The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.
There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.
It’s all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane.
A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.
As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
Despair is easy, or at least low cost.
I sometimes wonder what those of us who are writers would become in a nonliterary culture – storytellers? Hermits?
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.
Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide – a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.