Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn't afraid of him. I felt a hunter's exhilaration and a brotherly feeling.

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn't afraid of him. I felt a hunter's exhilaration and a brotherly feeling.

Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.