If you’ve ever talked to me about books at all and what they mean to me; about saying “fuck you” to everything called literary in the centers of power and deliberately moving elsewhere; or about why I write the kind of characters I do; or, come to think, about my own character, about that isolated and melancholy sense of being left behind that comes of living in a world that never did seem to fit right; about growing up in the kind of rural lifestyle that was already anachronistic when I was living it, and left me with a ghost sense of authenticity that, now gone, makes me distrust the idea of authenticity altogether; hell, about country music; or about the huge importance of walking outside, preferable alone; about the spiritual worth of a certain kind of hedonism, not to mention of deliberately pushing yourself to the fringes; of rejecting everything that you can’t carry; of refusing as much judgment from your life as you can possibly handle for a kind of radical humanism based on the appetites and John Bradford’s old saw, “There but for the grace of God go I”; of the necessity of lonesomeness as well as joy, because, like Melville says “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces”; of bourbon and heavy reading and fucking in the great outdoors; and all the BIG romantic nonsense I’ll talk about after one too many cups of wine or coffee, well, then you’ve probably heard me quote Big Jim Harrison.

And especially this from his memoir Off to the Side:

The trouble is that over fifty years later this life still lives within me and has presented unpleasant difficulties, including claustrophobia that is occasionally acute. It isn’t the hokum Daniel Boone-Robert Frost, city-country, civilization-wilderness thing, which is far too simple for actual humans, though it occurs regularly in our mythology, especially the aspects of the “mythos” that arise in television and movies. And low-rent fiction. You know, the guy has a pooch, a pet bear, says “darn it” a lot and can’t “abide womenfolk.” I mean something closer to the Portuguese notion of saudade, a person or place or sense of life irretrievably lost; a shadow of your own making that follows you, and though often forgotten can at any moment give rise to heartache, an obtuse sentimentality, a sharp anger that you are not located where you wish to be, an irrational and childish melancholy that you have cheated yourself of being married to a life essence that you have never been able to quite gather to yourself.