The engine breaks roared as the eighteen-wheeled machine fought against the relentless pull of gravity, doggedly claiming the 72,000 lbs of this reluctant monster on a small, winding highway I don’t know where, heading down, down, into a city which moments before looked like a speck but now appears as a sea of light, from a mountain hidden in the dark, towering mysteriously in the void of night. Had I liberty to reflect in my usual manner, I would surely wonder how an intellectual got here, but I would immediately recall that before all else, I am a spiritual being, and that life often gives such souls twists which may even at times appear violent.
…The soul is itself an incomplete and endless project. Some mysterious work is being done upon it, within it, and even the identity of the worker is indeterminate, though perhaps not indeterminable. Something tells me that we may either allow the work to be done, independent of our own intention, or intercept the process, taking the fire into our own chest, as it were, assuming final responsibility either for triumph, or catastrophe. Shall I therefore, in endeavoring to ponder the impenetrable, be as the young Isckirus, flying too close to the hot sun with my frail wings of wax, my mortality, aiming to digest the indigestible, understand the intractable—seeking to cup with my wrinkled palms the boundless cloud? Will my life be like the chasing after the wind, so fatalistically lamented in that great book? Perhaps there is, after all, a breed of us, the fools of life, doomed to destruction from the moment we overstepped our bounds. But as I’ve committed before, I will dance my dance, even the dance of the very dance!
…The Mystic Trucker project on which this book is based was an attempt of mine, at a particular time in my life (perhaps, in the fullness of my time), to randomly engage my fellow Americans in genuine conversation regarding the big questions of life. Given our natural condition of ignorance regarding both our origin and destination in this existence (what I’ve simply termed the human condition), I was curious about how my fellow Americans made sense of, or would make sense of (in the event that our encounter was their first, serious visitation of the subject) the meaning of their own existence. Given the various personalities of my interlockers, the level of engagement in the topic true varied with each subject’s readiness for philosophical thought. In some interviews, the question was engaged head on, while in others, it was skirted at best attempt. In each case, nevertheless, a meaningful dab of color materialized in the resulting, albeit incomplete, spiritual portrait of random America.
