is an Inquirer staff writer

Summer has arrived, and soon I'll be in Maine, sailing across Frenchman Bay, hiking up Cadillac Mountain. Maine, as the billboard boasts, is "the way life should be." The claim may be vaulting, but the sentiment fits a state whose license plates long proclaimed "Vacationland."

Maine amazes with a weird, moody beauty, but its true magic is this: It encourages a long view. The glacial landscape compels geologic contemplation. The vast night sky is spangled with advertisements for eternity.

The part of Maine I frequent is near Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. I've been going there since I was a boy. It's the heart of Down East Maine, the only spot on the East Coast where mountains descend to the sea. Bar Harbor's original name was Eden. Artists who discovered the transcendent splendor of Mount Desert Island in the 19th century felt they had glimpsed paradise.

Down East Maine is indeed east, which means the sun rises early, rousing me at an hour that would seem ungodly back home. E.B. White, who lived on a nearby saltwater farm, understood the dilemma of a day in Maine. "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world," he once wrote. "That makes it hard to plan the day."

On vacation, my body clock shifts to a more natural cycle. I wake up about 6, when the sun peeks over Hancock Point, scattering diamonds across the bay. I retire about 9, when the Nova Scotia ferry threads through the Porcupine Islands.

When I vacation in Maine, I truly vacate; I purge my mind and empty my cares. I enforce and enjoy a total media blackout. "Only connect," E.M. Forster famously exhorted. In Maine, I follow a different commandment: Only disconnect! No cell phone, e-mail, radio, TV, or newspapers.

And forget Twittering, the latest symptom of the exponential proliferation of instant (and increasingly inane) information. I say, we need less ingestion and more digestion. We need less information and more meditation, reflection, and contemplation.

"Where is the Life we have lost in living?" T.S. Eliot lamented. "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

It's amazing how pleasant and benign the world can seem after a week of breakfasting while watching seals frolic, or lobstermen pull traps, or schoonerlike clouds scud across the horizon, instead of scanning headlines about cold-blooded killings and corporate "restructurings," and the strutting and rutting of vainglorious politicians, meretricious celebrities, and boorish jocks.

For the most part, news is inherently bad, and much of what passes for news is glorified gossip, sensationalized trivia and ephemera, mental static and psychic clutter. There's nothing worse than waking up in a sunny mood, then reading a story in the paper that clouds your whole day by reminding you that people are liars, phonies, idiots, and brutes.

I'm not suggesting that you wallow in blissful ignorance or give up the newspaper habit altogether. I'm just recommending that, when it's your turn to go on vacation, you consider the salubrious benefits of a "news fast."

The term comes from Andrew Weil, the Harvard-trained physician and advocate of natural living and herbal health. In Spontaneous Healing, Weil writes: "A major source of my own mental turmoil is the news. The percentage of stories in the news that make me feel good is very small; the percentage of stories that make me feel anxious or outraged is very large and increasing, as news media focus more and more on murder, mayhem and misery. It is easy to forget that we have a choice as to whether we let this information into our minds and thoughts."

Come evening, I treat my senses to a more fascinating medium - the night sky. The heavens were the newspaper of our ancestors, a nocturnal front page of celestial tidings. In Maine, the firmament reveals itself with spectacular clarity, flaunts its boundless immensity.

On the rocks by the lapping shore, I lie on my back for hours, watching shooting stars, tracing constellations, examining craters on the moon, studying the vague vastness of the Milky Way, imagining far-off undiscovered galaxies, wondering whether the light I'm seeing now from a particular star issued in the time of the dinosaurs or Julius Caesar.

What a thrill to succumb to wonder and awe! Emerson supplied the words: "The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world."

Occasionally, a pining loon pierces the stillness with its haunting cry. Otherwise, the quiet is complete, the silence so unearthly, so profound, I can hear the thrumming of the cosmos, the music of the spheres. Pascal put it best: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me."

Convinced of my insignificance, I feel cleansed, refreshed, liberated from quotidian worries - the purpose and blessing of vacation.