public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.

A part, a large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.

One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle.

The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go?

public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.

I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand.