Patrick

“C. M. Doughty—Travels in Arabia Deserta—who almost never came back. A few Americans have tried to understand the desert: Mary Austin in her book Land of Little Rain, John C. Van Dyke in an unjustly forgotten book The Desert, Joseph Wood Krutch with The Voice of the Desert, the contemporary novelists Paul Bowles and William Eastlake in part of their work (but only in an incidental way), and such obscure figures as the lad Everett Reuss, author of On Desert Trails, who disappeared at the age of twenty-six into the canyon”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“I wish I understood it,” she said. “It’s okay,” I said. “Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.” “You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?” “There’s no self to hate. It’s like, when I look into myself, there’s no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don’t feel like they’re mine. They’re not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It’s like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there’s a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it’s solid all the way through. But with me, I don’t think there is one that’s solid. They just keep getting smaller.” “That reminds me of a story my mom tells,” Daisy said. “What story?” I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. “Okay, so there’s this scientist, and he’s giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything. “So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’ “The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’ “And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’ “And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’ “And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’” I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.” “It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.” “Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Suggested Further Reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr Dune by Frank Herbert To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel The Road by Cormac McCarthy The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi State of Wonder by Ann Patchett”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“beyond the confluence lies the wilderness of the Needles country, known to only a few cowboys and uranium prospectors; on the west side of the junction is another labyrinth of canyons, pinnacles and fins of naked stone, known to even fewer, closer than anything else in the forty-eight United States to being genuine terra incognita—The Maze.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire