Words&Dirt

“I still hear the sounds of the falls on the Columbia, always will––always––hear the whoop of Charley Bear Belly stabbed himself a big chinook, hear the slap of the fish in the water, laughing naked kids on the bank, the women at the racks…from a long time ago.”

––One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, pg. 73

“Estimates of the population of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries vary widely, but the number of adult male citizens clearly ran into some tens of thousands. How can a population of such a size be informed by a shared vision of the good? How can friendship be the bond between them? The answer surely is by being composed of a network of small groups of friends, in Aristotle’s sense of that word. We are to think then of friendship as being the sharing of all in the common project of creating and sustaining the life of the city, a sharing incorporated in the immediacy of an individual’s particular friendships.

This notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world. This is how we sometimes at least think of schools, hospitals or philanthropic organizations; but we have no conception of such a form of community concerned, as Aristotle says the polis is concerned, with the whole of life, not with this or that good, but with man’s good as such. It is no wonder that friendship has been relegated to private life and thereby weakened in comparison to what it once was.”

––After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, by Alasdair MacIntyre, pg. 156