Sierra Quotes

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

Opening yourself up to making mistakes and being vulnerable is what makes it beautiful and special with the person you love.

Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.

With someone you like that much, the lows are as low as the highs are high. Does that make sense?' It does. It also makes me sound bipolar.' Love will do that to a person.

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

Distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Your body is not a temple. Your body is the house you grew up in. How dare you try to burn it to the ground. You are bigger than this. You are bigger than this.

Nothing truly wild is unclean.

My body is a dead language and you pronounce each word perfectly.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

I loved you head over handles like my first bicycle accident — before the mouthful of gravel and blood, I swore we were flying.

This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!

Whatever happens after this, I just want you to know that this was worth it. You were worth it. You were worth everything.

God is bigger than our sins. God wants you as you are—stumbling, sinning, confused.

A veces la vida era como una canción. Durante tres minutos, perfecta.

Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

People think what they want. That's what I've had to accept," he says. "I can fight it, but that's exhausting. I can feel hurt about it, but that's torture. Or I can decide it's their loss.

Writing a list of ways I could be better and writing a suicide note are the same thing

You are a souvenir shop, where he goes to remember how much people miss him when he is gone.

You are enough. You are so enough. It is unbelievable how enough you are.

Find whatever love is left in your life and hold on to it tightly. And one day, things will have gotten less gray, less dull.

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

You wonder why I don’t answer your 3 a.m. phone calls. When you say “I miss you”, I begin to undress myself out of habit.

And your life,' Katie said to Christy, 'is turning into a rather predictable romance. Girl meets boy. Boy is a dork for four years. Girl blossoms into a gorgeous woman. Boy finds his brain. Girl turns into starry-eyed mush head.

He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]

My sister told me a soul mate is not the person who makes you the happiest but the one who makes you feel the most, who conducts your heart to bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in. It has always been you. -Love, Forgive Me

If you believe something will make the world better, then it's always worth a try, even if you fail.

Your body is the house you grew up in. How dare you try to burn it to the ground.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale." George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences. To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . . PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . . So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation. They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass! There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Para eso se es joven, para probar cosas, para experimentar. Para eso y para desafiarlo todo.

The pain of one-sided love, of knowing that I had loved her more than she had loved me

Today she looked menacingly into the mirror and said: “I’m Sierra María Santiago. I am what I am. Enough.” She sighed. These days were spooky enough without her talking to herself. “More than enough.

How many spanks have you had, Julia?” Damien asked. “Two, Sir.” “What colour are you on?” “Mortification,” she mumbled.

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

Si vis amari, ama," you tell me. If you wish to be loved, love.

Sierra, it's Christmastime. Put a stupid mistletoe over his head and kiss him already!

...the Sierra, a region so quiet and pristine that we have the sense of being the first human beings ever to set foot in it. We fall silent ourselves in its midst, as if conversation in a place of such primaevl solitude would be like talking in church.

if this was what love was, then I didn’t know how anyone could bear the weight of it.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that God is a very creative author, and He writes a different story for every person. No two lives or stories alike.

BDSM is about dropping the pretenses; I want you completely exposed.

A man and a woman wanting each other is by far one of the least sinful things I've seen

Mi médico decía que todos tenemos pesos en el alma, y que esos pesos son difíciles de quitar, así que lo que nos toca es hacer más fuerte el alma.

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today." (Interview, Sierra Magazine, May/June 2005)

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

I want a man who is sunny-side up, with a large sausage, and two hot buns.

a cold, self-righteous prig, who goes regularly to church, may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.

She has been happy here, and anxiously miserable, but she has never been free.

And mostly, I’m furious that I live in a world that has the power to make me feel ugly and unlovable because of my body.

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

I’ve hoarded your name in my mouth for months. My throat is a beehive pitched in the river. Look! Look how long this love can hold its breath.

One day, you might find that you have a life again. A life that makes you happy.

Sierra felt full of hope and confidence in God. She knew who she was. And she knew Whose she was. Whatever mysterious plan God had for her life, it would be an interesting one. As Christy had said earlier, God writes a different story for each person. Sierra decided hers might not be a bestseller or even a thriller. It certainly wasn't a romance. But it was turning into a fine mystery. And she could live with that.

