Author Topic: P.O. Boxes, Mailboxes and the No. 17  (Read 84360 times)

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: P.O. Boxes, Mailboxes and the No. 17
« Reply #220 on: May 31, 2013, 05:31:19 pm »
I have thought a lot about the 17 since an extended discussion on the DC forum about number symbolism, quite a while back.  And most of it I was not enthusiastic about because discussions of symbolism so often go flying away from particular characters in a particular story.  The only possible interest to me was, If Ennis was thinking about those two numbers as he put them up (whether or not he had had a choice in picking his address), what would they have meant to him? 

And I don't think he was in school long enough, or was interested enough in written words, to count the letters in Brokeback Mountain, for example.

But what he was always aware of was time, how long tilll he could get free long enough to meet with up with Jack again, how long had it been since he had seen Jack.  And that as he thought about their history together he had already counted up the years.  And I think as Ennis was putting up those numbers, he was saying again to himself, Just like the seventeen years I was meeting Jack in the mountains!  And I think the thought of that, the heft of all those years in spite of the brevity of each meeting, was a consolation to him.

I will include one other correspondence with the 17 which I am absolutely sure is PURE COINCIDENCE!  Which I just came up with on my own.  And I guess, shows how easy it can be to get numbers to perform tricks for you if you enjoy getting mystical about them.   I am going to quote again the sentence from the story I cited in the thread, 'Annie Proulx, classic writer':

Years on years they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback. 

To give a (to me, stunningly) concrete sense of the passage of time and of the epic dimension of their love, Annie lists 17 different mountain ranges and mountains in Wyoming, other than Brokeback Mountain itself, to which they never returned.

The 17 address is only in the movie, this list of names is only in the story.  But though I highly doubt that she counted them, I think Annie would have wanted to come up with a list that was roughly proportionate to the number of years they met, and, along the lines of what I said in the other thread, convey in a single sentence what few other writers would have trusted themselves to get across in under a page or two.

Gotta bump this wonderful old thread and say Happy Birthday, Andrew!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline chowhound

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Re: P.O. Boxes, Mailboxes and the No. 17
« Reply #221 on: June 02, 2013, 02:47:24 pm »
Gotta bump this wonderful old thread and say Happy Birthday, Andrew!

My, those were the days! Thanks for the bump, Front-Ranger.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2013, 02:57:45 pm by chowhound »

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: P.O. Boxes, Mailboxes and the No. 17
« Reply #222 on: June 03, 2013, 09:31:18 am »
You're welcome, chowie! I had a wonderful time catching up with Andrew at the AIDS walk here in Boston.
"chewing gum and duct tape"