This character in the book reminded me of Andre the Giant's character in Princess Bride. I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it did.
Kelly
Kelly
The Rhyming Rug Merchant
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I can't remember if that reminded me of the same thing or not, but I know that William Goldman, author of Princess Bride, and sK are friends.
Saw this quote: "...drinking in a sight that only a very few American children of his time had ever seen - huge empty tracts of land under a blue sky of dizzying width and breadth..." This is written of Jack in the Territories. I don't know which writer wrote it, but it's not accurate. I guess it depends on how you define "very few," but the fact is millions of American children have seen this and tens of thousands see it on a regular basis. I wonder sometimes if anyone can grasp how amazingly HUGE the United States is. It has massive, enormous, mind-boggleingly large empty spaces. And out here in the west they are everywhere. I grew up seeing this kind of thing all the time. One reason I moved back here to Idaho is because I always felt pinned in to tight spaces in Washington (Cascade Mountains and fir trees blocking line of sight everywhere), Louisiana (Swamp trees blocking the view) and Massachusetts (buildings, where I lived, blocking sight). I'm used to a BIG Sky, and I've always felt narrowed in and squeezed in where I didn't have it. I chose the lot we built on for its view. I can see the Owyhee Mountains to the south (about 70 miles), the foothills of the Blues to the West (about the same) and the Sawtooths to the North (about 40 miles), all from my yard. The view to the South is truly spectacular, though there are farms. But you don't have to go far to have wide open views in all directions. It's a thing of beauty, and wide open and empty. One reason I've always loved deserts more than forests.
Kelly
Kelly
...the portion of that quote you seem to be missing is "of his time".....
I didn't mention it specifically in my comments, but I was taking it into account. His fictional age is within a few years of my actual age. And I grew up seeing those wide open vistas routinely. As do many, many Americans. When I was in law school, there was a bar and grill in Harvard Square that had a print on the wall which showed a distorted map of the US in which Harvard and the Boston area are shown reasonably closely and, the further away you got from it, the less detail and area were shown, so that it looked like Cambridge was the only thing worth noticing in the US. It is a funny little self-jab by people whose lives are centered there. And that's as it should be. We only know what we see and experience as to our grasp of things. But it also tells a truth that a lot of people forget, that there is much, much more to know than we can possibly know, or even realize we don't know. People who live in crowded urban areas are very concerned with overpopulation. People who live in southern Idaho (or Utah, Arizona, eastern Oregon, etc.), not so much. We see massive, enormous, vision-filling, open vistas all the time.
Kelly