“There’s something strange about a place where men won’t let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. And he thinks he’ll just wait a while to see what the story is in this new […]
“It’s gonna burn me just that way, finally telling about all this, about the hospital, and her, and the guys––and about McMurphy. I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible […]
“This, however, is the story of science. A man discovers something. He doesn’t know what it is or what it’s for or what it might solve, but he knows he has unearthed another piece of a puzzle whose entire shape and picture and form he can only guess. He spends the rest of his life […]
“Fairly or not, I found myself disappointed with Tallent. As I have said, I did not and do not consider anthropologists the most creative and disarming of thinkers––though they do take superlative and meticulous notes––but I had come to admire what I had grown to see as his single-mindedness. But he was also to be […]
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great records of 19th-century American consciousness. Ruminating on the concept of whiteness, Melville writes: Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it […]
“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the […]
“Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears. And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuition […]
“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a […]
“I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail […]
Of the many paradoxes that bedevil human nature, one of the most intriguing is our tendency to seek out freedom while simultaneously longing for submission. American philosopher Josiah Royce understood this well: We profoundly want both to rule and to be ruled. We must be each of us at the centre of his own active […]