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The Year 1000, Rober Lacey and Danny Danziger, Little, Brown, and Company,
1999.
It was the quietness of life in a medieval English village that strike a visitor
from today - no planes overhead, no swish or rumble from traffic. Stop reading
this book a minute. Can you hear something? Some machine turning? A waterpipe
running? A distant radio or a pneumatic drill digging up the road? Of all the
varieties of modern pollution, noise in the most insidious
We Die Alone, by David Howarth, The Lyons Press, 1955.
He was beginning to suffer from exposure by then, and one cannot deduce how
long he had been stormbound, or whether it was night or day. When one=s body
is worn by a long effort at the limit of its strength, and especially when
its function is dulled by cold, one’s mind loses first of all its sharp
appreciation of time. Incidents which are really quite separate become blended
together; the present and the immediate past are not distinct, but are all
part of the vaguely defined present of physical misery. In a person of strong
character, hope for the future remains separate long after the past and present
are confused. It is when the future loses its clarity too, and hope begins
to fade, that death is not far away.
The simple art of Murder, Raymond Chandler
The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations
and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated
restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which
a screen star can be the finger man for the mob, and the nice man down the
hall is boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full
of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket,
where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of
money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because
law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world
where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but
you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because
the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like
your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed
to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons,
without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.
AIt is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers
with tough minds and cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and
even amusing patterns out of it.
Ten Percent of Life, Hiber Conteris, Fireside Books, 1985
Let me make things clear to you, Marlowe; it=s not that I think the movies
are pointless. Completely the opposite. The cinema isn=t merely an art form,
but rather the only completely new art form that has appeared on this planet
in hundreds of years. If Shakespeare had been born in this generation he would
have prospered; he would have refused to die in a corner. He would have taken
the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae
and forced them into something lesser men though them incapable of. Alive today,
he would have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what.
Instead of saying, >This medium is no good,= he would have used it and made
it good.
Fawn Island, Douglas Wood
There are certain places in the North Woods that seem to distill the essence
of the whole country. A chance combination of rock, tree, and water can be
focused in such a way as to symbolize the entire character of the land and
illustrate the timeless forces that have shaped it.
Fawn Island is a rugged but poetic outcrop of granite in the heart of the
North Woods. Draped with a shawl of juniper and jack pine, it rises out of
the vast blue mistiness of Rainy Lake, overlooking a long sweep of open water
sometimes lashed by wind and wave, sometimes still enough to reflect the starry
depths of the universe.
A Flame of Pure Fire, Roger Kahn, Harcourt, 1999.
Dempsey always worked hard at boxing, drilling, studying, thinking, sparring,
punching. He soaked his hands in brine to toughen them. He sloshed bull urine
onto his face. That was said to make the skin harder to cut. He was boxer of
extraordinary dedication and great intelligence. What he needed now was a manager
who believed in him and beyond that a manager with style and flair.
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant, Picador 1997
In Egypt, I loved the perfume of the lotus. A flower would bloom in the pool
at dawn, filling the entire garden with a blue musk so powerful it seemed that
even the fish and ducks would swoon. By night, the flower might wither, but
the perfume lasted. Fainter and fainter, but never quite gone. Even many days
later, the lotus remained in the garden. Months would pass and a bee would
alight near the spot where the lotus had blossomed, and its essence was released
again, momentary but undeniable.
Egypt loved the lotus because it never dies. It is the same for people who
are loved. Thus can something as insignificant as a name - two syllables, one
high, one sweet- summon up the innumerable smiles and tears, sighs and dreams
of a human life.
Sick Puppy, Carl Hiaasen, Warner Books, 1999.
Their girlfriends were both slender and brunette, possibly sisters, and too
cadaverously pale for the neon thongs they wore. Their bare bike-wrinkled
butt cheeks looked like pita loaves.
Andrew chose body piercing and embarked on a zealous program of self-mutilation.
He began with three small holes in each earlobe and advanced quickly to the
eyebrows, one cheek and both nostrils. And he didn=t stop there. He wore studs
and pegs made only of the finest silver, and before long he bristled from so
many man-made orifices that commercial air travel became impractical, due to
delays caused by the metal detectors. With each new attachment Andrew=s visage
became more grotesque, although it didn=t seem to bother his politician clients;
Andrew=s professional services were in greater demand than ever. Desie, on
the other hand, could hardly bear to look at him. She held out hope that it
was just a phase, even after Andrew got his tongue pierced to accommodate a
size 4/0 tarpon hook. Desie appreciated the symbolism but not the tactile effect.
