Nietzsche, Friedrich

The most acutely suffering animal on earth invented laughter.

from the Antichrist

Mankind does not represent a development of the better or the stronger or the higher in the way that it is believed today. `Progress' is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea. The European of today is of far less value that the European of the Renaissance; onward development is not by any means, by any necessity the same thing as elevation, advance, strengthening.

The word `Christianity' is already a misunderstanding--in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross. The `Evangel' died on the Cross. What was called `Evangel' from this moment onwards was already the opposite of what he had lived: `bad tidings,' a dysangel. It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a `belief,' perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian.

from Nachlass

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently; the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for the music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Olivier, Lawrence

A paraphrase from memory of a story I heard on PBS radio told by Sir Laurence Olivier with a Jewish accent:

This is a story about a poor, wretched Jew named Daniel who lived in the darkness of the Polish shtetl during the first years of this century. The shtetl, as you know, was the meager piece of earth that was reserved, out of the necessity after all of finding some place no matter how desolate, for the children of Abraham and Isaac - that stubborn people who despite every effort to convince them otherwise maintained the belief that their duty lay in reciting the age old prayer, the Shema: Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one! Blessed is His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.

Daniel recited it, too. But shall we say their was more of respect than piety in his observances? For Daniel was a representative of that new breed of men who had heard the furtive whisperings of socialism in the dark alleys and sweat shops of the town. The word socialism was practically itself the long awaited Messiah for the downtrodden Jews of that long ago day, and Daniel was no exception. The trouble was that the messiah was only a rumor on the wind, and nobody had yet seen it in reality. And in the meantime, the daily grind continued. At least for Daniel's father, who was a pious Jew, the world offered its condolences through the hundred and one simple pleasures through which God speaks to the simple. Every morning when he woke, Daniel's father would go to the window, breathe deeply and say with a smile, "Good morning, O my God!" Daniel would wake and say, "Oh my God what a morning!"

One night a dream came to Daniel. He was walking in a strange city, which seemed to be a very great city, along the banks of a great river and under a high and magnificent bridge. He came to a stop and heard a voice very plainly say to him: "Daniel, this is the city of Vienna, and this river is the Danube. Under your feet is buried a treasure. You have only to come and dig it up to make it your own."

Well, Daniel awoke baffled by the eery clarity of the dream which did nothing however to erase its absurdity. In fact, he gave no thought whatever to the idea of going to Vienna to find a treasure.

But he had the same exact dream the next night. Naturally, this produced just about precisely twice the amount of bafflement, but still Daniel gave no thought whatever to Vienna. It could not have been different in his case. Poor Jews from Polond did not take holiday in Vienna. Poor Jews had no papers to travel. Nor money to travel. Especially when it was about a dream. No, Vienna did not enter into his thoughts. It was only that the dream was troubling for some reason.

And the next night it was troubling again. And this time the voice had said, "What! Daniel! Still in bed in Poland, with a treasure waiting for you in Vienna?"

For two weeks, the dream came every night. Eventually the voice was becoming less polite and even edged toward sarcasm: "Daniel! What is it going to take, an engraved invitation?"

Daniel couldn't bear it any more. He told his father, and together they consulted, of course, the rabbi.

The rabbi didn't criticize or laugh, or suggest medicine and bedrest. He took Daniel and the dream very seriously, to everyone else's surprise, and he declared that Daniel would have to make preparations to go to Vienna. Papers could be forged under an assumed name. As for money, the old man took an old key from his desk, opened the small box which contained the pathetic treasury of his congregation, and gave Daniel enough money to make everything possible.

Daniel was flabbergasted. But soon everything was arranged. In a new suit, under a new name he boarded a train for Austria. Customs officials gave him nary a glance. He found himself walking in the city he recognized from his dream, along the banks of the same river, under the same bridge. He had chosen a late hour when no passing citizens would see his figure stooped low over a shovle and digging in the ground.

Unfortunately, he was noticed, by the guards on the bridge. "Hey you! What are you doing down there?" they called out. And unfortunately again, it had hours before been raining, and the ground was muddy and slippery. Surprised and alarmed by the voices of the guards, Daniel lost his balance as he came down on the shovel with his foot, and together with the shovel he went tumbling down the banks and into the river. Of course you know that the Danube is not blue, that it is dirty and grey, and bitterly cold. Poor Daniel, alas, could not even swim.

"Help, help!" he cried in desparation trying to stay afloat. The water was fast and overpowered him. The guards laughed and pointed hilariously at him. At this, gulping wate, he managed to shout "Death to the damned Archduke!!!"

That was a challenge that simply could not be ignored. Little as they desired to get muddy and wet fishing a nefarious stranger out of the water, still, it had to be done. And when they'd got him, and drained his lungs of the water, and revived him, they beat him to within a day of his life and dragged him back to the barracks to be dealt with by their superior officer.

Daniel lay shivering on the floor, his clothes in shreds, his body bloodied. The officer was immaculately dressed and stood stiffly in front of him. In the voice of one of those jaded men of the world who view the opportunity to exercise ultimate power over another human as a welcome diversion from the tedium of life, he said, "We would be so grateful to hear from you what you were doing digging under that bridge, since you are obviously a foreign spy and looking for something. Won't you be so kind as to tell us what it is. . . before we shoot you."

Daniel, as you can imagine, was in no mood to be shot. Had he asked to come to Vienna? Had he deserved to have a dream night after night. Without hesitation, he told the officer the complete truth, including his real name, and that he was only a poor Jew from Poland, and that he had had a dream. He told everything.

The officer and his men grew more and more amused as Daniel went on. When he'd finished, the officer looked at him with scorn.

"You filthy Jews!" he said with contempt, one eye blinking madly behind his monocle. "Why not leave the middle ages and live with the rest of us in the modern world? Look at me! I am an educated man. A man of culture. One cannot control dreams. I myself have had a dream. Believe it or not! I have been having a very similar dream every single night for the last two weeks, and it is always the same. I am in a tiny Jewish village in Poland, in the dirty little house of a poor Jew named Daniel, and I’m standing in front of the stove. A voice comes to me, saying `Beneath this stove there is a treasure. It is for you. You have only to come and claim it.' Now do you think that I would rush away, get on a train and go looking for a Jew named Daniel in Poland. Why there must be a thousand such Daniels in Poland. Look at me! I am an educated, a cultured man. Obviously, you are no spy. You are pitiful. Go. Leave Vienna. Go home, but go fast before I change my mind and shoot you anyway!"

Daniel didn't waste any time. That very night, he was back on the train to Poland, and in two days back in the shtetl of his birth, and running up the stairs to his house. His father greeted him, but he pushed him aside. Like a madman, he rushed to the stove. Dragging it across the floor, he cleared the old wooden planks which covered what he dared hope would be...

Indeed a treasure was buried in the floor. Perhaps not a great treasure, but a vast sum for a poor Polish Jew. The rabbi and the congregation made a handsome profit, and Daniel and his family used the money to come to America and settle comfortably in the new world, thereby escaping the holocaust which otherwise would have devoured them.

There are two morals to this story. One, always follow your dreams. The other, our treasure is often right under our nose, but sometimes we have to leave home to find it.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose

from "On Point of View in the Arts",

reprinted in Writers on Artists, ed. by Daniel Halpern

2. In the museum we find the lacquered corpse of an evolution. Here is the flux of that pictorial anxiety which has budded forth from man century after century. To conserve this evolution, it has had to be undone, broken up, converted into fragments again and congealed as in a refrigerator. Each picture is a crystal with unmistakable and rigid edges, separated from the others, a hermetic island.

And, nonetheless, it is a corpse we could easily revive. We would need only to arrange the pictures in a certain order and then move the eye - or the mind's eye - quickly from one to the other. Then, it would become clear that the evolution of painting from Giotto to our own time is a unique and simple action with a beginning and an end. It is surprising that so elementary a law has guided the variations of pictorial art in our Western world. Even more curuous, and most disturbing, is the analogy of this law with that which has directed the course of European philosophy. This parallel between the two most widely separated disciplines of culture permits us to suspect the existence of an even more general principle which has been active in theentire evolution of the European mind....

3. Movement implies a mover. In the evolution of painting, what is it that moves? Each canvas is an instant in which the mover stands fixed. What is this? Do not look for something very complicated. The thing that varies, the thing that shifts in painting, and which by its shifts produces the diversity of aspects and styles, is simply the painter's point of view.

...

Nonetheless, it is not the geodetic quantity of distance which decisively influences the painter's point of view, but its optical quality. "Near" and "far" are relative, metrically, while to the eye they may have a kind of absolute value. Indeed, the proximate vision and the distant vision of which physiology speaks are not notions that depend chiefly on measurable factors, but are rather two distinct ways of seeing.

If we take up an object, an earthen jar, for example, and bring it near enough to the eyes, these converge on it. Then, the field of vision assumes a peculiar structure. In the center there is the favored object, fixed by our gaze; its form seems clear, perfectly defined in all its details. Around the object, as far as the limits of the field of vision, there is a zone we do not look at, but which, nevertheless, we see with an indirect, vague, inattentive vision. Everything within this zone seems to be situated behind the object; this is why we call it the "background." But, moreover, this whole background is blurred, hardly identifiable, without accented form, reduced to confused masses of color. If it is not something to which we are accustomed, we cannot say what it is, exactly, that we see in this indirect vision.

The proximate vision, then, organizes the whole field of vision, imposing upon it an optical hierarchy: a privileged central nucleus articulates itself against the surrounding area. The central object is a luminous hero, a protagonist standing out against a "mass," a visual plebs, and surrounded by a cosmic chorus.

Compare this with distant vision. Instead of fixing a proximate object, let the eye, passive but free, prolong its line vision to the limit of the visual field. What do we find then? The structure of our hierarchized elements disappears. The ocular field is homogeneous; we do not see one thing clearly and the rest confusedly, for all are submerged in an optical democracy. Nothing possesses a sharp profile; everything is background, confused, almost formless. On the other hand, the duality of proximate vision is succeeded by a perfect unity of the whole visual field.

4. To these different modes of seeing, we must add another more important one.

In looking close-up at our earthen jar, the eye-beam strikes the most prominent part of its bulge. Then, as if shattered at this point of contact, the beam is splintered into multiple lines which glide around the sides of the vase and seem to embrace it, to take possession of it, to emphasize its rotundity. Thus the object seen at close Then, as if shattered at this point of contact, the beam is splintered into multiple lines which glide around the sides of the vase and seem to embrace it, to take possession of it, to emphasize its rotundity. Thus the object seen at close range acquires the indefinable corporeality and solidity of filled volume. We see it "in bul," convexly. But this same object placed farther away, for distant vision, loses this corporeality, this solidity and plentitude. Now it is no longer a compact mass, clearly rotund, with its protuberance and curving flanks; it has lost "bulk," and become, rather, an insubstantial surface, an unbodied spectre composed only of light.

...

5. A final and decisive observation.

When we oppose proximate to distant vision, we do not mean that in the latter the object is farther away. To look means here, speaking narrowly, to focus both ocular rays on a point which, thanks to this, becomes favored, optically privileged. In distant vision we do not fix the gaze on any point, but rather attempt to embrace the whole field, including its boundaries. For this reason, we avoid focusing the eyes as much as possible. And then we are surprised to find that the object just perceived - our entire visual field - is concave. If we are in a house the concavity is bordered by the walls, the roof, the floor. This border or limit is a surface that tends to take the form of a hemisphere viewed from within. But where does the concavity begin? There is no possibility of doubt: it begins at our eyes themselves.

The result is that what we see at a distance is hollow space as such. The content of perception is not strictly the surface in which the hollow space terminates, but rather the whole hollow space itself, from the eyeball to the wall or the horizon.

This fact obliges us to recognize the following paradox: the object of sight is not farther off in distant than in proximate vision, but on the contrary is nearer, since it begins at our cornea. In pure distant vision, our attention, instead of being directed farther away, has drawn back to the absolutely proximate, and the eyebeam, instead of striking the convexity of a solid body and staying fixed on it, penetrates a concave object, glides into a hollow.

