Essayists From The United States

"Rising interest rates have been advertised for so long and in so many places that anyone who has not appropriately hedged this position by now obviously is desirous of losing money."

"American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage."

"Intensive research in recent years into the sources of economic growth among both developing and developed nations generally point to a number of important factors: the state of knowledge and skill of a population; the degree of control over indigenous natural resources; the quality of a country's legal system, particularly a strong commitment to a rule of law and protection of property rights; and yes, the extent of a country's openness to trade with the rest of the world. For the United States, arguably the most important factor is the type of rule of law under which economic activity takes place. When asked abroad why the United States has become the most prosperous large economy in the world, I respond, with only mild exaggeration, that our forefathers wrote a constitution and set in motion a system of laws that protects individual rights, especially the right to own property. Nonetheless, the degree of state protection is sometimes in dispute. But by and large, secure property rights are almost universally accepted by Americans as a critical pillar of our economy. While the right of property in the abstract is generally uncontested in all societies embracing democratic market capitalism, different degrees of property protection do apparently foster different economic incentives and outcomes."

"It hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces."

"The reason there is very little support for the gold standard is the consequences of those types of market adjustments are not considered to be appropriate in the 20th and 21st century. I am one of the rare people who have still some nostalgic view about the old gold standard, as you know, but I must tell you, I am in a very small minority among my colleagues on that issue."

"Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise."

"For some, the benign inflation outcome of 1996 might be considered surprising, as resource utilization rates--particularly of labor--were in the neighborhood of those that historically have been associated with building inflation pressures. To be sure, an acceleration in nominal labor compensation, especially its wage component, became evident over the past year. But the rate of pay increase still was markedly less than historical relationships with labor market conditions would have predicted. Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996, despite the sharply lower unemployment rate and the tighter labor market, the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff."

"Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets.… But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?"

"I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said."

"Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said."

"We are obviously all hurt by inflation. Everybody is hurt by inflation. If you really wanted to examine who percentage-wise is hurt the most in their incomes, it is the Wall Street brokers. I mean their incomes have gone down the most."

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves."

"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense—perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire—that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other."

"Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear."

"The world of antitrust is reminiscent of Alice’s Wonderland: everything seemingly is, yet apparently isn’t, simultaneously. It is a world in which competition is lauded as the basic axiom and guiding principle, yet "too much" competition is condemned as "cutthroat." It is a world in which actions designed to limit competition are branded as criminal when taken by businessmen, yet praised as "enlightened" when initiated by the government. It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge’s verdict—after the fact."

"Once stock prices reach the point at which it is hard to value them by logical methodology, stocks will be bought as they were in the late 1920s not for investment but to be unloaded at a still higher price. The ensuing break could be disastrous because panic psychology cannot be summarily altered or reversed by easing money policies."

"I remember John’s hands wrapped around his pipe. His scent. I remember descending into the basement of the English Department building at S.U.N.Y.-Binghamton and thinking this is the home of John, Grendel’s dragon. Smoking. I can’t imagine John in a smokeless building. Knowing John, he’d burn such buildings to the ground. Return such an idea to some level of Dante’s Hell. Why should buildings be kept so innocent of a man’s presence? John’s steaming pipe was a part of his signature. I am thankful that I studied with him before the panics of second hand smoke. Of course, John was not much for obeying signs. And he belonged in that basement, or, more aptly, the basement belonged to John. He was “of” the basement. Soiled man of mud. The earth. Other professors seemed out of place down there. Almost frightened by the cold, damp, crusty hallway. All of them seemed to be struggling to get better offices, offices on the first floor among the living. Not John. This was John’s lair. He once told me that the walls of the school would fall down if he ever left. Now, when I return to Binghamton, more than anything else I feel John’s absence. The halls no longer seem to be on fire."

