Anyone Who Thinks They Can Save The

Alec Wilkinson Is A Spare, Clear, And Lucid Writer Who Works In Stylistic Simplicity With Material That Is Not Simple At All.

In The Clearness Of This Himalayan Air, Mountains Draw Near, And In Such Splendor, Tears Come Quietly To My Eyes And Cool On My Sunburned Cheeks. This Is Not Mere Soft-mindedness, Nor Am I All That Silly With The Altitude. My Head Has Cleared In These Weeks Free Of Intrusions- Mail, Telephones, People And Their Needs- And I Respond To Things Spontaneously, Without Defensive Or Self-conscious Screens. Still, All This Feeling Is Astonishing: Not So Long Ago I Could Say Truthfully That I Had Not Shed A Tear In Twenty Years.

When We Are Mired In The Relative World, Never Lifting Our Gaze To The Mystery, Our Life Is Stunted, Incomplete; We Are Filled With Yearning For That Paradise That Is Lost When, As Young Children, We Replace It With Words And Ideas And Abstractions - Such As Merit, Such As Past, Present, And Future - Our Direct, Spontaneous Experience Of The Thing Itself, In The Beauty And Precision Of This Present Moment.

I Was Just Very Interested In The American Frontier And The Growth Of Capitalism - Those Enormous Fortunes That Were Being Made, More Often Than Not, On The Blood Of Poor People, Black People, Indian People. They Were The Ones Who Paid Very Dearly For Those Great Fortunes.

In This Very Breath That We Take Now Lies The Secret That All Great Teachers Try To Tell Us.