In fact, sex with Andrew had already become to much of an obstacle course,
body ornaments snagging and jabbing her at the most inopportune moments
The Fig Eater, Jody Shields, Little, Brown and Co. 2000.
Underneath Vienna, there is another kind of light. She=s seen it, following
a guide=s faint torch into the Michaelerkirche crypt, where hundreds of corpses
are visible in half-open coffins or stacked on top of each other, their shriveled
flesh and fine clothing cold and intact for hundreds of years. Here, even
the shadows have a different quality.
She found the darkness in the crypt seemed to have no depth, moving like a
wash of ink over the nerveless hands, the limp neck ruffs, the innermost folds
of the corpses’ clothing, a steady black tide pushed pack only by the
weak light of their candles and torches.
Shackleton’s Forgotten Men, Lennard Bickel, Adrenaline Classics, New
York 2001.
Dick Richards, when not perched in the crow=s nest staring at the western range,
spent much of his time leaning over the after-rail grazing at killer whales
Adisporting like giant lizards in the clear water@; or watching a mammoth blue
whale, the largest mammal in the world, rise ponderously like a new blue island
being born and then sound again with a great swirl of water. The scene in the
pack ice at times is entrancing, e noted. Imagine a calm sunny day with water
tones from the deepest of shades to green and light blue, and scattered about,
here and there, dazzlingly white pack ice some few feet above the water, relieved
by dark shadows cast by the sun... Whales in the water lanes and penguins both
in and out of the water, swimming with most elegant grace and then leaping
some feet into the air to alight on the ice. Skuas and petrels overhead, and
somnolent seals on the ice, it made a picture one never forgets.
Watershed, Percival Everett, Graywolf Press, 1996
He didn’t dislike white people, but he didn’t trust them either.
He told me about having seen a man lynched when he was thirteen., lynched by
white men who talked about their god as if he were a neighbor, white men who
made burnt offerings to him on cold Virginia nights. He didn=t dislike Christians,
but he didn’t trust them either. He held firmly that his true beliefs
were lost someplace inside him and inside his daughter and son and inside me,
his only grandchild, and that the Christians had locked the door on those beliefs.
He didn’t dislike his wife for being Christian, but he didn’t trust
her.
Reilly’s Luck, Louis L'Amour, Bantam Books, 1970
Will Reilly gave him a thoughtful look. “Now, that’s interesting.
So do I. I have always liked the feel of a good book. It’s like a gun” he
added. “When a man opens a book or fires a gun he has no idea what the
effect will be, or how far the shot will travel”
The Dress Lodger, Sheri Holman, Ballantine Books, 2000.
The young lady pushes into the store. Now that she sees her up close, Mag realizes
she=s not quite as well-off as she first thought. Oh, she might fool some,
but a pawnbroker can spot the difference. The flimsy tulle gathered up all
around the wide skirt is patched in places with cheap white netting, and
she can see that the gorgeous blue dress is not properly held up underneath.
She hasn’t pawned twenty-five years’ worth of fashions not to
know a thing or two about frames. You must build these dresses from the inside
out, layering petticoats, cinching corsets, tying flaring wicker cages around
the arm=s eye to support the gigot sleeve. The gros de Naples gown, though
obviously of good quality, conceals a practically naked body underneath.
You're not fooling me, Mag thinks. Exactly what we can=t see is what gives
you away.
Girl,Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen, First Vintage Books, 1993.
Suicide is a form of murder-premeditated murder. It isn’t something you
do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you
need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good
organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the
suicidal state of mind.
interpreter of maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mariner Books, 1999.
