What can we make of any of this? It is the surreal and unique condition of our age. But these facts hold the same intensity and mystery as any lonely peak. The world is as rich as it ever was. Any belief less is cowardice and self consolation - Gerard Manley Hopkins opened and closed that question 150 years ago. Whenever we feel most keenly that “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”, a second, greater voice replies: “And for all this, nature is never spent”.

Distance has been destroyed. The world lurches forward in phantasmagoric collage. We can run from this fact, seeking ever deeper tracts of jungle to relive the idyll of the Victorian explorer - window shopping online for the last “vision quests” on the market - or we can accept the eternal and unvarying charge of the traveler: to remake the world as we experience it - and to be drowned, laughing, in the new.

— Henry Weikel, Like shining from shook foil, 2024