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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.

Sunbeams

He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes.

Randolph Bourne

Sunbeams

Whatever authority I may have rests solely on knowing how little I know.

Socrates

The End Of The Modern World?

Looking Over The Edge Of History With William Irwin Thompson

A new world order is going to require a new way of thinking. Just as our American revolution was preceded by a philosophical revolution, and the heritage of the Enlightenment, in the same way you can look out in the world now, you begin to see the ideological origins of the new world order revolution. We’re still in the stage where it’s for the most part myth, art, religion and philosophy, and we haven’t yet moved into the stage of politics, economics, organization, implementation. Everything, it’s been said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

An Interview With William Irwin Thompson

My feeling is that we’re headed into a discontinuous transition. But anybody living inside one has to try to work for a continuous transition. You go ahead, knowing better, even though the enormous probability is that it will be highly catastrophic.