Academics From The United States

"Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go."

"Dante attained the purgatorial hill, Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw, Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, — Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw? All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure."

"I take this cadence from a man named Yeats: I take it and I give it back again: For other tunes and other wanton beats Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain. Yes, I was dancing mad, and how That came to be the bears and Yeats would know."

"Beginnings start without shade, Thinner than minnows. The live grass whirls with the sun, Feet run over the simple stones, There's time enough. Behold, in the lout's eye, love."

"Bless me and the maze I'm in! Hello, thingy spirit."

"I'll seek my own meekness. What grace I have is enough. The lost have their own pace. The stalks ask something else. What the grave says, The nest denies."

"To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface, When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island; To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward; To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing."

"Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse: Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms. Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called; The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows; And love, love sang toward."

"The wasp waits. The edge cannot eat the center. The grape listens. The path tells little to the serpent. An eye comes out of the wave. The journey from flesh is longest. A rose sways least. The redeemer comes a dark way."

"Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear. Renew the light, lewd whisper."

"I saw the separateness of all things! My heart lifted up with the great grasses; The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds."

"A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait."

"The mind moved, not alone, Through the clear air, in the silence."

"Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going, I have married my hands to perpetual agitation, I run, I run to the whistle of money."

"Who stunned the dirt into noise? Ask the mole, he knows. I feel the slime of a wet nest. Beware Mother Mildew. Nibble again, fish nerves."

"Voice, come out of the silence. Say something. Appear in the form of a spider Or a moth beating the curtain. Tell me: Which is the way I take; Out of what door` do I go, Where and to whom? Dark hollows said, lee to the wind, The moon said, back of an eel, The salt said, look by the sea, Your tears are not enough praise, You will find no comfort here, In the kingdom of bang and blab."

"I shook the softening chalk of my bones, Saying, Snail, snail, glister me forward, Bird, soft-sigh me home, Worm, be with me. This is my hard time."

"At Woodlawn I Heard the dead cry: I was lulled by the slamming of iron, A slow drip over stones, Toads brooding wells."

"I study the lives on a leaf: the little Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions."

"Over the gulfs of dream Flew a tremendous bird Further and further away Into a moonless black, Deep in the brain, far back."

"The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy."

"Like witches they flew along rows, Keeping creation at ease; With a tendril for needle They sewed up the air with a stem; They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, — All the coils, loops and whorls. They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves."

"I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland; Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance, By pulling off flesh from the living planet; As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration."

"Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."

"Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch"

"This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?"

"He loops in crazy figures half the night Among the trees that face the corner light. But when he brushes up against a screen, We are afraid of what our eyes have seen: For something is amiss or out of place When mice with wings can wear a human face."

"And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene, The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled, Will turn its private substance into green, And young shoots spread upon our inner world."

"The light comes brighter from the east; the caw Of restive crows is sharper on the ear."

"My truths are all foreknown, This anguish self-revealed. I’m naked to the bone, With nakedness my shield."

"My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely swung. An epic of the eyes My love, with no disguise."

"At every turn "world opinion," like a schoolmarm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the world's moral sensibility. And this voice has achieved an international political legitimacy so that even the silliest condemnation of Israel is an opportunity for self-congratulation.Rock bands now find moral imprimatur in canceling their summer tour stops in Israel (Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Gorillaz, the Klaxons). A demonstrator at an anti-Israel rally in New York carries a sign depicting the skull and crossbones drawn over the word "Israel." White House correspondent Helen Thomas, in one of the ugliest incarnations of this voice, calls on Jews to move back to Poland. And of course the United Nations and other international organizations smugly pass one condemnatory resolution after another against Israel while the Obama administration either joins in or demurs with a wink."

"There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today's black identity. This identity wants to take over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective truth—its defining ideas of grievance and protest—become personal truth.... These are the identity pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to 'be black.' And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness."

"The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks."

"Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.“Why this new minimalism in war?It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority."

"[T]hough fear always seeks a thousand justifications, none is ever good enough, and the problems we run from only remain to haunt us."

"[W]hy are there no Martin Luther Kings around today? I think one reason is that there are no black leaders willing to resist the seductions of racial power, or to make the sacrifices moral power requires. King understood that racial power subverts moral power, and he pushed the principles of fairness and equality rather than black power because he believed those principles would bring blacks their most complete liberation. He sacrificed race for morality, and his innocence was made genuine by that sacrifice. What made King the most powerful and extraordinary black leader of this century was not his race but his morality."

"In the end, black power can claim no higher moral standing than white power. [...] No power can long insist on itself without evoking an opposing power."

"The Achilles’ heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like “systemic racism” and “structural inequality.” But what happens when the evils that menace us begin to fade, and then keep fading?"

