Essayists From The United States

"When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me — without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever — that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock."

"There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars."

"Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die."

"Our representative government now is perhaps more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not necessarily representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem. If you like philosophical problems. Here is one for you: should each human being’s vote register alike, as the lawbooks pretend and as some say the founders of our nation desired? Or should a vote be weighted according to the wisdom, the power, and the influence—that is, the money—of the voter?"

"Most of us rather hastily and thoughtlessly regard “science” as a sort of collection of linear accelerators and space vehicles and organic chemistry models. In fact it is not any of these things; it is only a systematic method of gathering and testing knowledge, involving certain formal procedures: gathering information, forming a theory to explain the information, predicting certain consequences of the theory and performing an experiment to test the prediction. If you investigate any area of knowledge (whether it is stellar physics or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin) by this method, you are doing science. If you use any other method, you are doing something else."

"Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad."

"That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely."

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb."

"‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—’ That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down."

"Merely pointing to the fact that some people have a lot more than others is less compelling as a critique; it invites the response “So what? Those who have more aren’t hurting anybody; you’re just appealing to envy.” By contrast, being able to show that those who enjoy a higher socioeconomic status have to a considerable extent achieved and maintained that status by forcibly expropriating and oppressing the less affluent provides for a far more effective indictment."

"The violence of the state, to be justified, must be transubstantiated in its essence into peaceful incantation, yet at the same time, to be effective, it must retain the external accidents of violence."

"Kevin Carson has coined the terms “vulgar libertarianism” and “vulgar liberalism” for the tendencies, respectively, to treat the benefits of the free market as though they legitimated various dubious features of actually existing “capitalist” society (vulgar libertarianism), and to treat the drawbacks of actually existing “capitalist” society as though they constituted an objection to the free market (vulgar liberalism)."

"The widespread assumption that big business and big government are fundamentally at odds, and that big business supports a free market, serves to maintain the ruling partnership in power; indeed, ‘vulgar liberalism’ and ‘vulgar libertarianism’ (in Carson’s sense) represent the dominant ideologies of the establishment left and establishment right, respectively. The establishment left disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as government intervention on behalf of the poor, while the right disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as an opposition to government intervention per se – and each side has an interest in maintaining the myth propagated by its nominal opponent. For those who are repelled by the realities of corporate capitalism are lured into becoming opponents of the free market and foot soldiers for the left wing of the ruling class, while those who are attracted by free-market ideals are lured into becoming defenders of corporate capitalism and foot soldiers for the right wing of the ruling class. Either way, the partnership as a whole has its power reinforced."

"Statists tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result."

"Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence."

"Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day “capitalist” society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian."

"Like racism and sexism, statism is the kind of moral vice that tends to enter the soul through self-deception, semi-conscious osmosis, and a kind of Arendtian banality, rather than through a forthright embrace; it is a form of spiritual blindness that can, and does, infect even those who are largely sincere and well-meaning."

"Rothbard is surely right in thinking that what we now call free-market libertarianism was originally a left-wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing—feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business—were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals. ... I like calling the free market a left-wing idea—in fact, I like calling libertarianism the proletarian revolution."

"Socioeconomic equality and legal equality both fall short of the radicalism of Lockean equality. For neither of those forms of equality calls into question the authority of those who administer the legal system. … Both forms of equality call upon that power structure to do certain things; but in so doing, they both assume, and indeed require, an inequality in authority between those who administer the legal framework and everybody else."

"As Locke sees, equality in authority entails denying to the legal system's administrators—and thus to the legal system itself—any powers beyond those possessed by private citizens:The law of nature is in that state put into every man's hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation…. For in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police."

"And so I continue in borderline poverty, save for my one indulgence, no, my single absolute necessity: I take cabs. Yes, on occasion, when I wish to see what people with unpleasant skin conditions are wearing, I do take the subway. I have never, I am proud to say, taken the bus, because people who take the bus have given up."

"Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, It's okay, I'm from New Jersey. I love New Jersey, because it's not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in, “Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I'm from New Jersey.”"

"There was a cable-TV program that documented how Peeps are made, and it showed unlimited hordes of Peeps bouncing merrily down a conveyor belt, right toward the camera. I came."

"1. If I should remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, I would like someone to turn off the TV."

"Wednesday (as Pocahontas): You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller." Becky (as Sarah Miller): Gary, she's changing the words! Wednesday (as Pocahontas): And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."

"I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks."

"There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms."

"Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose; prose may be written as very beautiful free verse. Which is which ?"

"Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her."

"to fashion silence into words"

"What the earliest utopians—Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella—understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively—as Christ did, as Thoreau did—in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things."

"Time, for Homo economicus, is not “the stream I go a-fishing in.” It is a medium of exchange. We trade our time for money."

"The true cost of a thing, Thoreau shrewdly observes, condensing hundreds of pages of Marxist analysis to an epigram, is "the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.”"

"Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual."

"What Marx and Thoreau shared with Christ was a sense that "the letter killeth." What killed was not the letter as Mosaic Law but as secular "legality." Legality had so saturated the human world that it stood before it as a kind of second nature."

"In the fraudulent Manichaeanism of Reason and Revelation, each the light to the other's dark, each more like the other than it knows, the Imagination seeks to be a decisive rupture."

"Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it."

"The ethereal is gained by simply doing one thing, consciously. "I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it," said Thoreau. What is divine is simply being attentive to what you are doing in the moment you are doing it, assuming that that thing is not merely stupid (i.e., anything you have to do to receive money)."

"Thoreau's famous retreat to Walden Pond is thus in a continuum with his sense of the duty of disobedience. He argued that "under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." Less self-destructively; we might say that Thoreau concluded that you might find a just man outside, at Walden Pond, in a self-created exile that is also the expression of a desire for the next world. He understood this exile as the need to create a society—even if a society of one on the banks of a tiny Massachusetts pond—that he could willingly join."

"Do Christian Republicans not understand the fundamental ways in which an unfettered corporate capitalism betrays Christ’s ethical vision and their own economic well-being?"

"Evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to “duty” that masks unspeakable violence and injustice."

"The Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. … For all the inevitability that surrounds the Christian/Enlightenment divide, it should not be so difficult for us to find a third option in our intellectual traditions, even if this tradition seems mostly defeated and lost. It is a tradition that is spiritual and yet hostile to the orthodoxies of institutional Christianity. It is the creation of the Enlightenment and yet it is suspicious of the claims of Reason, especially that form of Reason, economic rationalism, that defines capitalism. This tradition began in Europe with Romanticism and in America with the Concord Transcendentalists."

"Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal “rights” that constitute that order, especially the just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust."

"Christianity, for Blake, bled from Jesus his real substance as prophet/poet. Reason, or Ratio, on the other side, born with the scientific revolution, divided the world from the self, the human from the natural, the inside from the outside, and the outside itself into ever finer degrees of manipulable parts."

"The Imagination has always called for a return to the truest fundamentalism contained in the question "What does it mean to be a human being?" Needless to say, this is a question that deserves the deepest and most patient development. It will have to suffice for the present to say that our reigning social reality forbids—structurally, politically, violently—the broad posing of this question."

"As Simone Weil—perhaps the strangest and most unlikely Thoreauvian solitary, outcast, and transcendentalist of all—wrote, echoing Thoreau's sense of awareness: "The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty, and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object." Or, more tersely yet: "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." It is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless thing we can say about our culture that it is a culture of distraction. "Attention deficit" is a cultural disorder, a debasement of spirit, before it is an ailment in our children to be treated with Ritalin."

"Although the '60s counterculture has been much maligned and discredited, it attempted to provide what we still desperately need: a spirited culture of refusal, a counter-life to the reigning corporate culture of death. We don't need to return to that counterculture, but we do need to take up its challenge again. If the work we do produces mostly bad, ugly, and destructive things, those things in turn will tend to re-create us in their image. We need to turn to good, useful, and beautiful work. We need to ask, as Thoreau and Ruskin did, What are the life-giving things? Such important questions are answered for us in the present by the corporate state, while we are left with the most trivial decisions: what programs to watch on TV and what model car to buy."

"Leslie Marmon Silko's writing takes us into old worlds of consciousness inside the present, and inside ourselves."

"From Leslie Silko we hear, perhaps for the first time, the voice of contemporary Indian America rising above dull anthropological reports"

"At her best, Leslie Silko is very good indeed. She has a sharp sense of the way in which the profound and the mundane often run together in our daily lives. And her sense of humor is acute…We must take such words as "storyteller" very seriously. And we must make distinctions. A camera is not a storyteller. Neither is a novelist or a poet, necessarily. In view of the title of this book, let us make a distinction here. Leslie Silko is a writer, one of high and recorded accomplishment. If she is not yet a storyteller, she promises to become one."