Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

Life was better if you were no one’s victim.

Now he felt totally alone and an edge of panic crept into his soul that would stay with him for years. He thought, “What if what I’ve been doing all my life has been totally wrong?” He sat in the den the entire night thinking it all over. By dawn he decided he wanted to escape into the world rather than from it: there was nothing particularly undesirable or repellent in his life, only a certain lack of volume and intensity; he feared dreaming himself to death, say as a modest brook in a meadow eases along sleepily to a great river just beyond the border of trees. The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.

life was only what one did every day.

Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out.