Here in Wellfleet, this pure sand plateau, known to sailors as the Table-lands of Eastham, on account of its appearance, as seen f...rom the ocean ... stretched away northward from the southern boundary of the town, without a particle of vegetation,--as level almost as a table,--for two and a half or three miles, or as far as the eye could reach; slightly rising towards the ocean, then stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as sand could lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire. It was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous fortress, whose glacis was the beach, and whose champaign the ocean. From its surface we overlooked the greater part of the Cape. In short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. Yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible,--we never saw one from the beach,--and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. A thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery as their footsteps in the sand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The automobile and the telephone are defeated as instruments of individualism by being applied to the needs of a mass society. The... automobile fulfills man's desire to move over the surface of the earth all by himself; but by becoming accessible to everybody, automobiles have paralyzed our streets. Individualism is possible only in plenty of empty space. Similarly, telephones block their own paths of individual communication when everybody is talking: the phone is too often "busy." Private enterprise cannot but strangle itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to t...hat fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not... Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although I mean it, and project the meaning As hard as I can into its brushed-metal surface,... It cannot, in this deteriorating climate, pick up Where I leave off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"End of tomorrow. Don't try to start the car or look deeper... Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer Until the whole thing overflows like a silver Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »