No internet waves have yet lapped this shore. Time moves at a totally different pace, or rather, just as it used to. The day feels fuller and longer, even with nothing in it. Just as the night sky, cleared of buildings and light-leak, is incomprehensibly vast and black and starry.
The largest bog in the 48 states and the "lost" forest of 350-year-old pine trees that escaped the lumber barons back when will have to come tomorrow--I just picked up Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson and read the first twenty pages standing up, and now I'm cutting out of this 21st-century bookstore and heading back to the dock.
P.S. From Out Stealing Horses, page 5 (the narrator has retreated to a telephone-free cabin in the deep woods near a river):
All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly how I imagined it.
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