N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday
Navarre Scott Momaday— known as N. Scott Momaday — is a Native American author of Kiowa descent. His work House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work that celebrated and preserved Native American oral and art tradition. He holds 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth27 February 1934
CountryUnited States of America
Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.
For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.
The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word...
Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.
A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.
I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long turn of seasons and of years.
Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.
Once in his life, a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there.
We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.