Impressions of the West: D.H. Lawrence

Credit: texasswimming.blogspot.com

LeConte Stewart, Private Collection

"In a cold like this, the stars snap like distant coyotes, beyond the moon. And you'll see the shadow of actual coyotes, going across the alfalfa field. And the pine trees make little noises, sudden and stealthy, as if they were walking about. And the place heaves with ghosts. That place, the ranch, heaves with ghosts. But when one has got used to one's own home-ghosts, be they never so many, and so potent, they are like one's own family, but nearer than the blood. It is the ghosts one misses most, the ghosts there, of the Rocky Mountains, that never go beyond the timber and that linger, like the animals, round the water-spring. I know them, they know me: we go well together. But they reproach me for going away. They are resentful too."

From D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 1927        

D.H. Lawrence Ranch. Credit: 343.com

Perhaps the snow is in tufts on the greasewood bushes. Perhaps the blue jay falls in a blue metallic cloud out of the pine trees in front of the house, at dawn, in the terrific cold, when the dangerous light comes watchful over the mountains, and touches the desert far-off, far-off, beyond the Rio Grande.

Mornings in Mexico by D.H. Lawrence. First published 1927. Credit: ebay.com

Impressions of the West: Thomas Pynchon

(Note: For a long while we had a photo at the beginning of this post that had been identified on several sites as Thomas Pynchon. However, a reader recently alerted us to the fact that the photo probably was not of Thomas Pynchon. Consequently, we've removed it. If anyone has a photo that has been verified as being of Pynchon, who is well-known for his desire for privacy, please contact us. Thank you.)

Grand Canyon, Thomas Moran. Credit: PaintingHere.com

‘This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19^th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. … of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?”

Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 214.      

Sunset in Yosemite Valley, Albert Bierstadt. Credit: Artchive.com

After the Storm, Gilbert Munger. Credit: The Paintings of Gilbert Munger (Michael D. Schroeder)

Sunset at Black Rock, Paul Fjellboe. Credit: The Springville Museum of Art

Moonrise in the Canyon, Moab, Utah, Birger Sandzen. Credit: Springville Museum of Art

Wingate Cliffs, Ed Mell. Credit: Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts

Impressions of the West: Walt Whitman

Photo couertesy of pbs.org

Walt Whitman originally wrote ‘Passage to India’ in 1870, and first published it in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. There are many possible readings of the poem – one is about the flight of the soul toward transcendent wisdom:

I, turning, call to thee, O soul, thou actual Me, 
And lo! thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, 
And fillest, swellest full, the vastnesses of Space.

But on his way toward ‘all the seas of God,’ Whitman also follows a down-to-earth path, one that takes him into the territory of the American West, newly opened by the transcontinental railroad:

I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier; 
I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers; 
I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle, 
I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world; 
I cross the Laramie plains—I note the rocks in grotesque shapes—the buttes; 
I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions—the barren, colorless, sage-deserts; 
I see in glimpses afar, or towering immediately above me, the great mountains—I see the
Wind River and the Wahsatch mountains; 
I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest—I pass the Promontory—I ascend the Nevadas; 
I scan the noble Elk mountain, and wind around its base; 
I see the Humboldt range—I thread the valley and cross the river, 
I see the clear waters of Lake Tahoe—I see forests of majestic pines,
Or, crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows; 
Marking through these, and after all, in duplicate slender lines, 
Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel, 
Tying the Eastern to the Western sea, 
The road between Europe and Asia.

Photo courtesy of nyu.edu