How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Folks would, out of utter contentment, choose to stay home since the failure to do so was patently the root of many ills, current and historic. (10.38)
Is it possible to just stay home in the first place? Or do you always have to find it after a hard journey, literal or metaphorical?
Quote #8
—I take it that she could have been living in a better world, but she ended up fugitive, hiding in the balsams. (10.80)
Here Inman explains why the story the Cherokee woman tells him about trying to get to a place inside the Shining Rocks is so important: he sees it as a story about trying to get to a better world. Is that desire driving his hope to get home throughout the novel?
Quote #9
Men talked of war as if they committed it to preserve what they had and what they believed. But Inman now guessed it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that had made them take up weapons. The endless arc of the sun, wheel of seasons. War took a man out of that circle of regular life and made a season of its own, not much dependent on anything else. […]
So that morning he had looked at the berries and the birds and had felt cheered by them, happy they had waited for him to come to his senses, even though he feared himself deeply at variance with such elements of the harmonious. (11.126)
Is coming home connected to attending to nature and experiencing the rhythms of the seasons and the land you live on? Is war necessarily an experience of being not at home?