http://thebeginningfarmer.com/ALFA_DATA At least one person expressed astonishment that I was headed off to Miami for a week – “we mountain people,” she said, “don’t want anything to do with Miami.” I had a little taste of that in the airport on my way down. I was waiting on the security line, shoes and boarding pass in hand, when I noticed a woman with what seemed to me an unusually nice walk. She wasn’t extraordinarily beautiful in any photogenic way, but I just liked the way she walked. It took me a few seconds to understand that this was merely because she was going through the metal detector, and had no shoes on. It was, in other words, just the way that women walk naturally. But that’s not something I see terribly often, and in a society of shoes it actually seems quite intimate.
buy Lyrica online from mexico The goal of life, and the best producer of happiness, according to the Stoic school of ancient philosophers, is to live “in accordance with nature.” “Nature” is a flexible term, and even the ancients agreed that our capacity for artificiality seemed to be in some sense natural, but think it’s still an open question how much we can depart from nature without destroying the earth and our own happiness. From what I had heard of Miami, nature was precisely the thing it did not want – a bare female foot needed a four-inch-heel to make it attractive.
The plane’s course brought us along the Eastern seaboard the entire time. It is amazing how lit-up the countryside is. I have gotten used to darkness, I suppose. It seemed to me that we could eliminate half of the lights in every town down the entire length of the coastline without doing anything to our quality of life. It’s just waste. This is the thing which is (to me) saddest about our wastefulness: we don’t waste to make ourselves happy. We waste for no purpose at all.
Flying into Miami the plane made a wide turn and I saw the city lights stretch out until they – abruptly stopped. Inland, west of Miami, there is a vast area of darkness just at the edge of the city. This is the Everglades, which I would see later in the week. It makes an impression – seeing the extravagance and wastefulness of an illuminated American city pitched up against utter darkness.
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