I Swim In A Sea Of Words.

Sometimes I Want To Have A Mental Book Burning That Would Scour My Mind Clean Of All The Filthy Visions Literature Has Conjured There. But How To Do Without 'the Illiad?' How To Do Without 'macbeth?

Does Any Woman Ever Count The Grains Of Her Harvest And Say: Good Enough? Or Does One Always Think Of What More One Might Have Laid In, Had The Labor Been Harder, The Ambition More Vast, The Choices More Sage?

When I Write A Word In English, A Simple One, Such As, Say, 'chief,' I Have Unwittingly Ushered A Querulous Horde Into The Room. The Roman Legionary Is There, Shaking His 'cap,' Or Head, And Al Cap Is There, Slouching In His Signature Working Man's Headgear.

But That Franklin Trip Changed Me Profoundly. As I Believe Wilderness Experience Changes Everyone. Because It Puts Us In Our Place. The Human Place, Which Our Species Inhabited For Most Of Its Evolutionary Life. That Place That Shaped Our Psyches And Made Us Who We Are. The Place Where Nature Is Big And We Are Small.

A Book Is More Than The Sum Of Its Materials. It Is An Artifact Of The Human Mind And Hand.