What it takes

"Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon… It was always a wild, rocky coast, desolate and forbidding to the man of the pavements… Tough, young, geologically speaking the land has a hoary look. From the ocean depths there issued strange formations, contours unique and seductive. There are no rains or relics to speak of. No history worth recounting. What was not speaks more eloquently than what was. Here the redwoods made its last stand… At dawn its majesty is almost painful to behold. That same prehistoric look. The look of always. Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity…Peace spreads its naked wings. Was it ever meant to be otherwise? It may indeed be the highest wisdom to elect to be a nobody in a relative paradise such as this rather than a celebrity in a world which has lost all sense of values.

Peace and solitude. I have had a taste of it, even here in America. Ah, these first days on Partington Ridge! On rising I would go to the cabin door and casting my eyes over the velvety rolling hills, such a feeling of contentment, such a feeling of gratitude was mine that instinctively my hand went up in benediction. I blessed men and women everywhere, no matter on which side of the fence they happened to be."

—Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch