The Plains Gerald Murnane Quotes

How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?

...our joys and pleasures are only a compromise between our wants and our circumstances.

There must have been many a man who knew, without leaving his own narrow district of the plains, that his heart enclosed every land he could have travelled to;

Every plainsman knows he has to find his place. The man who stays in his native district wishes he had arrived there after a long journey. And the man who travels begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey. I've spent my life trying to see my own place as a journey I never made.

no film could show more than those sights that a man's eyes rested on when he had given up the effort to observe.

They supposed that their tinted papers showed something of what a man saw apart from himself--something they called the visible world. But they had never considered where that world must lie. They fondled their scraps of paper and admired the stains and blotches seemingly fixed there. But did they know that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness--an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the visible.

A man can know his place and yet never try to reach it.

I can only say that I sense about each of them a quiet dedication to proving that the plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.

Readers and audiences on the plains were seldom impressed by outbursts of emotion or violent conflicts or sudden calamities. They supposed that the artists who presented such things had been beguiled by the noises of crowds or the profusions of shapes and surfaces in the foreshortened landscapes of the world beyond the plains. The plainsman’s heroes, in life and in art, were such as the man who went home every afternoon for thirty years to an unexceptional house with neat lawns and listless shrubs and sat late into the night deciding on the route of a journey that he might have followed for thirty years only to arrive at the place where he sat—or the man who would never take even the one road that led away from his isolated farmhouse for fear that he would not recognise the place if he saw it from the distant vantage points that others used.

For the thinkers of that school disregard the question whether a possibility, once entertained, may seem one day to correspond to some meagre arrangement of events. They give all their attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and has been considered, perhaps even by a few plainsmen, to represent the extinction of all possibilities.

The Living is Easy; Gerald Murnane, The Plains; Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time. I walk to the bookstore

The Living is Easy; Gerald Murnane, The Plains; Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time. I walk to the bookstore closest to the coffee shop, my favorite