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Louisville Courier-Journal
Saturday, August 19, 2006
‘A Private History of Awe’
IU’s Sanders’ moving testament
By Scott Lurding
Special to The Courier-Journal
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “everyone has a vocation, talent
is the call.” With A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell
Sanders proves once again why he is counted among the sage writers of
our time. Recognized as one of America’s finest essayists, Sanders
has crafted a moving testament to the spiritual and personal journey
in our lives.
With candor and quiet authenticity, Sanders considers “the force
that animates nature and mind,” its power invoking within him
“wonder … clouded by fear.” He relates the life experiences
and relationships in which he has encountered awe, “this rapturous,
fearful, bewildering emotion” that awakens him to the universal
force.
A creative writing professor at Indiana University and the author of
19 books, Sanders uses his coming-of-age story in the baby boomer generation
to develop this deeply moving book that goes beyond being just a memoir.
His narrative reflections describe important moments in his personal
journey, from when he was a child of 4 watching a thunderstorm in the
safety of his father’s arms to adulthood when he became a father
himself at the birth of his daughter.
In one of the book’s most powerful reflections, Sanders describes
his decision to register as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam
War, explaining that he “had come to understand conscience as
a sympathetic vibration between my innermost fiber and the force that
brings new creatures into being and lavishes so much beauty on the world.”
As he relates stories about his childhood in rural Tennessee and Ohio,
his education, and his early career, some of the most poignant examine
relationships with his energetic mother of his youth and the deteriorating
mother of his late middle age, and his alcoholic father.
He tenderly describes the evolution and development of the deep love
he shares with his wife. And Sanders sympathetically relates what made
his father so special, while honestly describing the negative impact
of his father’s “shameful secret.”
As an adult, he confronts his father about his drinking. “I wanted
an excuse to hit him, as if I could beat sense into him, as if I could
snap the rope that was dragging him down. And if he pounded me, at least
I’d have a reason for all this pain.”
Sanders deftly weaves stories of his past with the present experience
of his mother’s physical and mental decline and his granddaughter’s
development, her “ferocious, irrepressible” urge to speak,
learn, walk and explore. He punctuates his own experiences in the cycle
of life, the “perennial flow” of the universe, with a mother
whose “self is breaking up” who is “dissolving into
the flow of things,” just as a granddaughter is “gathering
into a focus of curiosity, preference, humor, and desire.”
Watching his newborn granddaughter and her “clarity of perception,”
Sanders wishes “for all of us blessed with consciousness …
that we remain forever awake to the isness of things. …
The moment we begin taking this skein of miracles for granted, we cease
to live, no matter if our hearts still beat.”
Through beautifully crafted language that describes the moments of awakening
in his own life, Sanders has written a book full of honesty, wisdom,
and power.
Scott Lurding, a Louisville native, is associate publisher of The
American Scholar and associate secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa
Society in Washington, D.C.