He stepped into the foyer, impeccably suited and scarfed with a silk tie knotted
at his collar. Each evening he appeared in ensembles of plums, olives, and
chocolate browns. He was a compact man, and though his feet were perpetually
splayed and his belly slightly wide, he nevertheless maintained an efficient
posture, as if balancing in either hand two suitcases of equal weight. His
ears were insulated by tufts of graying hair that seemed to block out the unpleasant
traffic of life. He had thickly lashed eyes shaded with a trace of camphor,
a generous mustache that turned up playfully at the ends, and a mole shaped
like a flattened raisin in the very center of his left cheek. On his head he
wore a black fez made from the wool of Persian lambs, secured by bobby pins,
without which I was never to see him. Though my father always offered to fetch
him in our car. Mr Pirzada preferred to walk from his dormitory to our neighborhood,
a distance of about twenty minutes on foot, studying trees and shrubs on his
way, and when he entered our house his knuckles were pink wit the effects of
crisp autumn air.
White Widow, Jim Lehrer, Public Affairs, 2000
“I’s an unbelievable situation. I am acting like a high school boy
in jeans and boots with a crew cut and a letter jacket. I have to stop this.
I cannot continue to moon about this woman, this woman I call Ava. How silly
that is. Here I am, talking about this stranger as if she was my girlfriend or
mistress or something or other. Mistress. Listen to me use that word. What exactly
is a mistress anyhow? I don=t even know her name! I call her Ava after a movie
star. I remember guys in high school in Beeville did that. They=d come home from
a movie with Hedy Lamarrr or Lana Turner in it and then on Saturday night on
dates with real girls, they=d imagine they were actually kissing or feeling up
Hedy or Lana. Grown-up Master Operators do not act that way. But here I am. I
mean, here I am. My wife. What have I done to her.? She asks if I am running
around on her? No, I say. Which is the truth. The technical truth. But I am running
way, way around her in my head. And then some. But I cannot tell her that. I
cannot say, Loretta dear, what I am doing, to tell the truth, is that I have
fallen like heavy rain on dry sand for a woman on my Friday bus. We have exchanged
maybe twenty words. Forty words, counting both the ones she has said and the
ones I have said. Forty words! She looks at me like she does not even really
see me. And that is probably because she really doesn’t. I am only the
bus driver. I am like the seat. Oh my, there is the bus seat. Oh my, there is
the bus driver. She didn’t even miss me last Friday. Or at least if she
did, she didn’t say anything to College. “Where is that wonderful
man Jack T. Oliver, the regular driver on this run? Is he down with the flu?
Did he have to have an operation to remove something? Is he on vacation? Where
did he go on vacation? Did he die? Did he get run over by another bus? Has be
become president of Great Western Trailways? Has he become a movie star? Is he
Ward Bond?” But not a word like any of that. Not one question. This cannot
go on. I cannot continue to let this do this to me. Do what to me? Well, look
what happened last Friday. I actually sabotaged a bus. I actually destroyed company
property so I could simply be with her another twenty-five minutes or so. I sabotaged
a bus! It was simply crazy. Am I simply crazy? I am not thinking about murder,
heavens no, but I am thinking about Loretta dying. By natural causes, by all
means. In a fire, of all things. I cannot believe it! I am thinking that if she
died, then Ava would hold my head in her lap and comfort me. Ava would make it
all better for me. If Loretta were dead then everything would be all right.,
would be honorable, would be clean. You are a terrible, rotten despicable person,
Jack T. Oliver. I am ashamed to be you.
Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Collins 2000.
It was late afternoon, already something close to dark on the north side of
the mountain, where rhododendrons huddled in the cleft of every hollow. In
their dense shade the ground was bare and slick. A month from now the rhododendrons
would be covered with their big spheres of pink blossoms like bridesmaids=
bouquets, almost too show-off fancy for a wildwood flower on this lonely
mountain. But for now their buds still slept. Now it was only the damp earth
that blossomed in fits and throes: trout lilies, spring beauties, all the
understory wildflowers that had to hurry through a whole life cycle between
May’s first warmth-while the sunlight still reached through the bare
limbs-and the shaded darkness of a June forest floor. Way down around the
foot of this mountain in the valley farmland, springtime would already be
winding down by the first week of May, but the tide of wildflowers that swept
up the mountainsides had only just arrived up here at four thousand feet.
On this path the hopeful flower heads were so thick they got crushed underfoot.
In a few more weeks the trees would finish leafing out here, the canopy would
close, and the bloom would pass on. Spring would move higher up to awaken
the bears and finally go out like a flame, absorbed into the dark spruce
forest on the scalp of Zebulon Mountain. Everywhere you looked, something
was fighting for time, for light, the kiss of pollen, a connection of sperm
and egg and another chance.
