Horizon

by Barry Lopez

Some of one’s early intentions fade. Others endure through the inevitable detours of amnesia, betrayal, and loss of belief.

the unfathomable sublimity of a random moment, like the touch of a beloved’s hand on one’s burning face, might revive the determination to carry on, and, at least for a time, rid one of life’s weight of self-doubt and regret.

Or a moment of staggering beauty might reignite the intention one once had to lead a life of great meaning, to live up to one’s own expectations.

I could not find anywhere in my coursework in calculus the headlong spirit of Saint-Exupéry, scudding over dune crests in Western Sahara beneath a bejeweled sky. The meaning of Icarus’s defiant and incautious bravado was never addressed in my physics seminar.

“Nobody has the vaguest notion of what this world is really like; the only thing that can be safely predicted is that it is very different from what anybody supposes.”

the predicament of departure—the desire so strong to head out, yet at the same time feeling a breach opening, the breaking of a bond that can be repaired only by returning. What experience might be discovered on the far side of that breach to somehow justify the leaving?

The horrors—ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution—once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference.

We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.

As time grows short, the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.

“In subjugating primitive worlds they only imposed on them, with the force of cannons, their own confusion and their own alienation.”

will live his life like this, always searching, even though he doesn’t really know what to look for.

It has long seemed to me that what most of us are looking for is the opportunity to express, without embarrassment or judgment or retaliation, our capacity to love. That means, too, embracing the opportunity to be loved, to ferret out and nurture the reciprocated relationships that unite

that sense of loss one sometimes feels when a brief, intense relationship with someone encountered on a plane or at a café ends.

he also understood what could not be charted, the importance of the line that separated the known from the unknown. He understood what occurred in the silence between two musical notes. He also knew, I believe, the indispensability of this.

the throttled Earth—the scalped, the mined, the industrially farmed, the drilled, polluted, and suctioned land, endlessly manipulated for further development and profit—is now our home. We know the wounds. We have come to accept them. And we ask, many of us, What will the next step be?

“To explore,” he says, “is to travel without a hypothesis.”

the potential and promise inherent in departing the known.

a man who passed away oddly unfinished or sidetracked, a person in whose history one finds too many doors automatically closed simply because he had the wrong physical appearance, the wrong work history, the wrong ideas.

a knowledge of both the extreme complexity of the local (which Cook had neither the time nor the inclination to acquire) and the unbounded enormity of the grand overview.

If one has a capacity for appreciating both, the customary arrangements of space and time that constrain imagination become veils. They are no longer rigid walls.

with a visionary’s awareness of a fabric comprised of all these local universes, more options for humanity become apparent.

Experiencing this fundamental dynamic, the enduring earth and the changing weather, and not the static interior of my rooms, was the right setting in my mind for getting out of myself and trying to address the questions I had.

being free from unnecessary interruption and from scrutiny was essential to the moral, psychological, and artistic development of a human being, and of humanity in general.

How do elk object to the drone? How does anyone resist the many forms of daily invasion? If one intends to run, what is the destination?

Even avowed atheists bent on making business deals now arrive regularly in foreign lands with this attitude. It’s an outward sign of their success as a “superior” culture. It kills people. —

“a flight of mad fancy that captured the imagination at the cost of ignoring too many realities,”

“We weren’t going to improve anyone’s life, and we were faced with the wreckage of our own,” he said.

rid the human imagination of a particular kind of darkness, the darkness that leads to despair, to hatred and war, by opening it wider to both the real and the numinous dimensions of the world.

Camus wrote: “The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation.”