Fellow Conservatives, by Jonathan Rowe in West Marin Review Fall 2010

I just read the following prose and it so captured the irony and paradox of life in Marin . . .

Explore. Dream. Discover.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain (perhaps not!? H. Jackson Brown, Jr. published the work containing the quotation, but he did not take credit for it. The book “P.S. I Love You” contained a collection of wise aphorisms from Brown’s mother.)

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not see before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before. To be the first -- that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment.

- Innocents Abroad