Keel Kissing Bottom, Elizabeth de Freitas, Random House of Canada, 1997.
On a sea vessel, adrift and bewildered, we were meant to rely on buoys with foghorns
to aid in our navigation. Each buoy is anchored for life, singing mournful songs
induced by the movement of its chain. Each horn has its own phrase and rhythm.
I had always believed that foghorns bemoaned their service. Made of rustproof
materials and painted with antifouling, they were forever abandoned to the unforgiving
fog. And even when the thick air cleared, and the heavy smoke vanished, as it
refused to do on this particular day, they always appeared chilled and miserable,
locked to the insipid surface, the sea still tempered flat. In the midst of my
mother=s hysteria they seemed to be conspiring against us, calling us out into
thicker fog patches and adding to her confusion. Their sad song was dispersed
across the surface and seemed to emanate from everywhere at once, offering no
direction whatsoever.
Silent Snow, Steve Thayer. Signet Books, 1999.
“
Tell me something, Freddie, do you believe in reincarnation?”
“
That’s a strange question to ask a coroner.”
“
How so?”
Freddie set the brain down on the counter. It was dry and chunky, green and
white with the texture of cauliflower. It had been sitting for days. I see
the reincarnated remains of human beings every day. The girl that leaps from
the bridge. The teenager who overdosed. The old man with congestive heart failure.
The child beaten to a pulp by his mother, or more often his mother’s
lover. Every day. The same people. The same death. The chief medical examiner
pulled open a drawer and removed a knife the size of a machete. And all of
them, she said, stare up at me from the examination table with the same sorry
eyes and say the same damn thing. Maybe next time I’ll get it right.
Earth From Above, Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Harry Abrams Books. 1999.
Our planet in the year 2000 has approximately 6 billion people, 20 percent
of whom live in developed countries and 80 percent in the developing world.
Asia alone accounts for 60 percent of the world population. This world is
increasingly urban. According to the United Nations Population Fund, 45 percent
live in cities (the figure is 75 percent for developed countries and only
22 percent for the less developed countries). Forty-one metropolises have
more that 5 million inhabitants (half of them more than 10 million); three
quarters are located in developing countries.
A Romantic Education, Patricia Hampl, Norton and Company, 1981.
Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated
with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory. The act of remembering
becomes less autobiographical; it begins to feel tentative, aloof. It becomes
blessedly impersonal.
They were Irish, Catholic, Midwestern to the marrow, so much so that my mother,
after a trip west once, returned very ho-hum about the mountains. “Oh,
the mountains are all right,” she said. “But they do get in the
way of the scenery.”
Great Plains, Ian Frazier, Penguin Books. 1989.
Nineteenth-century travelers who wanted to see the interior of the Great Plains
when it was still a wilderness used to ascend the Missouri the way people
do the Amazon or the Nile today. The Indians who lived along the river grew
maize and beans, dried them, and traded them to tribes who followed the buffalo
herds. The river Indians usually built their villages near where the Missouri
and another river joined, and the white traders who came later followed this
example.
The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger, Harper Collins, 1997.
Gloucester was a perfect place for loose cannons. It was poor, remote, and
the Puritan fathers didn’t particularly care what went on up there.
After a brief period of desertion, the town was re-settled in 1631, and almost
immediately the inhabitants took to fishing. They had little choice, Cape
Ann being one big rock, but is some ways that was a blessing. Farmers are
easy to control because they’re tied to the land, but fishermen are
not so easy to control. A twenty-year-old off a three month trip to the Banks
has precious little reason to heed the bourgeois mores of the town. Gloucester
developed a reputation for tolerance, if not outright debauchery, that drew
people from all over the Bay Colony. The town began to thrive.
Zeke and Ned, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana
Becca remained where she was, in the doorway of the cabin. She looked at Zeke
and listened to him, waiting without being quite sure what she was waiting
for. He was dirty, distraught, and hurt. The wifely thing would be to take
him in, clean him, feed him, and dress his wound. Yet, the only wifely feelings
she could muster were old and cold and sluggish-thick, like the boggy mud
in the creeks near her home-not sudden and liquid, as they had once been.
Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bantam Books, 1998.
Back in the refuge she sat again in the dining room, warming up by the stove,
listening to the people around her talk. “All the Eskimos I’ve
seen have had to learn snowcraft all over again, they’ve been living
in pickup trucks or off their government grants. Either too poor or too rich.
