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DARWIN, HIS DAUGHTER AND HUMAN EVOLUTION, Randal Keynes, Riverhead Books,
2002.
When HMS Beagle landed at Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Charles saw many slaves
and met slave-owners. Captain FitzRoy saw no evil in the institution and Charles,
quite out of character, quarreled with him. One day FitzRoy told Charles that
he had just visited a rich slave owner who had summoned many of his slaves
and
asked them whether they wished to be free. “All answered, ‘No.’ I
then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answers of
slaves in the presence of their master were worth anything. This made him excessively
angry, and he said that as I doubted his word, we could not live any longer
together. Charles thought he would have to leave the ship but, after a few
hours, FitzRoy
sent an apology and asked Charles to continue to share his table.
A few weeks later, Charles and his companions met an Irish trader who took
them to a plantation he had cleared from the forest six days’ ride into the
interior. The trader had a violent quarrel with his agent in which he threatened
to sell at auction an illegitimate mulatto child of whom the agent was very fond.
He also said he would take all the women and children from their husbands and
sell them separately at the slave market in Rio. Charles wrote in his diary: “Can
two more flagrant and horrible instances be imagined?” Faced by such cruelty,
he rejected out of hand the argument that slavery was a “tolerable evil”.
He was angry at some English writers who showed sympathy towards slaveowners,
but gave no thought to the feelings of their slaves. “Picture to yourself
the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children – those
objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own – being torn
from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder.”
Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris 2001.
Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery
to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in
doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature.
Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances
of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized
and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more
foresight
than we are showing at this moment.”
Blue Latitudes, Horwitz, Henry Holt and Co. 2002.
Cordelia’s house, however, was appropriately plain: a modest brick cottage
on the edge of Whitby. Cordelia also seemed without pretense, a woman of seventy-eight
wearing a wool cap, loose blouse, long skirt and one sensible shoe. A cast
covered her other leg.
I asked her to expand on the book’s thesis that Cook’s character
bore many “marks of the true Quaker.”
“You see it first in his quietism,” she said. “Quakers are
quiet people, though you wouldn’t know it listening to me. When you read
the journals of Cook’s men, they almost never quote him directly. He didn’t
waste words.”
“Then there’s his modesty and plainness,” Cordelia went on. “That’s
very Quaker. I don’t wear a wedding ring, even though I was married forever.
Quakers back then carried this to extremes. Men’s jackets had no collars.
Cook wasn’t an extremist, but he was a no frills fellow. Also, he had no
room for religious ritual, at least not external ritual. He couldn’t
bear reverends on his ships and he almost never referred to the Deity in his
writing.
Belief is within oneself.”
He wasn’t strictly speaking a pacifist.
Cordelia disagreed. “He fired his guns, but only as a last resort,” she
said. “And whenever he did, he expressed regret over it.” She herself
had served in the Signal Corps during World War II, scrubbing floors and operating
telephones. “Quakers are peaceful, but they’re not barmy. You do
what you have to do.”
Jaguar, Alan Rabinowitz, Arbor House, 1986.
I built the trap during the day, and drove the roads at night, watching for jaguars
and hoping to find a good site for the trap. I worked nineteen-hour days, partly
because there was so much to be done and partly to take my mind off the loneliness.
Usually at night I saw nothing. However, one night, while returning to camp at
about 9 p. m., I noticed the tracks of a jaguar who had trailed behind the truck
for almost two miles before veering off into the jungle.
The next day I went back and followed the tracks into the forest. After several
hours of chopping through the undergrowth, I lost all sign of the animal and
turned back. A hundred yards back along the trail I had cut, I glanced down and
froze. There were fresh jaguar tracks inside of my own tracks!
The cat had intercepted my trail, followed me, and had gone back into the forest
when I turned and headed back. I knelt down and looked more closely at the
track. It was so fresh that piece of dirt tottering on the edge of one of the
toes fell
into the depression as I watched. I had been told by hunters that a jaguar
could follow you in the bush and you’d never see or it. I hadn’t
believed it until now.
