(no subject)
Something under the desert speaks to the yearning spirit, chiefly by refusing to speak at all. In the immenseness of sand that goes on communing with itself in a terrifying way, ignoring everything, answering itself with itself while the sky overhead wears out, the soul feels the same insignificance as the soul of the lost sailor.
Its look has been compared to the moon's, and the similarity is more than a visual one. Like the moon, the desert can't possibly be survived--but it has been. Like the moon, the desert is the place of distance, light and dreams.
To a man or woman trying to get across it, it isn't a landscape but a hostile medium, a dusty and sometimes steamy glare of fortnights to the west, a hopeless waste very like the top of the sea, a place not so much to be looked at as lived through. Part of its beauty is this hard fact, that while we're seeing it, we're also surviving it; and the sight arouses in us the humble gratitude of refugees.
Denis Johnson, Seek
Its look has been compared to the moon's, and the similarity is more than a visual one. Like the moon, the desert can't possibly be survived--but it has been. Like the moon, the desert is the place of distance, light and dreams.
To a man or woman trying to get across it, it isn't a landscape but a hostile medium, a dusty and sometimes steamy glare of fortnights to the west, a hopeless waste very like the top of the sea, a place not so much to be looked at as lived through. Part of its beauty is this hard fact, that while we're seeing it, we're also surviving it; and the sight arouses in us the humble gratitude of refugees.
Denis Johnson, Seek