Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire

Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire

“I now feel brave enough to venture forth and bear earth’s torments and its joys, to grapple with the hurricane.” (Faust, lines 464-66)

Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death? Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? . . . Declare if thou knowest it all. (Job 38:17,18)

Human beings are prideful creatures, and we have good reason to be. We have subdued a planet, changed the course of rivers, watered deserts, written poetry to make angels cry, and wrapped the world in a network of electric impulses and digital displays. We have created and killed not one but many gods. We can make a cloud rain by shooting heavy metal into it, and we can create a lake by pouring concrete in a canyon and damming a river. Most days, it seems that we human beings have everything under control and that if we miss wild nature, well, we can grow it in our gardens. (We can even genetically engineer the plants and animals.) Every so often, however, the universe spins out of our control. Forest fires rage. The earth quakes. Chaos descends like a great modern Zeus hurling thunderbolts and reminding us that nature is not ours to manipulate. In a great universe shaped by raw power and force, human beings are only small, easily crushed, organic structures. We need the reminder. Chaos and destruction are nature’s great gift to human kind because the realization of our frailty and insignificance leads to enlightenment. We learn something about ourselves, how we are here, where we want to go, and what we have to say about it.

Chaos spoke to Darwin in the shaking of the earth:

A bad earth quake at once destroys the oldest associati...

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...pe of bringing a frightening force of nature under control. Science, too, is a method of telling a story about nature. In the struggle to make sense of the raging universe, we sometimes discover art, an art purged of all pretense by the extreme elements of which it was born. When all is said and done, the disaster that brings us death also brings us an opportunity to find hope and compassion, and a chance to transcend our own blindness and limitations and find peace.

Works Cited

Darwin, Charles. Voyage of the Beagle. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Scientific Studies. New York: Suhrkamp, 1988.

—. Faust. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990.

Maclean, Norman. Young Men and Fire. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Pope, Alexander. “Essay on Man.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1960.