1, 2, 3, 4

䷷

5 & 6

7-8

Fire on the Mountain, 1962

a novel by Edward Paul Abbey

Rock & Sun

cover of the 1st edition

☶ 艮 (gèn) bound = (山) the mountain stands still.

Above it fire, ☲ 離 (lí) radiance = (火) fire, flames up and does not tarry.

Therefore the two trigrams do not stay together.

Strange lands and separation are the wanderer's lot.

The one who has few friends: this is the Wanderer.

山上有火，旅；君子以明慎用刑，而不留狱。

Fire on the mountain:

The image of the Wanderer.

Thus the superior man

Is clear-minded and cautious

In imposing penalties,

And protracts no lawsuits.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 1968

cover of the 1st edition

“If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.”

“I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”

“I am here not only to evade for a while the clamour and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.”

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”

— Edward Paul Abbey