The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

Just finished reading this book, I've reread three Wallace Stegner's in the past 6 months, and wanted to record bits of wisdom I enjoyed from the book.

p. 102-103 Edited . . . Joe Allston is talking with the author from out of Africa, Karen Blixen, who has retired back to her family home in Denmark.
Joe Allston: "You loved Africa," I said to her.
Karen Blixen: "It was life," she said.
"What's this then?" I asked.
"This? This is safety."
I had the nerve to argue with her. "Is it bad to have a place to come back to?" I said. "An American, or at least one kind of American, would envy you. HIs parents or grandparents were immigrants, uprooted. He was born in transit, he has lived in fifty house in fifteen places. When he moves, he doesn't move back, he moves on. No accumulations. No traditions. A civilization without attics."

p. 162 Reflections from Joe Allston
" . . . I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?"

p. 209, more reflections on life from old Joe
"Well, the hell with it, I do not choose to be a consenting adult, not just to be in fashion. I have no impulse to join those the Buddha describes, those who strain always after fulfillment and in fulfillment strive to feel desire. It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than the impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good."
"Then why cry over it, twenty years later? Because in every choice there is a component, maybe a big component, of pain."

I know its hard to read quotes out of context, but I really enjoy the descriptions and grasp on relationships that Stegner writes in his books. He writes about the West, its history and present. He compares recent social times, like the 60's and 70's, with an older time when people thought and lived very differently. The other two books I've recently reread are Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety, the later is one of my all time favorite books.

Anyhow, I had to return the book to the library, but I wanted to jot down a few thoughts and quotes.