cover image Real Matter

Real Matter

David Robertson. University of Utah Press, $39.95 (182pp) ISBN 978-0-87480-533-8

In a book that is part travelogue, part spiritual autobiography and part literary criticism, Robertson (professor of English at UC-Davis) explores the ways a variety of naturalists and poets, from John Muir to Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, have discovered the spiritual nature that pervades the ""real matter"" of the physical world. Not content merely to read their essays, journals and poems, Robertson sets out to recreate their journeys to the spiritual heart of the wilderness. Thus he climbs the mountain peaks of Yosemite in search of the beauty and spirit so eloquently described by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Clarence King and Muir. He retraces the climb up the Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevada that Dharma Bums, Snyder, Kerouac and John Montgomery made in 1955. Excerpts from their writings, Robertson's own journal entries, and photos are interspersed with his argument that the journey into the wilderness is a journey into the heart of the universe and into the heart of the self. To ground his vision, Robertson also blends in the Buddhist principles of No-Self and the story of bondage and liberation in Exodus. But while he can be mellifluous, his writing is so defined by its facile narration and a certain breathless self-consciousness (""To be isolated in the midst of desolation, to be lonely in a great land of loneliness! A number of cars drove by. None stopped. All had some place to go"") that it often resembles a trendy, New Age treatise on eco-spirituality. While there are moments here, mostly it is a reminder that the lyricism and timeless insights of Muir and Mary Austin, among others, are irreplaceable. (May)