The Plains: Text Classics

by Gerald Murnane

I was anxious to be accepted by these men and prepared for any test they might make of me. Yet I hardly expected to call on anything I had read in my shelves of books on the plains. To quote from works of literature would go against the spirit of the gathering, although every man there would have read any book that I named.

1ST LANDOWNER: I’m speaking of my ideal woman, remember—the only woman that any of us speak about.

He believed, nevertheless, that I might one day be capable of seeing what was worth seeing. If he could forget my young man’s eagerness to look at simple coloured images of the plains, he might concede that at least I was trying to discover my own kind of landscape. (And what mattered more than the search for landscapes? What distinguished a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?) Perhaps, young and blind as I was, I ought to present myself at his country seat at sundown on the following day.

For the thinkers of that school disregard the question whether a possibility, once entertained, may seem one day to correspond to some meagre arrangement of events. They give all their attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and has been considered, perhaps even by a few plainsmen, to represent the extinction of all possibilities.

But I was not bothered for long by the likelihood of her never reading my words. If everything that passed between us existed only as a set of possibilities, my aim should have been to broaden the scope of her speculations about me. She ought to acquire not specific information but facts barely sufficient to distinguish me. In short, she should not read a word of mine, although she should know that I had written something she might have read.

Gatsby

And so, on those darkening afternoons, at those scenes whose scenery seemed more often pointed at than observed, whenever the camera in my hand put me in mind of some young woman who might see me years afterwards as a man who saw further than others, I would always ask my patron at last to record the moment when I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.