Wandering In Strange Lands Quotes

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.

Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold...The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.

Nature Boy There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy They say he wandered very far, very far Over land and sea A little shy And sad of eye But very wise Was he And then one day A magic day he passed my way And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me “The greatest thing You’ll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return

This was what my spirit longed to do, to wander in strange lands. It couldn't stand being trapped in one body all the time. It had wanderlust.

My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you - are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude.

Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost! (96)

I AM RESTLESS AM restless. I am athirst for far-away things. My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance. O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore. I am eager and wakeful, I am a stranger in a strange land. Thy breath comes to me whispering an impossible hope. Thy tongue is known to my heart as its very own. O Far-to-seek, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I know not the way, that I have not the winged horse. I am listless, I am a wanderer in my heart. In the sunny haze of the languid hours, what vast vision of thine takes shape in the blue of the sky! O Farthest end, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that the gates are shut everywhere in the house where I dwell alone!

Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land.

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth stupid fumbling—oh, he conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid having government, any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to his bowels. But Harshaw did not have to like it. Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it a “good.” He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

“is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?” Arna Bontemps

I. My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the workings of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. II. What else should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare. III. If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly I did turn as he pointed, neither pride Now hope rekindling at the end descried, So much as gladness that some end might be. IV. For, what with my whole world-wide wandering, What with my search drawn out through years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope With that obstreperous joy success would bring, I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope. V. As when a sick man very near to death Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end The tears and takes the farewell of each friend, And hears one bit the other go, draw breath Freelier outside, ('since all is o'er,' he saith And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;') VI. When some discuss if near the other graves be room enough for this, and when a day Suits best for carrying the corpse away, With care about the banners, scarves and staves And still the man hears all, and only craves He may not shame such tender love and stay. VII. Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest, Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ So many times among 'The Band' to wit, The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed Their steps - that just to fail as they, seemed best, And all the doubt was now - should I be fit? VIII. So, quiet as despair I turned from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into the path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. IX. For mark! No sooner was I fairly found Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backwards a last view O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round; Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. I might go on, naught else remained to do. X. So on I went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: For flowers - as well expect a cedar grove! But cockle, spurge, according to their law Might propagate their kind with none to awe, You'd think; a burr had been a treasure trove. XI. No! penury, inertness and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land's portion. 'See Or shut your eyes,' said Nature peevishly, It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: Tis the Last Judgement's fire must cure this place Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.

...I have often wondered why we do it. Uproot ourselves, I mean. Why we feel the need to travel and wander into strange soil. Why we can't leave things alone. It must be the world calling to us. After all, they say it had been one giant continent once. Maybe this is why we feel drawn to each other, to the lands we cannot see. We think of new places as opportunities to build new lives, but all are we're really doing is trying to find our way back.

Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are defined by those people’s fervency. Fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell. The best sellers are on one shelf, cheek by jowl, whether what’s contained in them is true or not. People wander blindly, following the Gut into dark corners and aisles that lead nowhere, confusing possibilities with threats, jumping at shadows, stumbling around. They trip over piles of fiction left strewn around the floor of the nonfiction aisles. They fall down. They land on other people, and those other people can get hurt.

There fared a mother driven forth Out of an inn to roam; In the place where she was homeless All men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand, With shaking timber and shifting sand, Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand Than the square stones of Rome. For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay on their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done. Here we have battle and blazing eyes, And chance and honour and high surprise, But our homes are under miraculous skies Where the yule tale was begun. A Child in a foul stable, Where the beasts feed and foam; Only where He was homeless Are you and I at home; We have hands that fashion and heads that know, But our hearts we lost - how long ago! In a place no chart nor ship can show Under the sky's dome. This world is wild as an old wives' tale, And strange the plain things are, The earth is enough and the air is enough For our wonder and our war; But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings And our peace is put in impossible things Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings Round an incredible star. To an open house in the evening Home shall men come, To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home.

Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: 'Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.' Explain your emotion.

Nature Boy There was a boy A very STRANGE ENCHANTED boy. They say he wandered very far, very far, Over land and sea. A little SHY And SAD of eye, But very wise, VERY WISE was he... Until one day, ONE LUCKY day he passed my way, And while we talked of many things Fools and kings, This he said to me: "The greatest thing YOU'LL ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return.

But imagine this, for a moment. If an asteroid happened to hit one of the rare remaining older surfaces; if its strike were glancing enough that it didn’t pulverise the surface, but forceful enough that it ejected a chunk of rock with an escape velocity of 12,000 mph; if that chunk, flung out into space, wandered aimlessly for a million years or two before feeling the gravitational tug of a nearby planet; if it tore through the atmosphere of that planet in a blaze of glory and landed on one of the planet’s frozen ice caps; if the chunk was buried in snow, squeezed, shoved and harried until it re-emerged, blinking, into the strangely blue daylight; and if, tens of thousands of years later a few local bipeds happened upon it, might it contain signs of alien life? If so, it would surely become one of the most exciting pieces of real estate in the entire Solar System.

Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

I'll tell you what I miss. I miss that throbbing heart telling me to take a leap when the sky looks too dark. I miss the walk that I took in the narrow cobblestoned pathways that fumed of history and undying stories of love and loss. I miss the coffee that scented like mist in a frozen dream in a land of strange beauty. I miss the afternoon tea that followed my pen to hours of happy melancholy. I miss the muse I saw dance in a foreign land of near heart. I miss the stranger smiling at me from a corner and teaching me his language to smile at my twinkled happiness. I miss that symphony of mad evenings ending in a sky full of stars to fill my soul with an unknown ecstasy. I miss that hand of an old woman trying to tell me her story. I miss that child running up to me in a crowd of unknown faces to hand me her candy. I miss that night where I lay back on a distant balcony gazing at the solitary moon for hours knowing that it is shining at my homeland just as bright. I miss that stranger listening to my heart and telling me how beautiful it is. I miss a wandering soul, who went on filling her breath with life of eternal love in the wings of Life. And I'll tell you now when I look back I see how wonderful Time has treated me and how grateful I am to have lived in moments that roar of a beautiful Life lived with a heart throbbing to take a leap once again in that ocean of Life's beguiling journey.

Epistle to Be Left in the Earth ...It is colder now, There are many stars, We are drifting North by the Great Bear, The leaves are falling, The water is stone in the scooped rocks, To southward Red sun grey air: The crows are Slow on their crooked wings, The jays have left us: Long since we passed the flares of Orion. Each man believes in his heart he will die. Many have written last thoughts and last letters. None know if our deaths are now or forever: None know if this wandering earth will be found. We lie down and the snow covers our garments. I pray you, You (if any open this writing) Make in your mouths the words that were our names. I will tell you all we have learned, I will tell you everything: The earth is round, There are springs under the orchards, The loam cuts with a blunt knife, Beware of Elms in thunder, The lights in the sky are stars— We think they do not see, We think also The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us: The birds too are ignorant. Do not listen. Do not stand at dark in the open windows. We before you have heard this: They are voices: They are not words at all but the wind rising. Also none among us has seen God. (...We have thought often The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather Pointed to one tree but it was not so.) As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous: The wind changes at night and the dreams come. It is very cold, There are strange stars near Arcturus, Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky

From east to west, in fact, her gaze swept slowly, without encountering a single obstacle, along a perfect curve. Beneath her, the blue-and-white terraces of the Arab town overlapped one another, splattered with the dark-red spots of the peppers drying in the sun. Not a soul could be seen, but from the inner courts, together with the aroma of roasting coffee, there rose laughing voices or incomprehensible stamping of feet. Father off, the palm grove, divided into uneven squares by clay walls, rustled its upper foliage in a wind that could not be felt up on the terace. Still farther off and all the way to the horizon extended the ocher-and-gray realm of stones, in which no life was visible. At some distance from the oasis, however, near the wadi that bordered the palm grove on the west could be seen broad black tents. All around them a flock of motionless dromedaries, tiny at the distance, formed against the gray ground the black signs of a strange handwriting, the meaning of which had to be deciphered. Above the desert, the silence was as vast as the space. Janine, leaning her whole body against the parapet, was speechless, unable to tear herself away from the void opening before her. Beside her, Marcel was getting restless. He was cold; he wanted to go back down. What was there to see here, after all? But she could not take her gaze from the horizon. Over yonder, still farther south, at that point where sky and earth met in a pure line - over yonder it suddenly seemed there was awaiting her something of which, though it had always been lacking, she had never been aware until now. In the advancing afternoon the light relaxed and softened; it was passing from the crystalline to the liquid. Simultaneously, in the heart of a woman brought there by pure chance a knot tightened by the years, habit, and boredom was slowly loosening. She was looking at the nomads' encampment. She had not even seen the men living in it' nothing was stirring among the black tents, and yet she could think only of them whose existence she had barely known until this day. Homeless, cut off from the world, they were a handful wandering over the vast territory she could see, which however was but a paltry part of an even greater expanse whose dizzying course stopped only thousands of miles farther south, where the first river finally waters the forest. Since the beginning of time, on the dry earth of this limitless land scraped to bone, a few men had been ceaselessly trudging, possessing nothing but serving no one, poverty-stricken but free lords of a strange kingdom. Janine did not know why this thought filled her with such a sweet, vast melancholy that it closed her eyes. She knew that this kingdom had been eternally promised her and yet that it would never be hers, never again, except in this fleeting moment perhaps when she opened her eyes again on the suddenly motionless sky and on its waves of steady light, while the voices rising from the Arab town suddenly fell silent. It seemed to her that the world's course had just stopped and that, from that moment on, no one would ever age any more or die. Everywhere, henceforth, life was suspended - except in her heart, where, at the same moment, someone was weeping with affliction and wonder.

