The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.
Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
I don’t have to listen to you. You’re a dog. You don’t have a soul.
— Chris Griffin,
Family Guy, Season 4, Episode 1: North by North Quahog
I can barely see ‘cause my head’s in the way.
Culture is something that is done to us. Art is something we do to culture.
— Carl Andre, via Roger Copeland, “Against Instinct: The Denatured Dances of Merce Cunningham”
Working Papers p. 38, via Lewis Hyde,
Trickster Makes This World p. 307
I don’t believe hate is the best way to motivate people to develop long-term solutions to problems. It is a tried and tested way to motivate them to short-term support of dangerous leaders.
Headlines and shipping lanes aside, it’s becoming clearer that the Arctic Ocean of our history and lore — an ice-locked region hostile to humans (except for seal-hunting Inuit and the crews of nuclear submarines) — is transforming in summers to a place where ships may in a few decades find reliable short cuts between Asian manufacturers and distant markets, where polar bears may be fewer and thinner, where oil and gas rigs may increasingly dot the land and sea. Human-driven global warming is almost certainly playing a growing role in the region, although experts still say there are large natural fluctuations involved as well (darn, more hedges).
The Protestant ethic is so deeply engrained in our culture you don’t need to be Protestant to embody it. You don’t even need to be religious.
In China, those who dream of America as a promised land call it the Gold Mountain. For the rest of us, there is the family of our birth and there is some Gold Mountain, a more noble world to which we really belong, one whose citizens will recognize us for who we really are. The richness of this ideal world is often proportional to the poverty of the real, as personal grandiosity is proportional to shame.
[T]he happiness of letting the world happen.