He was still close, so close I imagined I could fell the heat of his body in
back of me. I spun around. Nothing was there but dense, silent jungle. I knew
he was not far away, watching.
Pigs at the Trough, Arianna Huffington, Crown Publishers, 2003.
How can there be talk of a shared destiny in a nation where just over one percent
of the population (170 billionaires, 25,000 deca-millionaires, and 4.8 million
millionaires) control approximately 50% of the entire country’s wealth?
Where the richest 20% earn 48.5% of the income and the poorest 20% merely 5.2%?
Where, since 1980, real income for the bottom fifth of families fell by $800,
while for the top fifth, it rose by $56,800?
The excesses of corporate America have become more than just a social crime:
they are a direct threat to the well being of our society. The bottom line
is that the United States can no longer hold its head up as the world’s
standard-bearer of capitalist virtue.
Even as our country has taken steps to abolish welfare, forcing the poor to
sink or swim, we’ve allowed the high-end corporate class to weave a giant
safety net for its members. Is this corporate welfare really any different
or less costly
than the kind most of these people inveigh against? To use their own argument,
how are we ever going to get them to act responsibly when we keep rewarding
them for irresponsibility? To say nothing of criminality.
Dreamer, Charles Johnson, Scribner, 1998
“ There is, deep down within all of us, an instinct. It’s a kind of
drum major instinct – a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade,
a desire to be first. And it is something that runs a whole gamut of life…We
all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead
the parade. Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the
dominant impulse…this desire for attention…Now in adult life, we
still have it, and we really never get by it. We like to do something good. And
you know we liked to be praised for it…But there comes a time when the
drum major instinct can be destructive. And that’s where I want to move
now…Do you know that a lot of race problem grows out of the drum major
instinct? A need that some people have to feel superior. Nations are caught up
with the drum major instinct. I must be first. I must be supreme. Our nation
must rule the world…but let me rush on to my conclusion, because I want
you to see what Jesus was really saying…Don’t give it up. Keep feeling
the need from being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want
you first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to
be first in generosity. That’s what I want you to do…”
Ciao America, Beppe Severgnini, Broadway Books,
2001.
“…
rocking-chairs (which made the restless American dream of being on the move
while sitting still actually come true)…”
Ethics for a Small Planet, Biodiversity Project 2003.
Perhaps no statement better captures the essence of our obligations to the
future than Deuteronomy 30:19 “I call heaven and earth to witness against
you [plural]. I have set before you [singular] life and death, blessing and
curse. Choose life, that you and your descendants might live.” Our
choices today can affect the very survival of those yet to come-or at least
surround them with the bountiful blessings or countless curses. Heaven and
earth are called to witness this covenant precisely because it is to be eternal
and because, when considered in an eternal time frame, the consequences of
our actions extend across the Earth unto the heavens above. Rabbinic commentaries
have understood the transition from plural to singular to have significance
as well: while this passage is addressed to the entire community, it is an
obligation to each and every individual.
Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel, Penguin Books, 2000.
…
as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things
that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as
well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the
physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers-as if I had placed
these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset Nature and Overturn
the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates
the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution
or destruction…
Reason for Hope, Jane Goodall, Warner Books, 1999.
When I telegrammed the news to Louis Leakey, he responded with the now-famous
remark: “Ah! We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees
as human!” My observations at Gombe challenged human uniqueness, and
whenever that happens there is always a violent scientific and theological
uproar. On this occasion there were some who tried to discredit my observations
because I was untrained, and therefore could not possibly produce reliable
information. But the photographs that I eventually obtained proved the truth.
Some scientists then actually suggested I must have taught the chimps to
fish for termites! The result of it all, however, was that it was deemed
necessary to redefine man in a more complex manner than before-heaven forbid
that we should lose any aspect of our human uniqueness! I was unaware of
all the controversy and speculation that was going on, as I was just living
my simple life and continuing to learn more about chimpanzees.
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain The Ecco Press, 2000.
What most people don’t get about professional-level cooking is that it
is not at all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the
most creative marriage of ingredients, flavors and textures; that, presumably,
was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking-the real
business of preparing the food you eat-is more about consistency, about mindless,
unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and
over again in exactly the same way. The last thing a chef wants in a line cook
is an innovator, somebody with ideas of his own who is going to mess around
with the chef’s recipes and presentations. Chefs require blind, near-fanatical
loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under
battlefield conditions.
The Bean Tree, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Perennial, 1988
I had to laugh, really. All my life, Mama had talked about the Cherokee Nation
as our ace in the hole. She’d had an old grandpa that was full-blooded
Cherokee, one of the few that got left behind in Tennessee because he was
too old or too ornery to get marched over to Oklahoma. Mama would say, “If
we run out of luck we can always go live on the Cherokee Nation.” She
and I both had enough blood to qualify. According to Mama, if you’re
one-eighth or more they let you in. She called this our “head rights”.
Of course, if she had ever been there she would have known it was not a placed
you’d ever go to live without some kind of lethal weapon aimed at your
hind end. It was clear to me that the whole intention of bringing the Cherokees
here was to get them to lie down and die without a fight. The Cherokees believed
God was in trees. Mama told me this. When I was kid I would climb as high as
I could in a tree and not come down until dinner. “That’s your Indian
blood,” she would say. “You’re trying to see God.”
From Where I could se, there was not one tree in the entire state of Oklahoma.
The sun was headed fast for the flat horizon, and then there would be nothing
but twelve hours of headlights in front of me. I was in a hurry to get out of
there. My engine was still running from Bob Two Two’s jumper cable, and
I hated to let a good start go to waste.
Longitudes and Attitudes, Thomas Friedman, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001.
“ All faiths that come out of the biblical tradition – Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam – have the tendency to believe that they have
the exclusive truth. When the Taliban wiped out the Buddhist statues, that’s
what they were saying. But others said it too. The opposite of religious totalitarianism
is an ideology of pluralism – an ideology that embraces religious diversity
and the idea that my faith can be nurtured without claiming exclusive truth.
America is the Mecca of that ideology, and that is what bin Laden hates, and
that is why America has to be destroyed.”
The future of the world may well be decided by how we fight this war. Can Islam,
Christianity, and Judaism know that God speaks Arabic on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays,
and Latin on Sundays, and that he welcomes different human beings approaching
him through their own history, out of their language and cultural heritage? “Is
single-minded fanaticism a necessity for passion and religious survival, or can
we have a multilingual view of God – a notion that God is not exhausted
by just one religious path? Asked Rabbi Hartman.
Many Jews and Christians have already argued that the answer to that question
is yes, and some have gone back to their sacred texts to reinterpret their traditions
to embrace modernity and pluralism, and to create space for secularism and alternative
faiths. Others – Christian and Jewish fundamentalists – have rejected
this notion, and that is what the battle is about within their faiths.
Before Women Had Wings, Connie May Fowler, Fawcett Columbine, 1996.
My name is Avocet. Avocet Abigail Jackson. But because Mama couldn’t
find anyone who thought Avocet was a fine name for a child, she called me Bird.
Which is okay by me. She named both her girl children after birds. Her logic
being that if we were named for something with wings then maybe we’d
be able to fly above the shit in our lives.
Smart Alliances, Harbison and Pekar, Booz, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998
The best alliances are built on goals for the future, and it is essential that
they not be viewed as static arrangements. Just as Ford and Mazda continue
to amend and transform their alliance, so must any effective partners find
flexible and effective means to respond to their changing know-how needs
and emerging critical processes.
