I’m curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not everything can be seen, not everything read and not everything thought torments me like the loss of ..... But I don’t see with fixed attention, I don’t read with great care, and I don’t think with continuity. I’m an ardent and inconsequential dilettante in everything. My soul is too weak to sustain the force of its own enthusiasm. Made out of ruins of the unfinished, I’m definable as a landscape of resignations.

On harsh, frigid January days, when the winds are relentless and the snow piles up around us, I often think of our small feathered friends back on the Third Line. I wonder if the old feeder is still standing in the orchard and if anyone thinks to put out a few crumbs and some bacon drippings for our beautiful, hungry, winter birds. In the stark, white landscape they provided a welcome splash of colour and their songs gave us hope through the long, silent winter.

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him. My body, my life, became the landscape of my son's life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world.

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, "There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?" Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”

“I think the concept is a wonderful concept. It'll be carried on television. Because of the nationalism involved, it could take on greater meaning in countries like Japan or the Dominican Republic or Venezuela than perhaps it would in the United States. But because of the nationalistic feeling, it could be a nice little launching pad because it is played in March. I think it's an interesting concept that should grow over the years. If you give it time, five or six or seven years from now, this could be a nice addition to the sports landscape and a big event.”

“Considering 70 percent of people who use popular e-mail devices also carry a mobile phone, the opportunity for us to provide one device and solution that perfectly addresses both the voice and data experiences is tremendous, ... In the current landscape, many industry players are going after a slice of the potential mobile e-mail market. Nokia is going after the full 650 million corporate e-mail inboxes. We want to knock down the barriers to mobilizing the entire corporate e-mail market.”

Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute governesses. Or — preferably — the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —

Few things are more dangerous to an egalitarian ideal than the concept of a chosen people, and the divide drawn by the early iteration of God's Church helped to exacerbate the many ideological faults that already underlay the landscape. When they chips were down, Tear's people were ready to turn on each other, and the fall of the Town was very quick, so quick that this historian wonders whether all such communities are not destined to fail. Our species is capable of altruism, certainly, but it is not a game we play willingly, let alone well

The intensity of my grief hits the mountains across Eclipse Sound, and then echoes throughout Arctic. There’s nobody around. I can barely see the town below the hill, nestled within the valley of barren tundra, across from the tiny airport, my only access to the south. I’m alone amidst this desolate landscape and there’s nowhere to hide. No trees or buildings or distractions. It’s just me in the depths of my suffering and all my faults and mistakes of the past are exposed underneath the spotlight of the midnight sun.