Sublime

His was the most interesting story, at least to Carter. At 5:55 p.m., with the fire just a minute away and rushing toward him at ever greater speed, he’d lit a second fire, up the hill he needed to climb. As his fire burned the grass in front of him, he walked into it and threw himself onto the hot ashes. He’d called for his men first to abandon th

There had been years of planning, and now, just as my solo was starting in earnest, the whole narrative changed. Glancing for a minute at the satellite image map, I searched for an alternate path. I mentally recited the mantra that I knew to be true after years of experience—that the plan falling apart is a natural part of any worthwhile adventure.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.

Not on preventing catastrophe, but simply surviving it; on keeping a tenuous thread of civilization going across the next many generations; on some of us getting through the horror and wreckage of it, to some other mode of living profoundly different from anything we know. This is the “hope beyond hope” that British writer and ecologist Paul Kingsn