Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest | Page 4

a human being will not be better adapted to his
environments by knowing their nature; on the other hand, to study a
provincial setting from a provincial point of view is restricting. Nobody
should specialize on provincial writings before he has the perspective
that only a good deal of good literature and wide history can give. I
think it more important that a dweller in the Southwest read The Trial
and Death of Socrates than all the books extant on killings by Billy the
Kid. I think this dweller will fit his land better by understanding

Thomas Jefferson's oath ("I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal
hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man") than by
reading all the books that have been written on ranch lands and people.
For any dweller of the Southwest who would have the land soak into
him, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," "Ode: Intimations of
Immortality," "The Solitary Reaper," "Expostulation and Reply," and a
few other poems are more conducive to a "wise passiveness" than any
native writing.
There are no substitutes for nobility, beauty, and wisdom. One of the
chief impediments to amplitude and intellectual freedom is provincial
inbreeding. I am sorry to see writings of the Southwest substituted for
noble and beautiful and wise literature to which all people everywhere
are inheritors. When I began teaching "Life and Literature of the
Southwest" I did not regard these writings as a substitute. To reread
most of them would be boresome, though Hamlet, Boswell's Johnson,
Lamb's Essays, and other genuine literature remain as quickening as
ever.
Very likely I shall not teach the course again. I am positive I shall never
revise this Guide again. It is in nowise a bibliography. I have made
more additions to the "Range Life" chapter than to any other. I am a
collector of such books. A collector is a person who gathers unto
himself the worthless as well as the worthy. Since I did not make a
nickel out of the original printing of the Guide and hardly expect to
make enough to buy a California "ranch" out of the present printing, I
have added several items, with accompanying remarks, more for my
own pleasure than for benefit to society.
Were the listings halved, made more selective, the book might serve its
purpose better. Anybody who wants to can slice it in any manner he
pleases. I am as much against forced literary swallowings as I am
against prohibitions on free tasting, chewing, and digestion. I rate
censors, particularly those of church and state, as low as I rate character
assassins; they often run together.
I'd like to make a book on Emancipators of the Human Mind--Emerson,
Jefferson, Thoreau, Tom Paine, Newton, Arnold, Voltaire, Goethe....

When I reflect how few writings connected with the wide open spaces
of the West and Southwest are wide enough to enter into such a volume,
I realize acutely how desirable is perspective in patriotism.
Hundreds of the books listed in this Guide have given me pleasure as
well as particles for the mosaic work of my own books; but, with minor
exceptions, they increasingly seem to me to explore only the exteriors
of life. There is in them much good humor but scant wit. The hunger
for something afar is absent or battened down. Drought blasts the turf,
but its unhealing blast to human hope is glossed over. The body's thirst
for water is a recurring theme, but human thirst for love and just
thinking is beyond consideration. Horses run with their riders to death
or victory, but fleeting beauty haunts no soul to the "doorway of the
dead." The land is often pictured as lonely, but the lone way of a human
being's essential self is not for this extravert world. The banners of
individualism are carried high, but the higher individualism that grows
out of long looking for meanings in the human drama is negligible.
Somebody is always riding around or into a "feudal domain." Nobody
at all penetrates it or penetrates democracy with the wisdom that came
to Lincoln in his loneliness: "As I would not be a SLAVE, so I would
not be a MASTER. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever
differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." The
mountains, the caves, the forests, the deserts have had no prophets to
interpret either their silences or their voices. In short, these books are
mostly only the stuff of literature, not literature itself, not the very stuff
of life, not the distillations of mankind's "agony and bloody sweat."
An ignorant person attaches more importance to the chatter of small
voices around him than to the noble language of remote individuals.
The more he listens to the small, the smaller he grows.