Prose Fragment #23

On his twenty-first birthday, he was asked where he wished to go in the world, to which he immediately responded ‘Otago’—knowing that the rushes in Victoria had abated, and having long been enamoured of the idea of the prospector’s life, which he conceived of in terms quixotic and alchemical. He saw the metal shining, unseen, undiscovered, upon some lonely beach of some uncharted land; he saw the moon rising full and yellow over the open sea; he saw himself riding on horseback through the shallows of a creek, and sleeping on the bare earth, and running water through a wooden cradle, and twining digger’s dough around a stick to bake above the embers of a fire. What a fine thing it would be, he thought, to be able to say that one’s fortune was older than all the ages of men and history; to say that one had chanced upon it, had plucked it from the earth with one’s own bare hands.

– From “The Luminaries,” by Eleanor Catton