6. Throughout the history of the arts in Europe, then, the painter's point of view has been changing from proximate to distant vision, and painting, correspondingly, which begins with Giotto as painting of bulk, turns into painting of hollow space.

This means there has been nothing capricious in the itinerary followed by the painter's shift of attention. First it is fixed upon the body or volume of an object, then upon what lies between the body of the object and the eye, that is, the hollow space. And since the latter is in front of the object, it follows that the journey of the pictorial gaze is a retrogression from the distant - although close by - toward what is contiguous to the eye.

According to this, the evolution of Western painting would consist in a retraction from the object toward the subject, the painter.

11. ...

Proximate vision dissociates, analyzes, distinguishes - it is feudal. Distant vision synthesizes, combines, throws together - it is democratic. The point of view becomes synopsis. The painting of bulk has been definitively transformed into the painting of hollow space.

12. ...

The premises formulated in our first paragraphs may seem to imply that the evolution had terminated when we arrive at the painting of hollow space. The point of view, transforming itself from the multiple and proximate to the single and distant, appears to have exhausted its possible itinerary. Not at all! We shall see that it may retreat even closer to the subject. From 1870 until today, the shift of viewpoint has continued, and these latest stages, precisely because of their surprising and paradoxical character, confirm the fatal law to which I alluded at the beginning. The artist, starting from the world about him, ends by withdrawing into himself.

...Now to look at something with the central ray of the eye is what is known as direct vision or vision in modo recto. But behind the axial ray the pupil sends out many others at oblique angles, enabling us to see in modo obliquo. The impression of concavity is derived from the modo recto. If we eliminate this - for example, by blinking the eyes - we have only oblique vision, those side-views "from the tail of the eye" which represent the height of disdain. Thus, the third dimension disappears and the field of vision tends to convert itself entirely into surface.

This is what the successive impressionisms have done....Painting tends to become planimetric, like the canvas on which one paints. One arrives, then, at the elimination of all tactile and corporeal resonance. At the same time, the atomization of things in oblique vision is such that almost nothing remains of them. Figures tend to be unrecognizable. Instead of Painting objects as they are seen, one paints the experience of seeing. Instead of an object an impression, that is, a mass of sensations. Art, with this, has withdrawn itself completely from the world and begins to concern itself with the activity of the subject. Sensations are no longer things in any sense; they are subjective states through which and by means of which things appear.

Let us be sure we understand the extent of this change in the point of view. It would seem that in fixing upon the object nearest the cornea, the point of view is as close as possible to the subject and as far as possible from things. But no - the inexorable retreat continues. Not halting even at the cornea, the point of view crosses the last frontier and penetrates into vision itself, into the subject himself.

13. Cubism

Cezanne, in the midst of his impressionist tradition, discovers volume. Cubes, cylinders, cones begin to emerge on his canvases. A careless observer might have supposed that, with its evolution exhausted, pictorial art had begun all over again and that we had relapsed back to the point of view of Giotto. Not at all! In the history of art there have always been eccentric movements tending toward the archaic. Nevertheless, the main stream flows over them and continues its inevitable course.

The cubism of Cezanne and of those who, in effect, were cubists, that is, stereometrists, is onoy one step more in the internalizing of painting. Sensation, the theme of impressionism, are subjective states; as such, realities, effective modifications of the subject. But still further within the subject are found the ideas. And ideas, too, are realities present in the individual, but they differ from sensations in that their content - the ideated - is unreal and sometimes even impossible. When I conceive a strictly geometrical cylinder, my thought is an effective act that takes place in me; but the geometric cylinder of which I think is unreal. Ideas, then, are subjective realities that contain virtual objects, a whole specific world of a new sort, distinct from the world revealed by the eye, and which emerges miraculously from the psychic depths.

Clearly, then, there is no connection between the masses evoked by Cezanne and those of Giotto; they are, rather, antagonists. Giotto seeks to render the actual volume of each thing, its immediate and tangible corporeality. Before his time, one knew only the Byzantine two-dimensional image. Cezanne, on the other hand, substitutes for the bodies of things non-existent volumes of his own invention, to which real bodies have only a metaphorical relationship. After Cezanne, painting only paints ideas - which, certainly, are also objects, but ideal objects, immanent to the subject or intrasubjective.

...

This equivocal cubism is only a special manner within contemporary expressionism. In the impression, we reached the minimum of exterior objectivity. A new shift in the point of view was possible only if, leaping behind the retina - a tenuous frontier between the external and internal - painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects. Note how, by a simple advance ofthe point of view along the same trajectory it has followed from the beginning, it arrives at an inverse result. The eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them; now, they are reservoirs of irreality.

It is possible that present-day art has little aesthetic value; but he who sees in it only a caprice may be very sure indeed that he has not understood either the new art or the old. Evolution has conducted painting - and art in general - inexorably, fatally, to what it is today.

14. The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing simplicity. First, things are painted; then sensations; finally, ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a straight line.

Now, Occidental philosophy has followed an identical route, and this coincidence makes our law even more disturbing.

Let us annotate briefly this strange parallelism.

The painter begins by asking himself what elements ofthe universe ought to be translated onto canvas, that is, what class of phenomena is pictorially essential. The philosopher, for his part, asks what class of objects is fundamental. A philosophical system is an effort to reconstruct the universe conceptually, taking as a point of departure a certain type of fact considered as the firmest and most secure. Each epoch of philosophy has preferred a distinct type, and upon this has built the rest of the construction.

In the time of Giotto, painter of solid and independent bodies, philosophy believed that the ultimate and definitive reality were individual substances. Examples given of such substances in the schools were: this horse, this man. Why did one believe to have discovered in these the ultimate metaphysical value? Simply because in the practical and natural idea of the world, every horse and every man seems to have an existence of his own, independent of other things and of the mind that contemplates them. The horse lives by himself, complete and perfect, according to his mysterious inner energy; if we wish to know him, our senses, our understanding must go to him and turn humbly, as it were, in his orbit. This, then, is the substantialist realism of Dante, a twin brother to the painting of bulk initiated by Giotto.

Let us jump to the year 1600, the epoch in which the painting of hollow space began. Philosophy is in the power of Descartes. What is cosmic reality for him? Multiple and independent substances disintegrate. In the foreground of metaphysics there is a single substance - an empty substance - a kind of metaphysical hollow space that now takes on a magical creative power. For Descartes, the real is space, as for Velasquez it is hollow space.

After Descartes, the plurality of substance reappears for a moment in Leibniz. These substances are no longer corporeal principles, but quite the reverse: the monads are subjects, and the role of each - a curious symptom - is none other than to represent a "point de vue." For the first time in the history of philosophy we hear a formal demand that science be a system which submits the universe to a point of view. The monad does nothing but provide a metaphysical situs for this unity of vision.

In the two centuries that follow, subjectivism becomes increasingly radical, and toward 1880, while the impressionists were putting pure sensations on canvas, the philosophers of extreme positivism were reducing universal reality to pure sensations.

The preogressive dis-realization of the world, which began in the philosophy of the Renaissance, reaches its extreme consequences in the radical sensationalism of Avenarius and Mach. How can this continue? Wht new philosophy is possible? A return to primitive realism is unthinkable; four centuries of criticism, of doubt, of suspicion, have made this attitude forever untenable. To remain in our subjectivism is equally impossible. Where shall we find the material to reconstruct the world?

The philosopher retracts his attention even more and, instead of directing it to the subjective as such, fixes on what up to now has been called "the contend of consciousness," that is the intrasubjective. There may be no corresponding reality to what our ideas project and what our thoughts think; but this does not make them purely subjective. A world of hallucination would not be real, but neither would it fail to be a world, an objective universe, full of sense and perfection. Although the imaginary centaur does not really gallop, tail and mane in the wind, across real prairies, he has a peculiar independence with regard to the subject that imagines him. He is a virtual object or, as the most recent philosophy expresses it, an ideal object. This is the type of phenomena which the thinker of our times considers most adequate as a basis for his universal system. Can we fail to be surprised at the coincidence between such a philosophy and its synchronous art, known as expressionism or cubism? (page 378)

Orwell, George

from 1984

Oceania has no capital and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows.

from I Corinthians 13,

as adapted by George Orwell

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbol. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. . . Money never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

Pascal Pascal

from the Pensees

What sort of a freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe.

Petras, James

from Socialism" Under the Market

in Against the Current, May/June 1989

"Economic reformers," as the Western and Eastern apologists describe them, are in effect capitalist restorationists who are challenging the residual progressive socio-economic changes resulting from the revolution. The class lines are being drawn in the East between the managerial supporters of the market and working-class defenders of democratic collectivism. It is time for those on the left in the West to also define themselves, because historical experience is demonstrating that one cannot be for both the market and socialism.

Plato

from Critias, III

Contemporary Attica may accurately be described as a mere relic of the original country. There has been a constant movement of soil away from the high ground and what remains is like the skeleton of a body emaciated by disease. All the rich soil has melted away, leaving a country of skin and bone. Originally the mountains of Attica were heavily forested. Fine trees produced timber suitable for roofing the largest buildings; the roofs hewn from this timber are still in existence. The country produced boundless feed for cattle. There are some mountains wchich had trees not so very long ago, that now have nothing but bee pastures. The annual rainfall was not lost, as it is now, through being allowed to run over the denuded surface to the sea. It was absorbed by the ground and stored...the drainage from the high ground was collected in this way and discharged into the hollows as springs and rivers with abundant flow and a wide territorial distribution. Shrines remain at dried up water sources as witness to this.

Plomer, William

from Turbot Wolfe

"...I thought then, as I think now, that trade is like art. Art is to the artist and trade is to the tradesman. I think the greatest illusion I know is that trade has anything to do with customers. It must have been so long ago, almost before history I should think, so very long ago quite plain that you must never, if you are to be a success in trade, in art, in politics, in life itself, you must give people what they want. Give them what you want them to want. Then you are safe.

Pousseur

from The Question of Order in New Music

Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory

Precisely where the most abstract constructions have been applied, it is not seldom that one has the impression of finding oneself in the presence of consequences of an aleatory free play.

Proust, Marcel

from Chardin: The Essence of Things

reprinted in Writers on Artists, ed. by Daniel Halpern

Take a yound man of modest means with artistic taste, sitting in the family dining-room at that commonplace, dreary moment before the table has been completely cleared. His imagination full of the glory of museums, cathedrals, the sea, the mountains, he looks with distaste and boredom, with a sensation approaching disgust, a feeling not far from depression, at one last knife, lying next to an underdone, unsavory cutlet on a half-removed tablecloth that drags on the floor. A ray of sunshine, alighting on the sideboard, resting gaily on a glass of water still nearly full after having quenched someone's thirst, accentuates as cruelly as an ironic laugh the everyday banality of this unaesthetic sight. At the other end of the room, the yound man sees his mother already settled down to her work, slowly unwinding, with her customary calm, a skein of red wool. And behind her, perched on a cupboard, next to a porcelain platter reserved for "company," a compact, fat cat seems like the petty evil genius of this scene of domestic mediocrity.

The young man looks away. His eyes fall on the brilliant, highly polished silver platters, and down below them, on the flaming andirons. Even more irritated by the order than by the disorder of the room and the table, he envies those men of wealth and taste who move only among beautiful objects, in rooms where everything, from the tongs to the doorknob, is a work of art. He curses these ugly surroundings, ashamed of having spent a quarter of an hour experiencing not so much a sense of shame as disgust and a sort of fascination. He gets up, and if he cannot take a train to Holland or to Italy, goes to the Louvre to look for the visions of palaces a la Veronese, princes a la van Dyck, harbors a la Claude Lorrain which, in the evening, will serve only to aggravate the dullness of the young man's return to the daily scene in its familiar surroundings.

