Barry Lopez Interview "What Do I Mean By My Life?"

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“No one can miss the alarm now in the air.”  Barry Lopez, “Horizon”

He was born on the Epiphany of 1945 and died this Christmas. During a reading years ago, he created a spell of silence over the crowd with a particularly compelling piece. He could have taken a personal bow, but instead simply said; “English is a beautiful, powerful language, isn’t it.”  He kept a “piece of eight” from a 17th century Spanish shipwreck on his desk, not because it was cool; “I keep this coin to remind me of the capacity of human beings to destroy other human beings on a massive scale for money.”  

Almost immediately after our interview, the Holiday Farm fire in Oregon razed his property on the banks of the McKenzie River, arguably a result of climate change he so passionately wrote about.  Soon after, he died. On a recent springtime walk surrounded by budding vine maples, well into his prostate cancer, he talked about these disturbing times and, on losing hope, said; “how embarrassing to give up when everything around you is growing.”

He spent thirty years writing his final book, the masterwork “Horizon.”  Somehow, he recognized its ending back then, just an old man walking down a narrow road in Port Famine, Patagonia, with crested caracara falcons inexplicably spaced evenly along the way in quarter-mile increments, watching from fenceposts.

Some “Horizon” quotes and unfinished phrases as enticements:

·       “The treacherous void between ourselves and the world…” 

·       "The neurosis of consumerism…"

·       "…the weight of the horror we force on one another in our manic quests for greater satisfaction."

·       “We are creating our own evolutionary pressures…” 

·       Of destroyed indigenous tribes: “Each eventually became another torn prayer flag, snapping in the wind over burnt ground.” 

·       “As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development…”

·       Our survival demands an “unprecedented level of imagination…some capacity hinted at but not yet realized.”

·       We are “…creating a spatial and temporal dysfunctionality, that increasingly produce despair instead of hope.”

·       The storyteller creates “a place where wisdom reveals itself.”  

·       We need to adapt to technology without “pharmaceutical help.” 

·       “…cynical corporate manueverings to secure the last waters…” 

·       “… we shimmer with intentionality, erotic grace and balletic capability…”

Farewell Barry.