….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.

Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn't know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.

Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.

Could a vow be not all the way broken? Could a sin be not all the way committed?

I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.

Todos tenemos una imagen de nosotros mismos, pero nunca coincide con la tienen los demás. Y debemos entender la de los demás, aunque sin dejar de ser nosotros mismos.

When I feel myself falling out of love with you, I turn the record of your laughter over, reposition the needle. I dust the dirty living room of your affection. -Love, Forgive Me

Todo el que crea un monstruo, tarde o temprano ha de destruirlo, o el monstruo le destruye a él.

Every morning, arising from the death of sleep, the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, "Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!

I cared about her as a person, as a soul, and I wanted to fuck her, and that was the recipe for something much worse than carnal sin. It was a recipe for falling in love.

Perhaps Embry’s always had the part of me that wielded the sword, but she… she’s always owned the part that wears the crown.

God dwelled in sex and marriage just as much as He dwelled in celibacy and service,

There was life after fucking up, after all, even for those who lived without fucking.

The first step to understanding anything—whether it’s the Bible or Fifty Shades of Grey—is acknowledging that we come to it with agendas of our own. We want it to mean something, we are biased whether we know it or not, and usually what we walk away with is what we want to walk away with.

How do they not hear the trickle of my heart’s blood dripping out of my chest, how do they not see the scooped-out pain in my eyes, how can they not hear every desperate plea and every rasping sob I’ve let out in the last twenty-four hours?

And if I ever thought Ash held all the power in their relationship, I see it clearly now. Embry holds my husband’s heart in his hands and he doesn’t even know it. He’s too busy looking at the details of Ash’s faces to see the expression, too busy being in love to see how loved he is.

I want to build a tower around you, and then build a castle around that tower, and then dig a moat around that castle, and then I want to guard you like a dragon. Burn anyone who tries to hurt you into ash and then scorch those ashes a second time.

It's not what you know, it's when you know it.

I want the memories to be worth the sins.

She was indeed the perfect package on the surface…but below it, I sensed she was so much more. Messy and passionate and raw and creative—a cyclone forced into an eggshell.

You want to know danger? Try living with a man who creates you just so he can eat your soul.

Soy diferente. Me gusta ser diferente, quiero ser diferente, verme diferente, sentirme diferente. No quiero que me pongan un número, ni que me den órdenes. No quiero que me anulen, ni formar parte de la masa. Quiero ser yo, porque soy todo lo que tengo.

I loved you head over handles like my first bicycle accident— before the mouthful of gravel and blood, I swore we were flying. -Cycle of Abuse

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.

Detective Castilla, your Secret is safe with me." She blinked with surprise, and I groaned. "God, Holden. How long have you been waiting to use that line?" "About three years." "And in three years you couldn't find any room for improvment?

When he sleeps, the snoring does not bother me: the rhythmic growl, gravel shoved across the sidewalk of his throat. It is the grasping, desperate way in which he takes in air—his gulping lungs as if every dream is filled with water and he is trying to inflate the life jacket under his skin. I babble in my sleep. He believes I am trying to tell him how my heart works, says he will translate the manual one day. I want to ask him: am I the ocean? Are you drowning in everything I don’t say when I’m awake?” —Heart Apnea

I want you to know that the idea of deserving something you want is only ever going to be an incomplete qualification. You’re far more likely to remember the reasons you shouldn’t have something you want than the reasons you should, and you’re far more likely to let shame steer you than joy.

I take it that's where you met Todd.' 'Yep. Almost five years ago. Can you believe it?' 'Five years! You and Todd should be the poster couple for the 'Love Waits' campaign.' Christy laughed. 'It didn't seem that long. A lot has happened during those five years. But I do agree that true love is worth the wait. I'd wait another five years for Todd if I had to. He's the only man for me. Ever.

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun,—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.

