Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest
First edition
|
|
| Author | Daniel Quinn |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Autobiography |
| Publisher | The Hard Rain Press |
|
Publication date
|
1994 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 172 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 31609040 |
Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest is a book by Daniel Quinn, published in 1994, and written largely as an autobiography blended with additional philosophical reflections. It details how Quinn arrived at the ideas behind his 1992 novel Ishmael and articulates upon some of these ideas.
Although primarily nonfiction in content, Providence is written with a fictional backdrop, in which the reader is presented as someone who has read Ishmael and sneaked into Daniel Quinn’s house at night to ask Quinn for further information regarding his inspirations for the novel and its philosophical ideas. Quinn, though tired, welcomes the reader into his house and opens himself up to the reader’s questions. Throughout the story, Quinn narrates as though replying to questions asked by (the character of) the reader, which Quinn “restates” in his answers and explanations; the voice of the reader is never directly heard.
Quinn begins by describing the earliest incarnation of a book like Ishmael back in 1977, which Quinn at the time called Man and Alien. This manuscript was revised over the next several years, resulting in five more incarnations (The Genesis Transcript, The Book of , The Book of the Damned, and two entitled Another Story to Be In), none of which Quinn could successfully get published. At last, though, Quinn heard of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award, which called for creative solutions to global problems. To win the award, though, Quinn was required to translate his long-brewing thoughts for the first time into a work of fiction: a novel. Quinn won the award with Ishmael but was left unsure, until now, about what he should write as a follow-up.
Quinn details basic memories of his Depression-era childhood in Omaha, Nebraska: specifically, the occurrence a dream in 1941 that he feels has influenced the rest of his life. In the dream, a tree is blocking the middle of a road he is traversing. A beetle crawls down the trunk to greet him and tells him that itself and other animals deliberately downed the tree to get Quinn’s attention in order to talk with him. Quinn is dumbfounded as the beetle says that the animals need to tell him the secret of their lives. Quinn is then expected to follow a deer into the forest, because he is for some reason needed by the animals, but before he can venture on, he awakes.
...
Wikipedia