So this sand and barrenness forms the setting for the personality of me.
Yet I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.
Every day the atmosphere of a house becomes unbearable, so every day I go out to the sand and barrenness. It is not cold, neither is it mild. It is gloomy.
I sit for two hours on the ground by the side of a pitiably small narrow stream of water. It is not even a natural stream. I dare say it comes from some mine among the hills. But it is well enough that the stream is not natural--when you consider the sand and barrenness. It is singularly appropriate.
And I am singularly appropriate to all of them. It is good, after all, to be appropriate to something--to be in touch with something, even sand and barrenness. The sand and barrenness is old--oh, very old. You think of this when you look at it.
What should I do if the earth were made of wood, with a paper sky!
And again I say I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.
Still more pitiable than the sand and barrenness and the poor unnatural stream is the dry, warped cemetery where the dry, warped people of Butte bury their dead friends. It is a source of satisfaction to me to walk down to this cemetery and contemplate it, and revel in its utter pitiableness.
"It is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my poor unnatural stream," I say over and over, and take my comfort.
Its condition is more forlorn than that of a woman young and alone. It is unkempt. It is choked with dust and stones. The few scattered blades of grass look rather ashamed to be seen growing there. A great many of the headstones are of wood and are in a shameful state of decay. Those that are of stone are still more shameful in their hard brightness.
The dry, warped friends of the dry, warped people of Butte are buried in this dusty, dreary, wind-havocked waste. They are left here and forgotten.
The Devil must rejoice in this graveyard.
It is something for me to contemplate that is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my unnatural stream.
The inhabitants of this cemetery are forgotten. I have watched once the burying of a young child. Every day for a fortnight afterward I came back, and I saw the mother of the child there. She came and stood by the small new grave. After a few days more she stopped coming.