Excerpt from Desert Solitaire

Delicate Arch (05/07/2011)

Excerpt from Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (1968):

There are several ways of looking at Delicate Arch.  Depending on your preconceptions you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geologic freak, a happening-a something that happened and will never happen quite that way again, a frame more significant that its picture, a simple monolith eaten away by weather and time and soon to disintegrate into a chaos of falling rock (not surprisingly there have been some, even in the Park Service, who advocate spraying Delicate Arch with a fixative of some sort-Elmer's Glue perhaps or Lady Clairol Spray-Net).  There are the inevitable pious Midwesterners who climb a mile and a half under the desert sun to view Delicate Arch and find only God ("Gol-dangit Katherine where's my light meter, this glare is turrible"), and the equally inevitable students of geology who look at the arch and see only Lyell and the uniformity of nature.  You may therefore find proof for or against His existence.  Suit yourself.  You may see a symbol, a sign, a fact, a thing without meaning or a meaning which includes all things.

Much the same could be said of the tamarisk down in the canyon, of the blue-black raven croaking on the cliff, of your own body.  The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.  (There is no beauty in nature, said Baudelaire.  A place to throw empty beer cans on Sunday, said Mencken.)  If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful-that which is full of wonder.

A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us-like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness-that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surrounds and sustain a ship.  The shock of the real.  For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels.  For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures ..."