Trouble Defies The Law Of Gravity. It's

The [travel] Writer, Looking Back At The Journey From A Distance Of A Year Or Two (or Three), Is A Different Character From The Hapless Character Who Undertook The Trip: Wise After The Event, With The Leisure To Tease Out Meanings From The Experience That The Distracted Traveler Never Had, And Often Impatient With His Alter Ego's Blinkered And Unsatisfactory Version Of Things.

It Always Seems To Me Odd To Call A Place A Wilderness When Every Wilderness Area In The Us Bristles With Rules And Regulations As To How You Can Behave, What You're Allowed To Do, And Is Patrolled By Armed Rangers Enforcing The Small Print. They're Parks, Of Course, Not Wildernesses At All.

One Classic American Landscape Haunts All Of American Literature. It Is A Picture Of Eden, Perceived At The Instant Of History When Corruption Has Just Begun To Set It. The Serpent Has Shown His Scaly Head In The Undergrowth. The Apple Gleams On The Tree. The Old Drama Of The Fall Is Ready To Start All Over Again.

We Need – More Urgently Than Architectural Utopias, Ingenious Traffic Disposal Systems, Or Ecological Programmes – To Comprehend The Nature Of Citizenship, To Make Serious Imaginative Assessment Of That Special Relationship Between The Self And The City; Its Unique Plasticity, Its Privacy And Freedom.

I Ain't Sleeping. I'm Just Taking A Good Look At The Insides Of My Eyelids.