What I mean — and I ought to know if any one does! — is that while most countries give, others take away. Egypt changes you. No one can live here and remain exactly what he was before.” This puzzled me. It startled, too, again. His manner was so earnest. “And Egypt, you mean, is one of the countries that take away?” I asked. The strange idea unsettled my thoughts a little. “First takes away from you,” he replied, “but in the end takes you away. Some lands enrich you,” he went on, seeing that I listened, “while others impoverish. From India, Greece, Italy, all ancient lands, you return with memories you can use. From Egypt you return with — nothing. Its splendour stupefies; it’s useless. There is a change in your inmost being, an emptiness, an unaccountable yearning, but you find nothing that can fill the lack you’re conscious of. Nothing comes to replace what has gone. You have been drained.’’ I stared; but I nodded a general acquiescence. Of a sensitive, artistic temperament this was certainly true, though by no means the superficial and generally accepted verdict. The majority imagine that Egypt has filled them to the brim. I took his deeper reading of the facts. I was aware of an odd fascination in his idea. “Modern Egypt,” he continued, “is, after all, but a trick of civilisation,” and there was a kind of breathlessness in his measured tone, “but ancient Egypt lies waiting, hiding, underneath. Though dead, she is amazingly alive. And you feel her touching you. She takes from you. She enriches herself. You return from Egypt — less than you were before.” What came over my mind is hard to say. Some touch of visionary imagination burned its flaming path across my mind. I thought of some old Grecian hero speaking of his delicious battle with the gods — battle in which he knew he must be worsted, but yet in which he delighted because at death his spirit would join their glorious company beyond this world. I was aware, that is to say, of resignation as well as resistance in him. He already felt the effortless peace which follows upon long, unequal battling, as of a man who has fought the rapids with a strain beyond his strength, then sinks back and goes with the awful mass of water smoothly and indifferently — over the quiet fall.

He heard a dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom. She came out dressed all in black, as she almost always did, and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trash can before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her, and it seemed to him later that she’d been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined—later it seemed possible that she’d simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she hadn’t stood in front of the sofa at all—had merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extended into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point. Later he was certain that the first few playbacks of that last morning were reasonably accurate, but after a few too many nights of lying awake and considering things, the quality began to erode. In retrospect the sequence of events is a little hazy, images running into each other and becoming slightly confused: she’s across the room, she’s kissing him for a third time—and why doesn’t he look up and kiss her? Her last kiss lands on his head—and putting on her shoes; does she kiss him before she puts on her shoes, or afterward? He can’t swear to it one way or the other. Later on he examined his memory for signs until every detail seemed ominous, but eventually he had to conclude that there was nothing strange about her that day. It was a morning like any other, exquisitely ordinary in every respect.

