Browse Topics

The Legacy Of The Wild

An Interview With Gary Snyder

Another way of seeing the world would be to say our monuments would be our wild areas. Leaving behind wilderness for the future would be the monument of our civilization.

Curlews

We are immortal until the hour death first seizes our imagination. This goes for species as well as individuals. To die you must once consider death and think of it as beautiful. All spiritual advances are advances in aesthetics.

Sabbaths

On The Poverty Of Affluence

An Interview With Paul Wachtel

When I look back on the Sixties, I realize it would have been absolutely and utterly inconceivable to me then that the world would be the way it is: that Ronald Reagan would be President, that our society would be so increasingly acquisitive, that the growth of the underclass would have proceeded the way it has. I really thought twenty years ago that today we would look back on the kind of race relations we had in the Sixties as a remnant of some dark age — like slavery and the era of Jim Crow — and that full integration and equality would have been achieved. Obviously, I was extremely wrong, which can be grounds for pessimism. But I do think that something radical and powerful and extraordinary happened in the Sixties. We just didn’t know how to consolidate it, to keep it going.

Questions Of Lifestyle

Voluntary simplicity has gained popularity since the late Sixties. Of course the idea is at least as old as the first religions, but nowadays voluntary simplicity is not practiced for overtly religious reasons. A cynic might say that a sense of reparation for damages done is driving some to practice a new spirit of self-denial. It touches most strongly, after all, the descendants of the adventurous, progressive pioneers from Western Europe who invaded this country a few centuries ago. In any case, exploitation is a touchstone by which many of us gauge our use of toilet paper, gasoline, rubber, washing machines, nylon, coffee, newspaper and on and on.

Hard Labor

Thoreau And The Meaning Of Work

More than any other commonplace notion, Thoreau attacked (largely through satire) his fellows’ commonplace notions about work. “Economy” is the first and largest chapter of Walden, and Thoreau gives the subject such primary consideration because he saw work consuming people’s lives before they had much of a chance to live, before they had enough time to reflect on the relationship of work to life for themselves. To Thoreau, the problem of finding one’s right work and integrating it into other proper demands on one’s life was a challenge that needed to be tackled early and with great energy if young adults weren’t going to step blindly into traps that were indeed much easier to step into than to get out of.

Old Friends

Two World Wars and the Great Depression, the old Firesign Theater “Everything You Know Is Wrong,” a wet comb

Sunbeams

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Herman Melville

What I’d Most Like To Change

The constant nagging desire to change things; my fear of death; my inner victim into a happier, healthier being

The Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter

I think we should have international coming out day where we gather our assorted courage and tell a few friends or the world The Awful Thing and find out — they already knew and didn’t care, they didn’t know and can’t see what the problem is, they’re shocked but get over it and are bigger in a while . . . or, or, or it’s awful to them too and we lose a friend.