Desert Solitaire

by

Edward Abbey

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Desert Solitaire: Episodes and Visions Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Labor Day brings the final tourist rush of the year in Moab. They enter the desert, trapped in their metallic shells like mollusks. Abbey badly wants to demand that they get out of their cars: take off their sunglasses, look around, and dig their toes in the sand. He wants them to take their bras and shirts off, get hurt, explore, leave their cars behind, and go for a walk in nature.
Abbey renews his anger at modern innovations that separate people from a direct connection with nature: cars and clothing. Throughout the book, he’s been sinking his bare feet in the sand to remind him of his innate connection to the earth, and here he states explicitly that this feeling of liberation can’t be won without a similar skin-to-skin contact.
Themes
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Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Instead, these tourists pummel Abbey with complaints about the lack of Coke machines and questions about how Abbey can live out here without a TV. Abbey answers each with sarcasm, suggesting to them that tourists are the most dangerous animal in the wild. If he tells the truth, they assume he’s joking and laugh with him—but by evening, Abbey feels guilty for mocking them. They’re largely nice people, and he does enjoy talking with them. He’s an exile from the new industrialized America of concrete and iron, and so he looks for sympathetic people to talk to.
Though he’s been harsh on tourists before, for their addiction to devices that remove them from nature, here Abbey admits that he likes and sometimes needs these people. His status as an “exile” from modern society means that he needs the company of others. This is an important admission that solitude can’t be permanent—people need social life too. This is part of the difficult balance Abbey’s been trying to calculate between isolated liberty and social democracy.
Themes
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Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Mormons are a major tourist group at Arches. Most of Abbey’s friends regard them as foolish political reactionaries—a view supported by the fact that Mormons deny church membership to black people. But Abbey thinks that other religions are just as ridiculous: Baptists insist on baptism for salvation, Jews demand circumcision, Catholics believe Mary was physically sent from Earth to Heaven, and Hindus regard the act of blowing one’s nose as sacred.
Before making an important point about Mormons, here Abbey renews his well-established dismissal of organized religion. In this catalog of what Abbey believes are errors in world religions, it’s notable that Mormonism’s particular flaw is intolerance. Like his tale of the self hating Spaniard Viviano Jacquez, this is evidence of Abbey’s wider belief that humanity’s arrogance (such as racism) stems out of a disconnection from the earth.
Themes
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Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Though equally silly in doctrine, Abbey thinks that Mormons deserve respect for settling the untamed Western frontier with their sheer hard work. They emphasized mutual aid and cooperation in their early communities, something unknown to other parts of America. They wove this belief into all aspects of their society—from irrigation to fencing—and kept their towns small enough to make every member vital.
In Abbey’s view, one thing saves Mormons from total ridicule: their work ethic. Because they’ve lived in a hostile environment for so long, and because their population is relatively low, their self-reliance has allowed them to nurture a compassionate, democratic community. This is vital evidence for Abbey’s political argument that finding freedom in nature makes people better citizens.
Themes
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These early communities have been destroyed by new American industry, though some of their nice, hard-earned architecture remains. But the Mormons who remain, though old-fashioned, are self-reliant and friendly. One Mormon Abbey knows, Leslie McKee’s wife, is so hospitable to Abbey that she has ritualistically bound his soul to hers. In doing so, she believes that he will follow her to Heaven when she dies. But if she predeceases him, will he be suddenly robbed of his life? It’s not worth the worry, as Abbey, quoting a hymn, is already “marching to Zion.”
Once again, as with cowboys and the Navajo, readers see that development—bringing an influx of people to remote parts of the world—has spoiled a hard-working, environmentalist lifestyle. Overpopulation, then, emerges here as the enemy of solitude and personal freedom. Abbey’s use of Christian song instead of prose is significant, as it’s not so different from his harmonica playing in Glen Canyon. Music further heightens his antipathy toward straightforward expression.
Themes
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Language and Reality Theme Icon
The distant mountains are nice, with their snowcaps like strawberry ice cream cones, but Abbey prefers the desert. It’s very hard to say why—it’s just more baffling than the mountains or the ocean. From Homer to Melville, many great writers have felt called to write about the ocean. The same goes for mountains, which inspired Rousseau and the Romantic writers. But few write of the desert. Mary Austin, John Van Dyke, and Joseph Wood have produced recent books on the desert, and some novelists have described it in passing. Historical studies from Wallace Stegner and Everett Reuss (who was so allured that one day, he disappeared into the desert forever) are good too. But none address the problem Abbey wishes to address: what is the exact and unique spiritual appeal of the desert?
Here, Abbey strikes at the heart of his frustration with language. The mountains have been accurately captured in literature throughout history—as expressed by Abbey’s poetic comparison to strawberry ice cream cones. But the desert’s alien strangeness is too elusive for language—it can’t be put into words, nor can the difficulty of verbalizing it be put into words. This passage elaborates on Abbey’s note in the introduction: that he will try to evoke (not merely describe) the landscape by using a “world of words.”
Themes
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Abbey thinks that the mountains illustrate the brute power of the earth, and the sea hides a hidden world of life under its surface. But the desert, by contrast, says nothing. It is a skeleton of “Being,” sparse and austere. On top of its simplicity, however, is a veil of mystery: it asks to be interpreted but never offers answers.
The sea is a useful contrast for Abbey’s argument about reality. Its surface obviously conceals a vast underwater world beyond one’s sight. But the desert, despite beckoning people to believe in a similar underlying reality, contains only exactly what one sees—an exposed “skeleton” of its own structure. This unshakeable truth prompts Abbey throughout the book to accept mere appearances.
