country. From that time I began a long and still continuing process of understanding Wallace Stegner as an influence, and of being influenced by him. But here again I am embarrassed. As I failed to understand him as an influence when I first knew him, so have I failed to know very exactly how his influence has grown upon me; it has been involved in my life as I have lived it."

-Wendell Berry, "The Momentum of Clarity," in Imagination in Place (2010); originally published as "Wallace Stegner and Influence," in Wallace Stegner: Man & Writer (1996)
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Today I encourage you to think about those people - whether they be teachers, or family members, or random strangers whose acts or words have stuck with you - that have given credence to your passions while skillfully avoiding completely useless sugarcoating; those who have made you more accountable; those who have done wonders by simply acknowledging that sometimes things just suck; those who you would like to think are proud of you and those whom you would be proud to be; those who have simply helped you "get back inside your life."
Forget just "thinking" about them...write them a hand-written letter.:)
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Recipes for Today:
Recipe...to make someone's day:
Send them a handmade recipe box featuring designs, objects, colors, and words that could not possibly look more like them. In short: Be Alexus Tolley.



Recipe...for a good laugh:
Imagine Andy at Holiday World today with 200 8th graders. As of 7:00 am, two kids were already bus sick.

Recipe...for a smile:

Recipe...for 1) giggles; 2) followed by descriptive statements like "those are big"; 3) followed by "this is the best breakfast I've ever had; 4) followed by an unfortunate, but worthwhile, stomach ache:
Join with me in the Cream and Sugar pancake-eating competition that I really do want to plan.