Quotations from “The Emptied Prairie”
*National Geographic* magazine, 2008 January
Charles Bowden
1945- American

A torn page from a textbook flutters in the breeze from a broken window in the Gascoyne school. The lesson reads: “Write the Other Word for CRY, AFTER, BAD, ALWAYS, GOOD-BY, LOST, and DARK.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Ghost towns stud North Dakota, and this empty house is just one bone in a giant skeleton of abandoned human desire.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Bjella explains the man walked the tracks each day for the two miles into town, did this year after year. One day he apparently did not hear the train and was killed. Bjella pauses, lets the tale float almost weightlessly in the air with its whisper of suicide. Self-destruction is not a forbidden subject in North Dakota, and people easily tick off cases in their neighborhoods. One woman came across a death book compiled in the early decades of the 20th century. She says the records show a remarkable number of people killed by trains.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He’s looked through his granddad’s diary from 1908 and notes, “a lot of the entries are about wind.”

“There were a lot of suicides,” he says.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He and his brothers and his late friend Oscar all served in World War II. Every winter he’d go by Oscar’s and say, “Well, do you remember how you were years ago at this time?” and Oscar would always answer, “Cold.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

You know I sit here alone for six months at a time, nobody comes to see me. I’ve outlived them all.
—Ragnar Slaaen, in “The Emptied Prairie” by Charles Bowden

“Knows Nothing”
Neil Lawful
1970- Irish

Standing there waiting
Waiting patiently
He had not got a care
People came and went
Some even began to stare
He was aware thinking
Sometimes reminiscing
Seen a young couple kissing
Trucks and cars
People and dogs
Oh why do they stare
At the man
Who doesn’t have a care
He will accept and
Maybe sometimes he too will stare
But after all he is
The man who knows
The man who knows anything
Knows he knows nothing.

Six-Word Story
Frank Miller
1957- American

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 1 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships. They had now a horror of the home service, with its harder conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages, good deckchairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes—would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of a boat on the coast of China—a soft thing; how this one had an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said—in their actions, in their looks, in their persons—could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a hundred pounds round-the-world tickets in their pockets. There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the ship-wrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“This Be The Verse”
Philip Larkin
1922-1985 English

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Six-Word Story
James P. Blaylock
1950- American

Nevertheless, he tried a third time.