Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered. - Jim Harrison

As a geezer one grows tired of the story of Sisyphus. Let that boulder stay where it is and, by its presence, exactly where it wished to be, but then I’m old enough to have forgotten what the boulder stood for? I think of all of the tons of junk the climbers have left up on Everest, including a few bodies. Even the pyramids, those imitation mountains, say to the gods, “We can do it too.” Despite planes you can’t get off the earth for long. Even the dead meat strays behind, changing shape, the words drift into the twilight across the lake. I’m not bold enough to give a poetry reading while alone far out in the desert to a gathering of saguaro and organ-pipe cactus or listen to my strophes reverberate off a mountain wall. At dawn I sat on a huge boulder near Cave Creek deep in the Chiracahuas and listened to it infer that it didn’t want to go way back up the mountain but liked it near the creek where gravity bought its passage so long ago. Everest told me to get this crap off my head or stay at home and make your own little pyramids.

He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” What a scandal that would be, America’s best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.

While it is a truism that man has not learned much more than the sexual act, and that fire burns when you stick your hand into it, it behooves the scholar to immerse himself in the analyses of the problem, rather than the problem itself.