Animals don’t behave like men. If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don’t sid down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.

To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us life and disperse- the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This is at least one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.

Rabbits, of course, have no idea of precise time or of punctuality. In this respect they are much the same as primitive people, who often take several days over assembling for some purpose and then several more to get started. Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin.

…what is marvelous? That which we do not comprehend. What is truly desirable? That which we cannot have. Now to see things I cannot understand, to procure things impossible of possession, such is the plan of my life. I can realize it by two means: money and will.

Suppose we say that wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit. Romance- but not to be dismissed on that account. The romantic view while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth. But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us a nd sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need- if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us- if only we were worth of it.

My God! I’m thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives- the domestic routine, the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crazy cheating and slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones-!

I will venture in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful- that which is full of wonder… out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.

Are men no better than sheep or cattle, that they must live always in view of one another in order to feel a sense of safety? I can’t believe it. We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.