Secrets of the Universe: Essays on Family, Community, Spirit, and Place

by Scott Russell Sanders

Ranging from an autobiographical tour-de-force that describes a childhood spent with an alcoholic father to "Looking at Women," a reflection on male yearning and confusion, to a look at the place—or absence—of nature in recent American fiction.

Genres: Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Nature

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Scott Russell Sanders is the award-winning author of A Private History of Awe, Hunting for Hope, A Conservationist Manifesto, Dancing in Dreamtime, and two dozen other books of fiction, personal narrative, and essays. His father came from a family of cotton farmers in Mississippi, his mother from an immigrant doctor’s family in Chicago. He spent his early childhood in Tennessee and his school years in Ohio, Rhode Island, and Cambridge, England.

In his writing he is concerned with our place in nature, the practice of community, and the search for a spiritual path. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of southern Indiana. You can visit Scott at www.scottrussellsanders.com.

In August 2020, Counterpoint Press will publish his new collection of essays, The Way of Imagination, a reflection on healing and renewal in a time of climate disruption. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories inspired by photographs.

Reviews

[Cheryl]

Carefully skimmed even the ones I didn't read, and found this a very mixed bag. Worst essay was "Looking at Women" which makes me uncomfortable for his wife. I did like "Local Matters" - especially the uplifting ending. Some lines, some provocations, are intriguing and/or graceful.

Still, I much prefer and recommend Michael Perry.

I've read a few other essay collections and anthologies, but should read more. Maybe someday I'll find someone worth exploring in between Perry's works.

Sept. 2024

[Longfellow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed all of these essays; while some of them cover familiar topics, Sanders avoids cliched perspectives, offering original thought in each piece. Others of the essays seem to me unique topics on their own, though being a novice reader of essays, this may be less true than it seems to me.

I particularly enjoyed "The Singular First Person," which discusses the essay as a genre, and while there were many sentences that struck me as particularly beautiful or profound, this brief section is my favorite:

"I might as well drag in another metaphor - and another unoffending animal - by saying that each doggy sentence, as it noses forward into the underbrush of thought, scatters a bunch of rabbits that go bounding off in all directions. The essayist can afford to chase more of those rabbits than the fiction writer can, but fewer than the poet. If you refuse to chase any of them, and keep plodding along in a straight line, you and your reader will have a dull outing. If you chase too many, you will soon wind up lost in a thicket of confusion with your tongue out."

Perhaps more than anything, these essays by Sanders have re-placed in me the desire to write, to play with language, to follow those rabbit trails seeking a surprising discovery or a combination of words that can only come about by conducting this kind of meandering exploration.

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be my favorite SRS book yet. "Secrets" is an early work of Scott's, reflecting more about life in Bloomington, Indiana than about parenthood as in "Hunting for Hope." I read a few chapters outloud to friends on the phone..it is that good.

[Sarah Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The effort of loving is reciprocal, not only in act but in desire, an I addressing a Thou, a meeting in that vivid presence. The distance a man stares across at a woman, or a woman at a man, is a gulf in the soul, out of which a voice cries, Leap, leap."

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually haven't read the entire book, but essays from the collection. Nice!

[Amy Bernhard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A couple very good essays, but as a whole, I was fairly bored with this collection :(