Science, Religion, Politics and in the pursuit of truth – HappyPsychotic

Later when we stop, Sylvia has tears in her eyes from the wind, and she stretches out her arms and says, “It’s so beautiful.  It’s so empty.”

…

John gets his camera out.  After a while he says, “This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph.  You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees lens, or something.  You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing.  As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.”  I say, “That’s what you don’t see in a car, I suppose.”  Sylvia says, “Once when I was about ten we stopped like this by the road and I used half a roll of film taking pictures.  And when the pictures came back I cried.  There wasn’t anything there.”

…

So we move down the empty road.  I don’t want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going.  We are just moving down the empty road.

And then in chapter 7:

This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why.  One lives longer in order that he may live longer.  There is no other purpose.  That is what the ghost says.