The Solace of Open Spaces

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Though I definitely won't argue with the handful of reviews that mentioned this collection of essays is more about cowboys than open spaces, because parts of it definitely felt like that to me, too. The author relates her responses to the land, tying these reactions to emotional transformations she experienced as she learned the territory and its ways. Ehrlich debuted in 1985 with The Solace of Open Spaces, a collection of essays on rural life in Wyoming.

What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us. We understand that not everyone can donate right now, but if you can afford to contribute, we promise it will be put to good use. Ehrlich loves the huge skies and mountains of Wyoming, and celebrates the harsh landscapes, where summers are arid and baking hot, and winter is almost as cold as the Arctic.The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

We build and maintain all our own systems, but we don’t charge for access, sell user information, or run ads. I didn't find this as strong as her later work, This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, but it was interesting, engaging, and poetic. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. The historic and continuing brutality of the ranchers towards anyone who gets in their way, their lack of respect for public lands, their overgrazing to fit as much cattle as possible on the land regardless of what it will do to man, beast or the land itself, made it hard to want to read more. Completing her picture are the Native Americans, whom she portrays respectfully and with an ironic appreciation for incongruity, as they both recover and reinvent a lost heritage.

The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Erlich is a collection of a dozen loosely connected chapters about the author’s experiences living and working amid Wyoming’s vast open spaces. We are told in the preface that the author wrote what is collected here in this volume from 1979 – 1984.

I imagine climate change, mining, and young people seeking to move away from this difficult life, may have lead to significant changes in the lifestyle Ehrlich is describing, but the introduction doesn't cover this. The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. When the water does come, it floods through the state as if the peaks were silver pitchers tipped forward by mistake. Reading her books, however, is very much like seeing a film, for her filmmaker's eye and awareness of nuance and gesture is evident in the way she chooses her words. The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation.She lived there for many years, living and working on ranches, and this book is a collection of essays describing her time there and the feeling of living there. The time scale of its transience so far exceeds our human one that our unconditional dependence on its life-giving properties feels oddly like an indiscretion about which we’d rather forget.

For all of those reasons, I'm both proud of myself for powering through this one and disappointed I didn't trust my gut enough to put it aside early on. The arid, windblown landscapes barren of trees, mantled in dust and sagebrush is the backdrop for that which we read. Il Wyoming è la terra della salvia, scrive Greta Ehrilch, e io non lo immaginavo, ma anche del vento, della neve, del freddo che ti si insinua nelle ossa e ti anestetizza la mente, e qui è rispondente al mio immaginario. La scrittura è molto evocativa, intensa, a tratti vivida, ma in alcuni punti un po' troppo poco (per i miei gusti) lineare, soprattutto quando è incentrata sulle persone. com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books.

We live amid and inside emblems of the touching longing for permanence that both defines us and defies reality: our houses, these haikus of brick and hope so easily discomposed by a tremor of the earth or a tempest of the sky; our homes, so easily hollowed by death or indifference; our bodies, these boarding houses for stardust. A compensare la solennità di questo paesaggio lunare, l’aurora boreale danza sopra i Big Horn irradiando il suo pallore invernale nel cielo notturno e così ci rammenta che, mentre tutti fanno ritorno ai loro nidi e alle loro tane, la natura continua a dar sfogo all’irrefrenabile, orgasmica energia che la anima. Questa lettura, per esempio, mi ha portata alla visione del film “Heaven’s Gate” di Michael Cimino dopo un accenno alla ”guerra di Johnson County, che non fu una semplice sparatoria fra buoni e cattivi bensì una vera e propria lotta di classe fra la borghesia terriera e i colonie abbienti, la sconcertante riprova del fatto che dopotutto l’Ovest non fosse il santuario di egualitarismo che ripensava” e proseguirà, probabilmente, con i racconti del Wyoming di Annie Proulx. A person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place.