TALLYING

"There remained the handful of gold dollars in his secret sack, never mind how much they came to; had he not engaged himself in the Western dream, in order to find out what he truly expected of himself, he might have gone on believing, as do so many broken down citizens, that the history of America is the tallying of what we all once had in cash."

—pages 28-29, The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann

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I've started the simultaneously thrilling and daunting task of reading the fifth dream in the "Seven Dreams" series by William T. Vollmann. The publication of volume/dream five (as well as it being the fifth of the seven books published, following volumes 1, 2, 6, and 3) comes twenty-five years after the publication of the first volume/dream (The Ice-Shirt) and fourteen years after the publication its most recent predecessor (Argall). It is also easily the most voluminous dream, being just over 1200 pages of story and another 150 or so pages of chronologies, glossaries, and notes on the text (all the latter in a smaller font).

So I head off into a novel of the Nez Perce War...