I am currently running down Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is amazing, a lucid dream. That this book is somehow ascendent right now in popular culture seems significant: that this is a time of the apocalyptic poet, the classical bent and beaten road scholar. Kerouac’s On the Road burst onto the scene in 1951. Some part of me calls this time and now eternal recurrence. Things are folded in on themselves, and they repeat a second time in a slightly different accidental form (due to the contexts in which they are birthed) but have underneath them the same basic substance. Things are always winding up and winding down, and there is a third sister who cuts the strands. Always has been. Freedom comes in many faces and its closest companion is Death.