A Walk in the Woods: Katie Conway

Bill Bryson hiked the Appalachian Trail and wrote about it in A Walk in the Woods:

‘Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. ...

You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties.... All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.

There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It's where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. ...

Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don't think, "Hey, I did sixteen miles today," any more than you think, "Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today." It's just what you do.'

The Psychology of War: Jack Roderick

Here's a "think" piece about the seriousness of war. It's from Lawrence LeShan's book The Psychology of War.

"On the sixth of August, 1945, the day when the first atomic bomb was used at Hiroshima, the human race was placed on the endangered species list. War, an activity practiced by nearly all human societies as far back as we have records, was suddenly not only outmoded, but potentially race-suicidal. And make no mistake: unless there are radical changes in human understanding and behavior, we will use the atomic bomb again. Our track record shows that we have always used every new technology, from iron-smelting to radio, for military purposes. We have never yet given up any weapon available to us as long as it was effective."

The Spanish Bow: Andromeda Romano-Lax

This is Andromeda Romano-Lax, author of The Spanish Bow. Feliu, a cellist, finds out his mother has died:

"All along, I had felt unable to impress her, unable to fulfill whatever hopes she had for me, or to make her lack of hope more bearable. Now that she was dead, that potential was finally revoked. The person we are by the time our parents have died is the person we shall always be; any aspirations to further development are delusional. We have had our turn, and now we stand just one generational step way from our own deaths, every year passing more quickly than the last."

Never Night: Derick Burleson

This is Derick Burleson of Two Rivers, Alaska, and this is my poem, "Never Night."

You'd like it here where
it's never night, where the sun
circles, rather, until it ends
up where it started from,
east or west, rises, sinks
but doesn't ever set,
where in the summer
you never need to sleep
and all day and all night
the sky is a series of blues
you've seen only once before,
blues van Gogh painted
at the end. Where all the traffic
is fox and moose and bear,
where aspen and birch
bud and leaf all in one day,
and your sleep, when sleep
finally comes, is innocent,
spring wind through a window
left open now that spring
is passing fast and summer
won't stay here long before
the snow sweeps any green
away again and then it's always
night. You'd like that too, when
endless night falls and the moon
comes up, reads your book over
your shoulder, learns which dead
poet moves you tonight,
when any heat at all rises,
and becomes a visible thing.

Historical Linguistics: Trish Jenkins

R.L. Trask, in his book, Historical Linguistics, looks at how language changes depending on what is considered taboo in polite conversation.

"The effect of taboo can be very powerful. Several generations ago, the simple anatomical terms leg and breast came to be regarded as highly indelicate in American speech. The unacceptability of these words required euphemisms not only for talking about the human body but even for talking about roast chicken and Thanksgiving turkeys, with the result that Americans began to speak of dark meat and white meat, as they still do today, even though leg and breast have more recently lost their indelicate status."