Crossing to Safety with a Recovering Cynic

On Stegner and 'sticking'

A man I’d never heard of until 2017 has become one of the most important voices in my life. He taught at Stanford. He wrote novels, essays, and defended the beauty and power of the American West. I have never cared much for lands west of the Mississippi, content to rest my affections on bluegrass hills. And yet Wallace Stegner, within a few pages of my first encounter, captured my imagination. For the last few years he has been a constant companion and friend.

I read his final novel, Crossing to Safety, for the first time in 2017, right after I completed my PhD. It was, in fact, one of the first books I read after taking a long(ish) hiatus from essentially reading anything at all. For those who make reading and the love of books their life, we can often know within a few pages if what is in front of us is going to become something we’re going to reckon with more than once, or that this book might become like a long lost friend which needs no time before you feel completely caught up. By the end of the first chapter I knew something was going to be different. I wasn’t quite sure what but I knew whatever it was our narrator Larry Morgan was undertaking, I wanted to hear. Is he happy? What made him happy? Who made him happy? Was he hopeful? Did he have good reasons for it? Does all that really matter?

The struggle of my life has been a fight to be happy. For as long as I can recall as an adult I have battled some level of depression, sadness, or general melancholy. For some these dark passengers manifest in bouts of isolation or perhaps intrusive thoughts (or both). For others it might run along the lines of feeling emotionally stunted; that no matter what you try or how hard you want to see the world differently, it still looks grey. Colors do not shine with the same brightness, food tastes slightly less distinct, and music feels like it plays at a volume only happy people can really hear. These realities can happen without announcement and last longer than anyone who has never experienced this could understand. One day you wake up and for days, weeks, even months the world looks and feels….off. It’s terrifying.

I have experienced all of this for longer than I care to untangle at the moment. But if I am really honest the largest indicator for when I am not well isn’t any of those things I’ve just described. Rather, the “WRONG WAY TURN AROUND” sign is when I realize just how cynical I feel about myself and the world around me.

It is not that I am just weary or that I don’t have sufficient reason for feeling despairing. Instead, it is that I begin to believe there is no good thing waiting for me or the good(s) I have are so tainted with the recognition that I don’t deserve them; or one day, without any preparation, they will be just gone. I begin to read motives as nefarious, actions as self-interested, and words as if they’re hollow. In short: I become something I despise. It has taken years to short-circuit this process in order to even begin to walk in defiance.

I read Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns on Affection” on a blustery winter weekend and to be perfectly honest I don’t remember much from this initial encounter beyond the terrible weather outside and something Berry mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs. He references a concept Stegner taught him: “Boomers” and “Stickers.” The former, his teacher said,

…is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power. James B. Duke was a boomer, if we can extend the definition to include pillage in absentia. He went, or sent, wherever the getting was good, and he got as much as he could take..

Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.

I had grown up in a beautiful, small Kentucky town with some of the best people you can find on this terrestrial ball. My parents still live there. My grandparents always lived close, ever-present in my life. I chose to leave home to attend college, knowing full well I had no intention of ever returning home. But you can leave a place but the place never really leaves you. While I don’t think I’ll ever go back home, Stegner’s notion of being a “sticker” has been so influential.

Stegner never really had a place he called home; “born on wheels” as he once wrote. This biographical reality meant that he wasn’t able to feel the sense of inherited, generational place that many experience. Instead, his sense of place was chosen, associational. It became something he had to create through marriage, children, and friendship.

I have experienced both. In the last decade and a half years we have lived in a city I was not born in, had no connection to, and only a few friends when we arrived. We came for grad school in 2008 and never left. In between these bookends has been a search for a sense of place, a stretching over the horizon to see what goods might be on the other side and if they could ever bring the sense of place and home that my people who changed my diapers and made sure I was home by 11 once brought.

I learned being a “sticker” doesn’t require going home. It doesn’t mean uprooting the good work done in one place in order to return to work previously left unfinished. Instead, sticking means patience. "See how the farmer waits for the precious fruits of the earth and is patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains," James reminds us. As one waits for the returns work is still to be done, and the work shapes the place.

