By: Julia VinogradPhotographer: Richard MisrachText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI have seen screams deserted by their owners, wandering the streets looking for a way home, any home. I have seen torn off masks with parts of faces still twitching inside them. I h
The higher aims of “technological progress” are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in “the future.” — Wendell BerryThe various reductions I have been describing are fairly directly the results of the ongoing revolution of
By: Charles BukowskiText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI believe that I love sleep much more than anybody I’ve ever met. I have the ability to sleep for 2 or 3 days and nights. I will go to bed at any given moment. I often confused my girlfriends this way— say it
By: Italo Calvino“What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”― Italo CalvinoIn the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Read more
By: Henry David Thoreau“Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” ― Henry David ThoreauText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWe must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, bu
By: Erik Rittenberry"Melancholy" (1892) By Edvard Munch“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”― Wendell BerryYou don’t have to be a jaundiced cynic to look around and reach the unfortunate conclusion that the world we inhabit is unraveling at a feverish pace. I
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”― Joseph CampbellJoseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American mythologist, writer, and lecturer who is best known for his groundbreaking work in the field of comparative mythology and the exploration of the human experience through the lens of
By: Oscar WildeAll art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vi
By: Tom RussellEdward Abbey in 1987, two years before his death. “I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree,” he’d written. (Photo: LA Times/Getty)Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt was in the town of Tucson in
“America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.”― Jea
It’d be hard to find a more book-devouring savage in the music world than the great Tom Waits. Of course, we all know Waits as a gravel-voiced poet of the back alleys and broken-down bars, but he was also a bookworm with an insatiable thirst for the written word. He’d spent much of his life reading
And the World's Getting WorseYou know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed. —James HillmanWe’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World’s Getting Worse (1992) is a provocative, conversational critique of modern p
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.—Anais NinI like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by n
By: Allen GinsbergRecent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator. The suppression of contemplat
“And then along came Hemingway. What a thrill! He knew how to lay down a line. It was a joy. Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.” ― Charles Bukow
By: Jack GilbertPhoto: Maurice TabardThe Lord gives everything and chargesby taking it back. What a bargain.Like being young for a while. We areallowed to visit hearts of women,to go into their bodies so we feelno longer alone. We are permittedromantic love with its bounty and half-lifeof two years.
By: Jack MichelineText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published It was attributed to Van Gogh that he said before he shot himself that there was “No Order in Life.” His mind burn- ing colors, deep red and yellows opening modern art to the Twentieth century. Damn the critic
By: Miguel de Unamuno, 1864 – 1936CARL GUSTAV CARUS - FAUST IN HIS STUDY, 1851Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt is night, in my study. The deepest solitude; I hear the steady shudder in my breast —for it feels all alone, and blanched by my mind— and I hear my
By: Robert Pogue HarrisonHow deeply do we live? How fundamentally do we live? Lying on the other side of the great stream of the Atlantic Ocean, America once held out the promise of a land on which to base a new ethos, or mode of dwelling on earth. No such luck. The oceans that separate also unite,
Poetry shouldn’t tell us what we already know, though of course it can revive what we think we know. A durable poet, the rarest of all birds, has a unique point of view and the gift of language to express it. The unique point of view can often come from a mental or physical deformity. Deep within us
