The Plover

There are some silences that are so huge, and fraught, and haunted, and weighed, and shocked, that they just are; there's nothing you can say about them that makes any sense. All you can do is witness them, and feel some deep ache that such things arrive, and must be endured, with wordless aching all around.

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.

Well the sky always seemed like another ocean to me, you know? Like we live between two incredible oceans, and we'll never get to the bottom of either of them.

People make too much of facts. Also people make too much of gut feelings. Gut feelings probably mean food poisoning.

But he was wise enough even at twenty to see that what many would call an utter and admirable freedom was also a sort of thicket or wilderness, in which, by virtue of being able to take any path he chose, he was lost in a dense jungle of the possible, the sheer welter of which sometimes overwhelmed him. The irony was, he thought, that as soon as you chose a path, you mourned and regretted the ones that you did not choose; but to choose none was to moon uselessly over them all, and thus be imprisoned by impasse. How very many people, he thought as he walked through the catchbirdtrees by the lake, were frozen by the weight of their potential, the imposing alps of their dreams?

But if we do not dream, then I think perhaps we are misusing our heads. They are not on our shoulders only to be farms for hair.

...awkward passion is so often so very much more admirable than mere achievement.

Better to sail alone, and let the battered vessel wander where it will. The only honest course. Assume nothing, trust no one, encumber not and be not encumbered, make your own way, steer your own ship and none other, exactly so.

So very many silences, and kinds of silence: chapels and churches and confessionals, glades and gorges, pregnant pauses and searing lovemaking; the stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world; the silence of space, the vast of vista; the crucial silences between notes, without which there could be no music;

If everything must be burned I will do the burning and so I will not be burnt but be the fire. Everything I ever loved burned and so I will be the burning. There is nothing but that must which be burnt. Women will burn and children burn and houses burn so I will be nothing that can burn. I will be the fire. The fire has no home. The fire goes where it wants. The fire arrives and departs and none can account the meaning of its travels. Everything I ever touched burned.

...people would tell you much more than you expected to if you were generically presentable and left silence next to them like a friendly stranger; it was like they were waiting for some friendly silence so they could fill it with words; and words were useful, words were hints and intimations, words were fingers pointed in certain directions, if you listened carefully..

he was a silent verb in a world of clownish nouns,

...we are starving for story, our greatest hunger, our greatest terror; and we love most what we must have but can never have; and so on we go, west and then west.

I think we are all children even if we have old bodies and we should make a republic that runs on the wonder of children whether we are old or young children.

I think he decided to be one kind of guy but liking us is rattling that kind of guy and that's why he's gruff and grumpy. I think maybe we just leave him alone and be gentle and maybe things will work out. You can't make people be who they don't want to be yet. You just be gentle and let them get there themselves.

Don't know what to do in a world without mud and moss, brother.

To live here you must be comfortable with the idea of not living here at all.

Was this the secret cost of civilization, perhaps, that once people were free from want, free to act as they liked, they did not act at all, but only stared at themselves, sentenced to solipsism?

We take stars totally for granted.... we casually look up and say stupid things like _hey, stars,_ when we should by rights be moaning and gibbering in wonder and fear that fecking nuclear furnaces are burning in the sky in numbers and at distances we cannot even imagine let alone bless me calculate.

He watched the stars be born; ever since he was a boy he loved to sit outside as dusk slid into dark and one by five by fifty the stars emerged, insisted, flared awake...

For some years a fishing boat bringing in regular catches, occasional permits filed for charter fishing, one permit filed for whale-watching cruise, a number of gratuitous permit applications filed in last three years apparently for the amusement of the owner: for flossing the teeth of unsuspecting whales, in search of Robert Dean Frisbie on account of incontrovertible evidence of his faked demise in the South Seas, in pursuit of the magnetic West Pole, in search of the names of god in the languages of the invertebrates west of the Mendocino Fracture Zone and east of the Emperor Seamounts, and etc. in that vein. Flurries

He claimed he had read the book so many times that the words had fallen out of it and the pages were all blank so he had to read the book to put the words back in or the book would be forlorn and naked.