A. P. Eberhart's Blog (6)

What was it that made you run off and build your hermitage, John? Why did you hide from the society of men all those years? What changed you from a prince to a pauper?

     With me it happened fast. I was twenty-two years old and living the high life--or as high as my credit-limit would allow, anyway. I drove a slick new sportscar, lived in a chic, stylish apartment downtown, and wore clothes from the expensive stores in the mall. I even had a cellphone in those days. I was a regular…

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Of a sudden the sky erupts in a dancing cauldron of color. From one bent circular horizon to the other, the sky engulfs the stunned and lonely man at the edge in a radius of painted light. Lavender lime tinted and glowing to a chrome lemony haze, running to cantaloupe coral and blazing salmon and peach with a tincture of radiant apricot orange, swirling here and there to inky indigo, then thrusting upward to beads and buttons of sapphire and teal and plunging to small jade windows of royal…

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The cold Modelo tastes like heaven and I sit spinning my half empty mug on the bar. A big guy approaches me. I see him coming out of the corner of my eye.

"I don't like the way you're a-lookin' at my woman," he says. Now wait a minute, I have been starring into my beer and tripping down Memory Lane for the last hour, at least. I look at him; his hat says his name is John Deere. Then I look at her. She is attractive, in a last-woman-on-earth kind of way... O boy. Here we go again. Now,…

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For all our Western liberal democratic traditions and individualist rhetoric, we are a collectivist, Gnostic people who long ago swallowed the horse-pill of Marxist determinism and chased it with a vial of structuralist poison, causing an ugly growth of confused moral relativism. We no longer trust ourselves, we no longer trust what we see, convinced that appearance is illusion and that there lurks below the surface some absolute but discoverable structural system. With no genuine faith left…

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Here is the Prologue to "Trouble in Paradox: A Creative Memior" by A.P. Eberhart (Copyrighted material).

How do I introduce such a book? Does the world really need to hear another tale of wilderness adventure? I doubt it. Thus I must first warn the reader that this is not a book about wild adventure--though there is some adventure, and a good deal of wildness. Second, I must warn the reader that this prologue is little more than the author attempting to…

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Here we are, authors, serious and otherwise, making our way through the yawning haze of American culture, fighting through the muck of popular ambivance, slashing at the fabric of public ennui, all scribbling our footnotes to Plato, and taking a dose of hemlock for our troubles. Why do we do it? Why do we write? For me, at any rate, I do it because there seems no alturnative. I fight on because I cannot do otherwise. Credo: I must write to shore-up the good and beautiful, the true and possible;… Continue