At noontime in midsummer, when the sun is at its highest and everything is in a state of embroiled repose, flashes may be seen in the southern sky. Into the radiance of daylight come bursts of light even more radiant. Exactly half a year later, when the fjord is frozen over and the land buried in snow, the very same spirit taunts creation. At night cracks in the ice race from one end of the fjord to the other, resounding like gunshots or like the roaring of a mad demon. The peasants dig tunnels from their door through the drifts over to the cow shed. Where are the trolls and the elves now, and where are the sounds of nature? Even the Beast may well be dead and forgotten. Life itself hangs in suspension - existence has shrunk to nothingness. Now it is only a question of survival. The fox thrashes around in a blizzard in the oak thicket and fights his way out, mortally terrified. It is a time of stillness. Hoarfrost lies in a timeless shroud over the fjord. All day long a strange, sighing sound is heard from out on the ice. It is a fisherman, standing alone at his hole and spearing eel. One night it snows again. The air is sheer snow and the wind a frigid blast. No living creature is stirring. Then a rider comes to the crossing at Hvalpsund. There is no difficulty in getting over­ - he does not even slacken his speed, but rides at a brisk trot from the shore out onto the ice. The hoofbeats thunder beneath him and the ice roars for miles around. He reaches the other side and rides up onto the land. The horse — a mighty steed not afraid to shake its shanks - cleaves the storm with neck outstretched. The blizzard blows the rider's ashen cape back and he sits naked, with his bare bones sticking out and the snow whistling about his ribs. It is Death that is out riding. His crown sits on three hairs and his scythe points triumphantly backward. Death has his whims. He takes it into his head to dis­mount when he sees a light in the winter night. He gives his horse a slap on the haunch and it leaps into the air and is gone. For the rest of the way Death walks like a carefree man, sauntering absentmindedly along. In the snow-streaked night a crow is sitting on a wayside branch. Its head is much too large for its body. Its beady eyes sparkle when it sees the wanderer's familiar face, and its cawing turns into silent laughter as it throws its beak wide open, with its spear-like tongue sticking far out. It seems almost ready to fall off the branch with its laughter, but it keeps on looking at Death with consuming merriment. Death moves on. Suddenly he finds himself beside a man. He raps the man on the back with his fingers and leaves him lying there. There is a light. Death keeps his eye on the light and walks toward it. He moves into the shaft of light and labors his way over a frozen field. But when he comes close enough to make out the house a strange fervor grips him. He has finally come home - yes, this has been his true home from the beginning. Thank goodness he has now found it again after so much difficulty. He goes in, and a solitary old couple make him welcome. They cannot know that he is anything more than a traveling tradesman, spent and sick. He lies down quickly on the bed without a word. They can see that he is really far gone. He lies on his back while they move about the room with the candle and chat. He forgets them. For a long time he lies there, quiet but awake. Finally there are a few low moans, faltering and tentative. He begins to cry, and then quickly stops. But now the moans continue, becoming louder, and then going over to tearless sobs. His body arches up, resting only on head and heels. He stares in anguish at the ceiling and screams, screams like a woman in labor. Finally he collapses, and his cries begin to subside. Little by little he falls silent and lies quiet.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deeprooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

Trail of Tears, “these forced migrations” whose “fearful evils…are impossible to imagine…. I have witnessed evils,” Tocqueville admits a couple of paragraphs later, “I would find it impossible to relate.”* Regarding the plight of Indians in the United States, words practically fail Tocqueville. As for black people, they seem less fated for extinction than Native Americans, but their situation is nevertheless dire: black people, enslaved or free, “only constitute an unhappy remnant, a poor little wandering tribe, lost in the midst of an immense nation which owns all the land.” Such an assessment seems strange, if not ridiculous, to the twenty-first-century ear, since “this poor little wandering tribe” comprised more than two million people, more than 18 percent of the total population. Tocqueville very clearly realizes that slavery damages southern white people as well as the southern economy. Because of slavery, southern white people’s customs and character compare poorly with those of other Americans.

His great-aunt had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children. That was what she’d always claimed, and could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge, the first blackberry darken and swell enough to harvest. Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they’d died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk. Knowledge of the land was the one memory that refused to dissolve. During her last year, Jesse would step off the school bus and see his great-aunt hoeing a field behind her farmhouse, breaking ground for a crop she never sowed, but the rows were always straight, right-depthed. Her nephew, Jesse’s father, worked in an adjoining field. The first few times, he had taken the hoe from her hands and led her back to her house, but she’d soon be back in the field. After a while neighbors and kin just let her hoe.

Trusting to this unity of civilized races countless people left hearth and home to live in strange lands and trusted their fortunes to the friendly relations existing between the various countries. And even he who was not tied down to the same spot by the exigencies of life could combine all the advantages and charms of civilized countries into a newer and greater fatherland which he could enjoy without hindrance or suspicion. He thus took delight in the blue and the grey ocean, the beauty of snow clad mountains and of the green lowlands, the magic of the north woods and the grandeur of southern vegetation, the atmosphere of landscapes upon which great historical memories rest, and the peace of untouched nature. The new fatherland was to him also a museum, filled with the treasure that all the artists of the world for many centuries had created and left behind. While he wandered from one hall to another in this museum he could give his impartial appreciation to the varied types of perfection that had been developed among his distant compatriots by the mixture of blood, by history, and by the peculiarities of physical environment. Here cool, inflexible energy was developed to the highest degree, there the graceful art of beautifying life, elsewhere the sense of law and order, or other qualities that have made man master of the earth.