If I knew this young man I should not try to prevent his going to the Louvre, rather I should accompany him. But leading him through the La Caze gallery and through the gallery of eighteenth-century French painting or through the Rubens or some other French gallery, I would have him stop in front of the Chardins. And once he was dazzled by this rich painting of what he calls mediocrity, this zestful painting of a life that he finds tasteless, this great art depicting a subject that he considers mean, I would say to him: "This makes you happy, doesn't it? Yet what more have you seen here than a well-to-do middle-class woman pointing out to her daughter the mistakes she has made in her tapestry work (La Mere laborieuse); a woman carrying bread (La Pourvoyeuse); the interior of a kitchen where a live cat is trampling on some oysters while a dead fish hangs on the wall, and an already half-cleared sideboard on which some knives are scattered on the cloth (Fruits et animaux); and even less impressive, some kitchen or dining-room dishes, not only pretty ones like Dresden chocolate-pots (Ustensiles varies), but a shiny lid, all shapes and kinds of pots; sights that repel you like a dead fish sprawled on a table (La Raie) and sights that disgust you like half-emptied glasses and too many glasses left full (Fruits et animaux)?

If all of this now seems to you beautiful to look at, it is because Chardin found it beautiful to paint. And he found it beautiful to paint because he found it beautiful to look at. The pleasure you get from his painting of a room in which women are sewing, of a pantry, a kitchen, a sideboard is the pleasure he felt and caught in passing, isolated in time, deepened, immortalized, when he looked at a sideboard, a kitchen, a pantry, a room in which women are sewing....Had you not already been unconsciously experiencing the pleasure that comes from looking at a humble scene or a still-life you would not have felt it in your heart when Chardin, in his imperative and brilliant language, conjured it up. Your consciousness was too inert to descend to his depth. Your awareness had to wait until Chardin entered into the scene to raise it to his level of pleasure. Then you recognized it and, for the first time, appreciated it. If, when looking at Chardin, you can say to yourself, "This is intimate, this is comfortable, this is as living as a kitchen," then, when you are walking around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, "This is special, this is great, this is as beautiful as a Chardin." Chardin may have been merely a man who enjoyed his dining-room, among the fruits and glasses, but he was also a man with a sharper awareness, whose pleasure was so intense that it overflowed into smooth strokes, eternal colors. You, too, will be a Chardin, not so great, perhaps, but great to the extent that you love him, identify yourself with him, become like him, a person for whom metal and stoneware are living and to whom fruit speaks. And when they see how he reveals their secrets to you they will no longer avoid confiding them to you yourself. Still-life will, above all, change into life in action. Like life itself, it will always have something to say to you, some shining marvel, some mystery to reveal. Day-to-day life will delight you if for several days you pay attention to his painting as though it were a lesson: and having understood the life of his painting you will have conquered the beauty of life itself. In rooms where you see nothing but the expression of the banality of others, the reflection of your own boredom, Chardin enters like light, giving to each object its color, evoking from the eternal night that shrouded them all the essence of life, still or animated, with the meaning of its form, so striking to the eye, so obscure to the mind. Like the sleeping princess awakened, everything is restored to life, resumes its color, starts speaking to you, living, enduring. (103)

...

We have learned from Chardin that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone. The painter has proclaimed the divine equality of all things before the spirit that contemplates them, the light that embellishes them. He has brought us out of a false ideal to penetrate deeply into reality, to find therein everywhere a beauty no longer the feeble prisoner of convention or a false taste, but free, strong, universal, opening the world to us. And he lauches us on a sea of beauty. (105)

Proverbs

Itallian

Saggio funciullo e chi conosce il suo vero padre.

Latin

Salus populi suprema lex est.

Zulu

You have to go fetch the future; it's not coming toward you, it's running away.

French

Happy people have no history.

Quayle, Dan

My friends, no matter how rough the road, maybe. . . We can and we will, never, never surrender to what's right. -

Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich

from an essay

included in the Selections from the Devil's Papers in 1789, and reprinted in FMR, November 1984

(After describing the inventions of a so-called "machine man" who relies on machines for everything. He has a machine for cutting quills and a machine which makes multiple copies of everything he writes, even though he writes absolutely nothing; a calculating machine, though he never worked as an auditor; a machine for chewing food, and a `dumb waiter' for serving it; machines for performing music, and even a machine for composing it by throwing dice; a machine for uttering prayers; a machine for speaking at confession and before the freemasons; machines for threshing and sowing; a machine for standing in his place at a duel; for making weather observations; for waking him, drawing his curtains, and lighting the fire; even a machine for satisfying his wife! He goes on:)

I've already said that all this is undeniably meaningful. But I will allow myself the further pleasure of imaging what life will be like when humans have achieved a much higher level in their relationship with machines. In fact, let me imagine that we are at the most advaned level, where humans have five machines to replace the five senses. They move about by means of a mechanized walkwork or wagon. They pick up not only their arms, legs, eyes, nose, and teeth from the factory, as now, but manufacture all the other limbs and the whole torso too, and slice off a section of firehose to serve as an appendix and endow it with healthy peristaltic action.

I imagine they'll carry it still further and will relieve themselves by means of hydraulic apparatus. A human won't even retain a natural individual identity any more, but will have one carved out by technicians. This, I must say, however, is especially hard to imagine.

Nor will the animals be alive any more. Archytas, Regiomontan, and Vaucanson have already given us artificial doves, eagles, flies, and ducks, and eventually the rest of the animal kingdom will doubtless be petrified and calcified, and whole lifeless menageries will be opened up, and clever people who have read Spener will think the Day of Judgment is at hand or already past. The world will be quite abominable, Natura naturans will vanish, and nothing will remain but the natura naturata , the machines without their master.

What sort of perfections, I ask, will then adorn the earth, which now stands before us in such rags and tatters? I mean, if a good head were to look out over the earth and take inventory of its perfections and assume that a being is more perfect the more it relies on machines and the more it sees such things as arms, legs, art, memory, intelligence as lying outside itself and therefore does not see any need to drag all that along with it, and perceives that animals, which live completely without machines, are for that very reason at the lowest, dirtiest level of perfection; and that the savage, who uses a few tools, occupies a higher one; and our farmer, because he operates several machines, lays claim to a still higher one; and the great and rich people who are served by the most machines are thus at the top - with what perdections would this good, inventory-taking head find the earth to be blessed? I'll tell you: with perfect fleaism, alienation, indolence, and frivolousness. Nonbeing wed to omnipotence. But all this is unthinkable before Germany's nineteenth century.

(Johann Paul Richter (1763-1825) under the pseudonym Jean Paul was a a Platonist, a novelist and satirist who, with Herder, wrote in opposition to Kant's speculative philosophy.)

Rochefoucauld

There are good marriages, there are no delightful ones.

Romero, Archbishop Oscar

Quoted in Voices from El Salvador

by Mario Menendez Rodriguez

...Christians are not afraid to fight; they are capable of fighting, but they prefer to speak the language of peace. However, when a dictatorship seriously attacks human rights and the commonweal of the nation, when it becomes unbearable, and all channels of dialogue, understanding and rationality are closed off, when this happens, then the Church speaks of the legitimate right to insurrectional violence....Choosing the moment of insurrection, determining when all channels of dialogue are closed off, is not up to the Church....I shout this warning to the oligarchy: open your hands, give your rings, because the time will come when you will have your hands cut off. (page 84)

Rostand, Edmond

from Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano

What would you have me do?

Seek for the patronage of some great man,

And like a creeping vine on a tall tree

Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?

No thank you! Dedicate, as others do,

Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon

In the vile hope of teasing out a smile

On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad

For breakfast every morning? Make my knees

Callous, and cultivate a supple spine,--

Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust?
No thank you! Tickle the horns

Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right

Too proud to know his parner's business,

Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire

God gave me to burn incense all day long

Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you!

Shall I go leaping into ladies' laps

And licking fingers?--or--to change the form--

Navigating with madrigals for oars,

My sails full of the sighs of dowagers?

No thank you! Publish verses at my own

Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint

Of a small group of literary souls

Who dine together every Tuesday? No

I thank you! Shall I labor night and day

To build a reputation on one song,

And never write another? Shall I find

True genius only among Geniuses,

Palpitate over little paragraphs,

And struggle to insinuate my name

In the columns of the Mercury?

No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid,

Love more to make a visit than a poem,

Seek introductions, favors, influences?--

No thank you! No, I thank you! And again

I thank you!--But...

To sing, to laugh, to dream

To walk in my own way and be alone,

Free, with an eye to see things as they are,

A voice that means manhood--to cock my hat

Where I choose--At a word, a Yes, a No,

To fight--or write. To travel any road

Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt

If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne--

Never to make a line I have not heard

In my own heart; yet, with all modesty

To say: "My soul, be satisfied with flowers,

With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them

In the one garden you may call your own."

So, when I win some triumph, by some chance,

Render no share to Caesar--in a word,

I am too proud to be a parasite,

And if my nature wants the germ that grows

Towering to heaven like the mountain pine,

Or like the oak, sheltering multitudes--

I stand, not high it may be--but alone!

Le Bret

Alone, yes!--But why stand against the world?

What devil has possessed you now, to go

Everywhere making yourself enemies?

Cyrano

Watching you other people making friends

Everywhere--as a dog makes friends! I mark

The manner of these canine courtesies

And think: "My firends are of a cleaner breed;

Here comes--thank God!--another enemy!"

Le Bret

But this is madness!

Cyrano

Method, let us say.

It is my pleasure to displease. I love

Hatred. Imagine how it feels to face

The volley of a thousand angry eyes--

The bile of envy and the froth of fear

Spattering little drops about me-- You--

Good nature all around you, soft and warm--

You are like those Italians, in great cowls

Comfortable and loose-- Your chin sinks down

Into the folds, you shoulders droop. But I--

The Spanish ruff I wear around my throat

Is like a ring of enemies; hard, proud,

Each point another pride, another thorn--

So that I hold myself erect perforce

Wearing the hatred of the common herd

Haughtily, the harsh collar of Old Spain,

At once a fetter and--a halo!

Le Bret

Yes...

Tell this to all the world-- And then to me

Say very softly that ... She loves you not.

Ruth’s Story

When I was a boy living in Denver, Colorado, there was a far distant outpost in the mountains, somewhere in the Uncompahgre range in the extreme southwestern part of the state, which I had never seen myself, but which I knew about through the tale of a friend.

Now, Ruth Miller was quite elderly when I knew her (which means that her story happened sometime around the turn of the century). She played viola in the community orchestra, as did I. Together with another violinist, and a cellist, we would all meet two or three times a month to play string quartets. The music was always strictly classical, of course, and our meetings had an atmosphere of refinement, and elevated conviviality. During our breaks, we would serve refreshments, and tell stories.

Ruth told us one time about her childhood in Ouray. My atlas, dating from 1972 lists Ouray with some 700 souls. Seventy years earlier there must have been far fewer, for, only imagine, Ruth was the only child in the entire settlement.

And how she did long for the comfort and pleasure of a little friend with whom she could share her lonely days! One day, her father gave her a book of children's stories, perhaps it was Alice in Wonderland. On the cover was a photograph of a lovely little girl, with long hair and a short little summer dress, smiling with expectation into the camera as if to say, "Won't you come and play with me today?"

That little girl became Ruth's imaginary playmate; for one day the image on the book became a dream, a waking dream, and the two little girls together sat and talked. They became so well acquainted they knew absolutely everything about each others families, about the arguments they had with the mothers, and the admiration for their fathers who did such grand and important things, which of course they described to each other in minute detail. On warm sunny days, they would walk together through the wildflowers and along the banks of the stream, dreaming about famous places where they promised to meet in the future, when they would be the two best friends the world had ever known, and when they would do and enjoy everything together.

Their friendship went on for sometime. No one discouraged the freedom of imagination Ruth had learned to exploit. Then one day, an amazing thing happened. Ruth's father came home with the news that they had new neighbors, a family from the East, in upstate New York. Ruth became very excited, because her father had learned that this family also had a little girl, just about Ruth's age. Ruth's father and mother gathered some welcoming gifts, and off they went to greet the newcomers.

