Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Just beyond We relate to the landscapes, or cityscapes, around us in different ways. Some of us crave the wild; other people shrink from it in terror. A friend of ours who was raised in the city regards our thoroughly suburbanized town with a good bit of the same awe and apprehension with which the earliest European settlers of North America must have beheld the unmapped expanses of the new continent they had landed on. To the aboriginal inhabitants of that continent, of course, that same continent, or at least their own neck of the woods, was already settled and quite familiar. They knew how the land was and what it had to offer, and they also knew where its mysteries and its dangers lay. I'm somewhat ambivalent about the true hinterland, the kind of backcountry where you can walk for days without meeting another soul. That kind of prospect appeals to me, especially after a long day of traffic and noise and bad headlines, but it seems I never quite make the break away from civilization. In the end it's enough (most of the time) to experience wilderness vicariously in my reading, to contemplate it in my imagination, or to gaze out upon it from a distance along well-travelled roads. Knowing that it's there — an option, an avenue of escape if things get really out of hand — is enough for now. Anyway, it's not in the open ocean but in the estuaries, the continental shelves, where live thrives; not the deep woods but the forest edge that draws wildlife. The planet's vast unbroken spaces are not enchanted, because they don't exist on a human scale at all. That is their virtue, and their purpose: to be our emptiness, our eternity, our death. My own preference is for transitional zones, the lands that lie just over the boundaries of our understanding. It's when you find yourself walking through terrain that was once ours but is no longer — abandoned railways, overgrown orchards, stone walls that have outlived their builders and their reasons for being, the little shrine to a forgotten god — and then go just a little further on, that you come to the really interesting places, the ones that nobody knows about, the ones you can't find again when you return, where your presence is permitted but only by leave of the genius loci. There are no oracles in such places — oracles belong to the world of men — and so no answers, but in the hush the questions, oh the questions become so much clearer there. March 2, 2007 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me