"Desert Solitaire"

[fiefoe]

Abbey wasn't a city person.

• the suffocation of logic
• The Navajos are people, not personnel; nothing in their nature or tradition has prepared them to adapt to the regimentation of application forms and time clock. To force them into the machine would require a Procrustean mutilation of their basic humanity.
• They must learn that courtesy and hospitality are not simply the customs of any decent society but are rather a special kind of commodity which can be peddled for money.
• We need coyotes more than we need,.. more people, of whom we have already an extravagant surplus, or more domesticated dogs, which in all fairness could and should be ground up into hamburger and used as emergency coyote food, to raise their spirits and perhaps improve the tenor of their predawn howling.
• ... the character of what I call Industrial Tourism and the quality of the mechanized tourists - the Wheelchair Explorers - who are at once the consumers, the raw material and the victim of Industrial Tourism.
• The aged merit even less sympathy: after all they had the opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled. However, we'll stretch a point for those too old or too sickly to mount a bicycle and let them ride the shuttle buses.
• At what distance should good neighbors build their houses? Let it be determined by the community's mode of travel: if by foot, four miles; if by motorcar, twenty-four miles;
• Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free?
• Civilization is the Ukrainian peasant Nestor Makhno figting the Gemans, then the Reds, then the Whites, then the Reds again; culture is Stalin and the Fatherland.

__ A few stars appeared, scattered liberally through space.
__ 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane'
__ The walls of the canyon-- were radiant, like heated iron. .. He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape.
__ watch the sky condensing in the form of twilight over the desert.
__ translucent obsidian - volcanic glass, "Apache tears"
__ the pack-rat storehouses and the litter of other animals

<<