Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?
Peter Heller
I always gave her a book. An old hardback from the same section in the used bookstore where you'd find Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and musty scrawled-in Hobbits, the painted paper covers often ripped or gone.. My favorite was a sort of illustrated guidebook of pond creatures on which a very young child had written in pencil on each page under the picture of an otterI love otterUnder a muskrat: I love muskratBeaver: I love beaver
boys book child creatures find picture young written paper favorite bookstore love books
I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.
extinction happiness
There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.
truth beauty reality
That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.
belief self epistemology fear
If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.
death grief
Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminished not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
pain life grief
The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb, the dead never do..
life-lessons
I want to be two people at once. One runs away.
self loss
Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains.
life nature death-and-dying dying
He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.
solitude
So I wonder what it is this need to tell. To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.
writing-life
fame death
Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious.
wilderness risk
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