Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [277]
I reached the microphone off the bed table and told my dream onto tape, for whatever it may be worth, and now I lie here on my back, wide awake, cold from my sweating, the plastic microphone lying against my upper lip and my thumb on the switch, and wonder if there is anything I want to say to myself.
“What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose?” she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother’s life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet it was not that that I hoped to find when I began to pry around in Grandmother’s life. I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.
There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
It will do to think about. For though Ellen Ward was not here this afternoon and evening, I am sure she will be here, or her representatives will be here, sooner or later. If she does not come of her own volition, or at Rodman’s urging, I can even conceive, in this slack hour, that I might send for her. Could I? Would I?
Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.
Read more Wallace Stegner in Penguin
ALL THE LITTLE LIVE THINGS
The sequel to the National Book Award-winning Spectator Bird finds Joe Allston and his wife in California, scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s.
ISBN 0-14-015441-8
ANGLE OF REPOSE
Introduction by Jackson J. Benson
Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece–the story of a century in the life of an American family and America itself.
ISBN 0-14-118547-3
BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
A fascinating look at the old American West and the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it.
ISBN 0-14-015994-0
THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN
Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this harrowing saga of people trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.
ISBN 0-14-013939-7
COLLECTED STORIES OF WALLACE STEGNER
Thirty-one stories, written over half a century, demonstrate why Stegner is acclaimed as one of America’s master storytellers.
ISBN 0-14-014774-8
CROSSING TO SAFETY
This story of the remarkable friendship between the Langs and the Morgans explores such things as writing for money, solid marriages, and academic promotions.
ISBN 0-14-013348-8
JOE HILL
Blending fact with fiction, Stegner creates a full-bodied portrait of Joe Hill, the Wobbly labor organizer who became a legend after he was executed for murder in 1915.
ISBN 0-14-013941-9
RECAPITULATION
Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City not to perform the perfunctory arrangements for his aunt’s funeral but to exorcise the ghosts of his past.
ISBN 0-14-026673-9
REMEMBERING LAUGHTER