We Are All Youthful Barbarians, And Only

My Senses Of Space, Of Distance, And Of Direction Entirely Vanished. When I Looked For The Ground I Sometimes Looked Down, Sometimes Up, Sometimes Left, Sometimes Right. I Thought I Was Very High Up When I Would Suddenly Be Thown To Earth In A Near Vertical Spin. I Thought I Was Very Low To The Ground And I Was Pulled Up To 3,000 Feet In Two Minutes By The 500-horsepower Motor. It Danced, It Pushed, It Tossed. . . . Ah! La La!

When I Opened My Eyes I Saw Nothing But The Pool Of Nocturnal Sky, For I Was Lying On My Back With Out-stretched Arms, Face To Face With That Hatchery Of Stars. Only Half Awake, Still Unaware That Those Depths Were Sky, Having No Roof Between Those Depths And Me, No Branches To Screen Them, No Root To Cling To, I Was Seized With Vertigo And Felt Myself As If Flung Forth And Plunging Downward Like A Diver.

Of Course I’ll Hurt You. Of Course You’ll Hurt Me. Of Course We Will Hurt Each Other. But This Is The Very Condition Of Existence. To Become Spring, Means Accepting The Risk Of Winter. To Become Presence, Means Accepting The Risk Of Absence.

I Shall Never Again Admire A Merely Brave Man.

There Is A Cheap Literature That Speaks To Us Of The Need Of Escape. It Is True That When We Travel We Are In Search Of Distance. But Distance Is Not To Be Found. It Melts Away. And Escape Has Never Led Anywhere. The Moment A Man Finds That He Must Play The Races, Go The Arctic, Or Make War In Order To Feel Himself Alive, That Man Has Begin To Spin The Strands That Bind Him To Other Men And To The World. But What Wretched Strands! A Civilization That Is Really Strong Fills Man To The Brim, Though He Never Stir. What Are We Worth When Motionless, Is The Question.