1997
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Watching bulbous, sodden clouds, those dark sailors of the heavy sky, brush the snowy, veined mountain-tops and shroud the grey landscape below in dancing shadows and veils of wetness. – journal, 1993
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It would have been more prudent to leave the day before. Yes, well it would have been prudent to stay at home. You have to let things go their own way, or why be here at all. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels
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All the way I was saying goodbye. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
Extreme situations always seem absurd until they happen. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
Does it rain because you carry your umbrella, or because you don’t? It’s a personal matter depending on how you remember it. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
There had been no awkwardness, no break even in the mood. The episode had seemed quite natural. It went one way, could as easily have gone another. I sat up with my back against a pillar and smoked another cigarette, lost in the mystery of it. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
Thoreau: “We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” If Thoreau were alive today he would find full confirmation of his fears. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
For me this is a landscape and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love the sorrow for the pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or hunger between meals. Perhaps even to discover that pain and pleasure, since they cannot exist without each other, are really the same thing. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
Like all strong prejudices they not only prepared me for the worst. They paved the way. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
… I felt myself to be the most privileged person on the earth to be able to pass through where others saw only normality, and to think myself in paradise. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
… thier happiness had an unusual clarity and depth, like a clear pool, that invited others to jump in and share. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
[the monkeys] seemed so close to enlightenment, as though at any moment they might stumble over it and explode into consciousness. They experiment with any familiar object … just as a human baby does … And nothing comes of it. To be so close, yet never pierce the veil! I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and picking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it but unable to make sense of it. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
The vital instrument of change is detachment and travelling alone was an immense advantage. At a time of change the two aspects of a person exist simultaneously; and with a caterpillar turning into a butterfly there is the image of what you were and the image of what you are about to be, but those who know you well see you only as you were. They are unwilling to recognize change. By their actions they will try to draw you back into your familiar ways. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
The truth obviously does not reveal itself unaided to humans. It has to be uncovered by an effort of consciousness. Or more likely, it exists only in human consciousness. Without man around to recognize it there is no truth, no God. – Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels %
I smiled to myself at the sight of this money, ‘O drug’ said I aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou are not worth to me to me, no, not the taking off of the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.’ However, upon second thoughts, I took it away … – Robinson Crusoe
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There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a deadweight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest: Thoreau was right. – Paul Theroux
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From what I have said of the natives of New Holland they may appear to be some of the most wretched people on earth. But in reality they are far happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in Tranquility. The Earth and the Sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary in life. – Captain Cook
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And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.
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Whatever this man is - wanderer or evil monk, or saint or sorcerer - he seems touched by what Tibetans call the “crazy wisdom”: he is free. – Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard %
All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: acquisistions end in dispersion, buildings end in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, and building and meeting, and … set about realizing the Truth … Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation … “ – Milarepa
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You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars …
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When you are ready, the teacher will appear. – Buddhism (from Peter Matthiessen)
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… Followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, o seekers, o finders of reasons to be up and gone …” – Saint John Perse
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It was at that moment that I realized that while it is possible to love two people at the same time, in different ways, in the heart, it is not possible to do so in the world. – David Leavitt
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Playfully, absently, without even giving thought to repercussions, she spoke right back to him. A conversation above the spoken words, beyond their meanings. Some folk call it chemistry, some call it lust; some call it honesty.” – Randall Kenan
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My Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane …
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There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way - Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, commute, your brother’s in South Africa, your mother’s in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. – Annie Proulx, the Shipping News
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Hard for Bunny, who still measured events on a child’s scale of fair
and unfair.
– Annie Proulx, the Shipping News
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How hard it must be to have to appear tougher than you are, and to go round the stray corners of the world with people whose hearts are shallow as far as you are concerned; and to have nothing you wish to be or do that you will risk your life for the reaching of; and to have a face that is pretty only for a time.
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How lucky is a stream, I thought as I lay idly, that has no need to repeat its rounds over the same ground like most of us, looking for something it never finds, but knows its way, and eats through the hills that impede it.
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A very small boy came to drive away the black cows grazing at a distance. Air and water and the busy grass fell silent. In the thickening velvet of the night the moon was soon climbing her steep invisible stair.
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Time and change … [are] visible anywhere and could be seen every morning as one walks to one’s office, since time and space are fluid along Thames as along Euphrates, and everything one looks at is transition. But such basic facts are what the human race, as soon as it has any initiatve at all, pathetically smothers out of sight.
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Ever since the tower of Babel was built in the first adventure against space, people have been aware at intervals of the supremacy of Man. It remains perhaps to be proved, but meanwhile the landscape of our age advertises it, regretfully but with success, pushing the more permanent background out of sight. The mountains are there, but the factories take the foreground, and the seaside villa intrudes before the sea; and it is only in untamed corners that one can forget - or possibly remember - to whom the world belongs. The ‘underdeveloped countries’ (the arrogance of this term was almost incredible) - those poor underdeveloped countries may console themselves with the reflection that no great religion was ever born in a landscape whose foregrounds are completely occupied by men.