I began to realize that this idea of sticking, a holding fast to these people in this place, was going to be how I develop a different lens to see the world around me. Committing to this good, finding friendships that have the same common vision, and viewing my work as fostering a generation of stickers was important and meaningful.

It was this simple concept that started holding back my cynicism. Until Stegner I was seldom able to develop the psychological architecture to recognize our lives and the work we do has a purpose but it so often arrives at different times and different ways. Perhaps it arrives in a web of generational attachments that help one know their place. Perhaps it is more like Stegner, a placeless person searching for somewhere to call home. “Home”, Stegner writes in Angle of Repose, “is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.” Recently a friend described an encounter with a former Abbot in his previous town. When the Abbot was asked about what he wanted to achieve in his role he simply said: serve the brothers and community, and to be buried “right out there” as he pointed toward the abbey cemetery.

Somewhere along the path of leaving my inherited place and the present, I lost myself (or, more frighteningly: did I ever really have it?) I don’t know if or when something like that is really recovered but Stegner’s notion of ‘sticking’ has brought incredible relief for the in-between. I have passed on these ideas to my student in lectures and informal discussions. It is an inescapable rhythm of my teaching and personal life.

Find a place. Make it yours. Stick. Shape. Die. Pass on the vision.

Friendship

If Crossing to Safety is about anything, it is a book about friendship. The story is of four main characters, Larry and Sally Morgan alongside Sid and Charity Lang, and their bond from first encounter until old age when all those gifts reserved for age begin to arise. Their friendship is nothing spectacular and the first chapter tells you there will be no bombshells. Instead it is simply a story of how friends find each other, shape each other, and save each other. Through the ebb and flow of life, the distance that Fortune perhaps threw their direction, the joys and tragedies, they remained bound by their love for one another.

Friendship is useless, as CS Lewis once quipped. But it is invaluable. Not everyone will marry, have children, grandchildren, secure meaningful careers, or feel like they’ve accomplished what they want by the end of their life. But they will have friends. Stegner lost all his inherited relationships by the time he was 30. Knowing his personal life makes the story of Crossing to Safety all the more rich and meaningful. The only relationships remaining for Stegner were marital and friendships.

“Amicitia”, Stegner writes in Crossing to Safety, “lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars poetica.” This rhythm of mutual love both chastens our paths and opens our hearts to the possibilities of being known and loved within chosen relationships. We do pick our friends, and this choice either enlarges or restricts our world; it develops empathy and patience; it changes us and so changes others. These are the gifts of friendships that cannot be expedited and cannot be delegated to another. They are ours to receive and ours to give.

A common thread through most of my life has been to downplay the the near endless solace friendship provides, and this has been to my great failure. I have worked to remedy this mistake for the better part of a decade. It is not accidental that some of the darkest moments in my life coincided with seasons where I would isolate, hide, or just simply not pursue (or allow pursuit) of deep and meaningful friendships; it is through friends that we “spark and inspire one another’s ambitions,”; that among friends we are able to build a place where love grows and safety is felt. Where, perhaps for the first time, we feel as if we belong. And if we belong, what dark passengers have we carried which now have more hands to hold back the pain, more mouths to speak peace and love instead of judgment, more love to give without asking for anything in return? This is the story of Larry and Sally and Sid and Charity. This is friendship. “After all,” Stegner says in a letter to a young writer, “what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?” Whether inherited or chosen, we long for belonging.

Inspiration often arrives from unlikely places. If you told me that a Stanford creative writing director would have an outsized influence on my mental furniture, I would have thought you were talking to someone else. Anyone else. But his place in my living room is alongside a Kentucky farmer, a North African bishop, an English conservative, and others. They all, in different seasons, have leaned over and whispered to me that my cynicism is a cancer, and its removal is often painful. It is also slow. Wallace Stegner’s voice isn’t louder than the rest of the room, but in the last few years it has carried from the American West into the heart of a Kentuckian who so desperately needed to be rescued from cynicism.

Love your place. Your people. Remake what has been unmade. Become a sticker.