They were, in fact, very illustrious people, not at all the kind of people one might expect to come to the frontier, a tiny mining outpost in the Rockies. Oh, Ouray was beautiful enough to charm any sort of person. But the newly-arrived Stanley's had left behind not only the comforts and pleasures of a richly urban environment in New York: they were also leaving behind their great success in that world where they had gained wealth and fame as the inventors of the sensational Stanley Steamers, which applied the steam engine to navigation in ways that had never been done before.

The Stanley's were important people in the community. They knew political and industrial leaders, and they were supporters of the arts. They knew many artists on a level of friendship, and their daughter had even posed for a famous set of photographic portraits, which were then very popular among the early patrons of that art.

Ruth herself had seen one of those portraits, and when she stood for the first time on the Stanley doorstep, and the door opened, she was dumbfounded to find standing before her the very same little girl from the book with whom she had made such a great friendship. And Ruth did indeed become very great friends with the little Stanley girl. They were friends all through their lives.

Rybakov, Anatoli

from Children of the Arbat:

"How is Sasha?" he asked.

She was slow to reply.

"Sasha - the last letter was sent from Kansk. He was supposed to go to the village of Boguchany, but nothing has come from there yet. I don't know how he got there, on foot or what. I've looked at the map...Boguchany's on the Angara River, there's no road there, so he must have gone on foot...." She smiled suddenly. "I don't know how people are taken into exile nowadays. It used to be in Stolypin wagons, but now I don't know...."

"Sofya," Mark said reprovingly, "I know it's very hard for you, but I want you to have a clear understanding of the way things are. First of all, there's no hard labor anymore. Second, Sasha has not been sent to a camp, but into exile. I have been to see the highest authorities. They intervened, but it was impossible to do anything. The law is the law. They have something on Sasha, probably nothing very serious, but something all the same. We are living in strict times, and there's nothing to be done. He's been exhiled for three years. He'll live in a village, like millions of other people who are living in villages. He'll find himself work out there. He's young, and the three years will fly by. But you must reconcile yourself to the inevitable: you have to wait patiently and calmly and not let yourself go."

Se smiled suddenly, and then again. He knew that smile well.

"So, it wasn't such a heavy sentence, only three years," she said.

"Did I say they ought to have given him more? Sofya, be reasonable! What I'm saying is that, given the times we're living in, three years of exile is a trifle. They are shooting people, you know...."
She was still smiling and looked as if she might burst out laughing.

"So, you see....They didn't shoot him. For the little verses in the wall newspaper they didn't shoot him, for the little verses in the newspaper he only got three years' exile in Siberia - thanks very much! But what's three years, just a triflt! After all, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin only got three years' exile, and he'd been organizing armed uprisings and strikes and demonstrations, he'd published underground newspapers, traveled abroad illegally, but still, only three years, and he escaped from exile, and they resettled him for the same three years. Buit if Sasha should run away, he'd get ten years in a camp, at the very least." She had stopped smiling and was now looking at her brother straight and hard. "Yes! If the tsar had sentenced you Communists according to your laws, he'd still be on the throne for another thousand years...."

He smashed his fist down on the table. "What rubbish! You're a fool! Where did you pick that nonsense up? Stop it right now! How dare you speak that way! In front of me! Yes, we do have a dictatorship, and a dictatorship means violence, but it's the violence of the majority over the minority. Under the tsar the minority oppressed the majority, which was why the tsar didn't dare use the extreme measures that we use in the name of the people and for the people. The Revolution must defend itself, otherwise it is not worth anything. Your misery is great, but it doesn't give you the right to become a philistine. You're not thinking what you're saying. If you say that kind of thing to anyone else, you'll end up in the camps yourself. Take not of that, Sofya, if only for Sasha's sake. He shouldn't lose his mother at a time like this."

She sat and listened in silence, feelinf for crumbs with the tips of her fingers and pressing them into the table. Then clamly she said: "Listen, Mark....First of all, while you're in my home never bang the table with your fist. I don't like it. Aside from my feelings, I have neighbors and it's embarrassing: my husband used to bang on the table, and now you're doing it. It must never happen again. Bang on your own table in your office, in front of your subordinates. Please don't forget this. As for the camps, don't threaten me - I'm not afraid of anything now, I've had enough of being afraid, and that's it. They can't put everyone inside, there aren't enought prisons....~A tiny minority.' How easy it is to say it! `Millions of people are living in villages.' But have you seen how they live? Don't you remember, when you were young you used to sing ~Find me the village where the Russian peasant doesn't groan'? You sang it well, with heart, you wer good, you pitied the peasant. Why don't you pity him anymore? Who were you singing about in those days? `For the people, in the name of the people' Isn't Sasha the people? Such an honest, openhearted boy, and so believing, and they send him to Siberia. They couldn't shoot him, so they send him to Siberia instead. What's left of you songs? Prisons, exile, camps. Now you pray to your Stalin..."

Mark Alexandrovich stood up and pushed back his chair.

"My dear sister - "

"Don't make a fuss, don't get excited," she continued calmly. "Listen to what I have to say, Mark. You offered my money, but you can't buy yourself off. You've raised your sword against the innocent, against the defenseless, and you yourself will perish by the sword!" She lowered her gray head and, looking at her brother from under her brows, she pointed a finger. "And when your time comes, you'll remember Sasha, you'll think of him, but it'll be too late. You did not defend an innocent man. And there'll be nobody to defend you."

...She [Nina] and Varya were now on opposite sides of the barricades. And it was not coincidence that Sofya Alexandrovna was giving her shelter; she was also on the other side of the barricades, unable to forgive the Soviet regime for Sasha's exile. But even if that had been a mistake, the Soviet regime as such was not at fault, there wasn't a government in the world that did not make mistakes. And when a fierce class struggle was going on, and the Party was forced to liquidate the remnants of hostile parties and factions and oppositions, occasional mistakes were likely to be made. (page 543)

Sale, Kirkpatrick

from The Conquest of Paradise

The end of the world: the idea was taken quite seriously by Europe of the late fifteenth century - not as a mere conceit, not as a metaphor or theological trope, but as a somber, terrifying prediction based solidly on the divine wisdom of biblical prophecy and the felt experience of daily life. The protean German historian Egon Friedell, who calls this period the "incubation" of the Modern Age, argues that "there was a general feeling of the world's end, which, expressed or unexpressed, conscious or unconscious, permeated and dominated the whole ear." Or in the words of Joseph Grunpeck, the official historian to the Hapsburg emperor Frederick III, "When you perceive the miserable corruption of the whole of Christendom, of all praiseworthy customs, rules and laws, the wretchedness of all classes, the many pestilences, the changes in this epoch and all the strange happenings, you know that the End of the World is near. And the waters of affliction will flow over the whole of Christendom."

In such an atmosphere it is not suprising that so much of Christendom reacted with an explosion of messianic milleanrianism - Armageddon at hand, the terrible words of St. John come true ("Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth"), the reign of the Antichrist, the triumph of the serpent "which is the Devil," a thousand years of misery. The British historian Norman Cohn has filled a long book with the evidence of this strange but obviously very prevalent strain of Christianity in the late Middle Ages, and the only conclusion one can reach after his elaborate recitation is that for countless hundreds of thousands of Europeans manifestly millenarian - Ranter or Thuringian, Amaurian or Taborite, Free Spirit or Franciscan - there must have been hundreds of thousands of others resonating with the same sensibilities. (page 30)

We must begin, alas, with Europe's fear of most of the elements of the natural world - a fear based, as it always is, on simple ignorance, a benightedness among the learned sectors of Europe as well as the illiterate majority, that is shocking indeed as we look at it today.

The Church offered no encouragement for any investigation into the foreordained ways of God's creatures, much less the established workings of His trees and rivers and soils, and it was sufficient for most people to know that God created them, blessed them, and then gave humans "dominion over" them. Common lore, as we know it from the bestiaries and herbals of the time...was not much better, filled with either mundane and stereotypical views (lambs are meek, lions brave, wolves crafty) or fanciful and erroneous ones (toads suck cows' milk at night, woodpeckers are dangerous predators, beech trees deflect lightning, crushed rosemary leaves tied to the right arm "shall make thee light and merry"). Medieval poetry was not more sophisticated, treating the natural world with arch and ritual formulas by which "soft zephyrs" from the "dark woods" are always wafting over "murmuring waters," and one is certain to find passion in winds, love in roses, pity in streams, anger in storms, and violence in the ocean. All this platitude and misinformation about the real world was glued together with nonsense about the monstrous and fantastic world, and held to with the same level of credulity by even the most inquiring minds of the day....

It is hardly surprising that the European mind, mired thus, should fear what it did not comprehend and hate what it knew as fearful. Nature in the broad - its storms and floods, its harsh seasons and pestilences and famines - as well as in the particular - its rodents and roaches, its wolves and werewolves - represented for most people an antagonistic, oppositional world. The familiar was daunting enough, but the unusual and the distant and the unknown were scarier still, at times nothing less than terrifying, as we know from the fairy tales of the era, and this was particularly true of those places that remained the most remote: the mountains and the forests of the wilderness....

...

But forests and mountains - and with them deserts, jungles, even islands - need not be populated to be fearsome. It was enough that these places were wild: that was the trigger to the terror. For "wild" is, etymologically, "willed," that is, self-willed, unruled unmanageable, out of control, uncivilized (as in Spanish, where "wilderness" is falta de cultura), and one is there lost, confused, bewildered. It represents for the European mind that part of nature, and that part of human nature, where the hard-learned, hard-won constraints of "civilization" do not operate, where nothing is predictable and therefore everything awaits. It was that place to which the covenant-breakers and cursed are sent by the Old Testament God, into "the great and terrible wilderness" (in the Hebrew text, incidentally, the word is tohu, or "chaos," as in the primordial darkness before Creation), and to which sinners go to purge themselves of their natural evils. It was that place so alien to human contemplation that it is seldom even mentioned, only very rarely painted or drawn, and almost never directly described for most of the period from the collapse of Rome to the sixteenth century....

This separation from the natural world, this estrangement from the realm of the wild, I think, exists in no other complex culture on earth. In its attitude to the wilderness, a heightening of its deep-seated antipathy to nature in general, European culture created a frightening distance between the human and the natural, between the deep silent rhythms of the world and the deep recurrent rhythms of the body, between the elemental eternal workings of the cosmos and the physical and psychological means of perception, by which we can come to understand it and our place within it. To have regarded the wild as sacred, as do many other cultures around the world, would have been almost inconceivable in medieval Europe - and, if conceived, as some of those called witches found out, certainly heretical and punishable by the Inquisition.

It is but a short step from the fear of the wild to the love of the tamed and from there to the imperative of human domination and control of the natural world - hence the images of the subjection and mastery of the untamed landscape that are so frequent in late fifteenth-century culture.

...

But of all the images of control, the most pervasive and most revealing is that of the formal Renaissance garden, whose style was perfected and popularized in the last third of the fifteenth century and reached its peak in the middle of the next with such careful arworks as the gardens of Compton Wynyates in England (1520) and Tivoli in Italy (1549). Here it is the hand of man and not the grace of nature that is ever-present: bushes and small trees trimmed in rigid geometric shapes to look like wedding cakes or perfume bottles, closely clipped hedges along geometric walks, blocks of flower beds in uniform colors, carefully edged lawns, and artfully distributed statues, benches, fountains, pools, and bridges....

Such a concept of mastery is not exclusive to early modern Europe, to be sure - the historical record suggests that the attempt to dominate nature began long before, with those ancient societies that became dependent on controlling animal herds and building water-control systems for agriculture and creating the monotheisms that would justify it. But it had seldom developed to this degree - "a compulsion," as the medieval historian John Block Friedman has put it, "of Western man to civilize what is rude and to dominate what is wild" - or so overtly entailed the unbridled hubris of human purpose and human right to possession and use;...

