Etymologies

"Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I'd never have found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It's a contention of Heat Moon's—believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey, misses about all he's going to get—that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him."

"Etymology: curious, related to cure, once meant 'carefully observant.' Maybe a tonic of curiosity would counter my numbing sense that life inevitably creeps toward the absurd. Absurd, by the way derives from a Latin word meaning 'deaf, dulled.' Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and the obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one...Whitman calls it the "profound lesson of reception."

William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways