If you asked for directions to the fabled hole in the suburban soul, you might end up here, where the emptiness has been wrapped in the tightest gauze of retail.
He started a blog called the Emptiness, where he wrote posts such as "Socialism Is Selfish" and "Taxation Is Theft".
The church is "a preparation for death- an emptiness where others have been, which is what death will be".
Much of northern Maine is like this, a vast stretch of emptiness where lakes and mountains sometimes have numbers instead of names.
Our ship motored back past the Verrazano, the twinkling lights of Lower Manhattan and the yawning emptiness where the twin towers used to be.
Even with some resemblances to Prince and R. Kelly, he's an unusual character for R&B: estranged but observant, admitting an attraction to a man, finding emptiness where others find material or emotional comfort.
There's an emptiness where a baby once lay, but it's being slowly replaced with something akin to pride of the sweet and smart boy he's becoming, secure in himself and independent.
"He's beside me now," says Gough. "He's no longer lost in that awful emptiness where he was when he lost his nerve at 17 and fled Deià." The White Goddess: An Encounter by Simon Gough is published by Galley Beggar Press, £10.
Later, as I huddled with a little crowd on the viewing platform, watching people scrawl their names or write "God Bless America" on the plywood walls, it occurred to me that a form of repopulation was taking effect, with so many visitors to this place, thousands of visitors, all of us coming to see the wide emptiness where so many were lost.
Above all, the visual image of the west that was to shape Hollywood's most all-American genre was created by Frederic Remington, John Quincy Adams Ward, Charles C Schreyvogel and other illustrators of a picturesque and epic dusty emptiness where "Red Indian" braves with feathered headdresses and rifles eternally fight the blue-clad Seventh Cavalry.
