Customer Reviews

A Private History of Awe

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A Private History of Awe is a coming-of-age memoir, love story, and spiritual testament. I never thought I would make such a book, wary as I am of memoirs and spirit-language. For years I shied away from writing about religious experience, in part because of the hostility that many literary readers show toward all references to spirituality, in part because these matters have always seemed to me better left private. Yet the questions I've kept returning to in my adult life are essentially religious ones, and I found myself unwilling to abandon this terrain to the televangelists and fundamentalists.

Beginning with childhood intuitions of spirit in nature, the narrative recounts an education in ultimate things. My ethics were formed in conversation with the Midwestern landscape, the Bible, rural Methodist churches, science, literature, and family. Those influences prepared me to hear the wisdom in such inspired human beings as Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, Einstein, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Buddha.

During the writing of this book, I spent many hours caring for my mother, as she suffered physical and mental decline, and caring for my first grandchild, as she launched into life with the marvelous energy and beauty natural to all healthy children. Together, the dwindling elder and burgeoning youngster made their way into the book, adding their twin stories of painful departure and exuberant entrance to the narrative of my own formative years.

I'd like to believe that A Private History of Awe belongs to the tradition of American wisdom literature running from Emerson and Thoreau to Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard. I set out to describe my own brushes with the ground of being, the holy source of all that rises and passes, and to record my search for a language and way of life adequate to those experiences. The resulting book may irk true-believers at one extreme and militant secularists at the other. But I hope that readers who dwell between those extremes will find, as the Quakers say, that A Private History of Awe speaks to their condition. --SRS

I initially bought this book for a friend--I knew he admired Sanders work. The more I looked at it, the more I decided I wanted to buy it and read it myself as well. I had read Sanders' "Hunting for Hope" and had been very inspired by his writing. He is very down-to-Earth and places himself not in the viewpoint of an expert offering advice and sage wisdom to a novice, but rather as a fellow questioner of the universe and the workings within. Upon reading this book, which I did in less than two days, I found that he has continued his style here, using his life's experiences to illustrate some things that he has questioned and learned, allowing the reader to take what he or she will from it. In talking about the past, Sanders often writes from the tone of the limited wisdom he had at whatever age he is illustrating, bringing forth the same questions he had then (and sometimes still has); this method of writing brings forth a kinship between Sanders and myself, a young man struggling with the meaning of life and questioning the consensus of values handed down by society. Reading this book assures Sanders' other books a spot on my to-read list for the near future. It is my wish that all of you take the time to read this book (and "Hunting for Hope", if not others). You'll find yourself nodding your head, laughing, empathizing, crying, smiling, and digging up the awe-some moments of your own life.

Near the end of A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders writes about his early days of teaching, when he looked for stories "in which a husband and wife love one another deeply, feel grateful toward their parents, look forward to becoming parents themselves, and then welcome into their marriage a child who arrives like an emissary straight from glory land." In the end, he finds no great novels about happy families, so he settled "for books whose authors clearly loved the world in spite of its darkness, and who held out hope for humankind in spite of our faults." This is one of those books. A deep pleasure to read, a record of human love.

I would like to give Scott Sanders' book five stars. I really would. It is well written, well meant and recommended to me by not one but three friends who have a spiritual bent and whom I trust deeply. I'm sure they'd recommend it to you as well if you are inspired by the sheer sweep of life - the sense of awe standing in the naked presence of reality.

Sanders book calls us to be present to the wonder of being alive. As my friends guessed, I love his description of the world, from the flash of lightning to the sweep of a swallow's beak drinking from the river while in flight. I resonate deeply with his observations: "Words dice the world into pieces small enough for the mind to hold, but the world itself is undivided." [31] I enjoy his ruminations on faith and science as when he compares the turning of water into wine to the even greater wonder of the turning of a tadpole into a frog. And, in fact, I find the first two sections of his memoir deeply moving.

But I didn't stop halfway and neither does Sanders. Somehow the last two sections of the memoir drag on listlessly. In the earlier sections, Sanders' rendering of his childhood geography crackled with life; his father and mother pop off the page and speak for themselves. But as the story shifts to Cambridge, academics and adult relationships, Sanders' lens defocuses. Even his wife seems muted and hidden behind his words rather than stepping forward out of them. The book deflates. It begins to feel like a mixture of travelogue, 1960s and 70s reminiscence, privileged musings on conscience and public discourse about Scott Sanders and his relations rather than the promised private history of awe. Where the earlier pages distilled the waters of childhood into wine, the later pages felt like tracing the wanderings of tadpoles, waiting for legs.

Sanders is at his best when he writes from the place of awe - the moment of being thunderstruck, startled, tongue-tied, bloodied, amazed, faced with the monumental truth of life, death, decay and rebirth. There are moments of sheer beauty in his prose. In particular, Sanders' portrait of his mother that was (from his childhood and early adulthood) and his mother who is (slowly decaying in a nursing facility) creates a powerful tension that drives the story in an orbit around the wonder and tragedy of life itself. If I had just stopped reading there, I would have joined my friends in their unbridled acclaim.

