In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing.
A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad
and solitary changeling child
announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.
--Cormac McCarthy The Road
Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
--Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five
Believing the stream to be Shinumo Creek, Robert Stanton stopped at Crystal Creek on February 8, 1890, to climb Point Sublime. Here a disgruntled crewman elected to abandon the expedition. After an arduous winter trek he arrived "nearer dead than alive" at a line shack on Buckskin Mountain. Before 1966, the mild rapid at Crystal appeared "much like Boucher, long, wide and slow at first, steep and clear at the last." The rapid is scarcely mentioned in any early river accounts, although the Carnegie Institute expedition portaged the upper section in November 1937. An unusually intense storm began on December 7, 1966 and dumped fourteen inches of rain in a thirty-six hour period along the North Rim. The resulting flood in Crystal's upper drainages obliterated Pueblo sites that had escaped floods for the previous 900 years. Crystal Creek's rampaging water and mud flows pushed the debris fan 200 feet farther into the Colorado, creating an impressive, ulcer-generating spectacle called Crystal Rapid. --Kim Crumbo (from A River Runners Guide to the History of the Grand Canyon)
As If The Universe Were Quietly Turning Itself Inside Out
And all this time I was keeping my eyes open, or trying to, only they kept closing, because I wanted to go on watching the stars, where the most extraordinary things were happening. A bright satellite, a man-made star, very slowly and somehow carefully crossed the sky in a great arc, from one side to the other, a close arc, one knew it was not far away, a friendly satellite slowly going about its business round and round the globe. And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled.
Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars. The moon was gone. The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration. The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars. And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold.
Peter Tosh: Fools Die (For Want of Wisdom)
Later still I awoke and it had all gone; and for a few moments I thought that I had seen all those stars only in a dream. There was a weird shocking sudden quiet, as at the cessation of a great symphony or of some immense prolonged indescribable din. Had the stars then been audible as well as visible and had I indeed heard the music of the spheres? The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing tgem out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. I discovered that I was feeling very stiff and rather cold. The rock beneath me was very hard and I felt bruised and aching. I was surprised to find my rugs and cushions were wet with dew. I got up stiffly and shook them. I looked around me. Mountainous piled-up rocks hid the house. And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely yet light, and I was afraid of myself and quickly lay down again and settled my rug and closed my eyes, lying there stiffly and not imagining that I would sleep again.
--Iris Murdoch The Sea, the Sea
Today, suddenly,
I reached an absurd
but unerring conclusion.
In a moment of enlightenment,
I realized that I'm nobody,
absolutely nobody.
When the lightning flashed,
I saw that what
I had thought to be a city
was in fact a deserted plain
and, in the same sinister light
that revealed me to myself,
there seemed to be
no sky above it.
I was robbed
of any possibility
of having existed
before the world.
If I was ever reincarnated,
I must have done so
without myself,
without a self to reincarnate.
I am the outskirts of some nonexistent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I'm always thinking,
always feeling,
but my thoughts
lack all reason,
my emotions
all feeling.
I'm falling
through a trapdoor,
through infinite,
infinitous space,
in a directionless,
empty fall.
My soul is
a black maelstrom,
a great madness
spinning about a vacuum,
the swirling of
a vast ocean
around a hole
in the void,
and in the waters,
more like whirlwinds than waters,
float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world:
houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices,
all caught up in a bottomless whirlpool.
And I, I myself, am the center that exists only because
the geometry of the abyss
demands it. I am the nothing around which all this spins,
I exist so that it can spin,
I am a center that exists only because every circle has one.
I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime.
I am the center of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.
If only I could think! If only I could feel!
And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
--Jack Kerouac On The Road
Christopher Robin
was sitting
outside his door,
putting on his Big Boots.
As soon as he saw
the Big Boots,
Pooh knew
that an Adventure
was about to happen,
and he brushed the honey
off his nose with
the back of his paw,
and spruced himself up
as well as he could,
so as to look
Ready for Anything.
Perhaps this planet does somewhere else contain a thing like the Colorado River--but that is no matter. We at any rate in our continent possess one of nature's very vastest works. After The River and its tributaries have done with all sight of the upper world, have left behind the bordering plains and streamed through the various gashes which their floods have sliced in the mountains that once stopped their way, then the culminating wonder begins. The River has been flowing through the loneliest part which remains to us of that large space once denominated "The Great American Desert" by the vague maps in our old geographies. It has passed through regions of emptiness still as wild as they were before Columbus came; where not only no man lives now nor any mark is found of those forgotten men of the cliffs, but the very surface of the earth itself looks monstrous and extinct. Through such a country as this, scarcely belonging to our era any more than the mammoth or the pterodactyl, scarcely belonging to time at all, does the Colorado approach and enter its culminating marvel. Then, for 283 miles it inhabits a nether world of its own. The few that have ventured through these places and lived are a handful to those who went in and were never seen again. The white bones of some have been found on the shores, but most were drowned, and in this water no bodies ever rise, because the thick sand that its torrent churns along clogs and sinks them.
This place exerts a magnetic spell. The sky is there above it, but not of it. Its being is apart. Its climate, its light, its own. The beams of the sun come into it like visitors. Its own winds blow through it, not those of outside, where we live. The River streams down its mysterious reaches, hurrying ceaselessly; sometimes a smooth sliding lap, sometimes a falling, broken wilderness of billows and whirlpools. Above stand its walls, rising through space upon space of silence. They glow, they gloom, they shine. Bend after bend they reveal themselves, endlessly new in endlessly changing veils of color. A swimming and jewelled blue predominates, as of sapphires being melted and spun into skeins of shifting cobweb. Bend after bend this trance of beauty and awe goes on, terrible as the Day of Judgement, sublime as the Psalms of David. Five thousand feet below the opens and barrens of Arizona, this canyon seems like an avenue conducting to the secret of the universe and the presence of the gods.
--Owen Wister from the preface for Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
And when he had put his hand
on mine with a cheerful look, wherefrom I took courage,
he brought me within to the secret things. Here sighs, laments, and deep wailings were resounding through the starless air; wherefore at first I wept thereat. Strange tongues, horrible utterances, words of woe, accents of anger, voices high and faint, and sounds of hands with them, were making a tumult which whirls always in that air forever dark, like the sand when the whirlwind breathes.
There was only one catch
and that was Catch-22,
which specified that
a concern for one's safety
in the face of dangers
that were real and immediate
was the process of
a rational mind.
Orr was crazy
and could be grounded.
All he had to do was ask;
and as soon as he did,
he would no longer be crazy
and would have to fly
more missions.
Orr would be crazy
to fly more missions
and sane if he didn't,
but if he was sane
he had to fly them.
If he flew them he was crazy
and didn't have to;
but if he didn't want to
he was sane and had to.
Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. That's some catch, that Catch-22, he observed. It's the best there is, Doc Daneeka agreed.
--Joseph Heller Catch-22
PANORAMA FROM LIPAN POINT
ILLUSTRATION BY KENNETH PATCHEN
SPENCER TERRACE FROM NEAR GARNET CANYON
