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| The Afghan campaign reflects a global struggle but also reveals a crisis inside America -- the attempt to construct on these shores a society willing to sacrifice democracy and individual autonomy for the promise of material security, the exchange of principles for goods and services. A society willing to trade the tumultuous uncertainty generated by a government dedicated to serving the interests of many different, unequal kinds of citizens for the certainty of a government responsive to a privileged few and their self-serving, single-minded, ubiquitous, thus invisible, ideology: profit. Such a government of the few is fabricating new versions of freedom. Freedom to exploit race, class, and gender inequities without guilt or accountability; freed to drown in ignorance while flooded by information; freedom to be plundered by corporations. Freedom to drug ourselves and subject our children's minds to the addictive mix of fantasy and propaganda, the nonstop ads that pass for a culture.
--Whose War, John Edgar Wideman
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| Which is better, cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? [...] For we are all divorced from life. We are all cripples - every one of us more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life and so can not bare to be reminded of it. Why, we have almost come to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? And we don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come. Try. Give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence. Untie our hands. Widen the spheres of our activity. Relax the control and we... Yes. I assure you. We should be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be angry with me for that and will begin shouting and stamping. "Speak for yourself," you will say, "and for your miseries and your underground holes and don't dare to say all of us." Excuse me, gentlemen. I am not justifying myself with that all of us. As for what concerns me in particular, I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry half way. And what's more? You have taken your cowardice for good sense and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully. Why, we don't even know what living means now - what it is and what it is called. Leave us alone without books, and we shall be lost in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men. Men with a real individual body and blood. We are ashamed of it. We think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible, generalized man. We are stillborn. And for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon, we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.
--Notes from the Underground, Dostoy
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| I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, effectively lost to us untile the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come in possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us.
It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encoounter it. --In Search of Lost Time, Proust
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| He once told me that he was offered something called an Albert Schweitzer Professorship in New York, which would have almost doubled his salary, but he saide that, even though he could have used the money, he couldn't accept it. He couldn't because he needed the bruising intellectual combat that his colleagues at the University of Chicago Department of Economics gave one another. It wasn't pleasant, but, he felt, he needed it. When one of his best students didn't land a job in one of the better-regarded universities, he told the student that it was a good thing, for it would take him outside all the worry about prestige and throw him back on his talent as an economist, which, if his devotion was such as to bring out his potential, would in the end result in his being made offers by better schools. Which, the studnet said is exactly what happened.
My cousin Sherwin's way into the snob-free zone was simple enough: care only about one's work, judge people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one's work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more or less amusing carnival at which one happens to have earned--through, of course, one's work--a good seat. Judge all things by their intrinsic quality, and consider status a waste of time. One of the reasons I liked him so much is that he brought all of this off without any contortion of his essentially kind character. -In a Snob-Free Zone, Joseph Epstein
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| "The news that she had cancer came as no surprise. It had grown in her bronchi and was inoperable. radiation was held out as a palliative --it might shrink the tumor enoug to allow air into the congested lung--but my mother was not considered a candidate for chemotherapy. She had, during the course of forty years of, as they say, hard living, progressively and inexorably deteriorated. The story of my mother's lifelong deterioration is, in some respects, the story of her life. The story of my life is bound up in this story, the story of her deterioration. It is the story that is always central to the ways in which I perceive myself and others in the world. It is the story, or at any rate it is my use of the story, that allows me never to lose my mother." -I Bought a Bed, Donald Antrim
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