The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life,” the doctor said. “Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness.” He sipped at his bourbon and ice. “Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal.” Another thought. “And the universe goes mad.
I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness.
I shall never sacrifice a friend to an ideal. I shall never desert a friend to save an institution. I shall never betray a friend for the sake of the law. Great nations may fall in ruin before I shall sell a friend to preserve them. I pray to the God within me to give me the power to live by this design.
Let our people travel light and free on their bicycles – nothing on the back but a shirt, nothing tied to the bike but a slicker, in case of rain. Their.
To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he’s a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.
All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.
Wherever two human beings are alive, together, and happy, there is the center of the world.
Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind – what else is there? What else do we need?
We are caught,” continued the good doctor, “in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.
If you wish to see it as it should be seen, don’t wait – there’s little time. How do you get there? Well, I couldn’t tell you.
The night. The stars. The river.
What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?
To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...
She fasted on the mesa rim, waiting for a vision, and fasted some more, and after a time God appeared incarnate on a platter as a roasted squab with white paper booties on His little drumsticks.
Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
We always used to think it didn’t matter, that when you mined out one area, or farmed it out, or overgrazed it, you could move to new country beyond the hills, keep moving West. But there are no new places to go anymore. The land is full. We have to stay where we are, take care of what we have. There isn’t going to be anything else.
The romantic view, while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth.
The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky- all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.
Space and scarcity give us dignity. And liberty. And thereby beauty.