Blood Lure, Nevada Barr, Berkley Books, 2001
Though unasked, the questions were hot and sharp in her brain and they kept
her from sleep. Beside her, snuggled into her navy-blue down bag, Joan snored
gently. Women snoring was a well-kept secret. Not from the world at large or
husbands and lovers and roommates with ears to hear, but from the women who
did it. Idly, Anna wondered if she snored. No one had ever told her she did,
but then they wouldn’t, would they?
Living on the Wind, Scott Weidensaul, North Point Press, 1999.
If nocturnal migration is best for many birds, why not for all? For small
songbirds that must flap constantly to stay aloft, the night’s calm air
and cool temperatures are a clear advantage. For hawks, it is daylight, with
its winds and thermals, that brings the biggest energy savings. This is especially
crucial for the broad-winged hawk, which migrates as far south as Colombia,
and which needs to save every possible gram of fat for a journey that will
take it down the spine of the Appalachians, along the Gulf Coast to eastern
Mexico and through the narrow spine of Central America. What’s more,
some experts believe that broadwings fast during much of their migration; if
true, then any energy savings becomes all the more critical..
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall, Vintage Books, 2001.
Undaunted that he was getting one-upped by a fat drunk kid, Arnold got on Wicked
Joseph. He stayed on the bull well over the required ten seconds; he stayed
on so well that once the horn had sounded he didn’t really want or know
how to get off. The old Brahma kept bucking away, his gargantuan balls flailing
like cathedral bells between his legs, and Arnold, holding on with such conviction
that he looked like he was trying to strangle the thing. Wicked Joseph, who
was, I imagine, thoroughly annoyed with Arnold’s persistence situated
himself in a corner of the ring and began ramming Arnold into a steel livestock
gate, which made a boom-boom-boom noise like someone banging on a battleship
with a sledgehammer. Still Arnold hung on, his brand-new, jammed-on had getting
loose from his head, quarters and nickels and dimes zinging out of his pockets,
his beig round face still caught in that oblivious grin. All around the arena
cowboys were standing up on the fence and cussing and shouting, “Let
go you idiot!”
Finally Arnold was rammed into the gate with enough force that his collarbone
was broken and he had to relinquish his death grip on poor old Wicked Joseph.
Even with the broken bone he hopped right up, looked around and yelled, “Where’s
my hat?” An exhausted Wicked Joseph galloped a wide U-turn and made a halfhearted
attempt at goring Arnold in the back, but Arnold spotted him and scrambled through
the slats in the fence. This time the crowd was duly appreciative; Arnold got
a standing ovation.
Icefields, Thomas Wharton, Washington Square Press, 1995
Glacier ice is not a liquid, nor is it a solid. It flows like lava, like melting
wax, like honey. Supple glass. Fluid stone.
To watch it flow, one must be patient. There are few changes that can be seen
in the course of one day. But over time crevasses split open and others close.
There are ice quakes that shift the terrain, unpredictable geysers of meltwater
that carry away ice aiguilles and other landmarks. And of course the evidence
of flow, acts of delicate, random precision: shards of rock are plucked by the
ice from the strata, carried miles downstream, and left lying with fragments
from another geological age.
In the Beginning, Alister McGrath, Doubleday, 2001.
One fund-raising strategy that was vigorously pursued was anew indulgence sale.
The marketing of these indulgences was subcontracted to professional “pardoners,” who
had no hesitation in talking up the benefits offered by their products. In
1517, perhaps the most famous indulgence peddler of all arrived in Wittenberg.
The scene was set for a showdown. Johann Tetzel’s message was fairly
straightforward: sin – no problem. Just buy an indulgence, carefully
tailored to your needs and your ability to pay, and forget all about it.
In fact, why limit this to yourself? How about your dead relatives, now languishing
in purgatory? Get them out! Was there ever a better investment? In an age
when people knew how to enjoy sin, there was no shortage of clients. Tetzel
even wrote a nice little jingle advertising his sevices:
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings
The soul from purgatory springs!