I don’t know what it was about menopause, specifically, that caused me all of a sudden to become a gatherer of “found objects.” But now, wherever I went in this bleakly untamed and often inhospitable landscape in the wild western extremes of Ireland, I seemed to hear things calling out to me. I was rooting for something — I didn’t know what. For fragments of myself, perhaps; my life, my loves. For fragments which reflected something of myself back at me — whatever I might be becoming now, at this turbulent, shapeshifting time of my life. And all the fragments I seemed to need came from this new place, from the ancient, uncompromising earth around me: that land which I walked compulsively, day after day after day. I would come home from the woods reverently carrying strangely shaped sticks, from the lough with pebbles and water-bird feathers, from the beach with seashells and mermaid’s purses — as if I were reassembling myself from elements of the land itself. After the deep dissolutions of menopause, I was refashioning myself from those calcinated ashes; I was growing new bones. It’s something we all have to do at this time in our lives; somehow, with whatever tools are available to us, we have to begin to curate the vision of the elder we will become. It’s an act of bricolage. And so now I had become like the bright-eyed, cackling magpies which regularly ransacked our garden: a collector — though not of trinkets, but of clues. I was gathering them together in the safety of my new nest. The clues were there in the pieces; those clues are threaded through this book. Scattered in shadowy corners and brightly lit windows, these objects I’ve selected are so much more than random gatherings of whatever it was that I happened to come across in my wanderings. They’re so much more than mere clutter. They are active choices, carefully selected objects that mirror my sense of myself as a shapeshifting, storied creature. Because the clues to our re-memberings are in the stories, and the stories are always born from the land.

Nostromo is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the publication of the Typhoon volume of short stories. I don’t mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration; a phenomenon for which I can not in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the Typhoon volume it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about. This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for Nostromo came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable details. As a matter of fact in 1875 or ’6, when very young, in the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the troubles of a revolution. On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I heard no details, and having no particular interest in crime qua crime I was not likely to keep that one in my mind. And I forgot it till twenty-six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. It was the life story of an American seaman written by himself with the assistance of a journalist. In the course of his wanderings that American sailor worked for some months on board a schooner, the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard in my very young days. I have no doubt of that because there could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the same part of the world and both connected with a South American revolution.

As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you. From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvellous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf. But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down. You saw that was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth’s deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh – you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy, swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.

Something in this meadow and places like it, humble and hidden, offers respite and moments of calm for the wild, adventurous soul that plagues the boys of the world, the wanderer's soul that gnaws and aches inside of them even unto gray manhood. It is the plague of horizons, the plague of the next river bend, the plague that drives men over the vast oceans into strange lands beyond the edges of the maps.

March 16 MORNING “I am a stranger with thee.” — Psalm 39:12 YES, O Lord, with Thee, but not to Thee. All my natural alienation from Thee, Thy grace has effectually removed; and now, in fellowship with Thyself, I walk through this sinful world as a pilgrim in a foreign country. Thou art a stranger in Thine own world. Man forgets Thee, dishonours Thee, sets up new laws and alien customs, and knows Thee not. When Thy dear Son came unto His own, His own received Him not. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. Never was foreigner so speckled a bird among the denizens of any land as Thy beloved Son among His mother’s brethren. It is no marvel, then, if I who live the life of Jesus, should be unknown and a stranger here below. Lord, I would not be a citizen where Jesus was an alien. His pierced hand has loosened the cords which once bound my soul to earth, and now I find myself a stranger in the land. My speech seems to these Babylonians among whom I dwell an outlandish tongue, my manners are singular, and my actions are strange. A Tartar would be more at home in Cheapside than I could ever be in the haunts of sinners. But here is the sweetness of my lot: I am a stranger with Thee. Thou art my fellow-sufferer, my fellowpilgrim. Oh, what joy to wander in such blessed society! My heart burns within me by the way when Thou dost speak to me, and though I be a sojourner, I am far more blest than those who sit on thrones, and far more at home than those who dwell in their ceiled houses. “To me remains nor place, nor time: My country is in every clime; I can be calm and free from care On any shore, since God is there.” “While place we seek, or place we shun, The soul finds happiness in none: But with a God to guide our way, ’Tis equal joy to go or stay.

