Expedition. Sets out to accomplish, discover, claim, explore. Sets out with an agenda.

But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately—ecology, democracy,

The boiling point of water is straightforward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.

The far edge of the world, at the back of the North Wind, east of the sun and west of the moon, as far as far, at the back of beyond, out of reach, out of touch, out of the ordinary, beyond the Arctic Circle, beyond so many things. Far.

(Another view of Elvis, from Billboard magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural life, integration has already taken place.”)

I once read that we crave, contradictorily, both security and adventure, comfort and challenge.

Oscar Wilde once remarked, “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” This profound uncertainty has been the grounds for my own hope.

My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story.