[Image: opening scene from the classic computer game Myst, as rendered in the later so-called realMyst: Masterpiece Edition. (Click to enlarge.) For some wool-gathering about Myst, see the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.
(Ken Kesey [source])
…and:
October
I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.
(Don Thompson [source])
…and:
I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
(Edward Abbey [source])
