Monday, April 30, 2012

A thing all but inexplicable in that landscape.

Can't stop watching Fringe. Here's a bucket of quotes thrown at you from All The Pretty Horses. It's lovely... lots of Spanish and cussing in it but a true cowboy tale. Fun. I find that the prose style is almost just like The Road -- you don't see speech marks, ever (so Faulkner) and McCarthy's got plentiful 'tree terminology' as  I like to coin it (didn't have half a clue what a nopal was before reading McCarthy, and seeing as Chrome underlines it in red, squiggly lines, it's not too familiar to the educated society either). Reading this makes me miss horse riding. Powerful animals, they are.

aisteach:

flowers by reinvented reality on Flickr.
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.
Love the quote above, true determination and valor.
They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
I can feel the darkness described above.
They were drowned, shot, kicked by horses. They perished in fires. They seemed to fear only dying in bed.
The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein convinced that it's all that good a thing.
Ayn Rand could fully support the quote above, ha!
They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle legged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the grey twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.
Quote above: disgust at fellow dirty humans... horses feel it too!
“You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?
Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.
...nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.
Absolutely love the one above.