Aupres de l’ancienne ville de Lyon du costé du Soleil couchant, il y a un pays nommé FORESTS, qui en sa petitesse contient ce qui est de plus rare au reste des Gaules. Car estant divisé en plaines & en montagnes, les unes & les autres sont si fertiles, & seitués en un air si temperé, que la terre y est capable do tout ce que peut desirer le Laboureur.

—L’Astrée, Honoré d’Urfé

Eight months ago, I was woken up in the middle of a rainy night by two dogs fighting over a raccoon carcass. The next day, I took the raccoon into the woods. I forgot about it after a few days. Today I was out venturing for a beautiful sunny day walk in the woods. I found a pile of raccoon bones in the same spot. I brought the skull and the two femora home with me and placed them on a slate slab on my deck. This is how the world works.

The 25-year debt-fueled boom of 1982-2007 ended, and it left the country with a stagnant economy, massive debts, high unemployment, huge wealth inequality, an enormous budget deficit, and a sense of entitlement engendered by a half-century of prosperity.

After decades of instant gratification, Americans have also come to believe that all problems can be solved instantly, if only the right leaders are put in charge and the right decisions are made. And so our government has devolved into a permanent election campaign, in which incumbents blame each other for the current mess, and challengers promise change.

Henry Blodgett, “Here’s What’s Wrong With The Economy And How To Fix It,” Business Insider, October 1, 2011

Yesterday I was influenced with the rottenness of human relations. They appeared full of death and decay, and offended the nostrils. In the night I dreamed of delving amid the graves of the dead, and soiled my fingers with their rank mould. It was sanitarily, morally, and physically true.

Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts –
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines –
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

– Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

Come to these rocks –
The surgery.
To be authentic
Is primatology.

“I” or “me” or “you”
Garments that one finds
You
am
always in drag 

My life partakes of infinity. The air is as deep as our natures. I go forth to make new demands on life. I wish to do something worthy of me; to transcend my daily routine; to have my immortality now, that it be in the quality of my daily life; to pay the greatest price, the greatest tax, and enjoy the most. I will give all that I am for my nobility. I will pay all my days for my success. May I dare as I have never done! May I persevere as I have never done! I am eager to report the glory of the universe; may I be worthy to do it; to have got through with regarding human values, so as not to be distracted from regarding divine values.

Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861