For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of
what can be seen, the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges,
of anything far away.  The color of that distance is the color of
solitude and of desire, the color of there not seen from here, the
color of where you are not.  And the color of where you can never
go.  For the blue is not at the horizon but in the distancee between
you and the mountains.  "Longing," says the poet Robert Hass,
"because desire is full of endless distances."  We treat desire as a
problem to be solved, thougth I wonder whether with a slight
adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on
its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as
blue is to distance.  Something of desire will only be relocated,
not assuaged, by acquisition, just as the mountains cease to be blue
when you arrive among them, and the blue instead tints the next
beyond.  

	- Rebecca Solnit, from *A Field Guide to Getting Lost*
	  (Harper's Magazine, July 2005, p.13)