After a couple of years in Asia, it's been nice to be home in the wide open spaces of Saskatchewan. My heart is full of love for my homeland (even though a big part of me would love to hiking around some mountains) and this sentiment has determined which books I've been reading. Currently, I'm rereading Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow. Stegner lived a few years of his life in my home area, summers on their homestead on the US border and winters in the town of Eastend (a town north of Frontier). I want to share with you his words on the Prairies . . .
Desolate? Forbidding? There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drouth or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don't get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don't escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.
It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your single head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe or impotent man. Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall.
Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, New York: Penguin Books, 8.
I think that any prairie dwellers out there would understand what he means.
4 comments:
The prairies will always be home and will always be beautiful to me. As much as I do love the coast and the mountains...it can never replace the splendor of growing up in Frontier
That was just perfect...it almost made me cry.
I definitely feel it. I actually walk out to the ocean here every once in a while just to pretend I'm on the prairies. It's close, but not the same; there's really no place like home.
-Amy
This is a cool book, very wise and silghtly emontional, similiar to one of the chinese writers' book that I usesd to read, but she wirites about the life in the city and people's relationships. Hoping I can find this book at local library.
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