nothing is happening. well nothing i can tell you. but don’t assume that that means some high speed stuff is going on. i felt really strange today while i was reading an intelligence brief, because i read two or three sentences that were really nothing but numbers and acronyms. and i read it like i would read dr suess. it seemed so natural, it just flowed. very odd.
my mother recently sent me a book called “wind, sand and stars” by antoine de saint exupery. it is a telling of his life flying planes in the 20s and 30s in the sahara and across the andes. yet the book is so much more. it is filled with magnificent writing and philosophy. it is one of the best books i have ever read. here is an excerpt from the latter end when he traveled to spain during the civil war and talked to the soldiers.
You never really wondered about the imperious call that compelled you to join up. You accepted a truth which you could never translate into words, but whose self-evidence overpowered you. And while I sat listening to your story, an image came into my mind, and I understood.
When the wild ducks or the wild geese migrate in their season, a strange tide rises in the territories over which they sweep. As if magnetized by the great triangular flight, the barnyard fowl leap a foot or two in to the air and try to fly. The call of the wild strikes them with the force of a harpoon and a vestige of savagery quickens their blood. All the ducks on the farm are transformed for an instant into migrant birds, and into those hard little heads, till now filled with humble images of pools and worms and barnyards, there swims a sense of continental expanse, of the breadth of seas and the salt taste of the ocean wind. The duck totters to right and left in its wire enclosure, gripped by a sudden passion to perform the impossible and a sudden love whose object is mystery.
Even so is man overwhelmed by a mysterious presentiment of truth, so that he discovers the vanity of his bookkeeping and the emptiness of his domestic felicities. But he can never put a name to this sovereign truth. Men explain these brusque vocations by the need to escape or the lure of danger, as if we knew where the need to escape and the lure of danger themselves came from. They talk about the call of duty, but what is it that make the call of duty so pressing? What can you tell me, Sergeant, about that uneasiness that seeps in to disturb your peaceful existence?
The call that stirred you must torment all men. Whether we dub it sacrifice, or poetry, or adventure, it is always the same voice that call,. But domestic security has succeeded in crushing out that part in us that is capable of heeding the call. We scarcely quiver; we beat our wings once or twice and fall back into our barnyard.
We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow. But you, Sergeant, did discover the sordidness of those shopkeepers’ bustlings, those petty pleasures, those petty need. You felt that men did not live like this. And you agreed to heed the great call without bothering to try to understand it. The hour had come when you must moult, when you must rise into the sky.
The barnyard duck had no notion that his little head was big enough to contain oceans, continents, skies; but of a sudden here he was beating his wings, despising corn, despising worms, battling to become a wild duck.