The roots of this attitude are essentially biblical, found in that creation myth which is central to any society. The Hebraic Yahweh, so little a part of nature that He actually spends most of His time using its elements to wreak vengeance on His flock, creates humans in His image and as His surrogate, "to have dominion over" all the animals of the earth, and to "replenish the earth, and subdue it"; this is reiterated enought times to make it obvious what the proper hierarchy of creatures was and who was to get the chief benefit of it all. Keith Tomas's careful study of the importance of this thought for the English refers to "the breathtakingly anthropocentric spirit in which Tudor and STuart preachers interpreted the biblical story," as with the Jacobean bishop who declared that "the creatures were not made for themselves, but for the use and service of man," or those divines who said the world would be annihilated after Judgment Day since it had been made for humans' use and would have no further purpose after their departure.

There was one other important source of such hubris, as we have seen: what was not authorized by God was sanctioned by the principles of humanism and science then being propounded with such vigor, all of them shot through with notions of human dominance, of what no less a figure than Bacon called "that right over Nature which belongs to [humans] by divine bequest." The humanist Ficino had it plainest: "Man...perfects, corrects, and improves the works of lower nature. Therefore the power of man is almost similar to that of divine nature....How wonderful is the cultivation of the soil all over the earth, how marvelous the construction of buildings and cities, how skillful the control of waterways!" Or, as the medievalist A.R. Hall has put it, "The world...existed simply to be cooked, or distilled, or mutilated in man's service."

From these elemental patterns in Europe's tapestry of nature - ignorance and fear, separation and hostility, dominance and exploitation - a discernible image emerges: of a world more mechanistic than organic, more artificial than intrinsic, more corporeal than numinous, from which intimace, sacredness, and reverence have all but vanished (it would be the achievement of the next five centuries to eliminate them entirely) and in which something colder, duller, and more lifeless presides instead.

As to the rest of what we know of Europe's ecological heritage, it can be seen written across the face of the land. With some significant exceptions, it is a record of deforestation, erosion, siltation, exhaustion, pollution, extermination, cruelty, destruction, and despoliation, all done either in the name of utility and improvement for the betterment of society or, as often, in ignorance of natural systems and the human connection to them.

The landscape of Europe had of course been a victim of this process - in ecological terms, drawdown beyond carrying capacity - for a long time: what it has meant to be "civilized" since the time of the Myceneans has entailed the increasing domination and control of the natural world. The Greek empires destroyed the once wooded hills and flowing streams of the Mediterranean through deliberate fires and urban encroachment, careless herding and overgrazing, ignorant planting and relentless cultivation; Plato wrote of visiting shrines dedicated to spirits of springs and streams where there were only dry crevices in the land. The Roman successors carried the devastation as far north as Britain, as far west as Iberia, and south into the Sahara, turning lands into granaries for their ever-growing cities and so heedlessly overdeveloping, overharvesting, and over-grazing that millions of square miles of European soils were soon exhausted and the imperium collapsed of its own inability to feed itself. During the long centuries of Christian dominance thereafter, environmental destruction was only intermittent, there being no cohesive empire to achieve it, but even then the rapacious use of nature went unchecked: England, for example, was significantly deforested as early as the eleventh century, with probably no more than 20 percent of it still wooded (and not mroe than 2 percent virgin) by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086.

Thus the legacy given to fifteenth-century Europe was straight-forward: it was right and "natural" for human societies to fell trees, clear brush, "recover" fens and marshes, till soils, plant crops, graze herds, harness beasts, kill predators and "vermin," dig canals and ditches, and in general make use of the bounty of nature that a benevolent Lord had provided for them. Increasingly from the twelfth and especially the fourteenth century on, they did just that with a vengeance. For it was indeed a struggle, a battle experienced in hostile and violent terms, an unending campaign by which, as Marx would later say approvingly, "man oppses himself to Nature...in order to appropriate Nature's products." (page 82)

Indeed, it is not fanciful to see warring against species as Europe's preoccupation as a culture, the source of its food as well as its furniture, its energy as well as its sport, its urban space as well as its agricultural sprawl, its images for the nursery as well as it pulpits. Disturbing as it may appear from our vantage, a sense of enmity and opposition, as in the more familiar kind of war, seems to have characterized the thought and action of much of fifteenth-century Europe, especially in those dark decades when the inadequacy of nature's yields brought famines and the malignancy of nature's spirits brought plagues. The diaries and letters and memoere ritual sexual abstinence (before a hunt or major communal ceremonies, for example), sanctions against and punishments for infidelity, the spacing of children to allow each the undivided attention of the parents through childhood, voluntary emigration or suicide by the old or ill, and the use of plant abortifacients. On a different scale, there were practices to prevent villages from overstressing any one environment: summer and winter migrations to different camping sites, periodic (once-a-generation) necessities of life, and no society can live without having some impact on, or even doing some violence to, the natural world: it is called survival. Is there something about the attitudes and practices of Europe that make it so different?

The answer would seem to be yes. We know too little about other societies of the world in either a comparable stage of development or contemporaneously in the fifteenth century, and even less about their ecological habits and beliefs, but the general scholarly agreement is that Europe of the late medieval era can be seen to be distinct in a number of important ways.

For one thing, it seems that its fundamental regard for nature was more hostile and antagonistic than was true of any other developed civilization. Other cultures were not uniformly so benign that they never misused their environments: China, for example, permitted its population expansion under several dynasties to lead to the clearing of forests and extermination of certain wild species; the Mayans permitted deforestation that eventually led to erosion and crop failures that in turn caused the downfall of Teotihuacan. But nowhere else was the essential reverence for nature seriously challenged, nowhere did there emerge the idea that human achievement and material betterment were to be won by opposing nature, nowhere any equivalent to that frenzy of defiance and destruction that we find on the Western record. Even China at its most statified, when it embarked on some fairly elaborate engineering projects to press back the wilderness, adhered religiously to its idea of "working with nature" and what it saw as carrying out the wishes and designs inherent in a particular river or mountain or waterfall.

"Religiously" is of course the key word. However misused and distorted, the central religions of neither the Asian nor the American civilizations permitted a separation from, or an attitude of dominion over, the natural beings and patterns of the nonhuman world. On the contrary, the religions of India, for example, most particularly Buddhism and Jainism, taught a compassion for all living things and an interweaving of humankind into the unity of nature; the wilderness of mountain and forest was not fearful there but holy (hence the image of the guru on the mountain ledge), and reverence for one or another Himalayan peak or range played a part in every local form of worship throughout that subcontinent. Of the Chinese beliefs, Taoism was perhaps most unqualified in its reverence for the natural world and the requisite place of humans in the sacred "web of life," but all of them expressed some of that; all of them expressed also a veneration for wilderness, as is seen so plainly in the traditional silk and scroll paintings, an art form well established from the sixth century on explicitly to celebrate and appreciate those places of the landscape that Western artists felt to be so fearsome....And Japan's Shintoism was an explicit nature-worshipping religion, with shrines to the gods and goddesses of mountains, springs, forests, even storms, and ceremonies (still practiced today) such as the decoration of sacred rocks and communal prayers for the passage of the moon across the nighttime sky; wilderness, again, was a manifestation of the divine rather than the lair of the devil.

Europe's technophilioa, its unchecked affection for the machine, also distinguished it among world cultures. The reasons for it are deep and tangled, but one can certainly say that Europe was more adept at turning technology to its own uses, and turning its institutions to the service of that technology, than any other society; in the judgment of Lewis Mumford, only Europe saw fit "to adapt the whole mode of life to the pace and capacities of the machine." Even those civilizations (Chinese, Persian, Japanese) that demonstrated a certain proficiency for mechanical inventiveness did not evolve an elaborate abstract system of rationality to go with it - we call it science - and thus did not develop a culture of technology, a self-propelling and self-reinforcing mode of thought that created its own purposefulness and momentum. Only Europeans, once learning of firearms from the Chinese, went on to perfect them with such ferocious skill that in the space of little more than a century they had far surpassed all other cultures in armaments; only Europeans, too, borrowing again from many other cultures, refined and perfected the technology of ocean navigation so as to beome the supreme naval power in the world by the middle of the sixteenth century, Chinese and Ottoman accomplishments notwithstanding.

Europe was also, as we have seen, uniquely a culture in flux, with its institutions and traditions in turmoil during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and far less stable and conservative in its religious customs or political systems than those ancient, encrusted regimes of long-sanctioned rule and unquestioned authority of the kind found in Mesoamerica or China or the muslim East....

Finally, there was Europe's special emphasis on material acquisitiveness and resource accumulation, usually obtained at the sacrifice of the natural world. Perhaps, as some historians think, this was a response to the difficultioes of survival on a relatively small land area...under continual pressure from a population whose growth was encouraged by Church and prince alike. Perhaps, as Braudel suggests...this is a result of its "particular social structures," which were encouraged always to expand and accumulate "on a larger scale and on a more secure footing than elsewhere - more often that not with the state's blessing." But surely the chief reason for this was the power of the still young but increasingly vigorous capitalist system moving into vacuums left by medieval institutions...: more materialist, for sure, than any other economy, more expansionist, more volatile and energetic, more linked to growth and progress, and almost everywhere without the kinds of moral inhibitions found in the world's other high cultures. William Woodruff, in his Impact of Western Man,...provides a neat summary:

No civilization prior to the European had occasion to believe in the systematic material progress of the whole human race; no civilization placed such stress upon the quantity rather than the quality of life; no civilization drove itself so relentlessly to an ever-receding goal; no civilization was so passion-charged to replace what is with what could be; no civilization had striven as the West has done to direct the world according to its will; no civilization has known so few moments of peace and tranquillity.

(page 91)

For the Noble Savage is not, as sometimes supposed, an ancient and common part of Europe's mythical heritage. Visions of the Golden AGe and Arcadia and the like go back a long way, but the images are often blatantly fanciful (houses made of sugar-andspice, for example) and the inhabitants usually undefined stick figures, nothing more specific than Adam and Eve, or Brahmin sages and Ethiopian kings, or endlessly happy children....The specific elements of the Edenic society are not found in the works of classical authors or early Christian theologians, not even in the radical sectarian dissidents of the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, whose images ofthe Good Polity are essentially, in the words of a recent study by German Arciniegas, "built on air...poetic abstractions without consequentce."

This is of marked importance because it is the description of the Indian of the New World in the early accounts, beginning with the Santangel Letter and running for three decades thereafter, that basically created the idea of the Noble Savage in Europe and provided for European political thought the underlying characteristics of the free commonwealth. The idea of political liberty - masterlessness, a society without kings, hierarchies, laws, parliaments - really began here; so too the idea of equality - social parity, shared property, without mine or thine; the idea of social harmony - communal ease, peaceful concord, sodality, without judges and lawyers; and the idea of abundance - enoughness, living on the fruits of nature, without wants, without toil. Right from the start these were the impressions that made the New World stand for "the land of liberty," the land of Possible Paradise; as the decades went on, they became every bit as important and ubiquitous in Europe as potatoes and tobacco, two other borrowings from the same soil. When Europeans (particularly north Europeans) actually began to settle in that New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were taking back to it these ideas and ideals, expecting to see them flourish in the colonies they implanted there, a process that of course culminated in the revolution that for the first time asserted just these values to the world and sought to build a new nation upon them. Full circle.

But this positive impression of the New World, important as it was for Europe, was not the only or even the principal one: for the Noble Savage existed always intertwined with the Savage Beast, and it was the latter whose images gradually predominated, particularly in the minds of those who went to the new lands and dealt with the Indians face to face.

