Essayists From The United States

"In the past four years, I've branded on a ranch in , stalked in Texas, watched cows butchered by hand in a in Colorado, and toured a plant near that kills 6,000 cows per hour. I've attended conventions of the in and of a breakaway group in Denver, applauded lectures at the American Grass-Fed Society in Indiana and whooped it up at rodeos at the . I've talked with a New Jersey housewife investigating , with an ex-bull rider turned political activist, with an animal scientist who transformed . I went to Florida to see in the s, to to "Eeeeehaaaawwww" with the Cowgirls of the West in the Pioneer Days Parade. I even enrolled in Beef 101 at , in order to get some hands-on experience in how we turn cows into meat."

"Treating corn as a commodity is a part of our ingrained history — but it’s only two hundred years old. To people who aren't accustomed to thinking of history at all, that’s a long time. But to us here, it’s an eyeblink."

"Fortunately, good and premium wines are at the command of almost anyone in America who wants to drink them. Also, they are almost always dependable—a far cry from the old idea that "gentlemen" had their own s and their resultant giddy high life, and that the rest of the world lived on beer and s."

"The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow."

"The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."

"Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them."

"The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things."

"I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know."

"She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."

"Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto."

"This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in the doorways, and she was afraid."

"In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise."

"Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness."

"Wherever you look there's meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can't live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean."

"Next to music beer was best."

"And how can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?"

"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone."

"If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do."

"I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?"

"It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known."

"I'm one who knows. I'm a stranger in a strange land."

"All we can do is go around telling the truth."

"It is far better for the profits of our purse to be taken from us than to be robbed of the riches of our minds and souls."

"The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear."

"By focusing on the entitlements of collectivities (notably nation states) as opposed to the well-being of individuals, the just war theory frames a rationale for war which omits the central moral issue...whether the massive, systematic and deliberate killing of human beings can ever be justified."

"Pacifism: A Philosophy of Nonviolence, Bloomsbury, New York, 2016 pp. 265-266. ISBN 978-1-4712-7983-3; See the review of the book by Cheyney Ryan, Oxford University 2017 in "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", quoted on ndpr.nd.edu."

"On War and Morality, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1989. ISBN 978-1-4008-6014-2; quoted on Google Books."

"To justify going to war...that is to establish jus ad bellum in the first place, requires showing that what one would be doing by waging it is justified."

"If a visitor from outer space were to come to know human beings on this earth .... at work and play, and without knowledge of human history or international affairs, what would he conclude? No doubt that virtually everyone values friendship, peace and happiness; ...If having observed all this the visitor were then told that a scheme had been proposed ... which for the present would require that people pour their wealth into the production of weapons of destruction, ... train their sons and daughters to kill and periodically send them off to slaughter..[and] that humans could improve their lot provided only that they do all of these things, he would ridicule the scheme as having not the slightest chance of success, and even less of being accepted by rational beings. Yet this is precisely what humankind has been led to accept in the case of war. It has proven willing to abandon virtually everything worth living for, to do things all agree are abhorrent, for reasons few understand, and for ends (such as peace) that history shows cannot be secured by these means."

"The Ethics of Nonviolence: Essays by Robert L. Holmes. Ed. Predrag, Cicovaki. Bloomsbury, 2013 ISBN 978-1-6235-6580-0 quoted on Google Books"

"What I mean by saying that war is wrong is not only that it is bad but that it ought not to be waged, that governments ought not to declare and fight wars, societies ought not to provide them with the means by which to do so, and individuals ought not to sanction, support and participate in wars."

"It is not nuclear violence alone that is the threat to mankind. It is the willingness to kill our fellow human beings – the innocent as well as the noninnocent- for political ends. Unless we are willing to redirect our time, energy, and resources away from perfecting the means of mass destruction of whatever sort and into exploring nonviolent alternatives to war itself, our efforts to combat the threat of nuclear war are likely to be of no avail."

"The threat to retaliate massively in the event of a nuclear attack is not rationale...contrary to the usual wisdom, we have no good reason to believe that nuclear deterrence has worked in the past, or that if it has, it will continue to do so in the future...even if nuclear deterrence should be one hundred percent effective, it still increases the probability of nuclear war."

"To be a pragmatic pacifist, one need only consider that large-scale, organized, and systemic war violence is unacceptable in today's world."

