He means by this that the person who lives in the mountains but was intended to sojourn by the seashore will be discontented, and vice versa, and never quite understand why. Likewise the person who was born in Rome might perhaps belong in Oslo or the person who calls Paris home should instead live in Peking. This does not mean, natrlich , that the river in and of itself is better than the lake or the lake than the ocean or the ocean than a desert, but in any case you must decide which is your own chosen landscape and try to make it your own. And in part because of this they ordered every Jew to move to one surrounded place and proclaimed a ghetto where the ironworkers worked. Let us live in Murano, Karl's ancestors begged, we will purchase the whole island, but the Doge said no.
Wind rattles the north-facing windows, here at the top of the house.
When you look down upon the earth from twenty thousand feet it is impossible to see inside the desks of office buildings, or the inside of men's minds, and everything that's venal or corrupt gets leached away. At the far wall of the garden, the maples bend and wave. No doubt an Albert Einstein or an Albert Schweitzer could manage a global philosophy and understand the ways that good and evil intersect. From the perspective of an airplane, it does not matter much. From the perspective of a satellite, it scarcely matters at all.