Gretel Ehrlich, Driving Beauty to the Bone

When Gretel Ehrlich called to say that she was in Berkeley and wanted to stop by for a visit, it felt selfish to keep one of America’s most provocative, original, and iconoclastic writers all to ourselves. We got in touch with a few friends, Osher Lifelong Learning gave us a comfortable room, and a couple of days after we got Gretel’s initial call we had assembled about thirty people for a brown-bag lunch. In a world numbed and half-alive from effects of comfort and convenience, Gretel stands out like an Old Testament prophet, who has left the soft life of the city to seek truth and the life of the spirit in the harsh and forbidding places of the world. “Mountains invite us to humiliate ourselves,” she writes in The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold. “They bring danger and difficulty, and drive beauty to the bone.” This is not the “beauty” that the world of commerce tries to sell us every hour of every day. Rather, it’s the beauty that the poet Rilke encountered in a storm on the cliffs outside the Castle of Duino on the Adriatic Sea, describing it in the opening passage of the Duino Elegies as the “beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” Few people have led the life Gretel has led, and virtually no one else has written about it with such courage, intelligence, and skill. What a privilege to have her among us!