Themes
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At sea, the journey from one place to another is really the whole point. Similarly, in the mountains, one climbs to the top then must climb back down. The desert, however, is wide open and just inviting enough to support habitation, while still hostile enough to discourage people. This mystery both repels artists and writers from attempt the subject, while drawing people like Everett Reuss deeper and deeper into the landscape. This mysterious search is always futile, as the desert has no treasure or heart. It is a riddle without an answer. This doesn’t stop Abbey, however: one whiff of juniper smoke, one poem like The Waste Land, and he’s dying to seek the desert’s truths.
Abbey’s point about sea travel shines some light on his road metaphor: the open sea can only be a path from one place to the next. But the desert, once entered, serves no purpose other than to be lived in or to be left. As such, roads are irrelevant to its purpose. Further, all the development, industry, and tourism that accompany roads are irrelevant as well—deepening Abbey’s argument that the wilderness must remain untouched.
Themes
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Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
In an argument with a park visitor one night, Abbey is accused of hating humanity. Abbey takes issue with this, and he has to articulate to the man that what he hates is not people but anthropocentricity, the belief that human beings are superior to the earth. This man brags about science and champions the medical prolongation of life.
Abbey finally gives a name to the human arrogance he hates so much: anthropocentricity—the belief that human beings (anthropo-) are at the center (-centricity) of the natural order. Rejecting this ideology, Abbey instead aligns himself with the theory of Robinson Jeffers, whom he’s quoted earlier. “Inhumanism” is Jeffers’s belief that human beings are no better than animals and the earth.
Themes
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Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Abbey and the man agree that culture and civilization are two different things: culture includes collective institutions like religion and economy, while civilization, a byproduct of culture, is a more intangible network of ideas created by individual thinkers. Thousands of such thinkers—from Socrates and Jesus, to Jefferson and Paine, to Twain and Nietzsche—give human life its sense of adventure. Civilization is superior to culture but depends upon culture for its existence, as a brain to a body. Civilization is the vital force; culture the inert mass of institutions. Civilization is mutual aid and self-defense; culture is law and order. Civilization is rebellion; culture is state-sponsored war. Civilization is the angry youth; culture is the cop who guns him down.
Each of these oppositions between “civilization” and “culture” have one major difference: civilization comes from intellectuals, and culture comes from the government. Culture is the enemy for Abbey, who throughout the book has opposed both government infringement on personal liberty and the destruction of the natural parks that inspire such liberty. It’s important that Abbey again notes Jefferson, the definer of America’s founding freedoms, as Jefferson helps cement Abbey’s view that free thought is essential to a functioning society.
Themes
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Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Quotes
After a long debate stretching into the morning, the Abbey and the man go to sleep. Abbey is alone when he wakes. He checks the park’s registration book and finds the man’s fake name: J. Prometheus Birdsong. Like Christ before him, Birdsong has failed to convert Abbey.
Abbey has already alluded to Prometheus, the Greek hero who was punished for stealing fire for humanity. The fact that this man takes the hero’s name suggests he has a similar ambition to achieve more than human beings are naturally capable of. Satisfied with a humbler life in nature, Abbey thinks that Birdsong’s Promethean love of science is not only arrogant but harmful—as evidenced by the ravage of Navajo communities by improved medicine and unnatural overpopulation.
Themes
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Abbey urges the reader to imagine a new scheme to develop the national parks: pave all the roads and flatlands in the name of democratic parking, charge huge admission fees, advertise everywhere, replace rangers with pretty girls in costume, drench the desert in electric light, install gas grills everywhere, remove campgrounds to keep people from overstaying. He thinks this is only a slight exaggeration. But once Labor Day is over, as Abbey cleans up the tourists’ trash, the former stillness returns, and he can focus on the blooming asters. Their purple flowers are undoubtedly an existential statement. Abbey refutes Heidegger’s idea that only human beings truly exist.
By this point, readers are aware of Abbey’s antipathy to development—but after such a long section on personal freedom, the road symbol now emerges as a personal enemy to functioning democracies. Here, Abbey links the road symbol to electric lights, advertisement, and immediacy—all hallmarks of modern commercial society. Like roads, each of these things are means to an end (money), and they each threaten nature’s status as an end in itself.
Themes
Wilderness, Society, and Liberty  Theme Icon
Language and Reality Theme Icon
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
In late summer, even the night sky is different. Stoking a campfire for “liturgical requirements,” Abbey spots constellations, including Cassiopeia, a big “W.” In 1572, Christians interpreted this constellation as a punishment for their persecution of church reformers. Seventeen years before, they’d executed two Bishops at Oxford. Two years later, some 277 more were killed, followed by more over the years until the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in 1572. The cause of all this killing was a small disagreement about transubstantiation (the belief that bread can be transformed into Christ’s body and wine into Christ’s blood). Abbey admires Cassiopeia and other constellations, and he wonders whether intelligent life exists on Earth. Today, a letter from Abbey’s friend Bob Waterman arrived, confirming their upcoming trip into The Maze.
Having just critiqued humanity’s arrogance and false superiority, Abbey turns these sentiments toward organized religion. In Abbey’s view, Christians tend to interpret the world as evidence for a supernatural deity. Readers have seen Abbey refute miracles—such as when Billy-Joe Husk hallucinates a burning bush—and here, he pokes fun at Reformation-era Christians for a similar misinterpretation. By contrast, Abbey’s simple wonder at the stars is his own private act of worship.
Themes
Nature, Wonder, and Religion Theme Icon
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
Quotes