Essayists From The United States

"We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know."

"Reductionism (ultimately, the empirical explanability of everything and a cornerstone of science), has uses that are appropriate, and it also can be used inappropriately. It is appropriately used as a way (one way) of understanding what is empirically known or empirically knowable. When it becomes merely an intellectual "position" confronting what is not empirically known or knowable, then it becomes very quickly absurd, and also grossly desensitizing and false."

"Never forget: We are alive within mysteries."

"I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love."

"By this time, the era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any "political liberties" that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject."

"Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free — and should be encouraged — to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions."

"The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes any sense for a country — or, for that matter, a region — to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people, conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people’s ability to feed itself? And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?"

"It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that."

"The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful."

"Eating is an agricultural act."

"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."

"The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it."

"Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world."

"Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained."

"The secret of life is more life."

"Any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes."

"You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn."

"The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost. "The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being." "Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow." "About some things there is no other way to speak.""

"In an infinite universe, every point in space-time is the center."

"The elite of the universal religions have always substituted belief in the Infinite for the experience of it. We all need God — but only in small and measured doses. Who can look upon the burning bush and not be destroyed in its flames? Who can bear the heaven and hell of each moment blazing in time? Who can shine like a star? And so, for all but a few of the manswarm, the rare ones who are truly human, it is better to glimpse such a miracle through a dark glass or to grasp it through words only."

"The belly is the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god."

"Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which the universe is made."

"That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die."

"For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man."

"This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself."

"Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart’s deep love."

"For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face."

"All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war."

"But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever..."

"Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?"

"In time, the heart of each religion grows hard and dies. And so seekers of the godly will always turn to new prophets and new ways, never realizing that, ultimately, all religions separate man from God."

"Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words."

"A man lusts to become a god ... and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?"

"The true human being ... is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities."

"What is a human being, then?" ... "A seed." "A … seed?" "An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."

"All living things are afraid to die." "No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die."

"The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods."

"Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out? (p88)"

"Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise."

"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."

"I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life."

"For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down."

"To be what you want to be: isn't this the essence of being human?"

"What's beautiful is that a creator can be astonished by his own creations."

"Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety."

""Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible."

"The white race is the cancer of human history? Who was this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium, encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review. Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan's line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but otherwise she was just a typical American intellectual of the post-World War II period."

"The theme that runs through Susan's writing is this lifelong struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the aesthetic … There was something unusually vivid about her writing. That's why even if one disagrees with it — as I did frequently — it was unusually stimulating. She showed you things you hadn't seen before; she had a way of reopening questions."

"(You lived in New York for over a decade. What are some of your fondest memories of that time?) LV: Incredibly enlightening friendships: Susan Sontag, Jerome Bruner"

"I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because I met the great [mathematician] Benoit Mandelbrot on the same day. It took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist event of September, in a radio station in New York. Sontag, who was being interviewed, was piqued by the idea of a fellow who "studies randomness" and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a [stock market] trader, she blurted out that she was "against the market system" and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me (note here that courtesy is an application of the Silver Rule), while her assistant gave me a look as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote with pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff.No, she did not grow her own vegetables, it turned out. Two years later, I accidentally found her obituary (I waited a decade and a half before writing about the incident to avoid speaking ill of the departed). People in publishing were complaining about her rapacity; she had squeezed her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for what would be several million dollars today for a novel. She shared, with a girlfriend, a mansion in New York City, later sold for $28 million. Sontag probably felt that insulting people with money inducted her into some unimpeachable sainthood, exempting her from having skin in the game."