"As my teacher, John C. Gardner did not so much bring me to the word, as he carried me home once again to the flesh of the words that so much of my academic background had year after bloody year destroyed. He returned the eye that the king of trolls had stolen from Woden, my eye that too many literary critics had forced to become blind to listening. John made reading–in place of mere meaning-scavenging–possible once again. The boundless page of schizophrenic resistance. He put me in a position to begin forgetting in order to remember, not with some sort of Garden of Eden innocence, but with voices, echoes, and uncertainty. John blew off the institutional dust that had, because of the desire of the academic industries to explain away beauty, accumulated over William Faulkner’s breathing and returned me to the dizzy breathlessness of Faulkner’s writing. Faulkner’s words, John reminded me, are made from blood, are marked in blood; they are not simply palaces of meaning, convoluted places where dead or dying scholars meet to whisper over the runes in secretive hermeneutic struggles. Read Faulkner’s sentences aloud. Feel them move, not from the page, but from inside the depths of your own body. It was with the recovery of this listening eye that I was finally able to burst into writing. John taught me to hear in physical ways the rhythm of my lips forming words. The touching of two lips, of lips to tongue, each-to-each. The ineluctable modality of the visible. Closed eyes on a beach."

"I don't know how Gardner might have been with other students when it came time to have conferences with them about their work. I suspect he gave everybody a good amount of attention. But it was and still is my impression that during that period he took my stories more seriously, read them closer and more carefully, than I had any right to expect. I was completely unprepared for the kind of criticism I received from him. Before our conference he would have marked up my story, crossing out unacceptable sentences, phrases, individual words, even some of the punctuation; and he gave me to understand that these deletions were not negotiable. In other cases he would bracket sentences, phrases, or individual words, and these were items we'd talk about, these cases were negotiable. And he wouldn't hesitate to add something to what I'd written—a word here and there, or else a few words, maybe a sentence that would make clear what I was trying to say. We'd discuss commas in my story as if nothing else in the world mattered more at that moment—and, indeed, it did not. He was always looking to find something to praise. When there was a sentence, a line of dialogue, or a narrative passage that he liked, something that he thought "worked" and moved the story along in some pleasant or unexpected way, he'd write "Nice" in the margin, or else "Good!" And seeing these comments, my heart would lift. It was close, line-by-line criticism he was giving me, and the reasons behind the criticism, why something ought to be this way instead of that; and it was invaluable to me in my development as a writer. After this kind of detailed talk about the text, we'd talk about the larger concerns of the story, the "problem" it was trying to throw light on, the conflict it was trying to grapple with, and how the story might or might not fit into the grand scheme of story writing. It was his conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiment were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it. A writer's value and craft. This is what the man taught and what he stood for, and this is what I've kept by me in the years since that brief but all-important time."

"[John Gardner would] take one of my early efforts at a story and go over it with me. I remember him as being very patient, wanting me to understand what he was trying to show me, telling me over and over how important it was to have the right words saying what I wanted them to say. Nothing vague or blurred, no smoked-glass prose. And he kept drumming at me the importance of using—I don't know how else to say it—common language, the language of normal discourse, the language we speak to each other in. [...] All I know is that the advice he was handing out in those days was just what I needed at that time. He was a wonderful teacher. It was a great thing to have happen to me at that period of my life, to have someone who took me seriously enough to sit down and go over a manuscript with me. I knew something crucial was happening to me, something that mattered. He helped me to see how important it was to say exactly what I wanted to say and nothing else; not to use "literary" words or "pseudo-poetic" language. He taught me to use contractions in my writing. He helped show me how to say what I wanted to say and to use the minimum number of words to do so. He made me see that absolutely everything was important in a short story. It was of consequence where the commas and periods went."

"True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values."

"Technically our novelists (for instance) are shrewd enough, and publishers and reviewers seem, as never before, eager to be of use. Nevertheless, wherever we look it's the same: commercial slickness, misplaced cleverness, posturing, wild floundering -- dullness. Though not widely advertised, this is general knowledge. When one talks with editors of serious fiction, they all sound the same: they speak of their pleasure and satisfaction in their work, but more often than not the editor cannot think, under the moment's pressure, of a single contemporary writer he really enjoys reading. Some deny, even publicly, that any first-rate American novelists now exist. The ordinary reader has been saying that for years..."

