2 April 2006, Truckee CA

Strange how the same organism that gives rise to emotions capable of overwhelming reason, can be satisfied by the simplest of actions: driving in a rainstorm, making a fire, cooking. It is only when one stops moving that they seem to appear, but of course when they do it becomes clear that they were there all along.

The green hills of the California Coastal Range, when shrouded in mist, assume the softness of a body, and the mind imagines hands large enough to grasp them and draw them close. There is, even in this impossible gesture, something of the phenomenon of physical contact, for you see past all the artifacts of civilization – roads, subdivisions, chain stores,and farms – to something far older, with its own logic and causes. Continental plates scrape against each other, exposing this or that kind of stone, whose histories emerge as they erode and form soils suitable to some plants and not to others.

Our own deep desires lead us to congregate like boobies or murrulets on our own favored bits of rock, where we build nests and make our own noisy squawks. The irony is that in order to live together in peace we have to form civilizations, which connect us at a rational level but separate us at other levels. Desires become rarefied, abstracted, and directed at concepts like profit, gas prices, the economy, and appointments. There is, in the final analysis, nothing wrong with this: as Aristotle says, man is a political animal. In fact it is something of an affront to nature to seek to live outside the bonds of society, because humans form roots as surely as trees. Some to a lesser degree than others, and to an extent that depends on whether a particular society is just, or just amenable, but the ancients were right when they said that a man who can live without society is either a beast or a god. Those with no desire or need for human contact are not quite human.

As proof I need look no farther than my own heart, which was seized, as soon as I ceased to distract it, with an animal terror at being uprooted like this. “It ain’t right,” Clark said semi-jokingly, and indeed it is not. But there are bigger things at stake here: my nature as an individual, as Daniel Meliza, which demands something over and against my nature as a human. Or rather, seemingly against, for what is more human than the desire to make something of value, something true or useful or beautiful. I have to take this opportunity, as much as it hurts me. such are the tensions we live with.

Though for my part I am not sure I could make these sacrifices if I did not wait in hope for the world to come. If I were not certain that I would have to answer for what I become. You may accuse me of escapism here: I accuse myself. Yet I know of no other way to answer the question of death, of which parting, like love, is a small foretaste. But if even love is mingled with death, all that I have seen of it convinces me that it is stronger. When I rest my own heart in it I find a great joy in my freedom.

But that is enough of these dark thoughts. I have gotten the philosophy and personal reflections out of my system; like Hans Castorp I have vowed to let death have no mastery over me; and now, gentle reader, we are ready for an adventure!

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 2April2006 )