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"Of some spot of earth one may feel that one would like it if one could really see or really know it. Here, one may say, I should like to stay for a month, or a year, or a decade. It could give something to me and I, perhaps something to it -- if only some sort of love and understanding. More rarely -- perhaps only once, perhaps two or three times -- one experiences something more like love at first sight. The desire to stay, to enter in, is not a whim or a notion but a passion. Verweile doch, du bist so schon! If I do not somehow possess this, if I never learn what it was that called out, what it was that was being offered, I shall feel all my life that I have missed something intended for me. If I do not, for a time at least, live here I shall not have lived as fully as I had the capacity to live."
Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year
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