“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
We are always askedto understandthe other person’s viewpointno matter how out-datedfoolish or obnoxious.One is askedto viewtheir total errortheir life-wastewith kindliness,especially if they are aged.But age is the total ofour doing.They have aged badlybecause they have livedout of focus,they have refused to see.Not their fault?Whose fault?Mine?I am asked to hidemy viewpoint from themfor fear of…
What can one person do in the face of acts that so fundamentally violate all human norms and ideals? Aside from speaking out and providing assistance from afar, I see one possibility: more deeply committing oneself to the qualities and practices that make us not the worst but the best of living things. At root, it is only by building up a culture of human fulfillment, both individually and cooperatively, that we can overcome this kind of savagery. Not once and for all, because that is impossible, but here in our own world. The task is ours and the time is now.
“Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.”
