Your youthful musings don’t often get to see the light of day as an
adult (I keep mine in the back of the closet behind the hat boxes, not brave
enough to throw away what was a lifeline but now seem so tedious). Barbara
Ehrenreich’s precocious philosophical probing in Living with a Wild God are unearthed as part of a university request for lifetime material. As
she sifts through her extraordinary glimpses of the divine, we also see a turbulent
teen with an all too common 1950’s middle-America inheritance of overbearing,
intellectually stunted wage slave father and bored, underemployed, mentally
unbalanced, housewife mother. What keeps you reading is the display of an
extraordinary intellectual curiosity, the boundless scathing self deprecating
narrative voice and the fascinating discovery of another dimension beneath the
surface, or rather lying alongside the three dimensional world.
Ehrenreich considers her episodic experience of another world as
evidence of the divine. She does admit her revelations could be classic
experiences of mental illness, disassociation, and other evidence of the rich
genetic stew and historical pressure cooker effects of her family and place in
history, but she quickly dismisses these hypotheses. I found her story painful,
insightful, and tedious all at the same time, just like those long hidden
journals of mine. The coming of age of any teen in modern North American society is the
emergence of the self from a materialist, egocentric, and self absorbed
wasteland. Ehrenreich finds her vocation away from an inward focused, minutely
observed and measured world into collective social activism and disruption in
the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 60’s.
I found the book very uneven; perhaps because I know so little about
the authors’ adult life achievements, but the thrill of revisiting a great mind
in the making was spur enough to drive my reading though some of the less
beguiling sections. As an invitation to think on how we perceive reality and
how a probing mind matures, this is a fascinating reflection.
- Rosslyn Bentley
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