{"product_id":"the-nature-of-generosity-isbn-9780679756873","title":"The Nature of Generosity","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe Nature of Generosity\u003c\/b\u003e is at once a natural sequel to the acclaimed memoir \u003cb\u003eHole in the Sky\u003c\/b\u003e and an entirely unique masterwork from one of the finest writers of the American West. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTaking as his topic the \"ordinary yearning to take physical and emotional care,\" William Kittredge embarks upon a literary and philosophical grand tour that explores the very core of who we are. Whether he's recalling a childhood in Oregon, touring Europe, or studying photographs of Japanese gardens in a bookstore in New York City, Kittredge's connections are as unexpected as they are inspiring. Shattering the myth that survival of the fittest means \"survival of the violent, or the cruelest, or the selfish,\" Kittredge imagines a world in which altruism dominates--and offers ample evidence that this is not an unreachable utopian ideal. \"[A]n unpredictable magnum opus, a daring and poetic polemic that challenges at every turn.\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Synthesizes a lifetime’s worth of fears and hopes for the planet.\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eNew Age\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Fascinating and instructive.\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eThe Oregonian\u003c\/i\u003eWilliam Kittredge lives in Missoula, Montana.Part One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Old Animal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eMan is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Mark Twain\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDUST LIFTED in slow streaks off the alkaline playa in the dry basin called\u003cbr\u003eLong Lake. Tiny orange and white flowers blossomed among boulders of black\u003cbr\u003elava-flow basalt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTen thousand years ago, when the first humans came to the Great Basin\u003cbr\u003ehighlands where I stood, Long Lake was part of a sweep of swamps and vast\u003cbr\u003ewatery basins fed by melting glaciers. Waterbirds lifted to wheel and\u003cbr\u003esettle, refolding their wings. Their movements, to my dreaming, are a\u003cbr\u003eflowering of momentum--in this, much like music.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the end of a rocky two-track road, Long Lake is lost among the ridges\u003cbr\u003erising from the east side of Warner Valley into an enormous run of\u003cbr\u003euninhabited lava-rock and sagebrush highlands. I grew up believing there\u003cbr\u003ewas nothing in the vicinity of Long Lake but shimmering distances.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen, sixty-five years old, I found that I'd spent my boyhood near an\u003cbr\u003eancient holy place. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the lava-flow\u003cbr\u003eridge at my back had fragmented into intricate, smooth-sided boulders,\u003cbr\u003ewhich were everywhere inscribed--drawn on by ancient humans attempting to\u003cbr\u003emanage their luck and their fate. The inscriptions were particularly thick\u003cbr\u003ein places next to fractures, breaks where souls and spirits could be\u003cbr\u003ethought to have emerged from an underworld, and through which they might\u003cbr\u003ebe fortunate enough to reenter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThousands of designs and figures had been pecked into the basalt surfaces\u003cbr\u003ewith stone or bone tools, ranging from entropic (behind the eye) patterns\u003cbr\u003eof the sort seen in trances--grids and dot complexes--to discernible figures\u003cbr\u003emetamorphosing from moss to fish to men and women. Some were colored with\u003cbr\u003epigment; others were delineated by thin encrustations of yellow and\u003cbr\u003egreenish lichens. The oldest images reach back ten thousand years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnthropologists suggest they were created by shamans, priests who thought\u003cbr\u003eall things, including stones, possess an innate soul. Animist cultures are\u003cbr\u003ea global phenomenon that seems to have lasted thirty thousand years or so,\u003cbr\u003eand still endure among people along the Yukon River lowlands of Alaska, in\u003cbr\u003eenclaves like the Kalahari Desert of southwestern Africa, and in central\u003cbr\u003eAustralia. These cultures hold that their shamans talk to animals, that\u003cbr\u003ewhile the shaman's body remains locked in a trance, the soul takes flight \u003cbr\u003ethrough fissures in the rock (actuality) and goes down into the underworld \u003cbr\u003ein order to encourage the emergence of hunting animals, or even out to the\u003cbr\u003eMilky Way for instruction from gods and ancestors who live there. At least\u003cbr\u003ethat?s what they've told anthropologists.