"David Searcy's writing is enchanting and peculiar, obsessed with plumbing the mysteries and wonders of our everyday world, the beauty and cruelty of time, and nothing less than what he calls "the whole idea of meaning." With "casual virtuosity" (the NewYork Times) and an insatiable sense of awe, Searcy leads the reader across the landscapes of his extraordinary mind, moving from the slightly faded architectural wonder that is the town of Arcosanti, Arizona, to the open Texas highway in his much-abused college VW Beetle, to the mysterious, canal-riddled Martian landscape that famed astronomer Percival Lowell first saw through his telescope in 1894. Searcy does not come at his ideas directly, but rather digresses and meditates and analyzes, until some essential truth has been illuminated. It is perhaps best to let Searcy cut to the heart of this book's mission himself: "So here's a theory. We are lost. We're neither here nor there. There's you, and there's the you that knows there's you. And in that gap between the two--and we are always in that gap--we're migratory. Back and forth, always crossing and arriving. Somehow never quite arrived. This never-quiteness, fine-scale longing, is the form our self-awareness takes. It's hard to tell, of course, because it's us. But now and then, we catch an intimation. Something draws the vital emptiness out and shows it to us: Sounds of summer insects. The bewilderment of photographs. That inexplicable void between the earth and sky in children's drawings.""--