Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

He cared for souls and bodies and believed that civil authorities had the equipment to conduct their business without his aid.

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

You see it happening from grade schools to retirement communities: the certainly accidental cohesion of two souls and bodies, often resulting in terror and unhappiness because so much previously unknown energy is released.

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.

The heart wants life so much and the brain is shocked at the approach of death. The soldier always thinks it will be someone else, the man before or behind him, or hopefully no one he knows will ever die.

He felt the ache of a man who had followed his passion far into the nether reaches of human activity with the full understanding that a return was improbable.

The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.

After twenty years of studying them I am no longer able to read newspapers. Why? It’s because they no longer reflect the world I perceive. I will have to go along with the way I see it even if wrong. And if they are right, it lacks interest.

Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father’s death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.

Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed,

Why should I want to know the strange when I am ignorant of the familiar.

Anyone knew that when you had to be called it was usually for something unpleasant.

People that tripped most often and fatally did so out of greed, not understanding that it was a limited though convoluted game.

People diminish themselves so horribly by letting themselves get pushed around by nitwits, whether by the government or the thousand varieties of criminals.

He had reached the age where his habitually romantic frame of mind had turned to the ironies; the past had become a dense puddle out of which he could draw no conclusions.

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.

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.

Oddly, and like many men compelled to adventure with no interest in the notion of adventure but only a restlessness of the body and spirit, Tristan did not see anything particularly extraordinary about his past seven years.

(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)

Two deaths in fourteen years of loved ones are not all that uncommon except to the mourner who has lost all sense of common and uncommon and is buried in the thoughts of things left out and how it might have been.