"Yes," said August, his voice like a dustpan full of ceramic lobsters tossed down an elevator shaft. -- Rob Swigart, A.K.A -- A Cosmic Fable, 1978. Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird-- Tom Wolfe, From Bahaus to Our House, 1980. We must, however, keep our historical perspective in thinking of India; we too were once in the Middle Ages, and preferred mysticism to science, priestcraft to plutocracy -- and may do likewise again. We cannot judge these mystics, for our judgements in the West are usually based upon corporeal experience and material results, which seem irrelevant and superficial to the Hindu saint. What if war and power, wealth and conquest, were only surface illusions, unworthy of a mature mind? What if this science of hypothetical atoms and genes, of whimsical protons and cells, of gases generating Shakespeares and chemicals fusing into Christ, were only one more faith, and one of the strangest, more incredible and most transitory of all? The East, resentful of subjection and poverty, may go in for science and industry at the very time when the children of the West, sick of machines that impoverish them and of sciences that disillusion them, may destroy their cities and their machines in chaotic revolution or war, go back, beaten, weary and starving, to the soil, and forge for themselves another mystic faith to give them courage in the face of hunger, cruelty, injustice and death. There is no humorist like history. -- Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, 1935. We don't know whether human music will mean anything to nonhuman intellegences on other planets. But any creature that comes across Voyager and recognizes the record as an artifact can realize that it was dispatched with no hope of return. That gesture may speak more clearly than music. It says: However primitive we seem, however crude this spacecraft, we knew enough to envision ourselves citizens of the cosmos. It says: However small we were, something in us was large enough to want to reach out to discoverers unknown, in times when we shall have perished or changed beyond recognition. It says: Whoever and whatever you are, we too once lived in this house of stars, and we thought of you. -- Timothy Ferris, "Voyager's Music," from Murmers of Earth, 1978. And so Fantine was buried in the common grave of the cemetary, which is for everybody and for all, and in which the poor are lost. Happily, God knows where to find the soul. Fantine was laid away in the darkness with bodies which had no name; she suffered the promiscuity of dust. She was thrown into the public pit. Her tomb was like her bed.-- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862. The lavish pulses and streams of love died into the warm deep sleep of exhausted lovers: Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry, Americans, slumbering in wedlock in the Palace Hotel outside Lisbon, on a January night of 1941, one of the more than two thousand nights of the Second World War, when so much of mankind slept so badly.-- Herman Wouk, The Winds of War, 1971. BERNSTEIN: Well, you're pretty young, Mr. . . . Mr. Thompson. A fella'd remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day back in 1896 I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry. And as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in. And on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol. And I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all. But I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.-- Herman Mankowitz and Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, 1941. It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's that by unskilful fisherman it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valient chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin, crowding all sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase. Oh! many are the Fin-Back's, and many are the Dericks, my friend.-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851. The trouble with steamboating is, there's too much of it. You can't get away from it. In the morning when the barges were wet with the dew and the hot cakes downed in Karo, all good high school graduates were sitting in clean buses reading the box scores on the night games, but we were on our knees scrubbing the pilothouse floor; at noon, when the boys were hard at the egg salad sandwiches at Walgreen's and the girls were sipping their iced tea, we lay down in our dirty bunks to listen to the luncheon music of the Diesels; in the evening, when the marquee lights commenced to twinkle in the streets and the couples strolled past the dime store windows, we arose from our sad blankets and went at it again. And in the middle of the night, when the kids were asleep in their trundle beds, the clock ticking in the kitchen and the mice making merry in the breadbox, we were still at it, pumping the barges, painting the hold, mumbling, spitting, rolling cigarettes, wondering what was doing on Main Street, and feeling sorry for ourselves. And it was a dismal feeling when we passed some little river town in the early evening and heard a bicycle bell under the trees.-- Richard Bissell, A Stretch on the River, 1950. The whole idea of government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it. And here, in small-town New Hampshire, in this veritable world's capital of probity, we were about to commit just such a theft. If we could collect sufficient votes in favor of special town meetings about sewers, we could make a golf course and condominium complex disappear for free. We were going to use our suffrage to steal a fellow citizen's property rights. We weren't even going to take the manly risk of holding him up at gunpoint. Not that there is anything wrong with our limiting growth. If we Blatherboro residents don't want a golf course and condominium complex, we can go buy that land and not build them. Of course, to buy the land, we'd have to borrow money from the bank, and to pay the bank loan, we'd have to do something profitable with the land, something like . . . build a golf course and condominium complex. Well, at least that would be constructive. We would be adding something -- if only golf -- to the sum of civilizations's accomplishments. Better to build a golf course right through the Redwood National Park and condominiums on top of the Lincoln Memorial than to sit in council gorging on the liberties of others, gobbling their material substance, eating freedom. What we were trying to do with our legislation in the Blatherboro Town Meeting was wanton, cheap and greedy -- a sluttish thing. This should come as no surprise. Authority has always attracted the lowest elements of the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores.   The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us. --P. J. O'Rourke, Parliament of  Whores, 1991      Back to the Home Page | E-Mail Me | Sign the Guestbook ©1995 - 2003 Scott P. Cook This page last updated April 11, 2009