Legends of the Fall

“He was a hard man to beat now; he was on his way. Somebody had stolen his soul and he meant to have it back.”

Cochran feels that Miryea is a part of him that has been stolen. Very subtly, Harrison illustrates how Cochran and Tibey both see Miryea as a possession. Losing her, though truly and deeply felt, is also seen as a personal insult by the other man, requiring vengeance. In addition, this quote highlights how someone fixed on and passionate about a goal can become unstoppable in their conviction.

“He had been at the end of his tether for two years in a time when the meaning of tether had long been forgotten.”

In this flashback to the day leading up to his beating, Cochran is in the shower, reflecting on his life’s purposelessness. After leaving the military, where his days were regimented and controlled, he lived day to day, competing in tennis tournaments and partying too hard. He rode that dangerous edge for two years and finally slipped over it.

“You see it happening from grade schools to retirement communities: the certainly accidental cohesion of two souls and bodies, often resulting in terror and unhappiness because so much previously unknown energy is released.”

Cochran is driving to meet Miryea on the day that Tibey confronts them. He thinks about the fact that although love is thought of as beautiful, its effect can be terrifying. In addition, he recognizes that this love, the energy given off by it, ripples outwards to affect those around the lovers as well.

“Tibey could easily call the infamous, albeit intelligent and dignified, assassin, El Cociloco, but it was necessary in the crime of cuckoldry to do your own revenging. He drank incessantly to work up a rage, because he, in fact, was so tired of it all that he wished to go to Paris, say to the Plaza Athenee, eat and drink and forget. But that would mean the end of his pride and he would have nothing left except money.”

Tibey considers hiring an assassin to kill Miryea and Cochran, but his societal code demands that he deal with the problem himself. He needs to work up anger that he is not feeling—he wants to travel and forget about the affair. But he recognizes that if he were to let them go, he would lose his standing. He has already lost his wife and his friend and, in the end, would have nothing left but money.

Cochran feels that Miryea is a part of him that has been stolen. Very subtly, Harrison illustrates how Cochran and Tibey both see Miryea as a possession. Losing her, though truly and deeply felt, is also seen as a personal insult by the other man, requiring vengeance. In addition, this quote highlights how someone fixed on and passionate about a goal can become unstoppable in their conviction.

“All three of them were, in fact, watching the moon in their separate agonies, all of them envious of the moon in its aerial distance floating so far above earthbound agonies.”

This rare moment brings Cochran, Miryea, and Tibey together in a way that they do not even realize. Harrison invokes nature and its impassivity to human suffering as well as the distance and perspective that make such suffering seem meaningless. In addition, the passage shows their common desire to escape from that suffering by imagining themselves to be as cold and distant as the moon.

“He reflected on the beauty of threat: the fatal equipment of the mamba owning a beauty shared by the grizzly, rattler, hammerhead shark, perhaps even the black Phantom he flew—an utterly malign black death instrument.”

Harrison identifies the intertwined nature of beauty and terror. He first notes the beauty of some of the natural world’s most terrifying predators, and then subtly transitions to the human world by invoking the image of Cochran’s military jet. This passage underscores that no matter how separate humans may see themselves from the natural world, they are essentially the same.

“He felt the ache of a man who had followed his passion far into the nether reaches of human activity with the full understanding that a return was improbable.”

This quote suggests that there are limits to human behavior, or what would be considered human. Once Cochran goes beyond it, he is in a new place, and may not be able to return to being the kind of human he was before. Beyond that, he may not be able to return to the beliefs about the world that he had before.

“Now he felt totally alone and an edge of panic crept into his soul that would stay with him for years. He thought, ‘What if what I’ve been doing my whole life has been totally wrong?’”

The motivation for Nordstrom’s actions throughout his story is stated in this quote. He questions the foundations of his life and later concludes that life is about what you do every day. It is this question that drives his search for an alternate lifestyle.

“By dawn he had decided he wanted to escape into the world rather than from it: there was nothing particularly undesirable or repellent in his life, only a certain lack of volume and intensity; he feared dreaming himself to death, say as a modest brook in a meadow eases along sleepily to a great river just beyond the border of trees.”

Nordstrom has decided to actively participate in life. He fears doing the wrong things, but he fears a life of passivity more. This is one of the pillars of his new philosophy of life, and it will help to drive his decision-making as he forges a new path for himself.

“Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father’s death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.”

Nordstrom has already decided to engage in, rather than escape from, life. In this quote, he comes to a new understanding that will be another pillar in his philosophy—that life consists of what one does in the present. Here, he has moved forward into the next phase of his understanding of what is required for true change.

“He had enjoyed the ballet but he was losing what little of the spectator was left in him: he was becoming an amateur in the true sense—one who loved the doing, and had the beginner’s openness about life that had been lost for transparent reasons since his childhood.”