"It's true that, in my books, monsters are always important. People are monsters, people are called monsters by other characters, and so on. Really, there are three kinds of things that are important in my things, I think. One is monsters, another is clowns, and another is human beings, and of course, they keep shapeshifting. One turns into the other. Clowns are always trying to be human beings. What I mean by clowns is this: Human beings do things and clowns desperately try to imitate human beings, so the acrobat gets up on the wire, and then the clown wants to be an acrobat and he tries, but he's a straw man and he can't be. He's always acting. He's always pretending. He's always faking and mimicking. Many of us feel that about ourselves all the time. That is to say, we put on masks and never find out who we really are. And one of the things that happens in a novel is characters who start out as clowns try to earn the grade as human beings, and sometimes they turn into monsters instead. Monsters are those things that I used to go to Saturday afternoon movies and see. I mean by monsters, "walking dead". I mean nihilists. People who really have given up on all faith and so on, and act as if the world were evil, and as if all people were either stupid or malicious. They're creatures who have given in to the emotional war that's in everybody. Sometimes, I use, for instance, in Henry Soames in Nickel Mountain, a monstrous kind of body which contains monstrous emotions, but he's holding it in, and the thing of course, finally, is that he really is a monster and he's holding it in and that makes him human, that constantly he does what he knows is right, whatever the power of his emotions. So, your monsters are everywhere."

"The ship struck at ten minutes after four A.M., and all hands, being mostly in their nightclothes, made haste to the forecastle, the water coming in at once. There they remained; the passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it, doing what they could. Every wave lifted the forecastle roof and washed over those within. The first man got ashore at nine; many from nine to noon. At flood-tide, about half past three o'clock, when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle, and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast, with her hands on her knees, her husband and child already drowned. A great wave came and washed her aft. The steward had just before taken her child and started for shore. Both were drowned."

"Her specter haunted all who knew her, and many who did not. Henry James, born in New York in 1843, stood beside his father on a Hudson River excursion boat and heard Washington Irving tell that Margaret Fuller had been drowned the day before. Even at the age of seven this small boy was resolved to be one on whom nothing is lost, and he knew, if nobody else did, that a heroine had gone to a heroic death."

"If our imagination is challenged to picture what Margaret Fuller would have been like had she remained in Boston, it is positively staggered at trying to conceive what would have been the career of the Marchioness Ossoli in America. The wreck of the Elizabeth deprived the cultural history of this country of what would surely have been an exciting chapter."

"Margaret had done her strenuous work under fire while her husband stood in daily peril of death and while she herself was cut off from all communication with her baby. Only after it was all over might Emerson even begin to measure the depth of the distress out of which she wrote him from Rome, “Let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.” In fact, we do not know whether the heart that beat with this healthful, even pulse ever did comprehend."

"The only woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future."

"After having admired the women of Rome, say to yourself, ‘I too am beautiful!’ … In you I met a real person. I need not give you any other praise."

""I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission — as Carlyle would have us — "Gad! we'd better!" — or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place."

"Only her presence can give you the meaning of the name Margaret Fuller."

"Just before the forecastle sunk, the remaining sailors determined to leave. The steward, with whom the child had always been a great favorite, took it, almost by main force, and plunged with it into the sea; neither reached the shore alive. The Marquis Ossoli was soon afterwards washed away, but his wife remained in ignorance of his fate. The cook, who was the last person that reached the shore alive, said that the last words he heard her speak were: "I see nothing but death before me, — I shall never reach the shore." It was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon, and after lingering for about ten hours, exposed to the mountainous surf that swept over the vessel, with the contemplation of death constantly forced upon her mind, she was finally overwhelmed as the foremast fell."

"Because if the anarchist-feminists' rejection of a belief in inherent differences between the sexes automatically barred their use of feminist arguments that relied on the reinterpretation of conventional feminine stereotypes in the interests of equality, they were forced to revert to a simpler polemical position. Deriving their analytic framework from the work of an earlier generation of feminists, particularly such singular rebels as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Grimké, the anarchist women insisted that the humanity of women was all the justification their cause required. For them the issue was uncomplicated: "Woman's emancipation means freedom, liberty. ...pure and simple." And when the Individualist Marie Louise announced that what women needed was "Liberty to act Liberty to live, Liberty to feel that our own acquired emancipation and happiness are not soiled by the aid of jealous proxies," her words were strikingly similar to the appeals to a common humanity voiced earlier by the Grimké sisters and Margaret Fuller."

