Somewhere in all novels.
A novelist finds himself at that moment when
he must imbue a character and he hopes the reader
with a moment of recognition.
A moment when a man begins to understand something
about himself, about the people around him,
and about the world in which he lives.
This evening, I should like to read passages
from three novels.
The passages will be moments of recognition
in the novels on the part of the various characters.
The moment of recognition [CLEARS THROAT]
is not necessarily confined to age or to youth,
it comes as we all know at unexpected moments,
with unexpected unpremeditated degrees of intensity.
The first passage is from a novel
published almost 15 years ago.
A novel titled "Butcher's Crossing."
I shall have to say a few words about these novels
in order to give some context to these moments of recognition.
Butcher's crossing concerns itself
with the last of the great Buffalo hunts in the American
West.
The year is about 1873, the young man Will Andrews
has come from the East from Harvard from Cambridge
to the West.
He is imbued with most of the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau,
ideas that were particularly current
in the middle and later part of the 19th century in the East
and in all of America.
It is an idea about the benevolence of nature.
Nature is good and one achieves grace or salvation
by submission to nature.
Will Andrews with these ideas comes
to the West engages himself on an adventure in which he hopes
to discover something about himself and about the world,
in terms of these Amazonian ideas.
It is a Buffalo hunt in a High Mountain Valley in Colorado.
Four men make the journey, an old Buffalo Hunter
named Miller, a Skinner named Schneider,
a man named Charlie Hogue, who has only one hand,
and will Andrews himself.
The trip is financed in part by a hired trader named
MacDonald, who has promised to buy
the hides from this last hunt.
The men stay too late in the mountains, they are trapped,
and must endure hardships over a long winter that cannot escape
from the mountains.
They have killed some 20,000 Buffalo
and their skins will make them their fortunes they think.
After a winter of extreme hardship starvation,
they return in the spring and in the return one man
Schneider is killed crossing a swollen river.
They return to the city of Butcher's crossing
to discover that the market is dead,
the bottom has dropped out of the hide market,
and all of their misery, all of their trouble,
all of their toil has been in vain.
And MacDonald, the man who is behind--
financially behind the expedition
speaks to young Will Andrews after he has returned.