She's never read a classic

Perhaps this country is a place built up in our minds as beautiful and worth being protected by men and women who believe in and live by the rule of law, but is now populated by people who have fallen into lazy, soft, pornographic patterns of thought and behaviors, a country in which one of its new, of-the-moment, critically acclaimed novelist's can say, defiantly and proudly, "I've never read a classic."

I, for one, don't quite know what to do with this bit of information, other than to say that such a statement both repels me and makes me want to read this new novelist, a woman by the way, me of all people, a reader who for the past five years or so has read nothing but classics, Rabelais at present, "The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel," finding inspiration there as a writer and solace as a citizen.

What this dinosauric reader most admires about "G & P", the saga of two giants, a father and his son, is how much invoking of the past there is in it, mostly through the invocation of ancient texts and the writers of them, and how thoroughly Rabelais (1494-1553), a serious man, a monk and physician, makes such fun of it all. To read Rabelais is to understand that the past is as monstrous as the present, and the present will someday be read as a smaller-than-humanly-thought-possible footnote of the future.

Meantime, here in Wyoming for a while, out walking in the beautiful wilderness, I keep my eyes and ears open for the sudden freaky summer thunder and lightning storms that can change everything for the worse in a minute or two, and for rattlesnakes, having killed one the other day, chopping its head off with a shovel. My son took an axe to the rattle, presenting it to his 8-year old son who was thrilled.

 Big wonderful Wyoming, where everything can change in a flash and a dinosauric reader has the freedom to read the classics.