"It is more than fifty years since Margaret Fuller, standing, as she said, “in the sunny noon of life,” wrote a little book, which she launched on the current of thought and society. It was entitled “Women in the Nineteenth Century”; and as the truths it proclaimed and the reforms it advocated were far in advance of public acceptance, its appearance was the signal for an immediate widespread newspaper controversy, that raged with great violence. I was young then, and as I took the book from the hands of the bookseller, wondering what the contents of the thin little volume could be, to provoke so wordy a strife, I opened the first page. My attention was immediately arrested, and a train of thought started"

"Feminist literary critics have shown how in the 19th century women writers began to acknowledge women as their muses and their role models. Margaret Fuller and Sarah Orne Jewett acknowledged their indebtedness to Madame de Staël, the author of Corinne...The list could be indefinitely extended to show the almost desperate search of writing women for authoritative female predecessors."

"She chose the Sistrum for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns to her periodically, annually, and punctual to its night. One dream she marks in her journal as repeated for the fourth time: "In C., I at last distinctly recognized the figure of the early vision, whom I found after I had left A., who led me, on the bridge, towards the city, glittering in sunset, but, midway, the bridge went under water. I have often seen in her face that it was she, but refused to believe it.""

"Coincidences, good and bad, contretemps, seals, ciphers, mottoes, omens, anniversaries, names, dreams, are all of a certain importance to her. Her letters are often dated on some marked anniversary of her own, or of her correspondent's calendar. She signalized saints' days, "All-Souls," and "All-Saints," by poems, which had for her a mystical value."

"She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. They were so much to each other that Margaret seemed to represent them all, and to know her was to acquire a place with them. The confidences given her were their best, and she held them to them. She was an active, inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought, the nobleness in New England seemed at that moment related to her and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest."

"I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me..."

"Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century. … Though today almost forgotten, Margaret Fuller still probably holds more firsts than any other American woman who ever lived. As editor of the transcendentalist Dial, she was the first woman editor of an important intellectual magazine. She was the first woman to write a book about the West and such experiences as sleeping in a barroom, shooting rapids in an Indian canoe, and witnessing maltreatment of the red man by the white man. She was the first woman to break the taboo against the female sex in the Harvard College Library. As columnist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, she was the first U.S. woman journalist and and the first professional literary critic of cither sex in the United States."

"In American literature she will remain a remarkable biographic phenomenon, while the tragic death of this Lycidas of women, a most painful personal story of shipwreck, was intensified by so many melancholy incidents that whoever, long years hence, may read them, will wonder how the gods could have been so pitiless, and why the life of new happiness and larger intellectual achievement which was before her should so suddenly have ended upon that savage and inhospitable shore."

"She possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time."

"When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it."

"When your dreams tire, they go underground and out of kindness that's where they stay."

"Be what you would seem to be."

"To feel that there is so quick a bound to intercourse, makes us prize the moment, but then also makes it so difficult to use. Yet this one thing I wish to say, where so many must be left unsaid. You tell me, that I may, probably never know you wholly. Indeed the obstacles of time and space may prevent my understanding the workings of character; many pages of my new book may be shut against me, better than to yourself. Perhaps? I believe in Ahnungen beyond anything."

"We will worship by impromptu symbols, till the religion is framed for all Humanity. The beauty grows around us daily, the trees are now all in blossom and some of the vines; there is a Crown Imperial just in perfection, to which I paid my evening worship by the light of the fire, which reached to us, and there are flashes of lightning too. But I do not like the lightning so well as once, having been in too great danger. Yet just now a noble flash falls upon my paper, it ought to have noble thoughts to illumine, instead of these little nothings, but indeed to-night I write only to say: thou dear, dear friend, and we must must meet soon."

"Chance cannot touch me! Time cannot hush me! Fear, Hope, and Longing, at strife, Sink as I rise, on, on, upward forever, Gathering strength, gaining breath, — naught can sever Me from the Spirit of Life!"

"Come, let us mount on the wings of the morning, Flying for joy of the flight, Wild with all longing, now soaring, now staying, Mingling like day and dawn, swinging and swaying, Hung like a cloud in the light: I am immortal! I feel it! I feel it! Love bears me up, love is might!"

"It was thy kiss, Love, that made me immortal."