This is an excellent book. Well written, thoughtful, and allows the reader to reflect upon similar events in their lives that have helped shape them. Compelling - hard to put down!

I love Sanders work. It takes me so deep that I can't read quickly, or skim, as I am wont to do.
This one engaged me in a way that I sent copies to my adult daughters, and that is an infrequent act on my part.
I commend it to you.

For a long time I have been an admirer of Scott Sander's prose. He brings to bear so many beautiful and rich metaphors to people and moments from his life. For instance the parts of this writing where he talks about his mother's decline as it is juxtaposed with memories of her as a caring and complex figure during his growing up, those are excuciatingly rendered pieces. In addition his wrestling with who his father was gave me a new word for how a gifted writer makes someone engaging and vivid--Angularity. Sanders , at least with those he loves, can draw out the layers of personality that honor what it means to be a human being. Unfortunately there is another part of his writing that detracts from what I have written so far: his continual and relentless ability to take himself so seriously on issues related to the environment and politics. When talking about those things he can come off appearing to think of himself as a moden day windmill chaser. Hell ,I agree with his stances. But he seems to one-up himself all of the time to his in-laws and others. His autobiography would have been more powerful to me if he had raised up more of his own humanness rather than be condescending toward those who had a different perspective than his own. I kept reading all of the way to the end, hoping that he would turn some of his gift at detecting nuance onto his own capacity for self-righteousness. Alas, except for a few nods to his immaturity, he never came through.

There are two kinds of "awe". There is the wide-eyed life-inspiring "awe" one feels when in the presence of nature or childbirth or love and then there is the other kind of "awe", the terrible dread-inducing "awe" one feels when in the presence of disease and death. Scott Russell Sanders writes about both and for Sanders both kinds of awe shake him out of his routine way of seeing and experiencing the world and make him aware of a wider more capacious world than the one he imagined himself to be living in. And both kinds of awe make the author aware that the awesome power that is always present for those who will open their eyes to it needs to be harnessed and directed by language. So this memoir is about one man's experience of awe and the way he uses a specific type of language (culled from western religions and western literatures) to craft a self that is able to make sense of those moments of awe and the larger world around him. Although, in truth, for Scott Russell Sanders each moment of awe does not really lead to transcendence of the midwestern ethos that he was raised to respect but to an affirmation of it and as a result the self and narrative that he crafts here are rather commonplace. And this is because his project is ultimately not to craft a literary self (Sanders is not a poet of myriad visions and selves) but a social self that is defined by a set of core values. So this "private history of awe" is really a "private history of values" and the Sanders' value set is what is spelled out in this narrative: anti-Vietnam, anti-corporatist, anti-consumerist, anti-immigration, pro-civil rights, pro-environment, pro-religion, and pro-family values. Sanders, in turns, presents himself as frontiersman, chronicler, and seer and he shares his evolved vision of the proper "American" value set (as opposed to the mainstream American value set) with his readers so that they too can climb aboard and see the light and participate in a common spiritual culture and a shared way of seeing/valuing/believing and journeying toward the promised land. (He's Daniel Boone, Walter Cronkite, and Dr. King all rolled into one.) Sanders' work is not designed for and does not attract the freethinking independent who charts his own course; rather it is designed for and attracts those who like Sanders himself want a common set of American values that give shape and meaning to life and that provide Americans with a sense of continuity and purpose. But this is much harder than it might at first sound for there is rarely a consensus of values even among people who share the same house let alone among those who share the same neighborhood, time zone, or era; geographical or generational proximity is no longer a gaurantee of shared anything. Nonetheless, Sanders gives it a go and he does seem to have the perfect combination of talents for attempting this ambitious inter-generational project: he is a folksy bible-carrying grass roots populist, a midwestern (albeit Cambridge educated) bard-pastor-professor, and his award winning naturalist-spiritualist essays read like sermons for a "get back to where you once belonged" neo-cultural conservative Americanist movement. Whether Sanders succeeds in articulating a common culture and shared way of seeing or not is debatable, but its interesting watching him try. GOP lookout! This guy just might be your next lightning rod.

