![]() ![]() When he died in 1973 at the age of 92, Neihardt left behind a considerable literary legacy that is still being read, analyzed, and argued over to this day. He had a little more time to work with than he originally thought. He became convinced that he had but a short time to live, and that-in order to justify his own existence-he must accomplish “some worthy work that might compensate for the potatoes he had eaten and the roofs that had protected him.” Gradually, the dream’s impersonal vastness came to represent a mystical longing, a desire to be wholly absorbed in something larger than himself. But for the precocious little boy in Wayne, Nebraska, this strange vision altered the course of his life. ![]() Had John Neihardt been an ordinary child, it might have stayed that way. Faster! faster! faster!”Īt first, it seemed like only a fever-dream, without meaning. ![]() There was something dear to be left behind, something yonder to be overtaken. “There was vastness,” he recalled many years later, “Terribly empty, save for a few lost stars, too dim and wearily remote ever to be reached… When I cried out in desperation, it seemed a great Voice filled the hollow vastness and drove me on. (This article first appeared in Nebraska Life, July/August 2000.)Įleven-year-old John Neihardt lay sick in bed, feverish and hallucinating. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |