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THE SHORT, HAPPY HISTORY OF A WRITING LIFE by David Eide:

Like many I started out a utopian---youth believes all is possible and if life were simply rational all would be well. I tapped into the generous vein of utopian thinking that came from both the religious and political side. Looking back I can see it is a good but doomed vein; and one must go into the next stage which is a confrontation with the real complexity in things. There is either, then, understanding and knowledge or nuttiness of a sort.

The utopian view is sustainable only by students and wealthy half-crazed aristocrats who don't want to get their shoes sullied by the working stiffs, the "wage slaves," as they aptly put it at times. The utopians suffer great inflations and hyperbole and the good in them moves on leaving the crusts and trails of cults that litter the landscape.

The confrontation with complexity requires an enormous amount of knowledge, structure, discipline if we are to survive intact. We finally weed out what we can't handle and focus on the next development which is specialism or careerism of one sort or another where energy is released and driven down one narrow channel. At the end of this process is a person, a citizen, someone who, hopefully, is productive and resourceful.

The writer passes through an odd moment of total disgust and disbelief at the world. In my case I had no confidence and no affinity toward the dominant institutions; that is, science, technology, capital, and bureacracy. Each was fully built and roaring by the time I gained consciousness. There was nothing innovative about them; they appeared like conquering armies of an imperial power that will subdue the people and make them submit to whole new rules and rituals. Science created an age of reduction, completely antithecal to the literary imagination. Technology was a taunting of the spirit, often; capital favored the very worst in human nature and marginalized the very best and burearcracy was this oppressive, corrupt weight that crushed out any aspiration. This was central when I was a younger man. It's a dangerous moment and I countered it with as much optimism as I could muster. I countered it by spiritual discipline, knowledge, thinking through, abandoning the irrational, and trying to understand that which dominated.

A return to simplicity. A return to the human, the core of the human, refinding it, nurturing it and so forth. Otherwise you are only a minion to the giantism that would forever threaten the existence of human life. That was my view when I was young. And it did initiate a building of some new foundations.

I still view it a very dangerous proposition for free people to glide or bump and grind their way through life without understanding that which surrounds them.

The most pernicious was the reductionism since it enflamed every hatred and destructive quality in human beings and gave them a gleeful weapon.

Certainly these activies were connected to human activities and to human beings some of whom one actually knew. That makes a difference. And knowledge makes a huge difference. But, even an educated person such as myself, needed to study a great deal more than simple college courses and apply concentrated effort to start to bring these behemouth powers down to some degree of understanding. Absent of that effort is alienation and a fruitless search for an equilibrium.

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