Cristobal Colon in this sense was quite typical. We have seen how he lost interest entirely in the gentle Tainos, so easy to subjugate, and contrived out of wish and myth the fierce Caribs who must be enslaved or slaughtered; we have seen how he conquered and ruled the Indians by force, killing fellow beings with no more compassion than a butcher for his beasts. Now, on this last voyage, when he spoke of the Indians at all it was with contempt. Thsoe who did not take kindly to his building a colonial outpost in their midst he called "very wild," and he decided on impulse to capture their kaseke; those who he decided ate human flesh he said had "brutish faces" betraying their practice; those whose language he could not understand he dismissed as "savage people." And when in the midst of the people of Jamaica, on whose hospitality he and his crew of more than a hundred had depended for an entire year, whose gifts of food and drink were all that kept the indolent and sickly foreign band alive, he wrote that he was "surrounded by a million savages full of cruelty and our enemies." By the end he seems to have quite forgotten the sweet marvelousness of those people of Guanahani, whom he now decreed to be, with all their kind, like the Wild Men who "live in hills and mountains."

This same cast of mind is evident in a great many other chroniclers of the Indians, and if their writings were not at first as popular as those of the Noble Savagists, they were actually more numerous and int he end more influential. Not surprisingly, they emerged as soon as anything of real value was seen in the new lands that were inconveniently in the hands of the natives, and after 1519, when Cortes uncovered the immense wealth of Mesoamerica, they fairly proliferated: those Indians who looked like Noble Savages when there was nothing but Guanahani to conquer came quickly to look like Savage Beasts when the treasures of the two vast continents became apparent and the stakes involved Mexico and Peru. Then, in official document and personal letter alike, with only the occasional exceptions from a man such as Las Casas, we hear again and again of the sinister nature of these foul creatures.

Here is a Dominican monk, Tomas Ortiz, writing to the Spanish Council of the Indies in mid-sixteenth century:

They are more given to sodomy than any other nation. There is no justice among them. They go naked. They have no respect either for love or for virginity. They are stupid and silly. They have no respect for truth, save when it is to their advantage. They are unstable. They have no knowledge of what foresight means. They are ungrateful and changeable....They are brutal....The older they get the worse they become. About the age of ten or twelve years, they seem to have some civilization, but later they become like real brute beasts. I may therefore affirm that God has never created a race more full of vice and composed without the least mixture of kindness or culture.

Thus the kindly cleric; here the great humanist and nationalist Juan Gines de Sepulveda:

Compare then those blessings enjoyed by Spaniards of prudence; genius, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion with those of the little men [hombrecillos, the Indians] in whom you will scarcely find even vestiges of humanity, who not only possess no science but who also lack letters and preserve no monument of their history except certain vague and obscure reminiscences of some things on certain paintings. Neither do they hve written laws, but barbaric institutions and customs. They do not even have private property.... How can we doubt that these people - so uncivilized, so barbaric, contaminated with so many impieties and obscenities - have been justly conquered?

And, he concluded, Indians were as different from Spaniards as cruel people are from mild, as monkeys from men. (page 202)

...it is generally accepted among historians and ethnologist that the societies of the continent north of the Tropic of Cancer shared enough in common, in both underlying principles and the practices they gave rise to, that these particular people of the Virginia tidelands may serve as well as any other as a window onto at least a substantial part of that world.

The first thing to note is Wahunseneka's refusal to kneel, for this reveals much about the character of those assigned to leadership roles in Indian society and about the nature of that leadership. [Sale has described the clumsy attempt of the English to make a crowned king out of the supposed chief of the Powhatans.]

In one sense, Wahunseneka did not have the humility to kneel, to take a subservient position before a European stranger in front of his assemble council. The quality that seems to have typified those chosen as leaders... was a quiet dignity, as self-evident strength of character combined with an aura of appropriate gravity that impressed even the Europeans;...

But in another sense, Wahunseneka did not have the poer to kneel - that is, to be the embodiment of the tribe so as to bind all other members of it to whatever the English had in mind. As a rule, an Indian "chief" - even Wahunseneka, who may have gathered unusual power in the tribal upheavals following earlier European contacts - had only limited powers, was more a respected spokesperson than authoritarian monarch; he might be expected to ascertain and speak the will of a meeting of the council of elders, for instance, or represent the tribe in dealings with other peoples, but he would be unable to make laws or decisions unilayterally or to act in any way not sanctioned by the consensual agreements of the governing councils. That this figure was not some sort of powerful satrap of a familiar type was usually incomprehensible to Europeans, who consistently made the native "werowances" or "sachems" or "sagamores" into chiefs and those chiefs into kings and emperors, and almost never understood what their role and authority were or how to deal with them.

Of course it would have been hard for Europeans, steeped in systems of hierarchy and patriarchy, to have grasped the general egalitarianism of the typical nonstatified Indian society. Nowhere north of Mexico were there the elements of nation-states - appartuses of government, powers of taxation, agencies of enforcement, fixed aristocracies, or the like - and even where chieftaincies were hereditary and in a predetermined lineage that conferred no significant trappings of power or elevated social role. Rules and codes there were, somtimes quite complex, and sanctions and taboos operated to give them effect, but to a great degree the individual was governed by the understood obligations of community (including the community of nature) rather than allegiance to a sovereign or recognition of laws or fear of civil retribution. Pere Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary who spent a season with the Montagnais in 1634, conveyed some of this in his account in the Jesuit Relations:

Nor do they endure in the least those who seem disirous of asusming superiority over the others, and [they] place all virtue in a certain gentleness or apathy.... All the authority of their chief is in his tongue's end, for he is powerful insofar as he is eloquent; and even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.

...

Women in general were accorded high status in Indian societies and were usually equal participants in both political and economic realms. I do not find much evidence that these were full-fledged gynecocracies, as some writers have suggested, but there is no doubt about certain salient features: women throughout the Algonkian and other cultures of the East Coast could and did become tribal chiefs (and in some societies, shamans) and through matrilineal descent - from an older brother or sister - rather than as an inheritance from a father or hustband; matrilineality was the rule rather than the exception in North American tribes, and rights to certain houses or usufruncture over certain fields and plots would be passed down the female line; women were full participants in economic life, usually responsible for field-tending and often harvesting, jut- and bertty-gathering, clothes-making, food preparation, and household work, and they had control over the products of their labor, as their husbands were well aware; women had considerable choice in the selection of a hustband, done only after a man proved his competence not only as hunter and provider but as lover. Since this contrasted so sharply with the position of women in contemporary European society, where women's economic and social power, already constricted by a patriarchal culture, was further undercut by the new capitalist economies stressing production by men and outside the home, it is hardly surprising that the men who wrote about it were generally confounded about what they saw and even typically detected in it an inferior status of drudgery for women quite at odds with the truth.

...Out of a deep ethnocentric insensibility, the English then and after assumed that either the Powhatan culture was so superficial or the European one so irresistible that it should take no more than their very presence - their superior mode of dress, superior instruments of war, superior form of religion - to persuade the Indians to renounce their Americn past and become tawny English folk... When it became clear that the Powhatans had no desire to give up their culture, and indeed would resist that with some severity, the English response was simply dismissal and hostility and a reversion to warfare.

Yet a truly objective English observer (if there had been one) might well have concluded that the life of rural Chesapeake in 1607 was not inferior in any substantial way to that of rural England, save perhaps in such technologies as metallurgy and firearms, and in certain substantial ways, from abundance of vittles to individual freedom, could be reckoned superior.

It was certainly superior in its system of food supply, in terms both of efficiency and of nutrition. The Powhatan system, similar to that of probably most Indians north of Mexico, was a combination of hunting-gathering for perhaps two-thirds of the nutritional intake and shifting horticulture based on the corn-beans-squash triad for the other third; it was, as Albert Cowdrey says, "the most energy-efficient of all economic systems," based on "the most useful grain in the world" - corn, which the eastern Indians had in several varieties. This system had been developed over the centuries with a number of methods that assured its success: mound planting... instead of row planting, for example, to prevent wind and water erosion; "three-sister" farming with corn stalks as a trellis on which beans would grow and squash as a moisture-retentive ground cover, all together providing both balanced soil nutrients and a balanced diet; limited areal planting, usually in nutrient-rich riverine fields, which were allowed to lie fallow after several years to restore fertility; selecting out and sometimes breeding of wild species to ensure the most beneficial and fertile nut and fruit trees, grapevines, and root plants; hunting within both territorial and seasonal limits that generally prevented overkilling or waste; fishing with complex woven woooden weirs, so intricate that the English couldn't even repair the ones they took from the Indians; and careful forest burns that were used both to drive big game in desired directions and to encourage pioneer plant species and smaller grass-loving animals. All in all, Cowdrey concludes, these methods, "fine-tuned by millennia of learning and transmission," created an Indian food system that "had long attained a high degree of subtlety and sophistication."

The New World was well endowed, of course, a land richer in diversity and abundance of natural species that Europe, and it was kept that way by careful environmental practices; in the summary words of Carl Sauer, the historical geographer who was a pioneer in this area, "The eastern Indians lived well and at ease in a generous land which they used competently and without spoiling it." But there was more to it than that, for the Indians were also extremely competent cultivators who had worked out a horticulture that, even without domesticated animals, surpassed that of Europe. Sauer again:

In general, it may be said the plant domesticates of the News World far exceeded in range and efficiency the crops that were available to Europeans at the time of the discovery of the New World. In grains Europe had nothing to match Indian maise as to productivity, food value, utility for hill lands, and varietal adaptions to many climates.... In plant proteins and fats, Europe again was poor and the New World richly supplied by cultivated plants.... The ancient Indian plant breeders had done their work well. In the genial climates, there was an excellent, high yielding plant for every need of food, drink, seasoning, or fiber. On the climatic extremes of cold and drought, there still were a remarkable number of plant inventions that stretched the limits of agriculture about as far as plant growth permitted.

To which should be added the Indians' use of plants in medicine. Only a small protion of native medical knowledge has survived to the present, but some 150 drugs from North American Indians and a third as many from South America have been taken into the modern U.S. pharmacopoeia. Early English settlers continually reported the efficacy of Indian medical practices and many benefited directly from their curatives.... There is evidence that native drugs were used as anesthetics, antiseptics, sedatives, laxatives, purgatives, anthelmintics, stimulatnts, antitoxins, and cauterizers, and that in general shamans would also have some knowledge of surgery, massage, and obstetrics (at which they have been said to be "probably more advanced" than contemporary Europeans), in addition to those forms of psychotherapy and self-healing dismissed as "witchcraft." Comparison is difficult, but it could be said that the Indian medical system was not less develpoed than the European, and in terms of its pharmacology was more extensive.

Other aspects of Indian life, as we may see it among th Powhatans, also do not suffer by comparison to Europe's. The villages were described as clean and neat, well laid out, often with palisades of tree trunks....The houses were capacious and clean, made of wooden frames in a bread-loaf shape and covered with either woven mats or bark sheets that were protective in winter ("that notwithstanding either winde raine, or weather," said Smith, "they are as warme as stooves") and could be pulled back on either side to let in air and light the rest of the year. Artifacts were generally simple, although some were decorated with extreme intricacy, and they were plentiful, for purposes bot utilitarian (clay pots and soapstone vessels, knives of reed and flint and beaver tooth, bows and bone-tipped arrows, dugout canoes up to fifty feet long, corncribs) and decorative or religious (animal sculptures, copper and pearl and bone ornaments, beaded belts and cloths, clay pipes). Clothing, usually fringed, was commonly of deer or raccoon skin; rabbit, wolf, and other pelts ere also used, and thigh-high leggings and moccasins were worn for forest travel, and feathered headdresses of various elaborateness for ceremonial occasions. Nothing is known about the Powhatans' concepts or practices of sanitation, but the English were struck by their emphasis on washing themselves every morning and before meals, a custom that even the well-bred European (such as James I, who is reported never to have washed his hands) would have regarded as excessively ablutionary.

As with the Tainos, though, it was the warm behavior and general civility of the Chesapeake peoples - at leat until open warfare broke out - that most impressed the English chroniclers, those who occasionally got beyond the "save beast" state at any rate. Whatever their inner doubts, the Indians behaved as "a most kind and loving people," "naturally most curteous," and "very cherrefully and friendly," and did not refuse hospitality even to strangers they had no reason to like: "we were entertained by them very kindly," "they entertaines us with much welcome," "the meanest sort brought us such dainties as they had," and so on. And not to strangers alone: the gentle and intimate ways that parents related to their children were so striking that even such hard-bitten Englishment as John Smith and Ralph Hamor remarked on it with approval, the lastter noting that Wahunseneka delcared he loved his daughter "as deere as his owne life... whom if he should not often beholde, he could not possible live."

