Having parents who taught me what wilderness was about eighty
years ago, I have tried to share the wealth of wilderness for
most of those years, and wasn't succeeding as I wanted to because
too few people had shared a moving experience with wilderness
out there. After too long it occurred to me to ask them to think
not about what was out, but what was in--the wildness we are
all constantly experiencing, but usually taking totally for granted,
the wildness within. I'd give a book that title.
The opportunity to think about using
that title came up when a New York publishing friend, with whom
we later did not agree as well as we should have, suggested he
would like to publish two books. One, inspired by the Rev. Francis
Sayre, of the Washington Cathedral, he would name "Sayre's
Prayers." The other he would call "Brower's Hours."
It would be in Exhibit Format, drawn from my Sierra Club and
Friends of the Earth books in that format, more than thirty of
them in eighteen years, including a spread of image and selected
texts to cover each of a year's 366 days (leap year included),
and weighing about eight pounds. We would devise furniture to
support it, and other promotion on need.
Publisher Werner Linz, editor Bruce
Colman, photographer Joseph
Holmes, and I devoted some months and eight thousand dollars
of my own working on this pretty impressive retrospective of
what a frustrated conservationist deemed important. We thought
we were on target. Three publishers agreed. Our printer in Verona,
Mondadori Editori, produced the eight-pound dummy. Then, years
ago, the world kept turning, at intervals of a day or so, it's
habit. The book didn't turn. . . .