The Sledge Patrol, David Howath, The Lyons Press, 1957.
It is sometimes said that the polar winter night is depressing: stories are
told of men it has driven mad. But if one can make any general statement about
it all, one can only say that to winter in the arctic accentuates some of the
qualities a man already has. An unstable person without any spiritual resources
of his own might find the darkness and silence either frightening or boring,
but luckily that kind of person seldom goes there. On the other hand, it is
certainly true that many people have profited by wintering there, rather asa
religious person may profit by a period of retreat. For the rest of their lives,
they value their recollections of its peace and freedom, and even when age
has made them far to feeble, they still long to winter there again.
Handbook for Butterfly Watching, Robert Michael Pyle, Houghton
Mifflin, 1984.
I thought I knew something of what butterflies were about until I went to Papua,
New Guinea. Butterflies, I quickly found, can be practically like birds, in
their biology as well as their size. The giant birdwings of New Guinea made
me completely rethink my concept of butterflies. This happened again when I
first went to Mexico to see the winter clusters of migratory Monarchs. No longer
were butterflies individual, silent things: They were trees, boulders, whole
walls; they were the forest floor and the sky itself. And they made such a
collective fluttering that one could hear them all day as a soft whir, like
stirring leaves.
The Shaman’s Coat, Anna Reid, Walker and Company, 2002
It was a sensible reaction, for until at least the mid-1800’s Russian
rule of Siberia was brutal, rapacious, and corrupt. Siberian postings tended
to attract the mad, bad, drunk or disgraced. A man who left Moscow as a common
soldier, it was said, became a sergeant in Tobolsk, a captain in Yakutsk and
a colonel in Kamchatka. Paid a derisory salary, he was expected to support
himself by kormleniye – literally translated as feeding – off the
local population, system of state-sanctioned graft abolished by Ivan the Terrible
in European Russia, but given a new lease of life east of the Urals. Distance
made controlling Siberian officials almost impossible, as illustrated by a
decree of Peter the Great. “Written laws,” the tsar thundered, “should
not be treated like playing cards. This Ukaz seals all orders and regulations
like a stamp, so that nobody can act according to their own whims or in breach
of instructions. If something in the regulations is unclear then one should
not define or decide anything independently, but report to the senate.” But
as long as the round trip to Tobolsk took ten weeks, to Tomsk seven months,
and to Yakutsk two years or more, such declarations were flimsy as the silk
they were printed on, and officials behaved as they pleased.
The Essence of Zen, Mark Byrne, Barnes and Noble
Great is mind. Heaven’s height is immeasurable, but Mind goes beyond
heaven; the earth’s depth is also unfathomable, but Mind reaches below
the earth. The light of the sun and moon cannot be outdistanced, yet Mind passes
beyond the light of sun and moon. Kocen gokoku ron
Equations of Eternity, David Darling, MJF books, 1993.
So we move on to consider the brains of the crow and the dog. And with these,
at last, we find evidence of some dramatic development in the high cerebral
centers. The forebrain of the bird and the mammal are large and bulbous,
and they dominate those parts concerned with autonomic functions. Interestingly,
however, all of the more primitive neural components (the spinal cord, the
brain stem, and the various subregions of these) are still present. In a
sense, a dog brain (and a human brain) has a fish brain deep inside it. That
is to say, an advanced brain is a primitive brain with advanced parts added
on. As always, evolution has been conservative, economical, building upon
what is proven to be sound rather than redesigning the whole system from
scratch.
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald, Houghton Mifflin Company,
1995
They sat on two of the old wooden chairs left out all summer
under the cherry tree. When Fritz had been born, sickly and stupid, she had
been given the blame, and had accepted it. When after months of low fever he
had become tall and thin and, as they all said, a genius, she had not been
given any credit, and had not expected any.
The Mighty Johns, Otto Penzler, editor, 2002. New Millenium Press
America’s game, for such a long time, was baseball. Now, it is football.
