Essayists From The United States

"It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?"

"They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more."

"How can I live in this country Where the foot knocks against The unburied bones of kin? I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot Write anything; five hands Seize my pen and order me to write The story of their lives and deaths. Was I born to become a ritual mourner? I want to sing of festivities, The greenwood into which Shakespeare Often took me. Leave To poets a moment of happiness, Otherwise your world will perish."

"From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved?My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more."

"I will neither resurrect the past nor return. Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers. I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes. Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals, its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl nest on the dead ogive."

"Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, Without knowing it, from various ills — A bird and a tree say to him: Friend."

"Those dying here, the lonely Forgotten by the world, Our tongue becomes for them The language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend And many years have passed, On a great Campo di Fiori Rage will kindle at a poet's word."

"Someone will read as moral That the people of Rome or Warsaw Haggle, laugh, make love As they pass by martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read Of the passing of things human, Of the oblivion Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only Of the loneliness of the dying, Of how, when Giordano Climbed to his burning There were no words In any human tongue To be left for mankind, Mankind who live on."

"— How is it, Chloe, that your pretty skirt Is torn so badly by the winds that hurt Real people, you who, in eternity, sing The hours, sun in your hair appearing And disappearing? How is that your breasts Are pierced by shrapnel, and the oak groves burn, While you, charmed, caring not at all, turn To run through forests of machinery and concrete And haunt us with the echoes of your feet?"

"Only when two times, two forms are drawn Together and their legibility Disturbed, do you see that immortality Is not very different from the present And is for its sake. You pick a fragment Of grenade which pierced the body of a song On Daphnis and Chloe."

"I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace."

"All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine And to know such pretending is disgraceful. But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed And started to prophesy. No one would hear me. Their screens and microphones are not for that."

"My time coming, any day, don't worry about me, no Been so long I felt this way, I'm in no hurry, no. Rainbows end down that highway where ocean breezes blow My time coming, voices saying, they tell me where to go. Don't worry 'bout me, no no, don't worry 'bout me, no And I'm in no hurry, no no no, I know where to go. California, preaching on the burning shore California, I'll be knocking on the golden door Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light Rising up to paradise, I know I'm going to shine."

"Copyright and intellectual property are the most important issues now. If you don't have something that assures fair use, then you don't have a free society. If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass."

"Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."

"You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here."

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."

"Among the waves of tragedy which have crashed on me with her death is a terror that our message of hope has been changed into a dreadful warning. But I must tell you that had I known in the beginning that I would be here today doing this terrible thing, I would still have loved her as unhesitatingly, because true love is worth any price one is asked to pay. The other message we wished to convey was one of faith in the essential goodness and purpose of life. I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know."

"With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it. We felt it was our gift to the world. We wanted to show the hesitant the miracle that comes when two people give their hearts unconditionally, honestly, fearlessly, and without reservation or judgement. We wanted to make our union into a message of hope, and I believe we did, even though we knew that hearts opened so freely can be shattered if something should go wrong. As my heart is shattered now."

"I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood. I also believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings. I'm convinced that such an angel dwelled in Cynthia. I felt this presence often in Cynthia's lightness of being, in her decency, her tolerance, her incredible love. I never heard Cynthia speak ill of anyone nor did I ever hear anyone speak ill of her. She gave joy and solace to all who met her."

"It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing."

"I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace."

"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs..."

"Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age."

"This life is fleeting, as we all know — the Muse we serve is not. John had a way of taking life’s most difficult things and framing them as challenges, therefore adventures. He was to be admired for that, even emulated. He’ll live on in the songs we wrote..."

"“Estimated Prophet,” words by John Barlow, music by Bob Weir, has always worked a special kind of magic. Barlow captures that whole slightly (or very) deranged or tripped-out Deadhead vibe so well, but the song’s character transcends that little box over time — both over the time the particular rendition might take, and over the time from when we may have first heard it played or performed to the most recent rendition we have heard. That character stands there in my mind’s eye, calling down the thunder, and he seems so sure, so devoted to his vision, that he stands for everyone who was ever caught up in a transforming belief, who gave in to delusions of grandeur, who believed himself the center of the universe — but wait — haven’t we all done that, at least to some degree? It’s human nature to consider oneself the center of the universe. … Barlow calls on plenty of biblical imagery for the lyrics, with the sea parting before the singer, and fire wheels burning in the air, etc. Pretty much your average run-of-the-mill vision for an experienced Deadhead. The interesting thing, for me, is the notion that this character is a prophet. And therein lies a more subtle biblical reference, not at all overt, but hovering in the back of our minds, perhaps, if we have any biblical training. Namely, the notion, expressed by Jesus in three of the four gospels, and therefore likely to be something he really did say, that a prophet has no honor in his own country. … This is one of those songs, and there are quite a number of them in the Dead’s repertoire, in which a not-entirely-sympathetic character is brought to life, and, in the course of being brought to life, is made more sympathetic."

