in ithaca for a few days
This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome---there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.
For myself I'll take Moab, Utah. I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it---the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky---all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.
---Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p.1
Not long ago, after years of being footloose, I decided it was time, not to sink roots but at least to establish a house. I weighed the pros and cons of a whitewashed box on a Greek island, a crofter's cottage, a Left Bank garçonnière, and other convenient alternatives. In the end, I concluded, the base might just as well be London. Home, after all, is where your friends are.
I consulted an American---a veteran journalist, who, for fifty years, has treated the world as her back yard.
"Do you really like London?" I asked.
"I don't," she said, in a gruff and cigaretty voice, "but London's as good as any place to hang your hat."
That settled it.
---Bruce Chatwin, "A Place To Hang Your Hat," in Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989 (Penguin, 1996), p.15
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome---there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.
For myself I'll take Moab, Utah. I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it---the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky---all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.
---Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p.1
Not long ago, after years of being footloose, I decided it was time, not to sink roots but at least to establish a house. I weighed the pros and cons of a whitewashed box on a Greek island, a crofter's cottage, a Left Bank garçonnière, and other convenient alternatives. In the end, I concluded, the base might just as well be London. Home, after all, is where your friends are.
I consulted an American---a veteran journalist, who, for fifty years, has treated the world as her back yard.
"Do you really like London?" I asked.
"I don't," she said, in a gruff and cigaretty voice, "but London's as good as any place to hang your hat."
That settled it.
---Bruce Chatwin, "A Place To Hang Your Hat," in Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989 (Penguin, 1996), p.15