notions

I am reading The Diamond Age, perhaps two decades too late to fully appreciate it, but in passing it is mentioned that a particular theater in futuristic Shanghai regularly shows Dances With Wolves. As a girl I loved Dances With Wolves, Little Big Man, Jeremiah Johnson, the story of Eunice Williams, kidnapped as a child by Mohawks in 1704 and refusing to go back to her puritanically white world.

I wonder sometimes, though, whether my teenage fascination with these tales of going native, of throwing off civilization's shackles and disappearing into the wilderness, revolved around the notion of transformation or the notion of disappearance.