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Journal of a Prairie Year QUOTES

Journal of a Prairie Year QUOTES

1 " The prairie is one of those plainly visible things that you can’t photograph. No camera lens can take in a big enough piece of it. The prairie landscape embraces the whole of the sky. Any undistorted image is too flat to represent the impression of immersion that is central to being on the prairie. The experience is a kind of baptism. "

― Paul Gruchow , Journal of a Prairie Year

2 " The city loomed out of the landscape like a fortress. I saw what walls we build against the prairie, how timidly we huddle together, how effectively we close off its vastness of space and make for ourselves another space of more human proportions.

Nearly every inch of land [along my 600 mile drive] had been painstakingly turn over, furrow by furrow. It seemed some unknowable comment on the human spirit that we should, despite our walls, have turned ourselves into an army of Lady Macbeths, rubbing out so relentlessly such a terrible space. "

― Paul Gruchow , Journal of a Prairie Year

3 " We are helpless as babies about this. Whatever we can see and do not understand and must acknowledge, we make over in our own image. The moon, the sea, the prairie — all present insurmountable barriers of distance. We cross them on the craft of egocentricity. We make the moon the marker of time and the dwelling place of desire; the sea the mirror, the bosom; the prairie the breadbasket. "

― Paul Gruchow , Journal of a Prairie Year

4 " To live on the prairie is to daydream. It is the only conceivable response to such immensity. It is when we are smallest that our daydreams come quickest. "

― Paul Gruchow , Journal of a Prairie Year