Like other great art Proulx's story feeds on itself and then slowly grows from itself. We need to go back time and time again to reread and see how it has changed since we left it, see how the shadows of sentences we noticed before have shifted, letting a brighter light fall on others.Oh, yes, absolutely, and thank you for doing that with this particular sentence of hers.
how Proulx shows the passage of twenty years, the gradual accumulation of the most essential moments in Jack's and Ennis' lives, it is amazing to find the core of it in a single sentence.Thank you again for this breakdown - it's so hard for me to stop and study this story, no matter how many times I've read it, because I get swept up in it, every time.
a two-page summary of Ennis' life in Riverton since, without Jack: the 'widening water' between him and Alma, the divorce, the Thanksgiving dinner.
a one-paragraph summary of Jack's life in Texas in the intervening years, without Ennis
then a long description of ... the final meeting.
This sentence is in the tradition of the epic writers - Homer, Virgil, Milton - who derived some of the quality of vastness of time and space with catalogs like this of heroes' names, of place names.The vastness of time she describes is, as you say, matched by the vastness of space. Not only "years on years" but miles on miles, and not just from one point on the map to another, but miles up those mountains, and down. The "headlong, irreversible fall" down Brokeback that in many ways was truly irreversible, but in other ways was reenacted every time on their trips that they came down from the mountains. That evocative list of names could be gone over for why she chose those, and not others, but regardless, each mountain was ascended in the joy of their beginning time together again, and each descended in a repetition of falling, irreversible loss.
The repetition, the rhythm is like a heart beat.