This at least is what I tell myself when I fix my attention on what is rational, sensible and realistic, believing that I have overcome at last that gallant infirmity of the soul called romance – that illness, that disease, the insidious malignancy which must be chopped out of the heart once and. for all, ground up, cooked, burnt to ashes… consumed. And for so long as I stay away from the desert, keep to the mountains or the sea or the city, it is possible to think myself cured: Not easy: one whiff of juniper smoke, a few careless words, one reckless and foolish poem – The Wasteland, for instance – and I become as restive, irritable, brooding and dangerous as a wolf in a cage.
In answer to the original question, then, I find myself in the end returning to the beginning, and can only say, as I said in the first place: There is something about the desert… There is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.
Edward Abbey, excerpt from Desert Solitaire: Episodes and Visions
(Click image to enlarge)
