I do not recall exactly when I met my fate in the look of a horse. Perhaps it was at the Fourth of july celebration we always attended at the home of friends of my parents: They had a horse farm. She was a noted authority on Morgans and, later, Thoroughbreds, and an author of many books about horses, and a woman I came to admire and fear as if they were the same thing when I first started taking lessons there. I was taught by one of her employees (always female) but was always looking for her so that I could watch out of the corner of my eye as she worked with horses or more advanced students. But in the beginning I just remember the annual summertime blast, with what seemed to me, and perhaps was, hundreds of guests, children running everywhere, galvanized water troughs filled with ice and soda and beer, and the Rubber City Retreads playing Dixieland. We would give the Shetland pony beer, and we would ride her; her name was Black Beauty. For a time I loved her.

You may have to take my word for the fact that traveling by bike is superior to traveling by car. All right--I will allow that it's very, very different.  Especially in the dark: the road seems to tilt ever upward, and you start imagining things. There will be rivers rushing in the blackness near the roadside; there will be a cliff looming overhead. You can ride into imaginative space, which is real traveling, because you are not anchored by anything. Look around. There is nothing between you and the weather, the smells, the color of the sky. All impress themselves on your consciousness as if the ride had turned it to wet cement. And there they will stay, apparently forever, so you can recall those sensations with an almost frightening precision years later.

What we are is where we have been. That is all there is, at least from where we can see. They keep trying to convince you that there is some objective reality out there, but you know in your heart how much nonsense that is. It’s their way of trying to sell you on the idea that change, being an “inevitable” part of “progress”— being dropped on top of your head by some deus ex machina with a bad sense of timing— can’t be fought. You can be choking on it, turning red and beginning to perspire, seeing little things start to float before your eyes, and they’ll dismiss you. In fact, they never even bothered to ask. Look in vain for many in-depth studies on the only thing that matters, what it feels like to live in the world you live in. That’s so they can take your home, the thing that made you, and shatter it, piece by piece.