The Nature of Generosity By William Kittredge (Knopf, 320 pages, $25)

"Imagining that long a time is like trying to think about a dream. It's sort of but not quite there, and haunting," William Kittredge writes in his new book, The Nature of Generosity. What he finds haunting is the conceptual difficulty of contemplating the vast epochs over which the human species and the world we inhabit has evolved. That difficulty--reviewing a significant span of time and events, then managing to make some sense of them--resonates throughout the rest of his wide-ranging book, and is perhaps its dominant theme. What is dreamlike and haunting to Kittredge, it seems, isn't just the evolution of Homo sapiens, but the evolution of his own mind and personality, as well as modern western culture as a whole. The Nature of Generosity is an attempt to come to some conclusions about humanity--where it's been, where it might be going--as viewed through the lens of the author's life.

Kittredge's last book, Hole in the Sky, was a memoir of his Eastern Oregon youth. That existence--of dusty days on horseback, working with his family's ranch hands, or gazing in awe as lightning storms flashed across prairie skies--remains a significant presence in this new work. Kittredge is now in his late 60s, however, so those childhood recollections share time with more recent impressions, primarily from his travels across Europe. He draws lessons from the history of Venice and attempts to understand the worldview of those who painted animals in the caves at Lascaux. These travel writings, in turn, lead to social and political observations, musings on the nature of man and the problems of modern society,
a culture in which everything has become a commodity.

Like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, the authorial voice in The Nature of Generosity seems to be "unstuck in time," jumping from ancient history to modern Europe, from Kittredge's childhood to the possible future. It's not unusual for these leaps to occur from one paragraph to another, and the constant changing of temporal gears and points of focus can be disconcerting. The book is labeled as "Literature/Philosophy/ Memoir," a mélange of terms vague enough to cover anything from the literary criticism of Aristotle to the poetry of Jewel. But what are we to call a collection of observations, anecdotes and memories of a writer whose primary motivation is to get his thoughts down while he can, organizational structure be damned? Historically contextualized autobiography? Personal manifesto?

To be fair, Kittredge has parceled the book into sections corresponding to a rough timeline of civilization: "The Old Animal," "Agriculture," "Commodification," and finally, what he hopes will be the future of society, "Generosity." These are extremely loose guidelines, however, and there is more than one moment that tends toward the garrulous. Kittredge recalls seeing a wolverine by a river, for instance, and concludes, "Maybe we should feel capable of existing like the wolverine, honoring joy and food, sex in the night and the hunt, and the kill and a good sleep. Or maybe we shouldn't." Well, one can't help but wonder, which is it? The next paragraph takes place in a different time, however, with different characters, and the subject of wolverine hedonism is either forgotten or subsumed in a different discussion.
Or maybe it isn't.

There is also, of course, some material on the nature of generosity. The introduction offers definitions of different types, and the epilogue features Kittredge's wish list of ideas the world should embrace, most of which center on sustaining cultural, biological and environmental diversity. These more straightforward moments, however, end up serving primarily as a frame for anecdotes of seedbanks in wartime, artist friends, the poetry of Pablo Neruda, and ranch hands and camp cooks.

To demand that The Nature of Generosity be a lean examination of exactly what its title implies, with a clear argument and traditionally organized support, would of course be unfair--Kittredge's goal isn't the creation of a doctoral thesis. "The point of this book can be suggested by pairing metaphors and examining how they resonate against each other," he writes. But the result is restless: thumbnail histories and short biographies; clever epigrams of famous thinkers; references to good writers and books; discussion of politics and religion; memories of friends and family; scientific and environmental analysis; and more, ever more.

Yet this constant restlessness prevents the development of any sustained discussion--rather than zeroing in on a few choice targets, Kittredge loads all of his metaphorical ammunition and commences firing immediately, sometimes wildly. The result of these constant, relentlessly juxtaposed anecdotes and metaphors is that they reflect Kittredge's observation on the difficulty of comprehending the vastness and complexity of time: The Nature of Generosity is sometimes dreamlike and haunting, but just as often sort of but not quite there.