Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience_ but we__ be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives_ because we didn__ like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

No matter how cheerful and blameless the day__ activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong _ you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

Growth is betrayal.

Every night we stopped in a cabin where wood had been stacked, matches left, and canned goods laid out for the chance traveler. All the unknown host received in return was a scribbled note giving our thanks, any news we could think of, and our names. This whole system of northern hospitality was a gigantic chain, for while we were eating this man__ beans, he was undoubtedly farther up the trail, eating somebody else__.