All this, carried out in a climate that was, except in the dead of winter, most benign and comfortable, must have added up to a quality of life that, even amid the disruptions brought by the Europeans, might reasonable have struck the Powhatans as hardly worth giving up for the hard, disputatious, violent, and unsettled life that the colony at Jamestown had to offer.

At this point it is important to enter a note of historiographical caution. It is not merely that the records we must work from are largely of English origin, assembled by the untutored and the condescending, or even that they cover such a limited span of years before communication between observer and observed was ruptured. It is rather that these accounts, and indeed all European accounts at the time of contact, can reflect but a pale glimmer of the original societies of the American natives. With the exception of the statified Mesoamerican cultures with surviving written glyphs and records, it is almost impossible to know anything with any great certainty about the precontact societies of the original people.

The reason is that all of those precontact societies were changed, and most quite radically so, by a century of lethal epidemics introduced from 1493 on that so devastatingly thinned their numbers - at least by two-thirds; the latest researches suggest perhaps by as much as 95 percent - that no aspect of life remained untouched. Among the diseases, new and ruinous to America, were smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, cholera, typhoid, pleurisy, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, influenza, gonorrhea, viral pneumonia, malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and alcoholism - perhaps, according to Russell Thornton, as many as ninty-three in all. The effect of such a high mortality, and in such a short period of time, could have been only to shatter or distort a great part of the Indians' belief systems, disrupt their political and social institutions, discredit their medical practices and the healers among them, produce psychological disorientation and demoralization, kill off most of the elders who were the repositories of tribal history and traditional knowledge, demand the simplification of the cultural inventory and its technologies, force migration and regrouping of remnant populations often in areas far from sacred lands, and increase the likelihood of warefare either in the clash of migrating groups or in the search for new populations. All of this must have so fundamentally altered the basic character of those societies that by the time they came into the historical record they were simply not the same as they had been through the earlier centuries; as the historian Henry Dobyns has put it, "Aboriginal times ended in North America in 1520-24 [the first widespread small-pox epidemic], and Native American behavior was thereafter never again totally as it had been."

...

There is no record either of the psychological dislocations these survivors would have gone through, but we can imagine that the fact of deaths in this number, beyond the powers of comprehension much less cure, could be assimilable into the Indian consciousness only with considerable mental and moral upheaval, even the abandonment of parts of the ancient belief systems proven inadequate in the new circumstances. And where those new circumstances also included new settlements of the white invaders, new systems of trade, new market values, new means of survival, new technologies, and new intoxicants (woodlands Indians having nothing stronger than tobacco), the effects must have been particularly convulsive....

Obviously not all ancient forms were jettisoned, but probably none was completely unaffected and no society could have remained as it had been. What the Europeans everywhere observed and recorded, then, although they assumed ti to be a culture unchanged since the dawn of time, was one vastly altered and reordered and still in many places in a state of flux. That it could still present to them a face of such comparative stability and serenity, as it did almost everywhere, is a singular testament to what must have been the great strength and success of the original customs and beliefs.

What endured in the altered world the Europeans encountered... were those basic integuments subsequently recorded, such institutions as the hereditary chieftaincy, such systems as the matrilineal clan, such technologies as the dugout canoe and mixed-crop planting. But what endured most, it is clear, in these as in all Indian societies of which we know, was the intimate and abiding relationship with nature that informed all important acts in the passage of an Indian lifetime; it was no doubt touched and altered during the century of epidemics, but it lasted and it ws there to be recorded again and again in the historical era because it was so obviously central to the worldview of Indian culture.

Europeans usually saw this relationship in terms of religion, but at its core was in fact a body of beliefs operating more widely and even more deeply than that. The standard way of labeling it is "animism"..., which sees life in all nature and all natural objects and processes - rain and wind and climate, mountains and rivers and rocks, as much as oaks and deer and turkeys - but that does not convey the complexities that such a relationship entails: of the resulting place of the human, for example, as another species of equal but not superior stature in that web of life; of the sacredness of this living world, whose special and delicate balance has to be maintained to conserve the human population; of the necessary reciprocal and mutually dependent relations among all parts of this world, the obligations of which must be especially appreciated (and met) by the human participants; and of the continual interaction among, and communication between, all these natural relatives, ordered in the way that ancestors have painstakingly come to understand and passed down in myth and story and legend, in dance and ritual and ceremony. All of this is not casual or peripheral, somewhere at the edge of daily life or confined to weekends, but rather primary and pivotal, at the very center of existence. Abuse it, and sickness or misfortune visits; disregard it, and calamity for the whole village follows. (page 308)

Healthy Indian societies, in normal times at least, made their earth-relationship further manifest in how they lived on the land. Again, different environments fostered different approaches, but what is striking the recurrent evidence that, as hunters or fishers or planters or pickers, Indians throughout North America were ritualistically conscious of and concerned about the effects of their actions on their surroundings and careful to see that limits and constraints were everwhere observed. Obviously the processes of getting food had to involve some interference with nonhuyan nature - no society, no species survives without some such interference - and Indian societies of various times and places are known to have used fire circles to trap animals, for example, burned forest undergrowth to promote new species, planted corn in quite extensive acreage, and in places drew off streams into irrigation ditches. Still, in all of the nostatified societies the fundamental respect for the land and its creatures formed such a crucial part of the belief systems that environmental damage was minimal, and nowhere so far as we know was the notion of humans versus nature, of conquest and control, ever practiced or even formulated.

...

"The land is sacred" - it is, really, as simple as thta common phrase, known in one way or another in almost every tribe. Like the sun and wind and clouds and air, land was understood to be part of the numinous cosmic spirit, but it was so obviously precious and life-giving that it had to be accorded special reverence and respect; it had its special holy spots, besides... which gave special evidence of the holiness of creation....

...Nowhere on record did Indians ever contrive concepts of land ownership, not by individual or family or village or tribe, and the idea would have been quite foreign. Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning or selling the clouds or the wind. There were no doubt concepts we would identify as usufruct - that is, family or village claims to a planting field or hunting ground while it is being used, and only for so long as it is used regularly - but such ideas never had very high standing and did not in any case imply possession of the European it's-my-land-and-I-can-do-what-I-want-with-it type....

...if this too brief delineation of some of the basic ideas of the Indian earth-relationship is inadequate, at least it suggests how innocent what Calvin Martin calls "the Indian thought-world" is from a belief in the idea of progress, for example, or the utilitarian view of nature, or the transcendence of material possession, or any view of creation seen only through the eyes of a single large bipedal species. Trying to see from inside the hogan and tepee, we may at least understand how far from the mark the early European observers were in theeir assumptions that the Indians were "just like us," only darker, and would, occupying the only thought-world those Europeans could imagine, succumb to the same temptations and threats; and how far from the mark have been most subsequent historians down to the present - most unfortunately the Marxist ones, mired in their materialist explanations - in their reluctance to shed preconceptions that prevent them from understanding a biocentric and ecological thought-world of considerable grandeur and pertinence.

One final aspect of the pervasive earth-relationship is perhaps most telling of all, but by no means without controversy. Although the Indians were settled across it in great numbers, particularly in the south and east, the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air. Indian societies had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking, burning, but there were still so many passenger pigeons that they darkened the sky in flight, so many sturgeons that, it was said, one could walk across the rivers, so many ancient trees that the forest often seemed impenetrable. Some reverence for nature, some elemental understanding of the human on the species level, must have been at work.

This becomes all the more impressive when we see how many people there may have been on the continent before European contact. This is a topic rife with dispute, even more so than the previous demographics of Espanola, for which there are at least Spanish censuses to rely on. In general there are two methods of estimation: one is to work back from what are hoped to be approximately reliable European surveys of the first half of the seventeenth century, figuring a depopulation of at least 70 percent and as much as 97 percent from the multiple epidemics of the previous century; the other is to try to calculate the number of people who might reasonably have been able to live in a given area with a given means of resource depletion, the settle horticulturists judged to be able to support larger numbers than hunter-gatherers. Such imperfect techniques inevitably have produced a wide range of population estimates, but there is now a rough academic consensus, quite sharply at odds with figures conventionally accepted earlier in this century, that the total number of Indians in the New World at the time of the Discovery was between 60 and 120 million people. (That compares to a population for Europe outside Russia of 60 to 70 million.) Estimates for North America alone similarly range from about 40 to 56 million, the bulk of which - perhaps 25 to 30 million - occupied the area of the Mesoamerican state systems south of the Tropic of Cancer and 8 million more the islands of the West Indies. That leaves 7 to 18 million people north of Mexico, the majority of whom were probably in the mixed horticultural-hunting belt in the Mississippi basin and along the Atlantic coast to Maine....

Whatever the exact figure...demographic and other scholars are agreed on one point: pre-Columbian North America was fairly densely populated, as such cultures go, and certainly was not the empty wasteland and untouched wilderness that Europeans took it to be. Yet it certainly gave off the aspect of an untouched world, a prelapsarian Eden of astonishing plenitude, even in just those coastan areas where population was the highest, and after centuries of occupation and use. ... and still occupying an environment that in important ways was ebullient and wild, abundant in both kinds and numbers of flora and fauna, functioning to all intents and purposes in its original primal state. If that does not argue for the Indian cultures a very special, an intrinsic, regardfulness for nature, it is hard to know what would.

The fashion of looking to American natives as ecological models, begun in the 1960s and undiminished since, has come under heavy fire in recent years from those who resist what they see as the impossibly romantic notion of idealistic tribes living in natural benignity - as, in fact, a modern version of the myth of the Noble Savage. This, they say, is a distortion of history; those people are the tribe that must be known as the Nevawas.

"The Indian revered nature because he had no other choice," as the frontier historian W. H. Hutchinson put it in leading this countercharge. "He perceived nature as being controlled by supernatural forces he was obliged to propitiate if he hoped for success in life," and that was all there was to it, no overriding spirituality, no fancy earth-relationship. "We ought to dry our eyes and recognize that the Indian was above all a self-centered pragmatist when it came to land use."

The argument tends to run this way. Indian societies were violent ones, characterized by hunting and war, in which the additional destruction of nature came easily. Whatever spiritual relationship they had with nature, the Indians obviously feared the forces around them more than they revered them and thus had no special difficulty, when the opportunities arose, in destroying both flora and fauna to their own advantage. There is good reason to think that the mass extinctions of the Pleistocene were caused by the overkills of Paleolithic hunters, and for the postcontact period evidence is plentiful that the Indians hunted the beaver to near extinction and were wasteful and careless in the slaughter of other desired animals. The only thing that prevented Indian societies from greater destruction before the Europeans was that their technologies were too primitive and their numbers too small, not that their values were too pure. The only Indians who lived any other way were the Nevawas.

It is a plausible tale, and it has won its converts. This is a murky area where sureties are not easy to come by, and hypotheses of this sort can be strung out at length with some persuasiveness. The difficulty with it, however, is that at too many points the argument rests on mere conjecture (and mean-spirited at that), and where there is evidence to test it against it does not stand up.

* There is no very good proof that precontact societies engaged in warfare that was either common or particularly fierce, and the weight of evidence suggests that they were for the most part pacific. The Indian scholar Darcy McNickle has estimated that fully 70 percent of North American tribes were pacifist, a figure hare to be sure of, although it does correlate with the estimated percentage of traditionally gynocentric tribes, characterized by high status for women and central female deities, which are said to have played down conflict and male heroics; at least two of them were recorded by Europeans as placing "all virtue in a certain gentleness or apathy" (Le Jeune) and being full of "women-like men [who] seeke rather to grow right by industrie, than famous by dees of Chevalry" (William Wood). Additional support for such an estimate comes in the numerous oral histories of Indian societies, where it is clear that warfare played so little a part that many of them, perhaps two-thirds, simply did not have war stories or battle legends of any kind; both the Algonkians of the Eastern woodlands and the traditionally peaceful tribes of the Southwest had no war myths that can be traced back before European times. The famous and popular war stories generally come from the Plains Indians, whose warrior codes and cults indeed played an important role in the later centuries, but it is interesting that virtually every one of them involves horses - and these did not appear until the seventeenth century.

