Friends,
Is there a single English word that means "there is something I would like to know but I am too embarrassed to ask, because asking would reveal a shameful void in my knowledge?"
Other than dumb-ass?
I dunno, maybe that's good enough.
People have been quoting Annie Proulx ever since they encountered Brokeback Mountain. Phrases, sentences... even whole paragraphs, such as the Dozy Embrace... take on meanings so vital, so deep, so personal, it is a phenomenon. Whose heart doesn't swell with the promise of her two simple words, "You bet"...
But another one of her phrases pierced my heart. I sense it has a literary significance that I simply don't know, maybe Biblical, maybe historical, maybe cinematic. I just don't know, but I would love to know. It is
The huge sadness of the northern plains rolled down on him.
She paints the plains as anthropomorphic, of course, but Annie's not flaky; she has good reasons in mind, I'm sure. Still I wonder, why might those metaphoric plains be sad?
Maybe because...
they witnessed the monstrous suppression of the Lakota
they witnessed Custer's monstrous ego and its destruction of his cavalry
they witnessed Wounded Knee
they witnessed the inundation of railroads and immigrants
they witnessed the annihilation of the buffalo
they witnessed the droughts, locusts and depression that befell
the early settlers, helpless before nature's forces and men's greed
they witnessed the rape of the land for coal, oil, gas
Are those plains sensitive to human grief, even individual grief?
Maybe Annie has some grander concept in mind; maybe she thinks those things are merely trivial episodes played out on a sedimentary landscape formed by the upwelling of the Rocky Mountains and the last glaciers.
So I ask for your opinion: Why does Annie feel the northern plains are hugely sad?
~~~fia