harrison

[Jochen Stremmel]

as some of you may have recognized I'm reading Jim Harrison at the moment
and found something re Henry Adams's Education there:

Even that arch-enemy of the Natives, General Philip Sheridan, admitted that
"a reservation is a worthless piece of land surrounded by scoundrels." Very
late in his life my father was delighted with Henry Adams's radically low
opinion of the "Western movement" while I found the book (The Education of
HA) too long on the ironies and short on the primary colors that life can
offer to those who are energetically curious.

Two pages later I found a passage worth quoting for other reasons:

With age one loses all sense of the supposed inevitability of art and life.
Vivid moments are no longer strung together by imagined fate. The sense of
proportion in good and bad experience loses its appeal. Bad is bad and you
let it go. Good you cherish as it whizzes by. Mental struggles become lucid
and muted with particular visual images attached to them, somewhat
irrationally or beyond ordinary logic. Money shrinks to money. Fear is
always recognizable rather than generalized. It is sharp and its aim is
very good indeed. If there is wisdom as such, it is boiled down by fatigue.
On the very rare occasion that I check out an old notebook as I am doing
now, the sweat rises in my hair roots and I wonder, What is this fool going
to do next?

JH, The Road Home, 1998, p. 9, 11