Thousands of years of wandering stripped the Central Australian aboriginal of independent ability toplan a future, and made him master only of the moment. His dwellings always have been temporary crude things of sticks and leaves and grass, built in a few hours and abandoned at the mystic call of far-away food, water, or tribal ceremony. He gorged himself today, starved tomorrow, and shared his temporary possessions. He believed in his descent from spirit and dream forms of totemic ancestors in an amazingly intricate and ceremonial network, which still baffles many of the world’s foremost anthropologists. A curiously talented race, with the minds of designing mathematicians yet little ability to count; whose great strength and past lay back in the ages of legend and ceremony; whose future was never their own concern, but the pawn of circumstance; a people who could not think ahead, but feverishly worshipped the traditions of the past.

Now as the train moved towards Calcutta, Malay felt as if his life was coming full circle. It had been a strange decision to visit the city at a time when post-Partition vomit and excreta was splattered on Calcutta streets. Marked by communal violence, anger and unemployment, the streets smelled of hunger and disillusionment. Riots were still going on. The wound of a land divided lingered, refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) continued to arrive in droves. And since they did not know where to go, they occupied the pavements, laced the streets with their questions, frustrations and a deep need to be recognised as more than an inconvenient presence on tree-lined avenues. The feeling of being uprooted was everywhere. Political leaders decided that the second phase of the five-year planning needed to see the growth of heavy industries. The land required for such industries necessitated the evacuation of farmers. Devoid of their ancestral land and in the absence of a proper rehabilitation plan, those evicted wandered aimlessly around the cities—refugees by another name. Calcutta had assumed different dimensions in Malay’s mind. The smell of the Hooghly wafted across Victoria Memorial and settled like an unwanted cow on its lawns. Unsung symphonies spilled out of St Paul’s Cathedral on lonely nights; white gulls swooped in on grey afternoons and looked startling against the backdrop of the rain-swept edifice. In a few years, Naxalbari would become a reality, but not yet. Like an infant Kali with bohemian fantasies, Calcutta and its literature sprouted a new tongue – that of the Hungry Generation. Malay, like Samir and many others, found himself at the helm of this madness, and poetry seemed to lick his body and soul in strange colours. As a reassurance of such a huge leap of faith, Shakti had written to Samir: Bondhu Samir, We had begun by speaking of an undying love for literature, when we suddenly found ourselves in a dream. A dream that is bigger than us, and one that will exist in its capacity of right and wrong and beyond that of our small worlds. Bhalobasha juriye Shakti

In grade school, I was never taught about the different social milieus that black people occupied in nineteenth-century America and earlier, and I was definitely never taught that free black people existed prior to the Emancipation Proclamation.

The United States government encouraged the Five Civilized Tribes to participate in chattel slavery for two reasons: (1) to interbreed the native population with their white fellow slave owners, diluting Indians’ undesirable “primitive” traits, and (2) more important, to dissuade the Native Americans from protecting runaway slaves.

And then in 1830, when Jackson was president, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced these tribes to move west of the Mississippi into what is now known as Oklahoma. The brutal journey they took is known as the Trail of Tears. A little-known fact about the Trail of Tears—one I never learned in grade school—was that both free blacks and enslaved blacks accompanied the Five Civilized Tribes on this journey.

black people could not provide documentation that they were legally free, as in the famous case of Solomon Northup recounted in Northup’s book 12 Years a Slave, and if they were captured, they were denied rights to a trial.

So white hunters used slave babies as bait to trap alligators, a legend much disputed until it was unfortunately confirmed to be true.

This intergenerational fear is one that could be explained through epigenetics, the study of how we inherit certain mechanisms without there being a change in our DNA sequences. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, conducted a study to gauge how trauma is passed down from Holocaust survivors and found that, years later, their children inherited this PTSD because of how overactive their amygdala was.

For two thousand years Masada remained the last time the Jews had controlled their own affairs. The Jews had wandered since then, scattering among the nations, unwelcome strangers in strange lands who were viewed as dangerous outsiders.

The best example of the rapid marginalization of Gullah Geechee people is on Hilton Head Island, one of the most lucrative places in the South.

