It is raining. Hooray!
For Christmas last year, Steve gave me the last 80 years of the New Yorker magazine on disks. I am embarrassed to say that it took until tonight for us to load them into the computer and take a look. It has been a busy year. There are 4000 issues. The hard part is knowing where to begin though I find myself thumbing, well, not exactly thumbing, but flipping through poetry, and, also, the wonderful covers. What a world it is. We are given an immense amount of information, and I can read all the cartoons I want.
I scurried to Muir Woods today to cleanse myself of my shopping trip and noticed a quote from John Muir about wisdom being in trees, not books. I think we need both.
I enjoyed E. B. White's book, Here is New York. It was published in 1949, the year of my birth, and is quite a treat.
E.B. White writes of the many small communities within the city of New York.
"Storekeepers are particularly conscious of neighborhood boundary lines. A woman friend of mine moved recently from one apartment to another, a distance of three blocks. When she turned up, the day after the move, at the same grocer's that she had patronized for years, the proprietor was in ecstasy - almost in tears - at seeing her. "I was afraid," he said, "now that you've moved away I wouldn't be seeing you any more." To him, away was three blocks, or about seven hundred and fifty feet."
He also writes the following.
"The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but it is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition."
This was written in 1949.
It shows our fear of change, of innovation. Perhaps the times are not so bad after all. Maybe all this internet connection will bring us closer to peace. With each step today at Muir Woods, I proclaimed to myself, "Peace, Peace, Peace."