Like many college students of the late sixties and early seventies Sanders was drawn to the broadmindedness of visionary poets like William Blake. And I must say it is kind of touching to hear him reminisce about his initial contact with this poet of the "infinite". He speaks like only someone who was once a college freshman from Ohio could. (I can say this with some authority for I too was once a college freshman from Ohio). Certainly plenty of great poets like Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg have admired Blake's cosmic liberalism. Although Sanders is no social revolutionary nor visionary poet you can see why someone like the ultra-conservative bible reading Sanders growing up amid the turmoil of the sixties and seventies would be attracted to Blake (Blake thought that social revolution could only succeed if it were guided by religion). Sanders reads Blake for his visionary breadth and christianist sense of history; Emerson for his Ecclesiastes-like acknowledgment of the ephemerality and provisionality of all things; HD Thoreau for both his naturalism and his civil libertarianism; and DH Lawrence for his primitivist vitalism and out of these he weaves his own homespun gospel which is somehow not as broad, nor as deep, nor as penetrating as the works from which he draws. I believe this is because Sanders is both attracted to and repelled by the uncontainable wildness and broadness of vision that he encounters in his favorite authors. His midwestern upbringing, understanding, and temperament simply do not equip him to negotiate the visionary wilds of western literature so instead of trying to thrive among the wild reaches of the creative imagination he domesticates his masters; he appropriates from them those thoughts that suit and serve his own project and disregards the rest. Perhaps all readers/writers do this to a certain extent but midwestern morals and standards are so ingrained in Sanders that he does not really allow himself to have any but midwestern encounters with life and literature and despite years of reading and writing these bedrock midwestern foundations and mainstays are never questioned or examined. I can't say that I don't have a certain fondness for the wholesomeness of the midwesterner whose strength lies in a kind of stoic adherence to moderation and established ways but there is also something oppressively insular and provincial about these landlocked states and the willed simplicity of (some of) their inhabitants. If literature doesn't pour out of these regions it is perhaps because there is a certain sameness to the life that is lived there, a sameness that appeals to those who stay and a sameness that calls some that leave back to it. This is not to say that ALL midwesterners think alike or that they all share the same traits, preferences, and lifestyles because they do not (again, I am, or was, a midwesterner and last I checked there was no official indoctrination process). However, the midwest does tend to resist the kind of cosmopolitan worldliness and openness to new ideas, cultures, and art that exists in the larger coastal cities and therefore it tends to attract those who prefer an uncomplicated, unchanging, and tradition-bound way of life. For these reasons (and because he is white, hardworking, and middle-class) Sanders loves the midwest but it should be noted that his literary heroes would probably not have found the midwest to be as habitable or as commensurable to their creative projects as Sanders finds it to be with his.

Scott Russell Sanders' readership is an orthodox group of domesticated traditionalists like himself, a group that does not cringe or wince when they read the following line: "While choosing the books my students and I would read, I had searched for stories in which a husband and wife love one another deeply, feel grateful toward their parents, look forward to becoming parents themselves, and then welcome into their marriage a child who arrives like an emissary straight from glory land." (p. 310) Except for those last two words this is not necessarily fanatical writing but when we read this kind of thing from cultures other than our own we call it "fundamentalism" (which is just a stones throw from "fanaticism"). There have been plenty of fanatics in English and American Literature, this is nothing new. Without fanatics our literature and poetry would not be as rich and varied as it is. Sanders is free to write whatever he wants to write; literature after all is and should be a land without fences. But in the public realm evangelical fervor and politics should be kept separate otherwise we become a nation ruled not by reason but by passion and prejudice. It makes sense that tradition-bound peoples in all nations feel threatened by globalization and that traditionalists feel like endangered species who must protect their habitat or face the extinction if not of themselves at least of their way of life. While I don't believe that Scott Russell Sanders or his nativist tribe are a threat to anyone, and while I don't believe that there is anything wrong with acting locally to protect one's native habitat, I do think that one needs to think in more global terms than Scott Russell Sanders tends to think. There is something about Sanders' nativism and his worship of the elemental lore of his beloved region that is attractive to his readership and that is fine. But the danger of regionalism (when taken too far) is that it breeds sectarianism which in turn breeds intolerance (of non-nativist peoples and ideas and ways of life). And Sanders has struck this protectionist chord in past books. The test of any common culture or belief system is its ability to adapt to new historical contingencies and to welcome new members. Any culture or belief system that is predicated on resistance to change and exclusion is destined to fail. All cultures talk about "tradition" but all cultures re-invent those "traditions" anew for every generation. A lot of what Scott Russell Sanders writes reads like a love letter to a very selectively rendered time and place but Sanders' "midwest", though resilient, is not immune from global economic and ideological paradigm shifts. It will be interesting to see in Sanders subsequent works whether he registers these changes and their effects and if so what these changes will mean to the Sanders' world view.

Until then I would suggest reading HD Thoreau ( a very peculiar writer of extraordinary gifts whose Walden is full of all kinds of awe and a book that transcends any attempt to categorize it) or Vladimir Nabokov ( another writer of extraordinary gifts whose Speak,Memory is full of several varieties of awe ) or Salman Rushdie ( whose Imaginary Homelands is an excellent collection of meditations on identity in our globalized world ) or Kwame Appiah ( whose "rooted cosmopolitanism" is one of the most interesting approaches and prescriptions for self-definition in our global age ) or any number of other writers whose extraordinary talents inspire a renewed sense of self before an ever-evolving (natural and social) universe.