Whatever else prairie is—grass, sky, wind—
it is most of all a paradigm of infinity,
a clearing full of many things except boundaries,
and its power comes from its apparent limitlessness;
there is no such thing as a small prairie
any more than there is a little ocean,
and the consequence of both is this challenge:
try to take yourself seriously out here,
you bipedal plodder, you complacent cartoon.
William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of the redwing blackbirds.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting at every post.
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in weeds,
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
Ted Kooser
But, for a little while, this is the place for us —
a good place too —
a place of good omen, a place of beginning things —
and of ending things I never thought would end.
Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest.
There was something athletic about it.
You flexed your face into a smile
and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.
Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore
Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—
are not all-important, not at the center of the world.
That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret,
offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains
or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.
Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information
Have a heart that never hardens,
and a temper that never tires,
and a touch that never hurts.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Anyone can be a barbarian;
it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
Leonard Woolf, Barbarians Within and Without