You Can Be A Scientist And Believe

There Are Things You Just Can't Do In Life. You Can't Beat The Phone Company, You Can't Make A Waiter See You Until He's Ready To See You, And You Can't Go Home Again.

I Sat On A Toilet Watching The Water Run Thinking What An Odd Thing Tourism Is. You Fly Off To A Strange Land, Eagerly Abandoning All The Comforts Of Home And Then Expend Vast Quantities Of Time And Money In A Largely Futile Effort To Recapture The Comforts You Wouldn’t Have Lost If You Hadn’t Left Home In The First Place.

Woods Are Not Like Other Spaces. To Begin With, They Are Cubic. Their Trees Surround You, Loom Over You, Press In From All Sides. Woods Choke Off Views & Leave You Muddled & Without Bearings. They Make You Feel Small & Confused & Vulnerable, Like A Small Child Lost In A Crowd Of Strange Legs. Stand In A Desert Or Prairie & You Know You Are In A Big Space. Stand In The Woods And You Only Sense It. They Are Vast, Featureless Nowhere. And They Are Alive.

18th Century Scientists, The French In Particular, Seldom Did Things Simply If An Absurdly Demanding Alternative Was Available.

It Is Unthinkable To Have A British Countryside That Doesn't Have Actual Functioning Farmers Riding Tractors, Cows In Fields, Things Like That.