There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition.

"The gist of the story is that when all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time."

I started listening to the audiobook for Charles Frazier's 13 Moons again and while I know that these "great man" bare knuckle wilderness trope stories are suspect, it really gets me up in a lather about all my old favorites: masculinity, wildness, violence, and survival. The story opens with the main character as an old man, reading about Lancelot in The Knight of the Cart. Gets me every time. I'm such a sucker for it.

I've often read things about women with strong father figures, and how that shapes their relationship with and to men their whole lives. Tina Fey posits that it leads for a lot of high expectations. I've wondered how my own inclinations factor that out. My father is very legendary in his right, the kind of man who, the year I was born, rode around Marajo in Brazil with nothing but a horse, a machete, and a whip, wrangling water buffalo in the jungle and killing the snakes the vaqueiros wouldn't touch. I probably like these frontier stories like 13 Moons because of some element there that I connect to and see as familiar and important.

That said, the quote above and the surrounding text really reminded me of something I think I'd forgotten this morning. Yearning is important. If you can't conjure up some fire, what is there?