Edward Abbey - My Favorite Quotes

Edward Abbey was an iconoclast, a contrarian, a gadfly, and a radical. He was a desert ranger, a poet, a novelist, a student of philosophy, and a keen observer of nature and human life. He was an aesthetic, a sensualist, an atheist, a materialist, and in general terms an antagonist. A provocateur.

In a list of his favorite poets, he names first Anacreon and then Lucretius . He is, after Thoreau, my second favorite essayist.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

Quote

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time. from his journal; (cf. Diogenes of Oenoanda)

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Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Desert Solitaire (places joy prior to virtue)

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As for the "solitary confinement of the mind," my theory is that solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for brains) and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic. -Desert Solitaire (relevant to a lot of arguments, like free will and determinism)

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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

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If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a Juniper tree or the wings of a vulture-that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

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Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand. -Desert Solitaire

Well, that's enough to be going on.

-josh

Quote

The rain-filled potholes, set in naked rock, are usually devoid of
visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable
microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the
spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of
estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When
the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in
his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a
swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral
existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the
pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before,
making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve that
moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after
week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening—we can imagine
—for the sound of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust
above their heads. If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if
not, this particular colony of Bufonidae is reduced eventually to dust, a
burden on the wind.
Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It’s a
strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night,
after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see
the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies
immersed in water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky
counterpoint. They are windbags: with each croak the pouch under
the frog’s chin swells like a bubble, then collapses.
Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat
apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing
outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night
with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak,
dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may
nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only
to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also
out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of
the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their
own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common
life.
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect
that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick
extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and
without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the
toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don’t, that the
sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail
cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene
of their happiness.
What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their
metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher
animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of
the second. Nothing is lost, except an individual consciousness here
and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest
survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The
rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And
again.

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

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