I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human DaysMacLane, Mary
General
I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days
MacLane, Mary
MacLane, Mary, 1881-1929; Montana -- Biography; Women authors, American -- Biography
Close at the east edge of this Butte is a barren ridge of Rockies
that is sudden and big and breathing-looking, barbarously personal,
touched with varying gifted color-moods and glowering morose
color-passions: at the south the snow-topped Highlands lie long faëry
solitary miles away, caressed at their summits by thin soft sun-rings
and sun-vapors of salmon and sea-green and turquoise and mauve: at
the west a gray-shadowed desert burns red-gold in the setting sun
and sleeps in pearl-and-ashen stillness under midnight stars: at the
north smaller spurs of the range break into foothills and bluffs and
gulches, restful wastes of lonely stones and blurred radiances of
tawny sand: on top of all the rarefied air of these plateau heights
refracts the light into hot dazzling prisms at any vagrant flash of
sun on a trailing storm-fringe. This Butte is capriciously decorated
with sweet brilliant metallic orgies of color at any time, all times,
as if by whims of pagan gods lightly drunk and lightly mad.
St. Paul-Minnesota looks a greenlier-prettier town: the Arizona Cañon
looks vastly more fearfully beautiful: Wichita-Kansas probably looks
more a regular town: Akron-Ohio doubtless looks more Americanly
reassuring: Rome-Italy must have a more ‘settled’ look: New York is
much larger and much brighter-looking.
Only this Butte looks deeply and exactly like Butte-Montana.
Its insistent charm is that it goes on strongly resembling itself
year after year.
There is love in me for this Butte.
I am profoundly lonely in it: my life-tissues are long-familiar with
the feel of it: its mournful beauty has entered like thin punishing
iron into my Soul: and my love for it is made of those things. For no
_reason_ I feel love for this Butte.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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