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You See ... A Man Like Me, A Cautious Man, Has His Life All Figured Out According To A Pattern, And Then The Pattern Flies Apart. You Run Around For Quite A While Trying To Repair It, Until One Day You Straighten Up Again With An Armful Of Broken Pieces, And You See That The World Has Gone On Without You And You Can Never Catch Up With Your Old Life, And You Must Begin All Over Again.

-Peter Matthiessen

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You See ... A

Peter Matthiessen

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You See ... A Man Like Me, A Cautious Man, Has His Life All Figured Out According To A Pattern, And Then The Pattern Flies Apart. You Run Around For Quite A While Trying To Repair It, Until One Day You Straighten Up Again With An Armful Of Broken Pieces, And You See That The World Has Gone On Without You And You Can Never Catch Up With Your Old Life, And You Must Begin All Over Again.

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I ... Had What Kierkegaard Called 'the Sickness Of Infinitude,' Wandering From One Path To Another With No Real Recognition That I Was Embarked Upon A Search, And Scarcely A Clue As To What I Might Be After. I Only Knew That At The Bottom Of Each Breath There Was A Hollow Place That Needed To Be Filled.

The Great Stillness In These Landscapes That Once Made Me Restless Seeps Into Me Day By Day, And With It The Unreasonable Feeling That I Have Found What I Was Searching For Without Ever Having Discovered What It Was.

Here I Am, Safely Returned Over Those Peaks From A Journey Far More Beautiful And Strange Than Anything I Had Hoped For Or Imagined - How Is It That This Safe Return Brings Such Regret?

How Could I Say That I Wished To Penetrate The Secrets Of The Mountains In Search Of Something Still Unknown That, Like The Yeti, Might Well Be Missed For The Very Fact Of Searching?

When We Are Mired In The Relative World, Never Lifting Our Gaze To The Mystery, Our Life Is Stunted, Incomplete; We Are Filled With Yearning For That Paradise That Is Lost When, As Young Children, We Replace It With Words And Ideas And Abstractions - Such As Merit, Such As Past, Present, And Future - Our Direct, Spontaneous Experience Of The Thing Itself, In The Beauty And Precision Of This Present Moment.

In The Clearness Of This Himalayan Air, Mountains Draw Near, And In Such Splendor, Tears Come Quietly To My Eyes And Cool On My Sunburned Cheeks. This Is Not Mere Soft-mindedness, Nor Am I All That Silly With The Altitude. My Head Has Cleared In These Weeks Free Of Intrusions- Mail, Telephones, People And Their Needs- And I Respond To Things Spontaneously, Without Defensive Or Self-conscious Screens. Still, All This Feeling Is Astonishing: Not So Long Ago I Could Say Truthfully That I Had Not Shed A Tear In Twenty Years.

You See ... A Man Like Me, A Cautious Man, Has His Life All Figured Out According To A Pattern, And Then The Pattern Flies Apart. You Run Around For Quite A While Trying To Repair It, Until One Day You Straighten Up Again With An Armful Of Broken Pieces, And You See That The World Has Gone On Without You And You Can Never Catch Up With Your Old Life, And You Must Begin All Over Again.

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