Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

But all his tears were shed in the past few semiwakeful days when, as any animal that plays dead, he tried to learn the nature of his immediate threat. And now that he knew there was no immediate threat, rather than relief he felt a suspension, as if he were dangling in some private dark while outside the universe continued on rules he had no part in making.

Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve.

He lived as a victim, albeit prosperous, of those dreams he built at age nineteen when all of us reach our zenith of idealistic nonsense. Nineteen is the age of the perfect foot soldier who will die without a murmur, his heart aflame with patriotism. Nineteen is the age at which the brain of a nascent poet in his rented room soars the highest, suffering gladly the assault of what he thinks is the god in him. Nineteen is the last year that a young woman will marry purely for love. And so on. Dreams are soul chasers, and forty years later Tibey was feeling cornered. He

The word “mystery” is still appropriate despite the implacable vulgarizing of the media, so total in attempt that it must express our desire to smash this last grace note in our lives.

He thought about his father, even felt envy for those Depression days when he had traversed the country to “look things over.” Starting from nothing, everything was fine to his father beyond a subsistence level. He made money because he was competent, had wit and could not help making money. It was simply another world, Nordstrom thought. His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting

He had enjoyed the ballet but he was losing what little of the spectator was left in him: he was becoming an amateur in the true sense—one who loved the doing, and had the beginner’s openness about life that had been lost for transparent reasons since his childhood.

As Nordstrom walked on he decided again that nothing was like anything else. One quantity could never technically equal another.

Of late he had become especially tired of pointless opinions and was trying to get rid of them.

He would catch himself thinking as everyone does: too hot, too cold, too green, too fat, too spicy, ugly building, old slippers, loud music, homely woman, fat man. Not, he thought, that one couldn’t discriminate but it had grown boring to get in a dither over rehearsing opinions about everything. To the degree that he had gotten rid of this propensity he felt a bit lighter and more fluid. The trouble was that life, the world around him, had begun to seem more fragile, almost evanescent.

All those years with Laura and the gradual deadness and then three years of true deadness. Then the lucky break which I am not interested in comprehending for fear still that it might disappear.

Ludlow was not fool enough to try to order a life already lived,

He was red-eyed and strained from his travel but for the first time in half a year he felt something akin to ease in his soul, as if the dawn shore breeze laved the surface no matter the currents and turmoil below.

Besides the old man said he disliked the smell of smoke or the sound of engines at sea and it was too late for him to develop an interest in the grotesque.

People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth.

The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being s...

Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.

(for there is little to tell of happiness—happiness is only itself, placid, emotionally dormant, a state adopted with a light heart but nagging brain)

But he was well past simple notions of vengeance and perhaps grief had coarsened and poisoned him to the point that he knew there was no evening the score with the world, because even if he could that would not re-create the woman whom the rain had beat against until her long black hair had swung against his legs.