[Video: actress/comedian Leigh French made a series of regular appearances on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour TV series in the 1960s. Her specialty: playing long-straight-haired “hippie chicks” who often made much more sense (in retrospect) than they seemed to at the time. In an interview last summer, she said of this particular skit: “…if I did it today and just changed a little of the slang and the dates, it would be as significant today as it was decades ago.”]
From whiskey river:
When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans themselves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to the Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
(R. Buckminster Fuller [source])
…and:
Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.
(Sarah Manguso [source])
…and (except for first two paragraphs):
The scientists and humanists were saying one thing, but the artists and poets were saying something else…
Someone was wrong.
In the very age when communication theory and technique reached its peak, poets and artists were saying that men were in fact isolated and no longer communicated with each other.
In the very age when the largest number of people lived together in the cities, poets and artists were saying there was no longer a community.
In the very age when men lived longest and were most secure in their lives, poets and artists were saying that men were most afraid.
In the very age when crowds were largest and people flocked closest together, poets and artists were saying that men were lonely.
Why were poets and artists saying these things?
Was it because they were out of tune with the spirit of the modern age and so were complaining because the denizens of the age paid no attention to them?
Or was it that they were uttering the true feelings of the age, feelings however which could not be understood by the spirit of the age?
Nobody wants to hear about his unspeakable feelings. It is only when the feelings become speakable, that is, understandable by a new anthropology, that people can bear hearing about them.
(Walker Percy [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Yesterday snow fell all day and covered the ground. This morning, though the sun came up clear, the thermometer read four above… It is a morning for books and notebooks and the inviting blank pages of writing paper.
For people who live in the country there is a charming freedom in such days. One is free of obligations to the ground… And the mind may again turn freely to the past and look back on the way it came. This morning has been bearing down out of the future toward this riverbank forever. And for perhaps as long, in a sense, my life has been approaching from the opposite direction. The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?
(Wendell Berry [source])
…and:
Two Nudes
I was working in a bookstore and as an antidote to the twin torment of exhaustion and boredom, one day I went with a friend on a walking tour. We made it as far as Berlin and there I met the man I would move with to a boarding house, then to furnished rooms in the flat of a civil servant, and from there one morning in January to the Registry to be married. Afterward we moved to a studio apartment and two years later from there to where boys returning from the war would remove their collars and sew them back on with red thread to demonstrate the end of their allegiance to the cruel and fastidious past. Everyone wanted to be launched into a place from which you could look back and ask whether the red was also meant to enact spilled blood. You could say so, but only if you want to insist that history’s minutia is best read as allegory. The fact is, history didn’t exist then. Every day was a twenty-four-hour standstill on a bridge from which we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to catch sight of the future. It’s near where you’re standing now. One day we were lying in the sun dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera came by and devoured us.
(Mary Jo Bang [source])
…and:
“When now and again a stone falls into a place that is utterly inevitable,” master craftsman Dan Snow reflects, “I feel I am suddenly standing under a shower of grace. For an instant I become inevitable, too. I share the compatibility that stone finds with stone. If I’m lucky, it happens a lot. Then again, some days it doesn’t happen at all. Grace may fall in the next moment or never again. I know only that if I put myself with stone, it may happen again.”
Although seemingly inevitable après coup, grace is always gratuitous, completely a matter of chance. It cannot be anticipated or earned, nor can the moment of grace be prescribed, programmed, or planned. Arriving as a total surprise, grace turns the world upside down—eternity enters time to disrupt, without displacing, what long had seemed settled. Grace—like a rose, a stone, and even life itself—is without why and, thus, remains forever incomprehensible. If there were a proper response to grace, it would be mute astonishment.
(Mark C. Taylor [source])
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