Land's end

The white clouds broke themselves off into little pieces so that I could think about the light and dark of things and decide for myself which aspect was better suited to my way of life.

Of the two pictures of the same thing, I prefer the pale one in which the foreground is clearer and I can see where I'm going.

Because I am who I am no one's gone before me and no one will come after.

I can't believe I was ever a Christian, but I suppose at the time I was Christian I didn't know what I was. I think I know what I am now. I'm a Greek, or someone between a Greek and a Hindu.

There's a great line in Lampedusa's, "The Leopard": "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." It's such a beautiful book about the past, written by a man who is living in it as if it is the present. I'm reading it very slowly, not wanting it to end.

The man who told Elvis Presley that he'd "never make it as a singer" died the other day. His name was Eddie Bond, a singer himself. What would it be like to have said something like that and to have to live with what you'd said the rest of your life, knowing you might have been right if things had turned out differently?

While I walk Land's End, an image from a William Stafford poem comes to me out of nowhere: that in life I don't want much to happen. Those aren't the words exactly--they're close--but convey the sense of the thing. I think I know what Stafford is saying.