What does this say about us as a country? Is the image of baseball as a soft
summer game, played in the sunshine in idyllic cornfields, accurate? And is
it the diametric opposite of football, the violent cold-weather game played
under steel gray skies on chewed up, muddy, or half-frozen tundra?
The Journey of Man, Spencer Wells, Princeton University Press,
2002
Africa is the most equatorial continent on earth. The entirety of its landmass
is found between latitudes of 38?N and 34ºS, and 85 percent of its land
area is in the tropical zone between Cancer and Capricorn. Sea-level freezing
temperatures are rare in Africa – uniquely among all the continents.
While the interior deserts of Sahara and the high volcanic mountains of east
Africa are inhospitable to humans, most of the continent is surprisingly benign.
Africa contains the Old World’s largest uninterrupted tract of rainforest,
and the savannahs of the east and south support a huge variety of large mammals.
The combination of rainforest and Savannah in close proximity, again unique
in the world, is probably part of the reason that humans evolved there. Hominid
bipedalism was almost certainly an early adaptation to the treeless grasslands
of Africa, perhaps, as early as 5 million years ago, where more resources could
be exploited by leaving the aerial safety of the deep forests.
Gullible’s Travel, Cash Peters, The Globe Pequot Press,
2001.
This is a particularly British trait, by the way. We can never accept compliments.
Say something nice and we’re convinced you’re lying, be horrible
to us and we get upset and storm off. You can’t win. Frankly, if I had
any advice for you at all, it would be to ignore us altogether. Stick with
people you understand.
Wild Earth, edited by Tom Butler, Milkweed Editions, MN. 2002.
“ Wilderness – Now more than ever”, Reed Noss
The problem of our estrangement from nature may lie in the increasing dominance
of cultural over biological evolution in the past few millennia of our history.
This cultural-biological schism also requires that we take measures to protect
wild areas and other species from human exploitation, if they are to survive.
The adaptations of most species are determined by biological evolution acting
through natural selection. Except for bacteria species and some invertebrate
species that have very short generation times, biological evolution is much
slower than cultural evolution, taking hundreds or thousands of years to express
itself. Through cultural evolution humans can respond much faster than most
other species to environmental change. Because most environmental change today
is human generated, we have created a situation in which our short-term survival
is much more assured than that of less adaptable species. Some of these species
are extremely sensitive to human activities. It seems to me that an environmental
ethic, as Leopold, Callicott, and others have expressed it, gives us an obligation
to protect species that depend on wilderness because they are sensitive to
human persecution and harassment. I hasten to add that few species “depend” on
wilderness because they prefer wilderness over human-occupied lands; rather
they require wilderness because humans exterminate them elsewhere. Roadlessness
defines wilderness. Where there are roads or other means of human access, large
carnioves and other species vulnerable to human persecution often cannot survive.
Beyond Wolves, Martin Nie, University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Wolves are an important indicator species – both biologically and politically.
Their return provides an opportunity for the country to assess where we are
and in what direction we want to proceed. Wolves have forced us to take stock
and ask some challenging questions on a number of different levels, some cultural,
some deeply personal, and others that are pure politics and political strategy.
Do we value wolves, biodiversity and evolution? Do we value the wilderness
or habitat they will need to persist without constant human manipulation and
interference? If so are we willing to back off a little to ensure this protection?
Are we willing to coexist with a species that cannot be consumed or turned
into profit? Are wolves merely another commodity, one more thing that Americans
want but are not willing to make sacrifices for? And on the political front,
how should wolf policy and management decisions be made and by whom? Can the
states or the smaller unit of government effectively safeguard biodiversity
and the nation’s collective wildlife legacy? Who are the stakeholders
here? And once invited to the decision making process, what role should they
play?
Neither Wolf nor Dog, Kent Nerburn, New World Library, 2001
I let her read those books I had. She looked at them real quick. Then she said
that they weren’t any help because the people sounded ‘flat and
uninteresting.’ That’s what she said. I remember those words.
