Horizon

by Barry Lopez

To travel, above all, is to change one’s skin. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Southern Mail

We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there.

I had in mind recounting my experience in five separate places, and believed that this journey through recollection would start at Cape Foulweather.

This was more than the atavistic scenes of medieval meat markets that Pieter Aertsen painted in the sixteenth century. It was the future, the years to come, when we would begin killing and consuming every last living thing.

diversity is an ineluctable component of every successful attempt to establish order.

we’re only ardently searching for coherence, for a way to fit all the pieces of our life experience together into a meaningful whole, to find a direction in which to continue.

the failure to love or to be loved explains most of the mental pain people endure. The failure to love explains the burden of human loneliness, which each person prays or hopes or works hard to be rid of.