‘Anchor in a Sea of Time’ Exemplifies the Fine Art of Changing One’s Mind https://ift.tt/yx5rFQb
There’s a point in Stephen Harrigan’s new collections of essays, An Anchor in a Sea of Time: Essays, where I moved from simply enjoying his voice to outright admiring him not only as a writer, but as a human being.
It happens in the stellar “Twilight of the Bronze Age,” when he’s examining his relationship — and past support — for the construction and preservation of statues depicting America’s troubled history. He writes, “When it came to Confederate statues, there was a point at which standing up for history felt too much like standing in the way of it.”
Harrigan composed this after George Floyd’s murder, during the country’s reckoning with celebrating the Confederacy. Until then, Harrigan, in his own words, had been more of a “contextualize-our-history-but-don’t-erase-it” type of guy, but then, after witnessing protest after protest, and listening to those who opposed the celebration of the old South, he did something so few us can stomach in this age of digging-in: he changed his mind.
“As a white American who possibly admires statues too much and questions them too little, I realize that the times have not appointed me as the arbiter of what should stay and what should go.”
It’s not only refreshing, but startling to read from a man of Harrigan’s stature. He’s been writing for over 50 years, much of which has been spent at Texas Monthly. Anchor in the Sea of Time is his fourteenth book and fourth essay collection, his first since 2013’s The Eye of the Mammoth. He’s also published best-selling novels, along with mediocre tv-screenplays – which he hilariously admits to in an essay.
More than most books, an essay collection reveals the author’s character: we read him in different circumstances, confronted by new conflicts, and through this continual shift of setting and time we witness his true self which, in Harrigan’s case, is a self defined by humility and heart. Most of us don’t stay open to the world and refuse to be knocked from our soapboxes, but Harrigan does just that throughout the collection, mixing memoir and journalism, questioning his own memories and prior stances, without dipping too deeply into nostalgia.
The book opens with a banger of an essay, “Off Course,” in which he investigates his father, who died in an Air Force flight accident while Harrigan was still in utero. We get the limited recollections of his mother before he then digs deep into the archives, going through military reports and seeking out the descendants of the other men who died in the accident. Throughout, Harrigan is asking questions about what it means to have a parent you’ve never met, one who you spent most of your life trying not to talk about.
“The death of my father had always been so personal to me, so secret even, that it was strange to be talking openly about it with my brothers, to be making plans to visit the place where he died, and to be meeting strangers whose own lives had vectored outward from that long ago-tragedy in the same ways that ours had. It was like sunlight suddenly pouring into a dark room, blinding and warming and exhilarating.”
His other essays follow a similar tact, with a conversational style that delves mostly into the complicated nature of being a life-long Texan, one who both loves the state’s swashbuckling history but understands its contradictions and crimes. Like a gentler Larry McMurtry, Harrigan interrogates the conflicts over how to represent history, whether it is through a conversation with members of the Karankawas tribe or the reconstruction of the Alamo as a tourist site or the late 1960s murder of an acquaintance, a young University of Texas student. Each of these demonstrate his eye for telling details and his empathy for human suffering.
Like any essay collection, especially those written originally for magazines, you’ll find yourself skimming some pieces that seem locked in the past. His essay on a pandemic Zoom movie club felt like a time capsule best left buried, but, for the most part, the essays feel not only timeless, but relevant to our current moment.
Harrigan’s essays remind us that in a time of hard stances, polarization, and unbending beliefs — despite whatever facts are thrown our way — that asking questions and changing our minds are the hallmarks of civil discourse and remaining a part of the world, even as it rapidly shifts beneath our feet.
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