She said they sounded ‘flat and uninteresting.’
“Those were real people’s voices written down. But they weren’t
good enough for her. They didn’t sound like how she wanted Indians to sound.
She didn’t give a damn how Indians really sound. She just wanted to have
us sound the way she thought we should sound.
“I told her maybe there were some Indians in Greenwich Village who sounded
better. She didn’t know if I was serious or not, so I kept on telling her
how maybe New York Indians sounded better because they had been part of that
Iroquois Confederation and had been a lot more used to giving speeches.
“She wrote it down and went away. I think she was really glad to go. Grover
here kept clearing his throat all the time and she kept thinking maybe he was
going to spit or something. The more nervous she got the more he cleared his
throat. Got so rattly in there I thought he was going to drown. I damn near split
in half trying to keep from laughing.”
Grover was nodding his head silently. His cigarette ash was almost an inch long. “That’s
the way it is, Nerburn,” he said. “White people don’t want
real Indians, they want storybook Indians.”
Monster of God, David Quammen, Norton and Company, 2003.
Meat-eating has its advantages. Most obviously, it provides riches of protein
and fat. It also entails special demands and risks, such as the necessity of
capturing prey, the task of killing what’s captured, the high likelihood
that a given hunt will end in failure, and the chance that a predator will
itself be injured during the hectic business of predation. Claws and other
appendages play roles in meat-getting, but the crucial tools for most carnivorous
creatures are teeth. Teeth seize. Teeth hold. Teeth sever spinal cords and
arteries. Teeth eviscerate. Teeth cut muscle and crush bone. Various sorts
of teeth – differing from one animal to another, and from one zone of
an animal’s mouth to another – are adapted to these various functions.
Life of Pi, Yann Martel, 2001. Harcourt
The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada, I used my fingers.
The waiter looked at me critically and said, “Fresh off the boat, are
you?” I blanched. My fingers, which a second before had been taste
buds savouring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his
gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn’t dare lick
them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those
words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh. I picked
up the knife and fork. I had hardly ever used such instruments. My hands
trembled. My sambar lost its taste.
The Radical Center, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, Anchor Books, 2002.
One of the earliest governmental responses to industrialization was the extension
of the state’s responsibility for education. During the early decades
of the American republic, educational reformers concentrated in the Northeast
promoted the “common school” or public school movement. A common
school education often ended with the sixth grade. The skills it provided – basic
literacy and numeracy – were adequate for an agrarian society but not
for an industrial society. As a result, reformers in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries sought to extend the period of primary education.
Child labor laws and compulsory school attendance laws were combined with the
spread of junior high and high schools.
Rough Draft, James Hall, St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
From the galley below, Gisela’s tape deck pumped out Jimmy Buffett’s
mindlessly soothing voice, song after song celebrating pirates and booze and
long torpid days. Gisela was a parrothead – a devoted follower of that
simple-minded Key West blend of acoustic guitars and the jingly steel drums
and plink-plonk of cruise ship reggae. A double margarita and Jimmy B. blaring
from the tape deck was her evening antidote to her daily overload of sleaze.
Eucalyptus, Murray Bail, Harcourt, 1998.
THE IDEA that a tranquil man would have a violent imagination doesn't seem
possible; and yet signs of the Napoleonic phenomenon are quite common in the
outer reaches of Protestantism. In fact, it may not be at all far-fetched to
claim that tranquility and violent imagination are precisely what have attracted
men to serve in the church in the first place. So common is this trait among
ministers, pastors and missionaries it can be ignored by the Protestant leaders
at their own peril. In certain conservative parishes, or when a seemingly tranquil
man is shipped out to a strange and difficult country as a missionary, there's
always the possibility of unseemly conduct. Missionary work, incidentally,
appears to be at odds with the cardinal rule, 'In seatedness and quietness
the soul acquires wisdom”