“I was afraid now, afraid to stop. I began to drive faster and faster, I was in lunar landscape now… the great arid mesa country of New Mexico. I drove through it with the indifference of a fly across the face of the moon.”– from THE HITCHHIKER by Louise Fletcher
Like most people I’ve flown over New Mexico on my way to places east or west. And I, like at least some of those people am always struck by the utter alieness of the landscape.
Think often of that arid, but beautiful, landscape… when the need to travel comes upon me.
Am always struck by that waiting lunar landscape nature.
By what it tells us of distances broad, and distances deep, geographies at least as much soul as soil.
A crystallization of what Tennessee Williams wrote, all those long yesterdays ago…
“I didn’t go to the moon. I went much further — for time is the longest distance between two places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. I traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something.”— Glass Menagerie
Heroic Times 