vintage sails

g'bye!

mud kids

pitch fork '08

quiet

strong opinions

On apology:

     "In the present 'culture,' few care to distinguish - indeed, few are capable of distinguishing - between sincerity and the performance of sincerity, just as few distinguish between religious faith and religious observance. To the dubious question, Is this true faith? or, Is this true sincerity? one receives only a blank look. Truth? What is that? Sincerity? Of course I'm sincere - didn't I say so?"

On political life:

     "...But surely God did not make the market - God or the Spirit of History. And if we human beings made it, can we not unmake it and remake it in a kindlier form? Why does the world have to be a kill-or-be-killed gladiatorial amphitheatre rather than, say, a busily collaborative beehive or anthill?

     In favor of the arts it can at least be said that, while every artist strives for the best, attempts to cast the sphere of the arts as a competitive jungle have had little success...artists know that the competition is not the real thing, is only a publicity sideshow. The eyes of the artist are, finally, not on the competition but on the true, the good, and the beautiful."

On the body:

     "We speak of the dog with the sore foot or the bird with the broken wing. But the dog does not think of itself in those terms, or the bird. To the dog, when it tries to walk, there is simply I am in pain, to the bird, when it launches itself into flight, simply I cannot.

     With us it seems to be different. The fact that such common locutions as 'my leg,' 'my eye,' 'my brain,' and even, 'my body' exist suggests that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in the relation of possessor to possessed to the body's 'parts' and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience."

[J.M.C.]

up up up

climbing