“The Myths of Bears” is in that sense its opposite. It is a harshly beautiful story that never even contemplates trying to escape the round that is life and death, beauty and ugliness. Rather it shows them as one thing, that death-life and beauty-ugliness are what the world, for us, is.

“Bears” is a human story, because thinking about things like death-life is human; it is a human way to understand that in which we live. The story tells of deer and bears, wolverine and wolves but it is human in a way Pilgrim is not. Oh, it is human to want to divide the whole into manageable bits; that desire is integral to what it means to be human. It’s just that the images which that desire conjures aren’t actually true about what it means to live as a human being. Not that all images we conjure are false. Oh no. I don’t think that. But we need to be careful about believing too easy.

Such an odd thing really, because Pilgrim is non-fiction and Bears is fiction, but really “Bears” is far more truthful — and that with the “magical” elements in Bass’ story.  But that’s normal I find. Truth seems something profoundly hard to talk about, even to experience. Especially when it’s some truth about the experience of being human.  I love non-fiction. Read it voraciously. Yet if it is some truth that I need, some sense of understanding about what it is to be me, I almost always reach for poetry, and although “Bears” is prose, somehow it nevertheless has the same pounding impact.

No proof of course, but I suspect that this may be because we evolved into the power of narrative as a strategy for survival. It has a hold on us that our more rational, linear minds, simply has not had time to develop. I also suspect that this is why the attempt to pull the world apart into neat conceptual categories like body and soul, good and evil, never work all that well. They seem always to fall in on themselves in a welter of broken bits; we argue over them endlessly in a way we never seem to about the blue sky, or the smell of grounded leaves in early Autumn.

The difference marks the two authors and why, bottom-line, Bass is a much more powerful writer than Dillard.