William Golding in his autobiographical novel Free Fall charges himself with the task of finding out that point in his life when he lost his free will, the ability to choose or even influence his own destiny. For my sitter, that point must have come when she was about eighteen. For the nation she grew up in, that point must have come right around the time they put Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth’s. That was when the Alamagordo desert lit up like a neon sign and Robert Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita:

People believed in the Bhagavad-Gita in 1955. When I got to my grandmother’s house she spent long hours explaining H-Bombs to me and showing me the routes the Russian bombers would take across Santa Claus’s home.

One of the reasons I’m approaching these subjects through story is that I now advise writers in an MFA program. And one of the things I have said to those writers is that the current night-sea journey of our culture, a journey of great danger that we must endure with great loneliness, is the experience of nihilism. It’s waking up at four a.m. in the midst of dark grey shapes in a dimly lit world where God has crumbled to dust and life and intimacy only exist as conditioned reflexes.

I’ve gone further to say that nihilism cannot be avoided. It must be faced and gone through. If you avoid it, you start lying to the people who read your words and eventually to yourself and you someday wake up at four a.m. anyway, but this time as an inarticulate and uncomprehending and tormented animal.

I say this as if I’ve successfully traveled through nihilism. I say it as if I’ve staked out a section in that green valley that lies just over the summit from the Valley of Death, and it’s the Promised Land, happily cleared of its previous inhabitants by bird flu or smallpox. There’s clean water in the creek that flows through the place, and the frost goes out of the ground in February, and there are apples and chokecherries on the trees, camas in the meadows, and venison in the old-growth forest just behind the homestead cabin.

I say go through nihilism, as if I look back at a soulless market-run scientific material culture. I say it as if I’m safely divorced from Hailey, Idaho, now a ghetto of extreme wealth, where vacant-eyed Hummer-drivers are building houses that cost the dollar equivalent of forty-five Habitat for Humanity homes and venture capital is building great state-of-the-art hospitals for a community of ten thousand. I see house lots selling for two million dollars, and bus drivers and nurses and maids and gardeners and mechanics and grocery clerks exiled sixty or a hundred miles south. They commute to work for a community that will not build low-cost housing because it will depress property values.