But what stayed with them was their values. Eskimos think it’s important
to be happy. You’re supposed to react to difficult situations cheerfully.
A happy person is considered a capable person, a good person. Unhappy people
are thought to be deficient in some significant respect. It isn’t acknowledged
to be an appropriate response. You have to face up to Naartsuk, that was their
storm spirit, the biggest god in their pantheon. They don’t seem religious
anymore, but they definitely believe in Naartsuk.”
Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris, Little, Brown, and Co. 1997
Yesterday I applied for a job at UPS. They are hiring drivers’ helpers
for the upcoming Christmas season and I went to their headquarters filled with
hope. In line with three hundred other men and women my hope diminished. During
the brief interview I was asked why I wanted to work for UPS and I answered
that I wanted to work for UPS because I like brown uniforms. What did they
expect me to say?
“
I’d like to work for UPS because, in my opinion, it’s an opportunity
to showcase my substantial leadership skills in one of the finest private delivery
companies this country has seen since the Pony Express!”
I said I liked the uniforms and the UPS interviewer turned my application facedown
on his desk facedown and said, “Give me a break”
A Rum Affair, Karl Sabbagh, Da Capo Press, 1999.
I have read a lot of scientific literature, although to call it literature
in the usual sense of the word is to give it more credit than it deserves.
Most scientific papers serve very specific purposes, and providing enjoyment
to the reader is usually not one of them..
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood, Anchor Books
2000
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh
can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance
blur
the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with
its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands
clear.
The Everlasting Sky, Gerald Vizenor, MN Historical Press 2000.
Jerome stood at the screen as the man nervously introduced himself as the director
of a new pioneer museum in Park Rapids. The director explained that he wanted
Buckanaga, an anishinabe educator, to sanction the display of a human skeleton
in the museum. Jerome stared at the man for a strategic moment and then asked
him if that was the same skeleton that had been stored in the closet. Yes,
it was in the closet, said the director who was too nervous to appreciate the
irony. Sure, you can hang that skeleton out, said Buckanaga.
The director expressed his gratitude, and confessed that he was worried about
being denied permission to show the skeleton. Jerome listened and then asked
the stranger if he wanted to know why he had agreed. Yes, of course, said the
director. Buckanaga said, That’s a white skeleton, so you can do anything
you want with it. The director was distracted, disconcerted, and even bedeviled
by the sudden racialist turn of skeleton events.
Jerome told me later that he had no idea if the skeleton was white, but he
took a chance that the director would never have a white skeleton in a pioneer
museum. By this strategy he may have saved an anishinabe skeleton from public
display.
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris, Little, Brown, and Company, 2000.
I’d heard once in school that if a single bird were to transport all
the sand, grain by grain, from the eastern seaboard to the west coast of Africa,
it would take...I didn’t catch the number of years, preferring to concentrate
on the single bird chosen to perform this thankless task. It hardly seemed
fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being
a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work. Birds search for grubs and
build their nests, but their leisure time is theirs to spend as they see fit.
I pictured this bird looking down from the branches to say, “You want
me to do what? before flying off, laughing at the foolish story he now had
to tell his friends. How many grains of sand are there in the world? A lot.
Case Closed.”
Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Perennial, 1993.
She’d believed that motherhood done fiercely and well would end her family’s
jinx of solitude. Alice threw herself into belief in her daughter as frankly
as Minerva had devoted herself to hogs. But kids don’t stay with you
if you do it right. It’s one job where, the better you are, the more
surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
The Boys' House, Jim Heynen
In Which the Librarian Writes a Letter to the editor
There weren’t many outdoor privies left. Ones that didn’t rot from
age were tipped over on Halloween nights by mischievous boys. And the owners
of the few that did remain did everything they could to outsmart the boys who
were trying to figure out ways to tip them over.
One very mean farmer looked out for his privy with a big machete that he flashed
around the town on Halloween day.
I’m going to wait inside my privy with this thing, he said, and chop
up anyone who comes near it.
Some older boys fixed him by taking a long rope and running with five boys
on either end until the rope came across the rear of the privy. Keeping their
distance this way, they tipped the privy onto its front door before the man
with the machete even heard them coming. They only way he could get out was
through the seat holes, which meant falling into the stinky pit.