I thought gangs were filled with members who were often unemployed and shunned from society. I never asked the heavier questions, like how did this unemployment begin and why has society shunned them in the first place? I thought gang members killed recklessly and that anyone who joined them was bloodthirsty. But

John Couper and Thomas Spalding, two slave merchants, purchased captured Nigerians for $100 apiece and put them on a slave ship called the Wanderer in 1803. From it, the captives were unloaded and then loaded onto another ship, called the York, to take them to Saint Simons, where several sprawling plantations awaited them. The story goes that seventy-five slaves rebelled and drowned their captors. Once the ship reached Dunbar Creek, the Africans were singing as they marched ashore and, following their chief’s command, entered the marshy waters and drowned themselves. Some say that the Africans’ souls flew back to Africa. The Igbo Landing has been so

with respect to everyone else. In 1654 a black indentured servant, John Casor, was bound to his master for life in a civil suit, Johnson v. Parker. This decision solved two problems: (1) It ensured that black people could not become wealthy property owners, like their white counterparts. (2) It maintained the control by wealthy whites of their black, non-English constituents. The

courts then made this fate hereditary, beginning with the Virginia colony in 1662. Because of the courts, if you were black and brought to the colonies by force, you were a slave. If you had children, they would be slaves, too. From then on, the terms black and slave were interchangeable.3 The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is a prime example of how the judicial system made the two synonymous.

The Lowcountry is a two-hundred-mile stretch of land that spans the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, along with the Sea Islands.9 It is believed that over half of the 388,000 Africans brought to the lands that became the United States first arrived in the Lowcountry.10 According to the International African American Museum, 80 percent of African Americans can trace an ancestor who set foot onto a Charleston dock first.11 Despite this rich history, I had heard of Gullah people only twice in my life—on Nickelodeon’s 1990s children’s television show Gullah Gullah Island and from a close friend whose late grandmother was Gullah. The Gullah Geechee people are the oldest sub-ethnic group of African Americans.

Despite the increasing rigor with which scholars are approaching slavery and erotics, the pervasiveness of intellectual skepticism reflects how deeply entrenched narratives of violation, violence, and trauma are to our understanding of black female sexuality. Emphasizing subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization, however, cannot preclude fuller incorporation of pleasure and erotic possibility in the lives of enslaved black women. Sex acts happened often during slavery. Political goals of the moment do not rewrite the sexual lives, desires, and choices of enslaved and free women of color, but they can obscure those lives to our detriment. . . . To search for this in chattel slavery by interrogating these possibilities . . . does not lessen the traumatic, terrorizing, and horrific nature of slavery. Such inquiries allow for the interior lives and erotic subjectivities of enslaved blacks to matter.6

My Butterfly. An Elegy THINE emulous fond flowers are dead, too, And the daft sun-assaulter, he That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead: Save only me (Nor is it sad to thee!) Save only me There is none left to mourn thee in the fields. The gray grass is not dappled with the snow; Its two banks have not shut upon the river; But it is long ago— It seems forever— Since first I saw thee glance, With all the dazzling other ones, In airy dalliance, Precipitate in love, Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above, Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance. When that was, the soft mist Of my regret hung not on all the land, And I was glad for thee, And glad for me, I wist. Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high, That fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind, With those great careless wings, Nor yet did I. And there were other things: It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp: Then fearful he had let thee win Too far beyond him to be gathered in, Snatched thee, o’er eager, with ungentle grasp. Ah! I remember me How once conspiracy was rife Against my life— The languor of it and the dreaming fond; Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought, The breeze three odors brought, And a gem-flower waved in a wand! Then when I was distraught And could not speak, Sidelong, full on my cheek, What should that reckless zephyr fling But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing! I found that wing broken to-day! For thou are dead, I said, And the strange birds say. I found it with the withered leaves Under the eaves. Robert Frost, A Boy’s Will. (1st World Library - Literary Society February 20, 2006) Originally published 1913.

The Hebrews come into the bread eaters' land with no bread of their own. It's famine, and Jacob's sons travel to Egypt in hopes of finding something to save their families. They find not only grain but forgiveness. Joseph is there, whom God takes from them so he can later deliver them. They find a new home. And they, too, find the miracle of yeast. Surely the descendants of Abraham bake their grains, mixing flour and oil and kneading it to dough. But this is 'uggah'- a flat cake baked on hot stones or in the ashes, the same given to the Lord by Abraham when he visits and pronounces Isaac's birth. Nomads have no time for fermentation, for waiting for dough to ripen. They have enough to carry from place to place. And they have no ovens, probably have never conceived of such a thing. Again, too heavy to move. So what must it have been like for them to see these risen loaves come from strange Egyptian baking containers? It becomes part of them, the first thing they cry out for in the wilderness, not any bread but that of those who enslaved them. The Hebrews have freedom. Instead, they want food, their bellies filled with the earthly comfort they know. And God, the heavenly Comforter, sends bread of a different kind. 'What is it?' They call it 'manna'. And it's given 'to' the wandering children of Israel, but not only 'for' them. For us. For all who brush away the veil and will one day lay eyes on the true manna, a child they do not yet know will be born in Beth-lehem, the house of bread.

