At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

“You mean you’re just going to sit there and let me call you a coward?” “You’ll get tired of it after a while,” Moon said.

she would have made a redoubtable Catholic or even Communist; it was the dogma that attracted her, the security of righteousness, for she felt no need to understand her faith.

“That’s the only way to do it—go. When there’s a jungle waiting, you go through it and come out clean on the far side. Because if you struggle to back out, you get all snarled, and afterwards the jungle is still there, still waiting.

He was at a beginning and at an end. He had thrown away his bearings, like a man who treks at night into a wilderness and hurls his map into the wind and drops his compass to the bottom of an unknown river.

but all of them were pinned like butterflies to the frame of their own morality, and that was that.

You want to go somewheres in life, then you got to commit yourself, you got to burn all the bridges behind you, man.”

When one has been in a place for a long time, he thought sympathetically, and nobody sees one off, the feeling comes that one has never been there.

One trouble with social progress was that it was so impractical.