"It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance. Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity's problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: "I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls 'turn-key totalitarianism'.”"

"The world lost a true hero today, a Renaissance man who was a relentless warrior for our freedom."

"Polyamory — that's where you're freely confessed that you have more than one lover at a time. And actually I'm less that way than I used to be, but I was trying to make people understand, that at least for some folks, this was a fairly natural state. And instead of skulking around about it that we'd all do better to avoid the deceit and be honest."

"I wasn't tempted to vote for Bush, but I understand why people did… because he obviously had integrity. It was a terrible kind of integrity, but he does what he says and he means what he says. And what he says is terrible and what he does is terrible, but he's consistent. So I think a lot of people in Wyoming who care so much about integrity that they're willing to choose somebody that has a monstrous willingness to do any damn thing as long as he's up front about it — but that's not really quite enough for me. I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. I'm an Alan Simpson Republican."

"I was always raised to think that Republicans were about limited government, about individual liberty, about fiscal responsibility, about balanced budgets, about a wariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement to business. There's a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are categorically against every single one of those things. So if they're Republicans, I'm not. But I'm really not a very comfortable Democrat. I mean the Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to be a bunch of dithering pussies... and it was pathetic. So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone."

"I'm a free-marketeer. I believe in free markets, but... sometimes you have things that look like free markets but aren't because of artificial reasons. I'm not very happy with the current state of what calls itself free market economy in the world because you've got all these grotesque monopolies that are able to game the system in a way that's to their advantage by virtue of their power, and that's not a free market. A real free market has some kind of countervailing influence from the government to keep a monopoly in check, but this government... it's not about free marketing principles, it's about greed pure and simple. And this government wants to assure that the other people that they went to college with get just as rich as they do. This country is going to make Mexico look like Sweden inside of ten years in terms of wealth distribution, because there are no countervailing forces. They've eliminated tax basically for the ultra-rich, they've eliminated any control over monopolies, the greedy have free reign and its just going to be the super rich and the peasants."

"It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government."

"You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment — the Internet — with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief. The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob."

"... you don't have to be larger than life to come to the aid of somebody in trouble. All you need to be able to be compassionate, put your own troubles on hold while someone else's are taking the forefront, and, maybe the toughest part, you have to be wholly nonjudgemental."

"There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools."

"What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine."

"We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?"

"When art separates this thick tangle of feelings, love bares its bones."

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."

"So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death."

"Not everything we feel is felt powerfully enough to send a message to the brain; the rest of the sensations just wash over us, telling us nothing. Much is lost in translation, or is censored, and in any case our nerves don’t all fire at once. Some of them remain silent while others respond. This makes our version of the world somewhat simplistic, given how complex the world is. The body’s quest isn’t for truth, it’s for survival."

"In the Bible, God instructs Moses to burn incense sweet and to His liking. Does God have nostrils? How can a god prefer one smell of this earth to another? The rudiments of decay complete a cycle necessary for growth and deliverance. Carrion smells offensive to us, but delicious to those animals who rely on it for food. What they excrete will make the soil rich and the crops abundant. There is no need for divine election. Perception is itself a form of grace."

"Out-of-body experiences aim to shed the senses, but they cannot. One may see from a new perspective, but it’s still an experience of vision."

"My muse is male, has the silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly."

"Most of all, the twentieth century will be remembered as the time when we first began to understand what our address was. The “big, beautiful, blue, wet ball” of recent years is one way to say it. But a more profound way will speak of the orders of magnitude of that bigness, the shades of that blueness, the arbitrary delicacy of beauty itself, the ways in which water has made life possible, and the fragile euphoria of the complex ecosystem that is Earth, an Earth on which, from space, there are no visible fences, or military zones, or national borders."

"For large minds, the Earth is a small place. Not small enough to exhaust in one lifetime, but a compact home, cozy, buoyant, a place to cherish, the spectral center of our life. But how could we stay at home forever?"

"We may pretend that beauty is only skin deep, but Aristotle was right when he observed that "beauty is a far greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.” The sad truth is that attractive people do better in school, where they receive more help, better grades, and less punishment; at work, where they are rewarded with higher pay, more prestigious jobs, and faster promotions; in finding mates, where they tend to be in control of the relationships and make most of the decisions; and among total strangers, who assume them to be interesting, honest, virtuous, and successful. After all, in fairy tales, the first stories most of us hear, the heroes are handsome, the heroines are beautiful, and the wicked sots are ugly. Children learn implicitly that good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly, and society restates that message in many subtle ways as they grow older. So perhaps it’s not surprising that handsome cadets at West Point achieve a higher rank by the time they graduate, or that a judge is more likely to give an attractive criminal a shorter sentence."

"That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on."