Mar 18, 2023
3 woodcock seen next property over from me. 10 inches of snow in most places. SE Canada
I am pretty sure I heard them Sunday night there.
I couldn’t figure it out quick.
Travel Books
Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop* is lost to me, though I consider it one of my favorite books. I have a sense that it involves a young priest rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church as New Mexico is flooded by settlers, and I also know that—spoiler alert!—he dies at the end. But what remain indelible are two oddly mathematical vistas. In the novel’s opening pages, a man winds his way through an endless landscape of conical red hills, so alike that “he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare.” Later, the bishop rides through the country and notices that the world is like a giant mirror: “Every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it.”
I’ve never been to New Mexico, but I’m half-convinced I have by the clarity of these mental images. That is the power of place in literature, and the closest that prose comes to a magic trick: The best writers can transport you to an utterly different time and location and convince you that you can see it.
I’ve never been to New Mexico, but I’m half-convinced I have by the clarity of these mental images.
Maybe Steve knows of it.
By Norman Maclean
This also made the cut which I didn’t expect.
A Dog Missile
She Is Bagheera. Shortlist, Motion. “The first obstacle of the course is the one I prefer most of all, because this is where it all begins. It is where the bond between human and dog is expressed in such a clear way, by such a magnetic look; where you can see the power of the dog’s muscles contracting and releasing energy at the handler’s every nod. Taken during a dog agility competition in Italy.”
