I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future. –Caitlin Upton, Ms. South Carolina 2007

It was the United States of America in the cold, late spring of 1967 and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a high sense of social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise but it was not and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. –Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain into the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees, too, were dusty and the leaves feel early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and the leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling, soldiers marching, and afterwards, the road bare and white except for the leaves. -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“So eagerly the fiend Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks or wades, or creeps, or flyes” -John Milton, Paradise Lost

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. -King James Bible

“And all I do is skate and smoke and rap and f***.” -Lil Wayne

“We drink and we dry up and now we crumble into dust.” -The Hold Steady

With their tanks, and their bombs And their bombs, and their guns -The Cranberries

Faint, weary, sore, emboyled, grieved, brent With Heat, Toil, Wounds, Arms, Smart, and inward Fire, That never Man such Mischiefs did torment; Death better were, Death did he oft desire -Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind that blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods.

A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week’s fishing and to revisit old haunts.

Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottagers with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birchbark canoes and the postcards that showed things looking a little better than they looked.