I realized that I don't really like book reviews that re-hash the plot. I'd rather read about how a book moved a reader or why it is so gripping or interesting, so that's what I'm going to do here after just a sentence or two of summarizing.
"Dances With Wolves" is about a man posted at a deserted US Army fort on the frontier in 1863. Moreover, it's about the man's transformation while living among his Comanche neighbors.
Probably the movie trailer can give a better synopsis than I can if you want to check it out...
While reading, I realized that I envy Lieutenant Dunbar. He experienced a different culture, a different world even. He was accepted by the people. He experience both the simple beauty (dances and tipi villiage life) and harsh reality (scalping a wagon-full of whites that killed buffalo for their fur and left the rest to rot) of Comanche life.
It's the newess, the ultimate foreignness that gets me about Native American stories. I love learning about different perspectives. I'm also nostalgic for simpler times and the beauty of nature. It makes me sad to think about what was lost here in our country, but then doesn't it most people? I'm grappling to explain my feelings. I guess basically I'm in awe of something so radically different from what I know.
"Dances With Wolves" isn't preachy about the plight of the Indians. No, I didn't like the book for any feelings of remorse or melancholy it stirred about that. In fact, there were many lines in the book that I loved just for what they say about life. By the end of the book I had dog-eared 10 or so pages. In one passage the author, Micheal Blake, explains how Lieutenant Dunbar releases himself from the grip of the clock. I think this was his first step in freeing himself from the conventions of white society.
Letting go of time is amazing. I know because when I go to my family's cabin in Canada measured minutes and hours cease to exist for me. Remembering this feeling inspired me to post a poem I wrote about a day on Green Lake.
"He woke with the sensuous afterglow of having surrendered completely, in this case to a nap...Shadows were creeping across the hut's doorway, and curious about how long he had slept, Dunbar pulled out the simple, old pocket watch that had been his father's. When he brought it to his face, he saw that it had stopped. For a moment he considered trying to set an approximate time, but instead he...hung the heirloom on a convenient hook a couple feet above the bed. He stared at the numbers on the watch's face, thinking how much more efficient it would be to work when a person felt like it, to eat when a person was hungry, to sleep when a person was sleepy. How it will be to live without time for a while, he thought."
What slaves we are to clocks. Throughout the course of my day I must be more concerned with the time than any other one thing. How nice to let it go, once in a while, especially when reading a a good book.
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