I look at you with such grim determination, and why? Adventure is the lifeblood of humanity, it’s what keeps us ticking forwards. You should be, by all accounts, a reason for joy and hope, an uplifted face, open and enthusiastic, so why should I meet you with such furrowed brow and heavy footsteps?
I want to seize and capture you, to hold you fast and proclaim to myself and the world that I have beaten you.
I am taken by flights of fancy to snow-peaked mountains, treacherous, forbidding, the great testers of courage and fortitude. I am taken into deserts, the hot, heady cradles of civilization, teeming with life on the surface, nothing but a brittle corpse below. To oceans deep, where the smallest and largest of life fight for their own survival, heedless of the conflicts of land-dwellers.
Where does adventure go? Where, how can I follow? I long to do Great Things, but I don’t know what, or how to begin. How do you be adventurous? Is it just a cry in the dark? What steps, if you are not Victorian English and equipped with a guide and social conventions to break?
It’s always a mistake to start reading. You start to get dangerous ideas. Ideas to burn apathy away and create longing. Longing for adventure. Longing for escape.
Yes, books are dangerous things. No wonder people burn them.
adoxographically 