The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

“What need do we have for those dusty classrooms?” It was what he always said when they were on the train—“All this,” he would say, wonderingly, stretching out his arms to encompass the landscape outside. “We have all this.”

“Ah, but differences are the life-blood of scientific discourse, are they not?”

Isn’t that what everyone wanted? To not be forgotten. To be more than a line in a ledger, the sum total of your life adding up to little more than the strength you wasted to make other men rich.

It is said that so much had been taken from the land that it was always hungry. It had been feeding off the blood spilled by the empires, and by the bones of the animals and people they left behind. It gained a taste for death.

“We are discussing whether a thing is less beautiful if one knows that it is also dangerous.

“But then does this threat lessen its beauty? Is the swan more lovely than the eagle, the placid whale more magnificent than the warlike shark?”

“Meaning. Why must we think that an absence of order equates to an absence of meaning? Is it not meaning enough that we should wonder? Is that not what God demands of us?”

“All things on this Earth are God’s creation, as strange as some of them may seem. There is a place for each of them.”

and what is it about a line that brings on the urge to leap over

leave you to find ways to live alongside it, to make the choice that faces us all—whether to turn away from the changes, to fight, to flee; or whether to welcome them in.