Dečko taj, čudni, začarani dečko taj vele da gdje je svijetu kraj, svijetu kraju otkri napokon. Pomalo plah, tužan na mah al' premudar bje on. There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy They say he wandered very far Very far Over land and sea A little shy and sad of eye But very wise was he

...because when I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it's amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth. Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a strange to myself, I go home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase. Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, never bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know. On I go through the noisy streets, never crossing at the red; I walk subconsciously unconscious, half-asleep, subliminally inspired, with every bale I've compacted that day fading softly and quietly inside me.

Aging with all my self. To my younger self, I'm not twenty-something anymore, and in just a month's time I shall walk into another decade of a whole new experience. I don't have youth on my side, but I have a heart of Life enlightened with the very spirit of Life itself, something that draws youth on its lap. Wisdom has been churned out from the mistakes and failures, and lessons have been disguised as soul fillers, and gratitude dances on my lips, waving my heart with a bunch of memories. Perhaps, the memories have been earned. Earned at the cost of those lost turns, cold betrayals, numb tears, forced smiles and a voyage walking through a rainbow of mad jest of Life. With that being said, I wouldn't go back and change even a bit. Through all of that heartache, I have unearthed a heart that is resilient, and pliant, I have met a soul that is strong and loving, and deeper than any thousand paged novel I could get lost in. I have come across beautiful souls in beautiful lands, I have soaked in different cultures and walked my way through observing hearts, listening to stories that run beyond time and tide. I have grown with each one of those smiles and tears, the sands of places that mark my soles make my soul whole in a strange but palpable tune. I have got lost in pathways and met a gypsy soul wandering in the space of infinite time, weaving moments through Life to take back a bunch of images and experiences from a journey called Life. My story has been filled with pages of ups and downs and my cup of Life has had several toxic turns, but in all of that, I have grown, along with one or two grey hair. My pages have often tasted Life in the most happy hue from voyages and dreams that kept overlapping and smiling across the tips of Time. And all of this, has helped me to nurture and nourish an invincible desire to live a life, with a passion no longer on hold, but a heart that is free forever to fly in the tunes of its own whisper. So as I open another day, walking closer to close the page of this twenty-something, I wear a smile that the youth of wisdom paints on my heart. And age, with all the grace that only Age can bring, while loving, forgiving and embracing my younger self in every air of Time. Love, a soul aging gracefully with the Smile of Life.

One of the questions we need to ask, if we are to have a future, she says, is "Where did we cause less damage to ourselves, to our environment, and to our animal kin?" One answer is: when we were nomadic. "It is when we settled that we became strangers in a strange land, and wandering took on the quality of banishment.

Lin Jingheng looked at him and strangely remembered the Starry Sea Academy on planet Beijing-β, that con artist of a headmaster that kept pouring out chicken soup to his poor students, then suddenly felt something grow inside his heart-- He had left the noble utopian land of Wolto for the cold Silver Fortress, then fell into the Heart of the Rose and wandered into the faraway Eighth Galaxy; now, he returned to where it all began on a completely different path . Lu Bixing had walked from beneath the starry dome of the ceremonial hall into the Milky Way City Command Post, and now seemed to have returned back under the same starry sky…but the sky above him was now much broader and eternal; it also didn’t cost six billion to build. Both man and history trudged down the path of time across countless turbulences on this journey, numerous deaths and rebirths…only to return back to where everything all began.

Chapter XV The Gathering of the Clouds Now we will return to Bilbo and the dwarves. All night one of them had watched, but when morning came they had not heard or seen any sign of danger. But ever more thickly the birds were gathering. Their companies came flying from the South; and the crows that still lived about the Mountain were wheeling and crying unceasingly above. “Something strange is happening,” said Thorin. “The time has gone for the autumn wanderings; and these are birds that dwell always in the land; there are starlings and flocks of finches; and far off there are many carrion birds as if a battle were afoot!” Suddenly Bilbo pointed: “There is that old thrush again!” he cried. “He seems to have escaped, when Smaug smashed the mountain-side, but I don’t suppose the snails have!” Sure enough the old thrush was there, and as Bilbo pointed, he flew towards them and perched on a stone near by. Then he