Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.