Christy said. "It's just weird, your seeing him like that. What are you going to do?" "Nothing. What can I do?" "Maybe he'll call you to see if you're okay," Katie said. "No," Christy said, "in the movies he would have told his friend to stop the car, and he would have run back to you with an umbrella and walked you the rest of the way hoe, and you would have made him a pot of tea." Sierra laughed. "I am drinking tea right now," she said. "Maybe my life is a low budget 'B' movie, and all I get is the tea. No hero. No umbrella." "Yeah, well then my life is a class 'Z' movie," Katie said. "No tea. No hero. No umbrella. No plot--" "Yours is more of a mystery," Christy interrupted cheerfully. "The ending will surprise all of us.

Worry is a sin, even I know that, yet I am more than just a lily of the field. I’m a lily that’s been plucked from the ground and laid at your feet. When it comes to you, I’m rootless and helpless and at your mercy for sunshine and water. And I’m not even supposed to be yours. How can I not worry?

God is bigger than our sins. God wants you as you are—stumbling, sinning, confused. All He asks of us is love—love for Him, love for others, and love for ourselves. He asks us to lay down our lives—not to live like ascetics, devoid of any pleasure or joy, but to give Him our lives so that he may increase our joy and increase our love.

Japhy,' I said out loud, 'I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned it all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.' Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said 'God I love you' and looked up to the sky and really meant it. 'I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.' To the children and the innocent it's all the same. And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said 'Thank you, shack.' Then I hadded 'Blah,' with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionise our entire epoch. Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, but the waving pine-forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure of youthful American dancing over the top of the Rockies. The supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America I will create a new dance that will express America. I bring to your theatre the vital soul that it lacks, the soul of the dancer. For you know...that the birth of the theatre was the dance, that the first actor was the dancer. He danced and sang. That was the birth of the tragedy, and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theatre, your theatre will not live in its true expression!

You are not my possession. You’re going to be my wife. My wife who kneels at my feet, who presents her cunt to me without question when I demand it, who trusts me with her heart and soul and future. You think it is either/or that you belong to yourself or you belong to me, but I’m telling you right now that it’s both/and. You belong to yourself and you belong to me, and I don’t fucking care that it seems to be a contradiction because we both know it isn’t. Now if you can’t accept that, then say my name right now and we will step back and renegotiate our relationship. But if you are willing to submit to the fact that I will move fucking heaven and earth to keep you from harm, then say yes, Sir.

the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

Why are some countries able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot? These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear. Leadership is crucial, of course. Kagame was a strong leader–decisive, focused, disciplined, and honest–and he remains so today. I believe that sometimes people's characters are molded by their environment. Angola, like Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is resource-rich, a natural blessing that sometimes has the sad effect of diminishing the human drive for self-sufficiency, the ability and determination to maximize that which one has. Kagame had nothing. He grew up in a refugee camp, equipped with only his own strength of will and determination to create a better life for himself and his countrymen.

Belief is this. Praying when you don't feel like it, when you don't know who or what is listening; it's doing the actions with the trust that something about it matters. That something about it makes you more human, a better human, a human able to love and trust and hope in a world where those things are hard. That is belief. That is the point of prayer. Not logging a wish list inside a cosmic ledger, not bartering for transactional services. You do it for the change around you; to the point of it is...itself. Nothing more and nothing less.

I have calculated the total number of hours we spend sleeping beside each other in a week and I wanted to tell you it could be considered a full-time job. We could be eligible for healthcare benefits, could probably even pay for a mortgage by now. I remind myself of this, in daylight, when I miss you and cannot reach across the bed for the comforting filling and refilling of your chest. Such a strange affair we are having on each other; these hours that I have not lost but do not remember. This cannot be the best of love: to drool on someone’s collarbone or inhale an elbow to the jaw or be woken by the most ungraceful sounds of the body. But what is it if not the softening of grips? A letting go of. Your heart finally slowly that stubborn, lonely march.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the spirit of the Mountain was thinking; and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great western slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. And beyond, beyond, over the Sierras the other side if Carson sink was bejeweled bay-encircled nightlike old Frisco of my dreams. We were situated on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the plains where somewhere a man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word and would arrive any minute and make us silent.