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The best thing about him was his wife and the best thing about his wife was a girlfriend named Dezi Duz who did whenever she could and had a Wac uniform that Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife put on every weekend and took off every weekend for every cadet in her husband’s squadron who wanted to creep into her.
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… then drew back the coverlet and stretched herself out luxuriously with an expression of feline expectation. She beckoned to him longingly, with a husky laugh. – Joseph Heller, Catch 22 %
Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian’s lust; but she was willing to take his word for it. – Joseph Heller, Catch 22 %
… beckoned him into bed beside her with that look of simpering idiocy of a woman in heat. – Joseph Heller, Catch 22 %
Nately had gone clear out of his mind. He wanted them all to fall in love right away and get married … Nately saw it all very clearly. Love had transmogrified him into a romantic idiot. – Joseph Heller, Catch 22 %
It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. – Joseph Heller, Catch 22 %
… And with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them. – The Wind in the Willows %
Conversation was impossible for a long time; and when it was slowly resumed, it was that regrettable sort of conversation that results from talking with your mouth full. – The Wind in the Willows %
But it was good to think he had this place to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again, and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome. – The Wind in the Willows %
To his horror he recollected that he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him in his cell, and with them his pocket-book, money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-case - all that makes life worth living, all that distinguished the many-pocketed from the no-pocketed productions that hop or trip about permissively, unequipped for the real contest. – The Wind in the Willows %
It is all very well, when you have a light heart, and a clear conscience, and money in your pocket, and nobody scouring the country for you to drag you off to prison again, to follow where the road beckons and points, not caring wither. – The Wind in the Willows %
The Mole was a good listener, and Toad, with no one to check his statements or to criticize in an unfriendly spirit, rather let himself go. Indeed, much that he related belonged more properly to the category of hwat-might-have-happened-had-I-only-thought-of-it-in-time-instead-of-ten-minutes-afterwards. Those are always the best and raciest adventures: and why should they not be truly ours, as much as the somewhat inadequate things that really come off? – The Wind in the Willows %
I remember the old doctor, ‘It would be interesting to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot.’ I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. – Joseph Conrad
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Perhaps I had a little fever, too. One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse. I had often ‘a little fever,’ or a little touch of other things - the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course. – Joseph Conrad %
There was no sign on the face of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs. – Joseph Conrad %
It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable goals and in undreamt-of directions. – Joseph Conrad %
The seamen were glad to get back into the alleyway. Secretly each of them thought at the last moment he could rush out on deck - and that was a comfort. There is something horribly repugnant in the idea of being drowned under a deck. – Joseph Conrad %
There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch. He turned that way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of the other instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly, not to be gain-said, as though the wisdom of men were made unerring by the indifference of matter. – Joseph Conrad %
He [put the box of matches back] now, but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never have occasion to use that box anymore. The vividness of the thought checked him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on the small object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits that chain us to the weary round of life. He released it at last, and letting himself fall on the settee, listened for the first sounds of returning wind. – Joseph Conrad %
Environmentalists, naturalists, and conservationists are often asked to defend their concerns for the well-being of other species of living things besides man. The question is, ‘what good are they?’ meaning, of course, what good are they to man, because if one asked what good they were to the planet, one could just as legitimately ask the same question about mankind. – the View from Great Gull
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We are frightened by the power of nature, discomfited by the weather, confused by the unpredictable in our environment; we want to live more comfortably, to enjoy life more and enjoy it longer, to travel faster and more safely. So we invent and construct things that have the effect of putting bulwarks and distances between ourselves and the earth. This gives us a feeling of safety, of mastery over nature, and that feeling tends to separate us spiritually and psychologically from our roots.
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Now fewer and fewer men, using bigger and bigger machines and increasing amounts of chemicals, supply food for more and more people; another force thrusting man away from the reality of the planet - particularly in those nations that have the greatest impact on the planet.
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‘Free as a bird’ is an expression in which a bird might find ironical amusement, especially as coming from man, the only animal who has, in his individual life, succeeded in achieving some measure of independence from the discipline of nature. – Louis J Halle, Jr.
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The cultural upcurve in society hasn’t kept pace with the technological upcurve … our spiritual relation to the planet is not yet scarcely so so sophisticated as our mechanical relation.
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… nibble at the edges of the unknown …
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There has been in recent years excessive emphasis on a citizen’s rights, and inadequate stress upon his duties and responsibilities. – Paxton Blair
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Animals, because they lack opposable thumbs, carry things in their mouths. Animals release their possessions because it’s too difficult to carry them, and so there isn’t any temptation to accumulate. Being able to grasp leads inevitably and naturally to being able to hold and then to being able to keep. And so humans like me fill our holes with what attracts us, and animals continue to be, as they have been for generations, unfettered.
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