Throughout “Horses of the Night,” Chris, a young man growing up in rural Canada during the Great Depression, finds refuge in his own imagined worlds that are at odds with the difficult realities of his life. Chris moves from his family’s struggling farm in Shallow Creek to stay with his Grandmother and Grandfather Connor in Manawaka to attend high school. Grandfather Connor is a harsh and critical man whose biting comments affect everyone in the family except, as his cousin Vanessa notes, Chris, who seems to retreat into himself where he is safe from this emotional abuse. As Vanessa gets to know and grow incredibly fond of Chris, she discovers the many ways he retreats into himself and his dreams to protect himself from difficult realities. Chris enchants Vanessa with tales of his life back in Shallow Creek where he says he lived in a tree house on a sprawling ranch, with a lake once full of prehistoric creatures, and two majestic horses. It’s only when Vanessa visits his home years later that she realizes this world existed only in Chris’s imagination and stands in stark contrast to the hardscrabble conditions of his family’s farm. Chris dreams of going to college, but his financial realities make this impossible. In the face of this loss, Chris dreams instead of becoming a traveller, but in reality ends up working as a travelling salesman, foolishly optimistic that each new item is his ticket to getting rich. Life in Shallow Creek becomes unbearable enough for Chris that he enlists in the army. However, the realities of World War II are so harsh that his dreams can’t defend him, and he suffers a mental breakdown. Unable to recover, he’s confined to a mental hospital where Vanessa hopes he can at last escape reality altogether and live perpetually in his imagined worlds. In this way, Chris’s story reveals the limitations of using dreams to protect oneself from reality. At some point the dreams can no longer ward off reality, and, if unable to face that reality, one risks losing hold of it altogether.
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Dreams vs. Reality Quotes in Horses of the Night
This method proved to be one that Chris always used in any dealings with my grandfather. When the bludgeoning words came […] Chris never seemed, like myself, to be holding back with a terrible strained force for fear of letting go and speaking out […] He would not argue or defend himself […] He simply appeared to be absent, elsewhere.
He missed the horses, I thought with selfish satisfaction, more than he missed his family. I could visualize the pair, one sorrel and one black, swifting through all the meadows of summer.
You take the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, now. Terrifically high – all those thin ribs of steel, joined together to go across the very wide stretch of water. It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s there. That’s what engineers do. Imagine doing something like that, eh?
I got this theory, see, that anybody can do anything at all, anything, if they really set their minds to it. But you have to have this total concentration. You have to focus on it with your whole mental powers, and not let it slip away by forgetting to hold it in your mind. If you hold it in your mind, like, then it’s real, see?
I need to say something really penetrating, something that would show him I knew the passionate truth of his conviction. “I bet –” I said, “I bet you’ll sell a thousand, Chris.” Two years ago, this statement would have seemed self-evident, unquestionable. Yet now, when I had spoken, I knew that I did not believe it.
No human word could be applied. The lake was not lonely or untamed. These words relate to people, and there was nothing of people here. There was no feeling about the place. It existed in some world in which man was not yet born. I looked at the grey reaches of it and felt threatened. It was like the view of God which I had held since my father’s death. Distant, indestructible, totally indifferent.
“People usually say there must be a God,” Chris went on, “because otherwise how did the universe get here? But that’s ridiculous. If the stars and planet go on to infinity, they could have existed forever, for no reason at all. Maybe they weren’t ever created. Look – what’s the alternative? To believe in a God who is brutal? What else could He be?”
He hardly ever talked about it, but this once he told me about seeing the horses in the mud, actually going under, you know? And the way their eyes looked when they realised they weren’t going to get out. Ever seen horses’ eyes when they’re afraid, I mean really berserk with fear, like in a bush-fire? Ewen said a guy tended to concentrate on the horses because he didn’t dare think what was happening to the men.
I was thinking of all the schemes he’d had, the ones that couldn’t possibly have worked, the unreal solutions to which he’d clung because there were no others, the brave and useless strokes of fantasy against a depression that was both the world’s and his own.
Well – what it said was that they could force his body to march and even to kill, but what they didn’t know was that he’d fooled them. He didn’t live inside it any more […] the letter seemed only the final heartbreaking extension of the way he’d always had of distancing himself from the absolute unbearability of battle.
Slowly, slowly, horses of the night – The night must move like this for him, slowly, all through the days and nights. I could not know whether the land he journeyed through was inhabited by terrors, the old monster-kings of the lake, or whether he had discovered at last a way for himself to make the necessary dream perpetual.