The narrator recognizes that as we age we lose the willingness we felt as children to be open and engage with life. This quote reflects Nordstrom’s commitment to engage with life, and here we see evidence that it is truly happening. He is regaining the openness and vulnerability required to make the most of one’s life.

“How strange we all are. One minute we’re laboring over the accounts and the next moment we’re chewing on each other’s bodies like dogs.”

Nordstrom reflects that, no matter what we would like to think, humans are not different from animals. It does not take much for us to shed the trappings of civilization and return to our more animalistic roots, no matter how hard we try. Those roots are often visible in the ways we treat each other even if they are sugar-coated.

“Felt like I’d levitated when the money was gone but now the feeling is gone and there’s no sensation but a slight lightness. Are we truly allowed to start over?”

Here we see Nordstrom’s understanding that change requires constant pressure. Giving away his money and shedding the baggage of the past is satisfying, but that satisfaction is fleeting. He wonders what is required to start again and if it is even possible.

“He began to get an inkling that the point was to be dancing in your brain all of the time when his daughter who was seated next to him sensed his bleakness, squeezed his hand and kissed him on the ear, saying please come visit.”

At the beginning of the story, Nordstrom is so emotionally reserved that it affects his relationship with his daughter. By achieving this new openness, he can show her he is feeling bad and accept the comfort she offers. As a result, he experiences true intimacy with her for possibly the first time and realizes that the freedom he finds in dancing is not about the activity itself but the joy and vulnerability of being his truest self.

“Things were bound to happen if you lived in the open, if you walked very far off your porch.”

With this statement, Nordstrom acknowledges the dangers of moving beyond the safety of a constrained life. Throughout the story, he perseveres in his efforts to walk off his metaphorical porch. He recognizes that both good and bad things will happen as a result of living an open, vulnerable life, and he accepts that danger.

“The world is haphazard. You can see the strain of resisting this principle if you study faces at all.”

Part of living the new life Nordstrom has chosen involves accepting the chaotic and dangerous nature of the world. The inability to do so, or rather, the choice to avoid this truth, results in having to hold conflicting ideas in one’s head—the notion that life can be controlled and the underlying truth that it cannot. Most humans are invested in the idea that they have some control, and it causes them pain and difficulty.

“Who reasons death any more than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty?”

Some concepts are so vast and abstract that they cannot be fathomed by human understanding. Death is one such concept, and human attempts to understand it, or to apply notions of reason or justice, are doomed to fail. This concept becomes clear as Tristan struggles unsuccessfully throughout the story to understand Samuel’s death.

“Tristan rode silently with her a few miles wishing that she were pregnant and that would somehow bring back Samuel, but no, he died pure and virginal. And now she rode off with only a photo to console her. He wanted to strangle the world.”

The reader can see the violent emotion roiling under Tristan’s surface, although he says nothing about it and reveals it to no one. Harrison shows us that Tristan feels his grief deeply even though he remains silent. This behavior remains characteristic of Tristan throughout the story.

“He was red-eyed and strained from his travel but for the first time in half a year he felt something akin to ease in his soul, as if the dawn shore breeze laved the surface no matter the currents and turmoil below.”

Tristan experiences some relief in the freedom and openness of the sea. In addition, the water acts as a metaphor for Tristan himself—the turmoil he experiences that does not show on the surface. This passage reflects the way that Tristan remains enigmatic even to the people who know him best but cannot see below his surface.

“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naive.”

Whenever someone dies, we ask why, a futile question without an answer. We know that there is no answer, but that does not end the need to ask the question. Harrison takes this one step further and states that this question is both naive and useless.

“Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out. Of course, no one ever saw the ‘will’ and perhaps it is a cheapish abstraction, one blunt word needing a thousand modifiers.”

Harrison suggests that we cannot understand what lies beneath the surface of others. Actions that seem incomprehensible may come from their deepest passions. Further, he says that how or whether they come to the surface is a matter of will, another abstraction that does not adequately describe what motivates us.

“Two deaths in fourteen years of loved ones are not all that uncommon except to the mourner who has lost all sense of common and uncommon and is buried in the thoughts of things left out and how it might have been.”

From an outside perspective, losing two people over so many years seems natural, even inevitable. But, as Harrison reminds us, for the person who has lost them, that time has no meaning. Neither does it matter that it is natural, inevitable, and common. When it is happening to an individual, it is a unique experience, and all they can see is the future that is no longer possible.

“Popular ideas as basically silly as ‘cowboys’ or ‘frontiersman’ or the law of Prohibition itself came after the fact in self-congratulatory phases of history, when the energies turned toward labeling and social order.”

Harrison illustrates the difference between reality, or life as it is happening, and how humans seek to shape that life after the fact. He posits that we are compelled to make sense of events after the fact, to fit them into a pattern and order that we can understand. Once again, this behavior comes down to the human need to control things coupled with the truth that such control is not possible.