Flow is More Than We Can Know

Hey y’all!

This week I finished reading Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

The novel swims between past and present chronicling the history of the Stampers, a logging family in Oregon. Much of the action concerns human contact with the edge of untouched nature and how different characters are drawn toward, interact with, or are frightened by that edge where there is continuous dissolution and erosion through rain, river flooding, and changing sea tides.

In writing about Kesey’s novel, literary critic Tony Tanner explains that at the edge there is the “ubiquitous sense of all things flowing steadily away” which “is responsible for the underlying fear which pervades the community.”

This idea of the edge, not only in the physical sense, but as the division between the known and unknown, really struck me.

Tanner continues with this sage advice, “We must keep our schemes of reality flexible so that they can be expanded to incorporate any new phenomenon which the outside world may present. Our notions are only our notions, while the flow is more than we can ever know.”