Nature & Animals Quote by Jessamyn West

Color is the argument Jessamyn West makes for the American West: not a backdrop, not a myth, but a sensory fact that overwhelms abstraction. She refuses the usual Western vocabulary of conquest and character-building and instead starts with perception - a move that quietly demotes ideology. The West, in her framing, isn’t “freedom” or “destiny.” It’s what hits the eye: earth, sunlight, ripeness.

The line “animal rather than vegetable” is doing more than painting a palette. West is separating the West from the polite, gardened greens of the settled East - from lawns, hedges, and the domesticated idea of nature as decoration. “Animal” suggests heat, hide, muscle, appetite. It implies a landscape that feels alive in a way that’s not necessarily gentle: dusty browns, blood-warm reds, sun-bleached golds. The subtext is that the West is not meant to be trimmed into civility; it resists being curated.

“Earth and sunlight and ripeness” adds a final twist: this is a West defined by maturity, not innocence. Ripeness is the moment just before decay, which makes the beauty slightly precarious. In a 20th-century context - as the West is increasingly narrated through tourism, cinema, and boosterism - West’s attention to color reads like a corrective. She’s insisting on the real materials beneath the legend, and hinting that what people call “the West” is often a story laid over a harsher, more saturated truth.