"For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle."

"All-out opposition to diversity mounted when Allan Bloom fired a major salvo with his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. That same year, the National Association of Scholars in Princeton, New Jersey, was founded to defend "excellence" from extinction with the help of intellectuals like D'Souza and magazines like the Atlantic. The Anglo generals in the war soon had a few lieutenants of color, like African-American professor Shelby Steele of California State University in San Jose (and later Ward Connerly, also of California). Steele attacked affirmative action, saying it represented over-reliance by minorities and women on "the power of being victims." In its place we should follow the Horatio Alger formula for attaining success through individual responsibility and hard work. Not long after came a few Chicano academics who also advised Raza students to forget affirmative action; just stop whining, study hard and help your mom sell more tamales, you too could be Hispanics."

"[T]he left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply not enough menace to service its demands for power. The voices that speak for the left have never been less convincing. It is hard for people to see the menace that drives millionaire football players to kneel before the flag. And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on. For the American left today, the indulgence in hate is a death rattle."

"[T]he left gets power from fighting white evil, not black despair. Today’s left lacks worthy menaces to fight. It is driven to find a replacement for racism, some sweeping historical wrongdoing that morally empowers those who oppose it. (Climate change?) Failing this, only hatred is left. Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice."

"[T]he left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left’s unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today—the source of its angst and hatefulness—is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace."

"Since so little is known about the early Macedonians, it is hardly strange that in both ancient and modern times there has been much disagreement on their ethnic identity. The Greeks in general and Demosthenes in particular looked upon them as barbarians, that is, not Greek. Modern scholarship, after many generations of argument, now almost unanimously recognises them as Greeks, a branch of the Dorians and ‘NorthWest Greeks’ who, after long residence in the north Pindus region, migrated eastwards. The Macedonian language has not survived in any written text, but the names of individuals, places, gods, months, and the like suggest strongly that the language was a Greek dialect. Macedonian institutions, both secular and religious, had marked Hellenic characteristics and legends identify or link the people with the Dorians. During their sojourn in the Pindus complex and the long struggle to found a kingdom, however, the Macedonians fought and mingled constantly with Illyrians, Thracians, Paeonians, and probably various Greek tribes. Their language naturally acquired many Illyrian and Thracian loanwords, and some of their customs were surely influenced by their neighbours[...] To the civilised Greek of the fifth and fourth centuries, the Macedonian way of life must have seemed crude and primitive. This backwardness in culture was mainly the result of geographical factors. The Greeks, who had proceeded south in the second millennium, were affected by the many civilising influences of the Mediterranean world, and ultimately they developed that very civilising institution, the polis. The Macedonians, on the other hand, remained in the north and living for centuries in mountainous areas, fighting with Illyrians, Thracians, and amongst themselves as tribe fought tribe, developed a society that may be termed Homeric. The amenities of city-state life were unknown until they began to take root in Lower Macedonia from the end of the fifth century onwards."

"The first Greek-speaking people in the southern Balkan Peninsula arrived in Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus sometime after 2600 B.C. and developed, probably due to the extreme mountainous nature of the country, their several different dialects."

"Our understanding of the Macedonians' emergence into history is confounded by two events: the establishment of the Macedonians as an identifiable ethnic group, and the foundation of their ruling house. The "highlanders" or "Makedones" of the mountainous regions of western Macedonia are derived from northwest Greek stock; they were akin both to those who at an earlier time may have migrated south to become the historical "Dorians", and to other Pindus tribes who were the ancestors of the Epirotes or Molossians. That is, we may suggest that northwest Greece provided a pool of Indo-European speakers of Proto-Greek from which were drawn the tribes who later were known by different names as they established their regional identities in separate parts of the country... First, the matter of the Hellenic origins of the Macedonians: Nicholas Hammond's general conclusion (though not the details of his arguments) that the origin of the Macedonians lies in the pool of proto-Greek speakers who migrated out of the Pindus mountains during the Iron Age, is acceptable."

"The Macedonians are a newly emergent people in search of a past to help legitimize their precarious present as they attempt to establish their singular identity in a Slavic world dominated historically by Serbs and Bulgarians. One need understand only a single geopolitical fact: As one measures conflicting Serb and Bulgarian claims over the past nine centuries, they intersect in Macedonia. Macedonia is where the historical Serb thrust to the south and the historical thrust to the west meet. This is not to say that present Serb and Bulgarian ambitions, where the past has precedence over the present and future."

"It is difficult to know whether an independent Macedonian state would have come into existence had Tito not recognised and supported the development of Macedonian ethnicity as oart of his ethnically organised Yugoslavia. He did this as a counter to Bulgaria, which for centuries had a historical claim on the area as far west as Lake Ohrid and the present border of Albania."