Mantra to Overcome Depression Vitamin D. Sunlight. Go outside. Get a good night of sleep. Not too good. Not shades drawn forever good. Not like you used to. Open the windows. Buy more houseplants. Breathe. Meditate. One day, you will no longer be afraid of being alone with your thoughts. Exercise. Actually exercise instead of just Googling it. Eat well. Cook for yourself. Organize your closet, the garage. Drink plenty of water and repeat after me: I am not a problem to be solved. Repeat after me: I am worthy I am worthy I am neither the mistake nor the punishment. Forget to take vitamins. Let the houseplant die. Eat spoonfuls of peanut butter. Shave your head. Forget this poem. It doesn't matter. There is no wrong way to remember the grace of your own body; no choice that can unmake itself. There is only now, here look: you are already forgiven.

Today Means Amen Dear you, whoever you are, however you got here, this is exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment has waited its whole life for you. This moment is your lover and you are a soldier. Come home, baby, it's over. You don't need to suffer anymore. Dear you, this moment is your surprise party. You are both hiding in the dark and walking through the door. This moment is a hallelujah. This moment is your permission slip to finally open that love letter you've been hiding from yourself, the one you wrote when you were little when you still danced like a sparkler at dusk. Do you remember the moment you realized they were watching? When you became ashamed of how much light you were holding? When you first learned how to unlove yourself? Dear you, the word today means amen in every language. Today, we made it. Today, I'm going to love you. Today, I'm going to love myself. Today, the boxcutter will rust in the garbage. The noose will forget how to hold you, today, today-- Dear you, and I have always meant you, nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, whose voice is someone's favorite voice, someone's favorite face to wake up to. Nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, the teacher, the starter's gun, the lantern in the night who offers not a way home, but the courage to travel farther into the dark. You, the lover, who worships the taste of her body, who is the largest tree ring in his heart, who does not let fear ration your love. You, the friend, the sacred chorus of how can I help. You, who have felt more numb than holy, more cracked than mosaic. Who have known the tiles of a bathroom by heart, who have forgotten what makes you worth it. You, the forgiven, the forgiver, who belongs right here in this moment. You, this clump of cells, this happy explosion that happened to start breathing, and by the grace of whatever is up there, you got here. You made it this whole way: through the nights that swallowed you whole, the mornings that arrived in pieces. The scabs, the gravel, the doubt, the hurt, the hurt, the hurt is over. Today, you made it. You made it. You made it here.

I've often wondered what people mean when they talk about an experience. I'm a technologist and accustomed to seeing things as they are. I see everything they are talking about very clearly; after all, I'm not blind. I see the moon over the Tamaulipas desert--it is more distinct than at other times, perhaps, but still a calculable mass circling around our planet, an example of gravitation, interesting, but in what way an experience? I see the jagged rocks, standing out black against the moonlight; perhaps they do look like the jagged backs of prehistoric monsters, but I know they are rocks, stone, probably volcanic, one should have to examine them to be sure of this. Why should I feel afraid? There aren't any prehistoric monsters any more. Why should I imagine them? I'm sorry, but I don't see any stone angels either; nor demons; I see what I see--the usual shapes due to erosion and also my long shadow on the sand, but no ghosts. Why get womanish? I don't see any Flood either, but sand lit up by the moon and made undulating, like water, by the wind, which doesn't surprise me; I don't find it fantastic, but perfectly explicable. I don't know what the souls of the damned look like; perhaps like black agaves in the desert at night. What I see are agaves, a plant that blossoms once only and dies. Furthermore, I know (however I may look at the moment) that I am not the last or the first man on earth; and I can't be moved by the mere idea that I am the last man, because it isn't true. Why get hysterical? Mountains are mountains, even if in a certain light they may look like something else, but it is the Sierra Madre Oriental, and we are not standing in a kingdom of the dead, but in the Tamaulipas desert, Mexico, about sixty miles from the nearest road, which is unpleasant, but in what way an experience? Nor can I bring myself to hear something resembling eternity; I don't hear anything, apart from the trickle of sand at every step. Why should I experience what isn't there?