One of the best-written novels of the century: Harrow by Joy Williams
Read the opening pages below
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On the vehicle that transported them was written: All creatures of whatever description, named or unnamed, are to be brought with us on the Great Journey. It was a perfect assurance becoming increasingly illegible. They believed themselves to be tourists. They wore sun hats and clutched sippy cups. Oh! they’d exclaim.
The rocks were pretty in a certain light.
The air was pleasant.
Was it not Socrates who doubted that a person was a human being at birth? He did so doubt. Those were the days when a human being was something to be aspired to.
They didn’t want to be told, shown maybe. Each felt the others to be as inanimate as dolls. They appreciated the paradox of being together in this but not really.
In the distance, something wheeled slowly in the air.
The beyond is in this life, a pretty exciting notion.
They paid scant attention to the scrimshawed vehicle that transported them. That was the skin outside them. It was lost on them really. The skein of ice on mud held patterns too.
Something fled in its shadow before them.
They had come from other places and the inevitable comparisons and confidences arose. They missed different things. They thought they’d see those things again here.
Where are the antelopes with their lovely masks…Where are the milty streams…
No one had brought a pen or a camera or a tin of paints.
I left my paints behind. Could hardly do this justice, I thought.
Yes. Look at these canyon walls.
When I first heard a cave breathe? I’ll tell you, I was scared. Something like that breathing. Inhale, exhale. The holes just scream.
Excuse me, we weren’t talking caves, we were talking canyons.
When my daddy had his cerebral hemorrhage he couldn’t talk no more but he could scream and sing.
That’s the left. When it affects the left.
Will this way go? That’s canyoneering jargon. When they say, I don’t know if this way will go, they mean…
I just got back from the desert, the American one of course, was visiting my nephew, my sister’s boy. He’s got himself an eagle now. He’ll kill anything to support that eagle.
How did he come by that?
Lottery. Now he’s got to support it which means feeding it. He shoots all manner of things for it but he’s got a connection at the grocery store who gives him stuff, too, mostly ham. Have you ever seen anything stiller than a ham? I’ve certainly not. You’d think an eagle wouldn’t care for anything that still.
What else did you do in the desert, Danielle?
Nothing stiller than a ham. That’s funny.
I don’t believe I’d care for the desert. You’d have to look at it, there’d be no choice. What else would there be to look at.
Well they’re putting in lots of solar grids now. They’re paving the desert floor with panels. Some poor devil whose job it is to have to look at those. They’re like the sheepherders of yore living in these peanut trailers, farming the sun and the wind. But the wind’s dying down out there, more and more no wind days a month. Isn’t that the darndest thing? It’s like the wind is saying I WILL NOT BE ENSLAVED.
Danielle, you are a riot today.
I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.
You are not our guide. You shouldn’t talk like you’re our guide.
I do like some of the guides better than others.
Some of them are nicer.
Death’s angels. They’re death’s angels, the nicer ones.
I’d like to go back to the little rooms now. Aren’t there still the little rooms where we can be?
Oh what have we done!! someone cried.
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