The toilet-tippers didn’t always get he last laugh. One clever farmer
moved his privy ahead six feet so that when the boys came up behind to tip
it on Halloween night, they were the ones who fell into the stinky pit.
There were so many tricks that privy owners and boys played on each other that
a book could be written about it.
But the only person who wrote anything about it in those parts was the town
librarian. She was one of these people who always look angry, but usually didn’t
say what she was thinking. She wrote a letter to the editor which was printed
in the newspaper. She said it was terrible the fuss people made over outhouses
on Halloween. She was bothered, she wrote, by the scatological obsession of
our youth. That’s what she wrote in the paper: scatological obsession
of our youth!
Most people didn’t understand her letter, but the boys figured out that
she didn’t like what they did to outhouses on Halloween nights.
Too bad for the librarian, she had an outhouse too. And hers was not old and
rotting. Hers was quite new and the only toilet she had. She had lived a simple
life of order and neatness. Her outhouse was so neat and clean that many people
didn’t know it was her toilet.
But the boys did. And what she wrote in the newspaper gave them an idea. They
started with forty squares of active yeast. They shoved these down into the
librarian=s toilet with broom handles while she was busy reshelving books in
the library. And like the world=s biggest loaf of bread, the toilet contents
did begin to rise. And rise. First the bulging mass came up through the toilet
seat holes, then lifted the neat little shanty into the air. The yeast kept
working until some people said the raised privy looked like a steeple on top
of that big mound. Others said it looked like a withes hat on top of a very
ugly witch’s head.
The newspaper printed a picture and a caption which read: Local librarian discovers
scatology on the rise, as shown in this backyard photograph.
Stolen Lives, Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi,
talk miramax books, 1999.
It was nearly 11p.m. We had decided to hide near the swimming pool and then
to spend the night in the hotel nightclub. A few sun loungers were arranged
in a circle on the lawn. I sat down on one of them. The canvas was wet and
my flimsy tunic was immediately soaked through. Shivering with cold, we huddled
together under trees to wait until the nightclub opened at midnight.
For fifteen years we had cherished a rose-coloured dream of our return to the
world. I, who was a teenager had lived only for dancing, had longed for the
time when I would be able to indulge in my nocturnal passion again. But either
everything around us had changed or we were no longer like everybody else.
In the club, the music was much too loud and psychedelic lights made our heads
spin. This barrage of noise was too much for our poor, hurting brains; it was
worse than the cruellest torture. We fled.
Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg, Harper, 2001.
The second aspect of moralism seen in the older way of looking at Christianity
grew out of the fact that we are not very good at being good. This older way
of being Christian was centered on the dynamic of sin, guilt, and forgiveness.
Indeed, it is striking how central sin and forgiveness are to this older, conventional
version of Christianity. Most Christian worship services include a confession
of sin, and most celebrations of the Eucharist (known as the mass, the Lord=s
Supper, or communion) have sin, sacrifice, and forgiveness at their center.
Even quite liberal churches emphasize sin and forgiveness. I was struck by
this at a recent week-long conference in a liberal Christian setting. Each
morning=s worship began with a confession of sin. I thought to myself, It’s
nine o=clock in the morning, and we’ve already been bad.
The Man Who Heard the Land, Diane Glancy, Minnesota Historical Society, 2001.
The University of Minnesota at Morris had been an Indian boarding school, and
Indian students still attended without paying tuition. There were not many,
maybe eighty out of nearly two thousand students, but once in a while he
had one in his class. They didn’t look like he thought they should.
He didn’t feel any particular kinship with them. They wrote about environmental
poverty. They wrote about the land as themselves: blue oat grass, spike grass,
big bluestem, ribbon grass, switchgrass, Indian grass, reed grass, moor grass,
hair grass, sedges, bottlebrush, rushes, and the rest of the tallgrass prairie
cleared for farmers’ crops, just as they had been.
He felt the heaviness of their thoughts. The animals uprooted. Some of them
pushed to extinction. The Indian students wrote, but they rarely talked in
class.
The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2001, edited by E.
O. Wilson, Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
“
In the Forests of Gombe”, Jane Goodall, Orion.
I ended by telling him that it honestly didn’t matter how we humans got
to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible.
