The Great Escape
Have you ever heard of a place where you can go to and forget all your worries and chores? Such a place has been identified before, and rumour knows it by many names: Arcadia, Halcyon, the Hesperides, Haven, Paradise, Eden, El Dorado, East, and also West of the sun and the moons. The truth is, such a place has no name at all, and the splendour of it as it is described accordingly is but a pale shadow of what it is to really experience the place yourself. It is after all, a place where your desires are true and anything can happen, as long as you will it to be so.
However, to describe this place is to impose limits on your store of possibilities, and render it finite. Yet, a complete refusal would mean to deny oneself of a dream of blissful happiness, even if that dream is but a painted picture, a handful of coloured glass, mere effluence of a wholly inadequate nature.
Have you ever heard of a place where you can go to and forget all your worries and chores? Such a place has been identified before, and rumour knows it by many names: Arcadia, Halcyon, the Hesperides, Haven, Paradise, Eden, El Dorado, East, and also West of the sun and the moons. The truth is, such a place has no name at all, and the splendour of it as it is described accordingly is but a pale shadow of what it is to really experience the place yourself. It is after all, a place where your desires are true and anything can happen, as long as you will it to be so.
However, to describe this place is to impose limits on your store of possibilities, and render it finite. Yet, a complete refusal would mean to deny oneself of a dream of blissful happiness, even if that dream is but a painted picture, a handful of coloured glass, mere effluence of a wholly inadequate nature.
And we realize this only at a point
Where they lapse like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up
Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.
-- John Ashberry.
I could sit here all day and look at pretty pictures, rendered all the prettier by some photo editing programme, and yearn to jump into that world in front of me, or I could get myself a plane ticket and see the wonder as it is in reality. A reality that I suspect will be at once grander in scale and yet only half as exciting as the colours on my computer screen
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