How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"So when we left Circe’s big house we didn’t have no place to go, so we just walked around and lived in them woods. Farm country. […] We were lost then. And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, and but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another." (1.2.40)
Nature is ever-shifting in this novel, and where it can seem harmless and even comforting at first to Pilate and Macon, it can, in an instant, become menacing. Pilate’s really good at detecting different kinds and different shades of colors in the world around her, each shade recalling a memory or an emotion.
Quote #2
"But it looked big to me then. I know now it must a been a little bit place, maybe a hundred and fifty acres. We tilled fifty. About eighty of it was woods. Must have been a fortune in oak and pine; maybe that’s what they wanted – the lumber, the oak and the pine. We had a pond that was four acres. And a stream, full of fish. Right down in the heart of a valley." (1.2.51)
Lincoln’s Heaven is the paradise that sits in Song’s heart. Like a sculpture, the farm is a work of creative genius and years of toil. Through it, Jake, Macon, and Pilate are completely in harmony with nature. The farm serves as inspiration for the Danville locals. The shooting of Jake for this land reveals the unnaturalness of his killers and an upheaval of the balance and harmony.
Quote #3
"But when I got up to it – and I was going real slow because I thought I might have to shoot it again – I saw it was a doe. Not a young one; she was old, but she was still a doe. I felt…bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man." (1.3.85)
Guitar makes himself very vulnerable at this moment, telling Milkman about an emotional moment in his young life in order to help his friend cope with the abuse he saw his father inflict on his mother. Guitar, who was born in the South, has always had a connection to the earth through his hunting escapades. It is on these escapades that he learns how to track prey and kill, but it is also through these experiences that he develops a reverence and understanding for nature. Milkman does not have this understanding, which is why he thinks he can go hiking in a three-piece suit.
Quote #4
She toyed, sometimes, with her unsucked breasts, but at some point her lethargy dissipated of its own accord and in its place was wilderness, the focused meanness of a flood or an avalanche of snow which only observers, flying in a rescue helicopter, believed to be an indifferent natural phenomenon, but which the victims, in their last gulp of breath, knew was both directed and personal. (1.5.128)
Here, we’re not talking about the real wilderness, but the wilderness that exists within us. A connection is drawn between the internal self and the natural world, suggest that the run parallel to each other or that they mirror each other. Just as nature is capable of being cruel and disastrous, so is the self.
Quote #5
Now the land itself, the only one they knew and knew intimately, began to terrify them. The sun was blazing down, the air was sweet, but every lead that the wind lifted, every rustle of a pheasant hen in a clump of ryegrass, sent needles of fear through their veins. The cardinals, the gray squirrels, the garden snakes the butterflies, the ground hogs and rabbits – all the affectionate things that had peopled their lives ever since they were born became ominous signs of a presence that was searching for them, following them, following them. (1.7.168)
Again, we see an example of how quickly nature, and the land which Macon and Pilate know so well, can turn on them, can become something entirely different. If the natural world is also reflected in the internal self, then we learn from these descriptions and stories that humans are also capable of transforming at the drop of a hat. Like when Milkman and Guitar are having one of their usual debates about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Guitar is able to change the tone of the conversation from playful to deadly without blinking. If you can’t trust nature, pure and good and untainted nature, then who and what can you trust?
Quote #6
Breathless, he reached for his cigarettes and found them soaked. He lay back on the grass and let the high sunshine warm him. He opened his mouth so the clear air could bathe his tongue. (2.10.249)
Baptism time! Nature is telling Milkman to quit smoking, and, as a way of convincing him, it bathes his tongue. How nice. He’s muddy, he’s soaked, he’s tired, he’s hungry, but Milkman feels clean and pure. Nature’s better than Safeguard soap.
Quote #7
After a while he sat up and put on the wet socks and shoes. He looked at his watch to check the time. It ticked, but the face was splintered and the minute hand was bent. Better move, he thought and struck out for the hills, which, deceptive as the sound of the creak, were much farther away than they seemed. He had no idea that simply walking through trees, bushes, on untrammeled group could be so hard. (2.10.250)
Nature is stronger than technology. Even our iPod would be no match for the Pennsylvanian woods. And nature is also deceptive to the city boy, who has no idea how to measure distance. He has to learn a whole new way of coping and living. We also just think it’s interesting that time stops. That seems kind of important, as though the measurement of time is pretty much irrelevant in these parts.
Quote #8
None of them tore their clothes as he had, climbing twenty feet of steep rock. (2.10.251)
That’s because they’re savvier than you, Milkman. We hate to break it to you Milkman, but you’re a little high maintenance and little slow when it comes to the whole nature thing. But it’s OK; you’ll learn. Macon and Pilate grew up in this world, so it’s like they speak Nature fluently and communicate with the world much more easily than you can.
Quote #9
The low hills in the distance were no longer scenery to him. They were real places that could split your thirty-dollar shoes. (2.10.257)
Milkman is learning! And if nature is both the world around us and the world within us, it could very well be that Milkman is not only learning how to be a mountain man, but he’s also learning about his own self.
Quote #10
"There’s a big double-headed rock over the valley named for him. […] And there’s a ravine near here they call Ryna’s Gulch, and sometimes you can hear this funny sound by it that the wind makes." (2.14.323)
Here we see the internal wilderness meet the external wilderness to combine in the formation of a wilderness milkshake of emotion, memory, and folklore. Ryna’s sorrow was so great that it transmuted into a ravine. Solomon’s leap was such a historical and monumental occasion that the locals named the rock after this event.