flotsam & jetsam

“We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary — or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro and incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?”

“But the more I live the more I can get beyond that - I mean the feeling of humiliation with its constant reaction of bitterness. I have gotten a better slant on people - that is, I don’t expect too much of them, don’t overestimate them. The root of all idealism! With its consequent guilt-sin-neurosis circle of viciousness. I don’t accept the world, and never will, I suppose - but I can live in it! Maybe that’s something. And furthermore I won’t have my books being an excuse for not living. I’m not going to live vicariously, in Art. How to live accordingly, and not be a hypocrite, not surrender, is in itself an art.”

“They say one gets mystical when he is hungry and starved - but I get practical and cunning.”

“Everything is a twenty-four hour service, whether it is necessary or not. Your things come back so fast you don’t have time to earn the money to pay for this service you don’t need. […] You get trimmed coming and going. You are in the sausage machine and there is no way out - unless you take a boat and go somewhere else. Even then you can’t be sure because the whole fucking world is going a hundred percent American. It’s a disease.”

“A really great book starts in the midriff and works outward. It starts vitally and ends vitally. It is vital through and through. The architecture comes about not through a desire to fill space but because hunger and faith demand an edifice, a testimony, a concrete symbol and resting place.”

“[…] the great change which has come over us - of America particularly - is the change of tempo. Even then we were not back in the days of the horse and buggy, of the narrow cinder path where the bicyclists wheeled along on Sunday mornings. We were in 1920, let us say, or perhaps a little earlier. But with every year that elapses since the war the pace grows sharper, the music more strident, the manners more gauche. We are being screwed up to a pitch where with every slightest turn we create a rasping noise. The machines are well oiled, but not ourselves.”

“True, I originally wanted to keep the real names; it would have been much better. But I haven’t got the right to do that, as far as I can see. I don’t mind what anybody writes about me - but then I’m rather unique in that way. Other people are still sensitive about themselves.”