The Plains by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction classics
ISBN: 9781921921872
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

*

I slept from early evening until just before sunrise. I walked from my bed out onto the balcony and watched for the dawn over the plains. I was surprised to find that the last minutes before dawn, even in that country, still set me hoping for something other than the usual sun to appear. And on that of all mornings it seemed odd to be seeing myself as a character in a film and the streets and gardens below me, already portentous enough, as scenery of redoubled significance.

Before packing the books and papers on my desk, I marked on a folder the label: LAST THOUGHTS BEFORE BEGINNING THE SCRIPT PROPER. Then, on a clean sheet inside the folder, I wrote:

In all the weeks since I arrived here I have looked out only twice from my balcony. It would have been a simple matter to explore those plains that begin at the end of almost every street of the town. But could I have possessed them as I always wanted to possess a tract of plains?

Tonight I will stand within sight of her plains at last. The first scenes of The Interior begin to unfold at last. Now I have only to set my notes in order and write.

Yet an old doubt returns. Is there anywhere a plain that might be represented by a simple image? What words or what camera could reveal the plains within plains that I heard of so often these last weeks?

The view from my balcony—now, like some native plainsman myself, I see not solid land but a wavering haze that conceals a certain mansion in whose dim library a young woman stares at a picture of another young woman who sits over a book that sets her wondering about some plain now lost from sight.

In moods like this I suspect that every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote private plain. Can I describe to others even the few hundred miles that I crossed to reach this town? And yet, why attempt to show them as soil and grass when someone far away might see them even now as only a sign of whatever I am about to discover?

And by now her father will have told her that I am journeying towards her.

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