When Someone Doesn't Show Up, The People

The Language Of Commerce Has Been Engineered To Describe The Overt Purpose Of A Thing, But Cannot Encompass Fringe Benefits Or Peripheral Pleasures. It Weighs The Obvious Against What In Its Terms Are Incomprehensible. When I Drive From Here To There, Speed, Privacy, Control, And Safety Are Easy To Claim. When I Walk, What Happens Is More Vague, More Ambiguous-and In Many Circumstances Much Richer. I Am Out In The World. It's Exercise, Though Not So Quantifiably As On A Treadmill In A Gym With A Digital Readout.

Beauty Is Often Spoken Of As Though It Only Stirs Lust Or Admiration, But The Most Beautiful People Are So In A Way That Makes Them Look Like Destiny Or Fate Or Meaning, The Heroes Of A Remarkable Story.

When I Think About, Say, 1995, Or Whever The Last Moment Was Before Most Of Us Were On The Internet And Had Mobile Phones, It Seems Like A Hundred Years Ago. ... Time Passed In Fairly Large Units, Or At Least Not In Milliseconds And Constant Updates. A Few Hours Wasn't Such A Long Time To Go Between Moments Of Contact With Your Work, Your People Or Your Trivia.

If You Look At A Lot Of Traditional Societies, They're All Organized Along What We Might Call Anarchist Guidelines, But It's Not Like The Zapatistas Were Reading European Social Theory.

Getting Lost Was Not A Matter Of Geography So Much As Identity, A Passionate Desire, Even An Urgent Need, To Become No One And Anyone, To Shake Off The Shackles That Remind You Who You Are, Who Others Think You Are.