"If one thinks of nonviolence as a way of life, then it works to the extent that one lives nonviolently and infuses everyday conduct with a nonviolent spirit...whether we act nonviolently, considerately, and respectfully of others in all that we do is within our control. Nonviolence in that sense cannot fail to work if we resolve to see that it works."

"It is presumptively wrong to do violence to innocent persons."

"We will never know whether there is a realistic moral alternative to violence unless we are willing to explore the potential of nonviolent action."

"Plausible moral theory must have at its center a concern for the lives and well-being of persons."

"A necessary condition of the justifiable pursuit of any objectives in war by any means whatever.. is that one be justified in engaging in such killing and violence in the first place."

"...in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush."

"Remember that there are elements of your personality you are totally unaware of that are immediately apparent to any stranger within five minutes of meeting you"

"There's an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I'd update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle."

"Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else."

"My first assignment for Down Beat was to do an interview with Milt Jackson, whom I didn't know and who was not a very easy interview. I asked several of my musician friends. But the fortunate thing was that he was recording for Atlantic, and Down Beat arranged for me to attend the session. He was recording with Coleman Hawkins, whom I had at that time already befriended. In fact, Coleman did a very big thing for me in terms of establishing me in the musicians' circle. Coleman was known for never buying anybody a drink. It's not that he was cheap, but he once explained it to me. He said, "You buy somebody a drink. Then they buy you one. You wind up drinking more than you really want." But he was noted for not doing that. We had become friendly. Coleman had this big, booming voice. Even in a noisy bar you could hear him over the crowd. His voice really carried. He said to me, "Danny. What are you drinking?" Everybody turned around and looked. That was like my initiation. Anyway, Coleman was recording with Milt Jackson. I had a little bit – he could see that I – after the session, when I started talking to Milt, that Milt was – he didn’t know me from Adam. Who is this guy? I was not – I couldn’t say that I was an experienced interviewer by then. So Coleman came over and just put his arm around and said, "He’s okay." Then Milt opened up."

"Then the next thing we did, which was in 1955, Art Tatum had a trio at Storyville [in Boston, Mass]. I really wanted Tatum solo. Guitar and bass – it's a fine – but I wanted to hear him himself. So we propositioned him. That turned out to be something that he immediately responded to. So we made sure that we got the best piano on campus and had it tuned to a T. I wrote a piece about him. The concert was terrific. ... Tatum played wonderfully. Then when we took him back to Boston and thanked him profusely, he then said – and this was something that I think jolted me and gave me maybe in the back of my mind the thought that I might want to get involved in this kind of thing – he said, "I want to thank you, because this is the first time I've done a solo concert all by myself." What he meant by that was that he had of course performed publicly solo piano before, but always as part of a program where there were other attractions. 1955 is a year before his death. It's astonishing."

"As an unintended result of the Nazi occupation [of Denmark, where Morgenstern lived at the time], jazz became more popular than ever—a phenomenon universal to countries under the Hitler jackboot. In France, Django Reinhardt enjoyed the greatest acclaim of his career, and even in Germany, there were clandestine groups of jazz fans who'd meet to listen to records. Jazz was anathema to the Nazis. who considered it a mongrel affront to Aryan "culture," the product of an unholy alliance between Africans and Jews. But to those who hated the Nazis, jazz stood for freedom, for democracy, and for the spirit of America, which, especially after Pearl Harbor, seemed to embody hope for a better future."

"While most first-time visitors wanted to see the Statue of Liberty (arriving by ocean liner, I'd already seen it) or the Empire State Building, I wanted to go to Fifty-Second Street, that legendary block of jazz clubs I'd read so much about. It wasn't much to look at from the outside, though the names on the various marquees and sandwich boards made me drool. History tells us that by the spring of 1947, the street was well into its decline and fall, and to be sure, there were signs touting strippers and comedians. But having Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holiday all on the same block wasn't shabby. I soon discovered that it was possible to hear a lot of music from outside the clubs, if their wasn't too much traffic noise and the doorman didn't chase you away. Eventually I learned how to nurse a beer through several sets of music by drinking from the bottle, which was opaque, instead of from a glass, which the bartender could easily spot when empty, or, if I wanted to stick around all night, to tip the bartender well on the first transaction, after which he'd leave me alone with my empty bottle."

"Loss is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind."

"Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death."

"She sleeps like a cocoyam. A thing without senses. She sleeps like his mother, unplugged from the world."