Wendell Berry

From Wendell Berry's wonderful new book on poet William Carlos Williams:

"...the metaphor of the machine has grown upon us until it has ceased to be a metaphor and has become an equation or an identity, so that organisms, including our minds and the world itself, are now conventionally spoken of as machines, and this has helped to make us cold-hearted and destructive."

"When you are mindful of all that is involved in the making of a poem, schools of criticism and schools of composition, whatever their uses, will look small in the presence of poetry itself and of the good poems you know. The only equipment at all equal to those presences is the human mind, complete: imagination, intelligence, reason, instincts, senses, shared knowledge and loyalties, and the personal furniture of experience, memory, history, and culture. And insofar as that mind is conscious, it will be conscious of mysteries, of being baffled."

"As Williams saw, as anybody who looks can now see, it is precisely in their granting of priority to ideas over things and over the world that the universities have failed us, for that priority is established and maintained by the industrial technology that oppresses and exploits the material world and all its bodies."

Heidegger on Encountering the Thought of Another

From Martin Heidegger's What is Called Thinking? (1954):

"One thing is necessary, though, for a face-to-face converse with the thinkers: clarity about the manner in which we encounter them. Basically, there are only two possibilities: either to go to their encounter, or to go counter to them. If we want to go to the encounter of a thinker's thought, we must magnify still further what is great in him. Then we will enter into what is unthought in his thought. If we wish only to go counter to a thinker's thought, this wish must have minimized beforehand what is great in him. We then shift his thought into the commonplaces of our know-it-all presumption. It makes no difference if we assert in passing that Kant was nonetheless a very significant thinker. Such praises from below are always an insult."

Or as Bob Dylan put it, "please don't underestimate me, and I won't underestimate you."

Ivan Illich on Irrational Consistencies

From Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971):

"Irrational consistency mesmerizes accomplices who are engaged in mutually expedient and disciplined exploitation. It is the logic generated by bureaucratic behavior. And it becomes the logic of a society which demands that the managers of its educational institutions be held publicly accountable for the behavioral modification they produce in their clients."

Kieslowski on America

From director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Kieslowski on Kieslowski. A cartesian meditation on American cities and highways:

"I'm afraid of America. Whenever I'm in New York I always have the feeling it's going to cave in and all I can think about is how to avoid being there when that happens. The same goes for other places in America. You don't get all those people and all that noise in the streets of California as you do in New York but, in turn, there's a huge number of cars going to and fro and I always have serious doubts as to whether there are any Americans inside. You know, who's inside? I've always got the impression that those cars drive themselves... ."

Cage on Life Without Art

From David Revill's revelatory Cage biography, The Roaring Silence:

"I can imagine a world without art, and it would not be a bad place. If there were a part of life dark enough to keep out of it a light from art, I would want to be in that darkness, fumbling around if necessary, but alive."

John Cage

Cyberspace Cowboys

From Democracy Inc.--Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism: "Outer space was soon overshadowed by the discovery of "cyberspace," the domain where [Jackson] Turner's fromtier thesis took on new meaning as its champions proclaimed that democracy had been reinvented. A band of young pioneers, personified in Bill Gates, explored and exploited a hitherto unknown world where physical power was irrelevant. The new frontiersmen were enterprising in the extreme, hypercompetitive, ruthless in their methods ("take no prisoners"), and able to create staggering amounts of wealth in a relatively brief time. Above all they invented forms of technology that appeared to have the potential for endless innovation: Turner's utopia, a frontier land that, like the universe, appeared to have no borders. Predictably, the introduction of the Internet was hailed as the perfect expression of democracy: that everyone could enter the Web and voice whatever happened to be on his or her mind=democracy.

Thomas Merton on Poetry

Thomas Merton invokes "the solidarity of poets" as a defense of the innocence of wonder and of art. From Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable.

"The Solidarity of poets is not planned and welded together with tactical convictions or matters of policy, since these are affairs of prejudice, cunning, and design. Whatever his failures, the poet is not a cunning man. His art depends on an ingrained innocence which he would lose in business, in politics, or in too organized a form of academic life. The hope that rests on calculation has lost its innocence. We are banding together to defend our innocence."