What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. How should
the mind that can contemplate God relate to our fellow beings, the other life
forms of the world? What is our human responsibility? And what, ultimately,
is our human destiny? Were we going to go on destroying God’s creation,
fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of His planet? Or were we
going to find ways to live in greater harmony with each other and with the
natural world? That, I told him, was what was important. Not only for the future
of the human species, but also for him, personally.
Ten Thousand Islands, Randy Wayne White, Berkeley Prime Crime
Books, 2000.
I’m like, they’re like-Tomlinson says the uneducated must now
speak in the third-person present tense because their only reality is a television
screen or a computer screen. Their brains can convert images but not ideas.
Chicago Poems, Carl Sandburg, Prairie State Books, University of Ill.,
1992.
Chicago
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Makee, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation=s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day, Thor Heyerdahl, Kodansha
International, 1996.
We shared our pleasures with everything that moved around us, and like the
rest of the ecological system we took the food that grew in the trees for
a given, just like the air we were inhaling. Only at certain moments, when
the jungle atmosphere seemed to wake us from a sort of habitual slumber,
did we differ from our four-or six-legged forest companions by asking ourselves
naive questions. It would happen when we ate a certain fruit. We=d take questions.
It would happen when we ate a certain fruit. We=d take a second look at the
mute tree that produced it and ask ourselves how the wood of one tree could
come up with delicacy so different in shape and taste from that yielded by
another. A chunk or splint from an orange tree did not look all that different
from a chip from a mango a breadfruit tree, and yet, when the same mud was
filtered through them, from the roots to the branches, it came out completely
different at the upper end. These simple tree trunks that fed us were in
fact master cooks. The raw material they used was nothing but what a child
has at its disposal when making mud pies. The best cook in the world, with
access to the finest choice of condiments and spices, could not convert mud
into the wide variety of supreme foods we got free from these quiet trees.
If a cook could do this, he would be a magician. In the jungle, we were surrounded
by magicians.
The Geography of Childhood, Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, Beacon Press,
1994
Connection to the natural world can begin with snakes, shells, or stars, birds,
beetles, or blackberries. For me, connection started with the land itself,
the bones and ligaments of the naked Earth exposed on the rocky surface of
the arid West. Geography seeped into me, a bedrock awareness of landscape and
place. I learned to pay attention to the flow of scenes framed by the car window.
The relatively slow pace and the familiar earthbound perspective of driving
made that progression of landscapes comprehensible in a way that today=s commonplace
airplane travel prohibits.
I kept staring at the maps. The arbitrarily legislated shapes on national parks
printed on them defined the places visually before I ever saw their vistas
and wildlife. Today, I close my eyes and conjure these shapes, connected by
the meandering red and blue lines of pre-interstate highways, and I can feel
the sweaty folds of paper in one hand, the hot rush of air beating and lifting
against the other, stretched outward through the open window of the old Dodge.
The art of undressing, stephanie lehmann, New American Library, 2005.
A girl behind the counter steamed some milk. I bet people who order cappuccinos
when there's a big line have no problem taking their sweet time coming to
orgasm. Or maybe they do, and the/re taking it out on the rest of us. As
the line barely moved, I had plenty of time to consider where in the world
I would choose to live. The Midwest sounded good. Someplace where nice people
lived. I could open a bakery cafe on Main Street. It didn't matter which
Main Street. Any one would do.
Finally. First in line! This could very well be the high point of my day. I
stood tall, ready to order. One of the girls behind the counter was talking
to the other about hair extensions. When she finally asked what I wanted, it
was as if she was doing me a big favor. I asked for my iced coffee in a pleasant
way. She got it for me, and I gave her the three dollars and fifty-five cents,
and she yelled, "Next customer!//
Why can't counter people in New York City say "Thank you"? It's such
a simple thing. Counter people around the world are saying "Thank you" after
every transaction, but not in New York. They slam the register shut. "Next!" You
don't matter. "Next!" And then you have to decide whether to say "Thank
you," because that's your way, but it becomes a hostile gesture—I
mean they're the ones who are supposed to be thanking you for the business,
right? But you tell yourself, hey, I recognize the fact that she's underpaid
and overworked so maybe it would be nice of me to go the extra mile and say "Thank
you" to her, just as a show of support to help her get through the day.
And then maybe she'll say "Thank you^ back. So you say "Thank you!" And
she says, "Next!"