on walking a mile with a stone in my shoe

http://www.laser314.com/qoutes/quote07.htm






The loneliness again. Now I had only the idea of the journey to keep me going. Black Elk says it is in the dark world among the many changing shadows that men get lost. Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.
Stars shone with a clarity beyond anything I could remember. I was looking into – actually seeing – the past. By looking up into the darkness, I was looking into time. The old light from Betelgeuse, five hundred twenty light-years away, showed the star that existed when Christopher Columbus was a boy, and the Betelgeuse he saw was the one that burned when Northmen were crossing the Atlantic. For the Betelgeuse of this time, someone else will have to do the looking. The past is for the present, the present for the future.


William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways





"He had a perfect, firm handshake, the sort that suggested that the handshake originated here in the south and was then exported north and west. I wondered: did the handshake originate, as I had once read (in a Fantastic Four comic) as a gesture of trust, a way of demonstrating that you had no weapon in your hand? Or was it, from the outset, a compromise, enabling both parties to offer one hand in friendship while keeping the other free for protection, a way of establishing physical contact while maintaining the maximum possible distance?"





Dyer likens himself to Lawrence in their propensity for travel, which might be better termed an inability for each of them to make up their mind as to where to live. Consequently, he is very much at home while on the road, dogging D.H. Lawrence's historic heels. In Taormina, Sicily, Dyer seeks out the Villa Fontana Vecchia, Lawrence's abode for 3 years in the 1920s. Upon finding the house, he comments on the inevitable letdown of the moment:

"I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages: you look and look and try to summon up feelings which don't exist. You try saying a mantra to yourself, 'D.H. Lawrence lived here.' You say, 'I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw…', but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same: a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glinting in the distance."


Out of sheer rage, Geoff Dyer