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIT WAS NOT that I'd never seen such inscriptions. At various points around\u003cbr\u003ethe edges of Warner, there are smooth-sided boulders inscribed with what\u003cbr\u003eI'd thought were simplistic snakes and sunrises; or maybe the jagged lines\u003cbr\u003eindicated days of travel. Those etchings were ordinarily considered the\u003cbr\u003ework of ancestors of the northern Paiute, who lived in Warner when the\u003cbr\u003ewhite settlers arrived. But the Paiute were relative latecomers, occupying \u003cbr\u003eWarner for less than a thousand years. Earlier cultures\u003cbr\u003ehad come and gone since those boulders were inscribed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePeter Farb, in \u003ci\u003eMan's Rise to Civilization: The Cultural Ascent of the\u003cbr\u003eIndians of North America\u003c\/i\u003e, explains that the people of\u003cbr\u003ethe northern Great Basin had fewer than a thousand of what\u003cbr\u003eanthropologists call \"cultural items.\" While this seems unlikely--\u003cbr\u003ecan a dream of heaven be called a cultural item?--Farb contrasts it to the\u003cbr\u003efact that, in 1942, George Patton's armies landed in North Africa with\u003cbr\u003e547,000 different categories of nonmilitary hardware. This statistic\u003cbr\u003eillustrates the vast distance between the Paiute mind-set and our own.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eShoshone\u003c\/i\u003e, Edward Dorn tells of visiting a Paiute couple who claimed to\u003cbr\u003ebe more than a hundred years old. Until midlife, they had lived the\u003cbr\u003etraditional wandering life, but by Dorn's time, they were living in a\u003cbr\u003etin-sided trailer house on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation along the\u003cbr\u003eIdaho-Nevada border. Savvy about the games of anthropology, they asked for\u003cbr\u003ecartons of Camel cigarettes before allowing him to take pictures of them.\u003cbr\u003eThen they told him something extraordinary: They'd never heard of white\u003cbr\u003emen until they were adults.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIs it possible to imagine with any accuracy the psychology of people from\u003cbr\u003ethat preliterate culture? What did they yearn for, and how did they define\u003cbr\u003ejoyfulness? Can we guess, and would we know if we got it right? Open seas\u003cbr\u003elie between my intuitions about the world and those of Paiute people. Yet\u003cbr\u003ehere were those people, living in that trailer and demanding tribute in\u003cbr\u003ecigarettes, who seemed to have crossed those seas so easily.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Paiute family lived just up the hill from us in Warner, under a row of\u003cbr\u003eLombardy poplars planted by homesteaders next to a garden ditch. The man\u003cbr\u003eof the family ran Caterpillar bulldozers for my father--his name was Don\u003cbr\u003ePancho--and his wife cleaned and ironed for my mother. The children--Vernon, Pearl, and\u003cbr\u003eHenry--played with us kids, and Vernon was my best friend (he's been dead\u003cbr\u003efor decades). Summer and winter, they lived in a pair of canvas tent\u003cbr\u003ehouses, one with a cookstove and the other for sleeping. Never allowed\u003cbr\u003einside, we used to wonder about what they did and said in those tents as\u003cbr\u003ethey persisted in surviving what I knew even then to be poverty. Now I\u003cbr\u003ewonder if they despised us in their secret hearts, and if not, why not?