why we love mandarin
Saturday 5 April 2008 | 4 cookies in the jar
Eustace told me that people tended to romanticize his lifestyle. Because when people first ask him what he does for a living, he invariably replies, “I live in the woods.” Then people get all dreamy and say, “Ah! The woods! The woods! I love the woods!” as if Eustace spends his days sipping the dew off clover blossoms. But that’s not what living in the woods means to 
Eustace Conway.
Some years ago, for instance, out hunting for his winter deer, he came upon a gorgeous eight-point buck grazing through the brush. He shot. The buck went down. Not knowing if he had killed the animal, he waited and waited to see whether it would struggle up from where it had fallen and try to run. There was no movement. Slowly, quietly, Eustace crept toward the spot where the animal had gone down and found the massive buck, lying on its side, breathing a thin, red vapor of blood through its nose. The animal’s eyes were moving; it was alive.
“Get up, brother!” Eustace shouted. “Get up and I’ll finish you off!”
The animal didn’t move. Eustace hated to see it lying there, alive and injured, but he also hated to blow off its beautiful head at point-blank range, so he took his knife from his belt and stabbed into the buck’s jugular vein. Up came the buck, very much alive, whipping its rack of antlers. Eustace clung to the antlers, still holding his knife, and the two began a wrestling match, thrashing through the brush, rolling down the hill, the buck lunging, Eustace trying to deflect its heavy antlers into trees and rocks. Finally, he let go with one hand and sliced his knife completely across the buck’s neck, gashing open veins, arteries, and windpipe. But the buck kept fighting, until Eustace ground its face into the dirt, kneeling on its head and suffocating the dying creature. And then he plunged his hands into the animal’s neck and smeared the blood all over his own face, weeping and laughing and offering up an ecstatic prayer of thanksgiving to the universe for the magnificent phenomenon of this creature who had so valiantly sacrificed its life to sustain his own.
That’s what living in the woods means to Eustace Conway.
(from The Last American Man, by Elizabeth Gilbert)
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And this is on page TWELVE. And by page three I was already COMPLETELY HOOKED. Because Mandarin knows me ALL TOO WELL.
4 cookies in the jar
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Darling! I love that you posted this and that you love the book which I just knew would be irresistible for you. [Bouncing up and down] And oh please post the bit where Eustace is in New York and explains to the people how he made his shirt…
Happy Batday! When I drew them they were going the other way! But I bet wrote on the back upside down.
Love love love!
and I must credit the Former Spouse with the discovery of the book.
When you finish the semester I send The Heart of the World. I would send it now, but it’s much longer than The Last American Man and it features all kinds of leeches and crazy nuns and Chinese border patrols!
Just finished this book, and besides the conviction that I ought to probably haul my sons off to the woods for the summer so that they may become Men, there are little synchronicities. I have gone years without wondering about frontiers and then a friend at lunch explains that the appeal of Law and Order is that the system of “the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders” is about the boundary between civilization and lawlessness—that the disappearance of an American frontier has opened us to an internal version of this boundary of civilization, and what happens there, a theory I find elegant and beautiful, that fits well with the reading of Lord of the Flies I am doing with my older sons. And then pick up Gilbert where she talks about the elimination of the American frontier and how it used to be that men would go out to the fringes of civilization and become Men (not to mention how Eustace needs a woman with the unusual combination of strength and submission!) Which has an eerie resonance with the Slate story titled “Envirogeddon” about how there’s this environmentalist fantasy about the end of civilization that has this subtheme of returning to traditional gender roles—men as hunters and providers, women as helpmates. And as the Unreliable Narrator is getting ready to teach a class on Feminist Post-Apocalyptic Literature I want to know what she thinks about the apocalypse as a sort of frontier, about how people put these ideas of what gender roles are natural and which are the result of civilization onto their fantasies of the frontier.
Editor: Oooh oooh oooh! [editor momentarily incoherent with insomniac intellectual excitement]
So, my planned title for tomorrow’s post? Was already: “Why I Broke Up With Eustace Conway.” !!!
Now I’d better take my sleepy meds so I can try to live up to it. You, my dear, are too cool for (almost) words.