Time Again: An Essay on Zhuangzi, Fatherhood, and Other Matters of Life and Death as They Concerned the Author on a Visit to Northeastern Oregon by Scott Parker
With his country seemingly crumbling around him, Scott F. Parker sets off to the northeastern corner of Oregon for a week of solitude, where he will hike, paddle, and reflect on the imminent birth of his son. A companion to his earlier book Being on the Oregon Coast, Time Again reveals Parker's thoughts about life, meaning, and, above all, fatherhood as they evolve in more playful directions. Guided by Zhuangzi and Bob Dylan, Parker balances this essay on the thin line of being. ISBN: 978-1-956056-72-3 (print; softcover; perfect bound) LCCN: 2022952451 Copyright 2023; released February 2023 86 pages; 12 full-color illustrations |
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Scott F. Parker is the author of several books, including Being on the Oregon Coast and A Way Home: Oregon Essays, as well as the editor of Conversations with Ken Kesey and Conversations with Joan Didion. He teaches writing at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.
photo: Alyssa Henry
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“Time Again is a poetic offering, a meditation, and a prayer. This is a love letter from a father to a son. A promise of life's continuations, its certainties, our smallness in its vast greatness.” “In this remarkable essay, with a baby on the way, Scott Parker consults not experts on baby-having but experts on being—3,000-year-old cedars, butterflies, trout, Bob Dylan, and Chuang Tzu, who wrote, ‘If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way.’ No book that makes the birthing of beings simple and straightforward is a candidate for being the Way; but Parker, listening to Lick Creek and the cry of an eagle and tracing ‘the grammar of a butterfly's path,’ and transcribing it all into sublime prose, has written an essay that is a candidate for being the Way.” “In Time Again, Scott Parker offers gifts from a quieter world. Like a prose poem that arises from the Way, inspired by the Daoist (Taoist) vision of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), Parker invites the reader to slow down, notice, partake as much from photographs of stillness in nature as from his words. This book is a respite for the mind, one that allows the reader to settle into the deeper rhythms of nature, both that of trees and creeks as well as one’s own mind.” |
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