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Loren Eiseley,
Notes of an Alchemist:

I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.

— “The Invisible Horseman”

This quotation is the result of
the following meditation:

Part I:
The Feast of St. Michael
and All Angels

On Michaelmas 2008 (yesterday):

The mailman brought next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. On the last page was an essay by Steven Millhauser, “The Ambition of the Short Story.” It said that…

“The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there– right there, in the palm of its hand– lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved.”

Part II:
An Actor’s Lesson

A search for the “grain of sand” phrase in this journal yielded a quotation from actor Will Smith:

“Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: ‘It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I’m teaching my kids.'”

The quotation’s source is The Independent of July 9, 2004.

Part III:
A date with Reba

The date of The Independent‘s story turns out to contain, in this journal, a meditation on white-trash food and Reba McEntire.

(Recall her classic lyric
“I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name.”)

It also contains the Notes of an Alchemist quotation above.

“Let, then, winged Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind”

— John Keats, “Fancy“

A passage closely related to Keats’s poem:

“Fullness… Multitude.”

These are the missing last words of Inman in Cold Mountain, added here on the Feast of St. Luke, 2004.  For the meaning of these words, click on Luke.