Returning to Myself

Men on small islands would do well to avoid the pursuit of philosophy.  The island illusion, that solitude and wisdom invented each other, is a very convincing one.  Day by day I seem to grow more profound.  Often I feel I am on the verge of some great philosophical discovery.  Man.  War.  Truth.  Time.  Fortunately I always return to myself.  I look beyond the white lace of the surf to my own unassembled past and I decide to let others stitch together the systems.  I enjoy the triteness of the situation, man and island, exile in the ultimate suburb.  The surf is massing and rolling, uneven now, page after page of terrible wild words.  All the colors borrow, sea from beach from sky, and after a while I follow my own foot prints back to the house.

-Don DeLillo, Americana

Glacier National Park

Travel

Travel

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

-Emily Dickinson

New York Public Library

Composure

"He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly."

-Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Mississippi at Sunset

Someday I'll be nothing too.

"I hated long views of life when the infinite overwhelms the finite subjects.  Not even forever lasts forever, and again I thought no matter what I do, someday I'd be nothing."  

Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up

Madison, Wisconsin

The Truth of Man

"I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world.  I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning.  But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.  This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justifications against fate itself. "    

Albert Camus
"Letters to a German Friend: Fourth Letter" 
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death 
1943

Wisconsin-Iowa

Lust

"The virtue of Hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust."

-Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

Iowa