The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Have you ever been someplace where all you could hear is the wind? One thing I love about hiking in North Florida is getting somewhere that remote. The world’s a wild and unexpected place. Take care with where you wander. I’ll only be your guide for so long before I fall away and you’re on the journey all alone…
“The Other Side of the Mountain” by Michel Bernanos also deals with desolation and with facing the unknown. It’s a brilliant piece of fiction from the 1960s. Although the Bernanos is not a conscious influence, in looking back I can see how the tenacity of my biologist is allied to the tenacity of the characters in “The Other Side…” You can find the novella in an anthology I edited with my wife, Ann, entitled, The Weird. This 1,200-page monstrosity covers one hundred years of strange an unusual fiction. For more on Bernanos, this essay by Gio Clairval provides an interesting overview.
http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/essay-the-mountain-dead-from-life/
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Skylar Phelps
