Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
That’s why T.E. Lawrence reportedly liked the desert; I could add, “It is indifferent.” And this weekend, it was also cold:
Fortunately, Mom and I were prepared with winter gear.
Also fortunately, we escaped the enormous mesa-top lizards this sign showed us: 
Lizards not to scale? Or do they come as big as bighorn sheep now?
I’m headed to the desert by Moab soon to make my inner hippie happy and get some perspective. Here’s Paul Bowles‘ feelings about it (even though his desert was the Sahara):
Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating…Once [someone] has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort or money, for the absolute has no price.
1. It’s the birthday of e.e. cummings today. Everyone write your emails in lower case and leave out punctuation to celebrate. We’ll call them e.e.mails.
2. Check out this video of time lapse desert landscapes and nightscapes. Space and deserts: Everything my inner hippy wants.
Landscapes: Volume Two from Dustin Farrell on Vimeo.
Found here.
“Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands and liked where I came from. I was used to a dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors–tan, rusty red, toned white–and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush and the sight of bare ground.”
Wallace Stegner, from the essay collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. (The title’s from the Big Rock Candy Mountain song!)