"Grounded in lives spent close to the earth, the essays in Instinct for Survival ponder questions about what makes things last, about what binds human beings together. Although no easy answers emerge, Pat C. Hoy II remains undaunted as he pursues some of the fundamental ideas that define our existence--ideas about community, family, spirit, and friendship." "From his childhood in a small Arkansas town to his career as an Army officer and professor of literature, Hoy uses the events of his own life as departure points in his winding quests for meaning. In "Soldiering," a memory of his brother's death in World War II leads to other memories--a telling moment on a high school practice field, his experiences in Vietnam, a sojourn on horseback in the Wyoming mountains--all of which become part of a thoughtful meditation on duty, leadership, war, and survival. Similarly, in "Mosaics of Southern Masculinity," Hoy begins by recalling his absent father (who abandoned the family when the author was five) and proceeds from there into a multilayered inquiry into male identity--an inquiry that includes, along the way, memories of his own sons and reflections on the ways in which other southern writers have grappled with the issues of father-son relations." "In other essays, Hoy writes about his relationship with his mother ("Goings and Comings"), about a counseling session with one of the first female cadets to attend West Point ("Imagining Lives of Our Own"), and about his personal poetics and philosophy of writing ("Conversing with Images"). One of the book's most intriguing pieces, "The Spirit Was Willing and So Was the Flesh," deals with the author's attempts to come to terms with the feminine aspect of his own personality--"the woman in my head," what Jung called anima--and with the apparent dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical. Encountering anima in his dreams, at the bedside of a dying friend, and in an Army-town honky-tonk, Hoy arrives at an essential lesson: "Not to sleep the dream, not to make waste of the spirit, not to seek the spiritual outside and apart from the life that I live, that, I think, is my sacred task.... That's where I want to be, in two places at once--not suspended, but moving back and forth, at ease, open always to life and its immanent mysteries."" "That openness to mystery is evident throughout these essays, which, in the end, form a kind of mosaic of a life in progress--one life interconnected with many other lives. In these lives, Pat Hoy ultimately finds something transcendent, something marvelous and unexplainable that beckons just out of reach."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved