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August 28, 2026
from “Cliffrose and Bayonets”
in Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
by Edward Abbey
“Edward Abbey inhabits his style in the same way that he inhabits the wild by shedding restraint and refinement to become someone greater that the product of civilized society.”—THE
Flipping through The Humble Essayist archives I came across an October 16, 2015 feature on Edward Abbey that spoke to me in a new way. We live in an age that swings between careless, obscene, and often hateful speech juxtaposed with speech that is careful, guarded, and safe. Woke, if you will. I’m rather firmly in the second group weighing my words carefully to be true without giving offense, an ethic that sometimes hangs over my writing too heavily, I fear. Abbey offers a possible path for writers like me born from his experience of living in the American West.
In All the Wild That Remains, David Gessner considers Edward Abbey to be “a man who, for all his flaws, showed through his example what it meant to live a counterlife, a life where the love of wildness really mattered and where one’s priorities grew out of that love.” Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang became a guide to environmental activism and his lyrical writing in Desert Solitaire offered up an elegiac cry for the lost wilderness of the West. For him, the good life lived in the wild offered the opportunity for spontaneity, and in this passage from Desert Solitaire Abbey describes the time that he threw a rock at a rabbit on impulse with surprising results. He is also surprised by—and learns from—his own response. It is the kind of honesty in writing that we need.
The Paragraph of the Week
For a moment I am shocked by my deed; I stare at the quiet rabbit, his glazed eyes, his blood drying in the dust. Something vital is lacking. But shock is succeeded by a mild elation. Leaving my victim to the vultures and maggots, who will appreciate him more than I could—the flesh is probably infected with tularemia—I continue my walk with a new, augmented cheerfulness which is hard to understand but unmistakable. What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added, by processes too subtle to fathom, to my own soul. I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul: white as snow. Check my hands: not a trace of blood. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!
—Edward Abbey
Commentary
I was reminded of this paragraph by David Gessner who uses it in All the Wild That Remains to extoll the beauty of Edward Abbey’s writing style. When I turned to the paragraph in my own battered copy of Desert Solitaire describing a rabbit that Abbey impulsively killed by throwing a stone, I rediscovered the qualities that Gessner admires. Abbey is “alive on the page” in a way that is rare among essayists. Often shy in person, he knew how to “let loose” in his writing “where it counted.” He reports his actions with care and registers his own responses honestly, even when they surprise or implicate him. There is the excitement of discovery in Abbey’s prose that “dramatizes thought” and turns it “into a kind of action,” the words coming at us with the urgency of “someone talking to us.” But the passage—like most of Abbey’s writing—is noteworthy for one other quality that I would add to Gessner's list of literary virtues. Call it a predatory prose style. Edward Abbey inhabits his book in the same way that he inhabits the wild by shedding restraint and refinement to become someone greater that the product of civilized society. To rend the veil that separates him from the wild, he follows his impulses both as a writer and a human being, rewilding himself on the page to claim a place on earth among “the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, [and] the foul worms that feed on our entrails.” In this way the style becomes the man, an embodiment of his maverick soul.
—THE
This Visible Speaking
Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called This Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
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The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
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