06-28-25 - june interim:

the past month went quick, a non-stop onslaught of being a student again and working somewhere new, readjusting how i devote my daily energies. so there's been no writing here, little reading, and a directionless fog of visual media i've failed at trying to remember - e.g., i watched seasons 2-3 of True Detective, a couple animes (e.g., Elfen Lied), there were miscellaneous late night rewatches (e.g., of Tenet or After Hours), and so on. the whole period is a blur, though.

it was only this last, most recent week that i could think somewhat clearly, having acclimated to my new normal maybe. thus i could read Butcher's Crossing, a book i've incidentally failed to look at despite having owned a copy now for several years. the experience of getting through it felt like waking up, a slowburn western to launch me into reading regularly once again.

Butcher's reminded me a lot of Conrad's The Shadow Line, both bildungsromans, both featuring protagonists that mature per encounters with nature, both kind of cynical and downbeat. i probably enjoyed Butcher's more since it's a longer, more fleshed out read and also because its setting is one i have some experience with - Kansas to Colorado, echoes of Boston, and so on.

reading through Butcher's had me thinking of several solo trips that i had taken over the course of one year quite some time ago. i think i went on this barrage of travel to scratch an itch that originated from my teenage readings of On the Road, wanting to see the country, to have strange encounters, to get wasted - all to, i guess, learn something about myself and the prospective course my life might take. in retrospect, it all seems corny and naive. but i was young.

i include some excerpts that seem crucial below:

During the last hour of the stand he came to see Miller as a mechanism, an automaton, moved by the moving herd; and he came to see Miller's destruction of the buffalo, not as a lust for blood or a lust for the hides or a lust for what the hides would bring, or even at last the blind lust of fury that toiled darkly within him - he came to see the destruction as a cold, mindless response to the life in which Miller had immersed himself. And he looked upon himself crawling dumbly after Miller upon the flat bed of the valley, picking up the empty cartridges that he spent, tugging the water keg, husbanding the rifle, cleaning it, offering it to Miller when he needed it - he looked upon himself, and did not know who he was, or where he went (137).

Why had he run away? From where had come that deadness inside him that made him know he must run away? He remembered the sickness in the pit of his stomach, the revulsion that had followed hard upon the vital rush of his blood as he had seen her stand naked and swaying slowly, as if suspended by his own desire, before him (151).

"Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you - that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old (250).

Gradually he came to look upon his frequent and desperate unions with Francine as if they were performed by someone else. As if from a distance, sightlessly, he observed himself and his sensations as he fulfilled his needs upon a body to which, meaninglessly, he attached a name. Sometimes, lying beside Francine, he looked down the pale length of his own body as if it had nothing to do with himself; he touched his chest, where fine hair like down curled sparsely on the white flesh, and wondered at the sensation of his hand brushing lightly above his skin. Beside him, at these moments, Francine seemed hardly to have any relation to him; she was a presence which assuaged a need in him that he barely knew he had, until the need was met. Sometimes, heavy upon her and lost in the darkness of his passion, he was surprised to find within himself qualities of sensation of which he had been unaware; and when he opened his eyes, meeting the eyes of Francine open and wide and unfathomable below him, again he was almost surprised that she was there. Afterward, he remembered the look in her eyes and wondered what she was thinking, what she was feeling, in the close moments of their passion (257).

the novel steeps the reader in disillusionment. we follow Andrews as he seeks out an Emersonian ideal in the west and in men like Miller, and we observe as Andrews realizes that this striving toward idyllic signposts of self-realization, nature, and whatnot provides few answers. per the above, Andrews comes to see that he hardly knows himself or what drives him. the process our protagonist undergoes, in tandem with the slaying of the buffalo and the encompassing history of westward expansion, are examined critically by Williams. the novel has Andrews's maturation mirror that of the country's: it's almost senseless in its violence, hurtling toward an unclear endpoint based on idealized premises.

the prose of Butcher and the few other Williams texts I've read make the writing a pleasure to read. i'm grateful it spurred me out of my funk. hopefully it sticks.