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePeoples who tell their stories aloud are rapidly vanishing everywhere on\u003cbr\u003eearth. Did anybody from our culture ever take the time to find out much\u003cbr\u003eabout the lives of native people who wandered the streets of northern\u003cbr\u003eNevada towns like Lovelock and Winnemucca when I was a young man? Or were\u003cbr\u003ethe northern Paiute basically invisible to a European culture obsessed\u003cbr\u003ewith getting rid of them so that settlement could proceed. What do we know\u003cbr\u003eabout the people who inscribed their designs on those boulders? Not much\u003cbr\u003ereally, except that in fundamental ways they were just like us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFOR MILLENNIA, Long Lake was a gathering place. I like to think it was\u003cbr\u003esacred and thus invaluable. But in the years I lived there, preoccupied by\u003cbr\u003evisions of an agricultural dream as we diked and drained the swamplands in\u003cbr\u003eWarner, lost in rhythms of endless work, nobody ever guessed there was\u003cbr\u003emuch of anything to value in this country except for the fertile parts. As\u003cbr\u003ea boy, I collected obsidian arrowheads and stored them in shoe boxes, yet\u003cbr\u003eI believed wisdom was found only in books. Later, I tried to read\u003cbr\u003eAristotle and Kant, came to see my own emptiness, and went half-crazy. I\u003cbr\u003ewas lost, quite desperately wanting to understand how my life in Warner, \u003cbr\u003ethe happy land of childhood, had in the long run brought me to feel \u003cbr\u003eso entirely contingent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePeople whose ancestors had made peace with isolation were still living\u003cbr\u003enearby, but I didn't think of contacting them. What could they know? What\u003cbr\u003eI might have done was recognize that those people were like me. Another\u003cbr\u003egeneration of Paiutes was no doubt still telling its stories; I might have\u003cbr\u003eunderstood more about what it means to be myself if I'd made an attempt to\u003cbr\u003elisten to them. But I didn't even think of this possibility, and in that\u003cbr\u003eway, I missed another boat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat might I have discovered? The little wind went on stirring the white\u003cbr\u003edust. The inscriptions at Long Lake were only props for unimaginable\u003cbr\u003eceremonies. What I could do was forget the wind and unpeopled distance and\u003cbr\u003ethink of the ordinary desperation that accompanied shamans on their\u003cbr\u003evoyages, as evidence of the degree to which we are all alike.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnthropological case studies are always partly make-believe, fictions\u003cbr\u003einvented out of research, and are often infected with an unconscious\u003cbr\u003ebelief in progress--from a condition called \"primitive\" to one called\u003cbr\u003e\"civilized.\"So they are frequently vehicles for condescension, in which\u003cbr\u003edominion over other peoples is regarded as inevitable, if not entirely\u003cbr\u003ejustifiable. In such documents, primitive sometimes connotes being less\u003cbr\u003ethan human, and people are discussed as if they were animals, or objects.\u003cbr\u003eBut while interest in \"simpler\" or more \"innocent\" or \"purer\" societies is\u003cbr\u003eoften driven by simple curiosity or implicit condescension, we ultimately\u003cbr\u003evalue anthropological research as useful in our search for models we can\u003cbr\u003euse in our efforts to reform and manage our own cultures.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is often claimed that humans reached the limits of evolutionary\u003cbr\u003eadaptation during the Paleolithic period. Sharman Apt Russell writes that\u003cbr\u003e\"we were few in number, tribal, creative, dependant on nature, in awe, in\u003cbr\u003etouch, in our natural setting. We were at home.\" Then she asks, \"Was it better emotionally? Were we\u003cbr\u003ebetter? Were we more alive, more human, more engaged?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith her, I wonder: If \"primitives\" were leading more natural lives, were\u003cbr\u003ethey necessarily happier? Besides, what does \"natural\" mean? According to\u003cbr\u003eRussell, \"We don't even know the meaning of better.\" But codifications of\u003cbr\u003e\"better\" seem to be part of every political agenda. Do we think the lives\u003cbr\u003eof preliterate people simple? An utterly condescending notion. There are\u003cbr\u003eno simple lives. Who would want one?","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303912591589,"sku":"NP9780679756873","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679756873.jpg?v=1767740640","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-nature-of-generosity-isbn-9780679756873","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}