Warfare was certainly known in historic times after the European invasion, sometimes quite awful and destructive, as the Irokwa annihilation of the Hurons in 1640 in the contest to determine who would control the Larentian fur trade. And it is probable that the devastation of epidemics triggered wars both in retaliation against those enemies presumed to have caused it and in search of additional population to make up for those lost; John Smith, for example, reported of the Virginia Indians that they fought "but for women and children, and principally revenge." But as to pre-Columbian warfare we know almost nothing, and what little we do know suggests that where wars took place they were infrequent, short, and mild; in fact "war" seems a misnomer for the kinds of engagements we imagine might have taken place, in which some act of bravery or retribution rather than death, say, or territory, would be the object, and two "war parties" might skirmish without much effect on either on and none at all on the home villages. Early European settlers often made a mockery of Indian warfare - John Underhill wrote of the Pequots that their wars were "more for pastime, then to conquer and subdue enemies," and Henry Spelman, who lived amont the Poshatans, siad that "they might fight seven yeares kand not kill seven men" - and were disdainful of the Indians' "strategems, treacheries, or surprisals" that avoided out-in-the-open battles. Even among warrior societies that emerged in the Great Plains, "counting coup" - some witnessed act of bravery, such as stealing an enemy's horses or touching him with a "coupstick" - was considered more important, and honorable, than killing him.

Organized violence, in short, was not an attribute of traditional Indian societies, certainly not as compared with their European contemporaries, and on the basis of the imperfect record what is most remarkable about them is their apparent lack of conflict and discord.

* The idea of interpreting any Indian society as fearful of nature, living in constant dread of its impersonal forces, is 2quite unfounded. As we have seen, the scholarly consensus is that, in the words of the ecohistorian J. Donald Hughes, Indians lived with "reverence for the earth, kinship with all forms of life, and harmony with nature." Which is not to say that they did not have a considerable deep respect for the power, even the capriciousness, of nature, and an understanding of their intimate dependence on its successful continuance; it is not even to say that they could not have had moments of fear in the midst of thunderstorm or volcanic eruption, periods of dejection or bitterness during drought or famine or disease. But nowhere in what we know of the Indian earth-relationship, whatever its other ambiguities, is there anything remotely like the fearful and vengeful sky gods of the desert cultures of the Middle East, of which Europe became the eventual inheritor.

*Indian cultures in much of the continent used fire as a technology to change the environment for their own ends, and that inevitably entailed the destruction of certain plants and trees and the disruption of some animal habitats. But this technology was used, and used carefully, with a largely positive effect. Regular and controlled ground-burnings such as the Indians practiced, whether in the prairie grasslands or the hardwood forests, increased the number and diverisity of species, the levels fo their populations, the amount of nutrients in the soils, the quantity of forbs and grasses, and the quality of available forage for all herbivores. In the forests regular annual fires averted the danger of hot-burning and damaging wildfires in the accumulated underbrush and stimulated the growth of such desired and fire-resistant hardwoods as chestnuts and oaks; in the prairies they held back the growth of forest cover altogether to promote the populations of bison and small-game animals and birds.

* The extinctions of the Pleistocene era may have been in some measure abetted by humans, but it is now generally agreed that they were by no means caused by it. The so-called Clovis hunters (Indians in several areas with better spear- and point-making techniques) seem to have come upon the scene about 11,000 years ago, just as a number of large mammals (woolly mammoths, mastodons, camels, etc.) died off in large numbers, some to extinction. But severe and abrupt climatic alterations are known to have taken place at the same time, producting great changes in the habitat of these large, mostly herbivorous animals, never very numerous in the first place and dependent on perhaps four to five hundred pounds of green fodder a day, which was unavailable in the new conditions. It is hard to see in any case how the peoples of that time suddenly could have come up with either the technologies or the motives to kill in such vast numbers; and the famous "cliff drives" and "bison jumps" that were responsible for large numbers of animal casualties two or three hundred years later were not extensive enough to have exterminated whole species (mammoths, for example, are not found at such sites). Moreover, the prime target of the Pleistocene hunters was the American bison, which in all respects was similar to the large mammalian species that eventually died out, and though it was hunted repeatedly and avidly it survived so successfully that even in the ninteenth century Europeans still could marvel at its astonishing numbers.

* About overhunting in historical times, however, there is no real question: the record is stained with verified accounts of slaughter, destruction, areal depletions, waste, profligacy, cruelty, everything that would characterize a culture that did not know the earth was alive and all beavers brothers. It was by no means universal and it was mostly spasmodic, but any number of tribes scuttled their taboos and customs at certain times and for reasons still not clear, and participated in animal-killings on an extraordinary scale. The extirpation of the beaver in the eastern half of the country, incidents of wanton and needless slaughter of herds of caribou and bison, nineteenth-century accounts of Indians who were "so accustomed to kill every thing that came within their reach" - the evidence is undeniable. What then of the ecological India?

The short answer is that the postcontact Indian was a far different creature from the precontact Indian and the aberrations of those later societies can be laid to the effects of decimating diseases and the disruptive pressures of war, trade, technology, and alcohol..Calvin Marin's path-breaking Keepers of the Game is an elaborate attempt to show just how this European intervention in eastern Canada, for example, preceded by exotic epidemics that killed great numbers and left the surviving societies in spiritual disarray, effectively destroyed the "long-standing compact between the animal kingdom and man" and "the mutual obligation-mutual courtesy relationship" that previously existed. If these hunting tribes were not "conservationist-minded during the heyday of the fur trade," he concludes, and "indeed they were baldly exploitative," it was "because their traditional incentives to conserve wildlife were rendered inoperative."

But the ecological Indian did not wholly disappear with the arrival of the Europeans. What we know about precontact attitudes to hunting and overkilling, if fact, comes from the traditions that were strong enough to survive into the historical era and were there to be recorded by anthropologists and ehtnologists of the past two centuries: Black Elk was not an invention of the Wilderness Society, nor was Luther Standing Bear -they and hundreds like them were authentic representatives of an ancient tradition that did not die away. Whatever anomalies were produced by the European invasion, the were anomalous, bizarre deviations from a norm not only durable but widespread. Nor did they affect all tribes in the same way or disrupt primal animal-bond beliefs everywhere; it seems from Martin's evidence that only nonhorticultural tribes heavily dependent on hunting game, and in which there might be a plausible reason actually to think that diseases were transmitted by animals, succumbed to the temptation to slaughter for the fur trade, or at least to the degree the eastern Canadian tribes did.Even where animal relationships changed and taboos about overkilling were discarded, the complex of other beliefs binding Indians to the other elements of nature, including animals, were not substantially altered and other parts of the environment were not subject to attack and destruction.

In short, despite the evidence of abnormal anti-ecological behavior in certain Indian tribes in the historical era, one can still conclude with Wilcomb Washburn, the principal Indian historian at the Smithsonian, that "there exist sufficient examples of Indian concern for killing only as much as was needed and only in the proper manner to support the assertion that the Indian was the first ecologist."

* To believe that such a phenomenon could exist only becuase this Indian did not have either the technologies or the numbers is the last refuge of one who cannot imagine that there might be a society that would not destroy nature if it could.

Indian societies had a variety of technologies, some quite sophisticated and many well beyond anything comparable in Europe at the time (Powhatan fishing weirs, for example, or bows and arrows far easier, faster, and safer than the musket), and certainly could have developed others if they felt any need to do so, particularly in regard to food supply. If they did not, there was likely to be a good reason: if they did not anywhere use the plow, for instance, that may have been because their methods of breaking the soil with a planting stick worked just as well with a tenth of the effort, or because they had learned that opening up and turning over whole fields would only decrease nutrients and increase erosion, or because their thought-world would not have allowed such disregardful violence. Technologies in a nature-relating society are selected with a mind to their ecological value and impact, not from some technological or accumulative or human-centered imperative: "Viewing the world through mythic eyes," as Calvin Martin has said, the American Indian had "no powerful incentive to dream up new technologies and associated strategies to assist human survival. The biological outlook on life does not spawn that sort of mentality or behavior."

The principal environment-altering technology Indians did have - fire - was certainly powerful and destructive enough to cuase immense damage if they had let it. But it was a technology surrounded with age-old constraints and used with the utmost care, to enhance rather than despoil local environments. If such a technique had not been embedded in an earth-conscious ethos, the whole continent might well have been black and denuded by the time the Europeans arrived, instead of the lush and wooded forestland they found it to be.

The matter of population size here is even more revealing. Small size does not necessarily ensure against environmental damage, as any number of European examples from barren Greek islands to deforeested English shires would testify. But it is true that large size is associated often with widespread depredation - at least when it takes the form of powerful state-based agglomerations, which everywhere in the world (not excluding Mesoamerica and environs) generally seem to be erected on principles of an ever more complex manipulation of nature to human whim - dams, irrigation systems, large-scale agriculture, extensive roadways, monumental buildings, cities - that ultimately succeed in bringing down on them the predictable revenge of ecosystems gone awry.

By and large the societies of North America above New Mexico did not go in this statified direction...and did not produce either large populations or environmental destruction. In fact, they seem to have been quite mindful of the necessity to minimize the human impact on the ecosystem, conscious in some way of what we would now call the "carrying capacity" of their tribal lands, and to have taken special efforts to hold the populations down. Among the various techniques used, not all with equal success, were ritual sexual abstinence (before a hunt or major communal ceremonies, for example), sanctions against and punishments for infidelity, the spacing of children to allow each the undivided attention of the parents through childhood, voluntary emigration or suicide by the old or ill, and the use of plant abortifacients. On a different scale, there were practices to prevent villages from overstressing any one environment: summer and winter migrations to different camping sites, periodic (once-a-generation) relocation of villages and their farmlands and hunting grounds, and division and separation of villages grown beyond a certain size.

Thus in effect is is accurate to say that Indian societies did not have sufficient numbers to destroy their environments - only this seems to have been consciously and deliberately so, a practice of great ecological wisdom.

...

That did not make America into a paradise precisely, but close enough that it was understandable why so many Europeans upon seeing it for the first tiem would speak of the Golden Age and the Garden of Eden....It is not as understandable why...they would choose to occupy, dominate, and destroy that land and the people who were its offspring - to assure, in the words of the historian Francis Parkman as late as the mid-nineteenth century, that since the Indian would not "learn the arts of civilization, he and his forest must perish together." (page 324)

Of course onemay still wonder, andwonder long, about what that says about this society, the one now dominant in America, and the West, and the world. And one may even legitimately wonder, if it is not too painful, about what might have been. Was not Europe in its groping era of discovery in the fifteenth century in fact in search of salvation, as its morbid sonnets said, or of that regeneration which new lands andnew peoples - and of course new riches - would be presumed to provide?...

And there was salvation there, in the New World, though it was not of a kind the Europeans then understood. They thought first that exploitation was salvation, and they went at that with a vengeance, and found new foods and medicines and treasures, but that proved not to be; that colonization and settlement was salvation, and they peopled both contingents with conquerors, and it was not that either; that progress and power and technics wrested from the new lands was salvation, and they made mighty nations and towering cities in its service, but it was not even that.

The salvation there, had the Europeans known where and hnow to look for it, was obviously in the integrative tribal ways, the nurturant communitarian values, the rich interplay with nature that made up the India cultures - as it made up, for that matter, the cultures of ancient peoples everywhere, not excluding Europe. It was theer especially in the Indian consciousness, in what Calvin Martin has termed "the biological outlook on life," in which patterns and concepts and the large teleological constructs of culture are not human-cnetered but come from the sense of being at one with nature, biocentric, ecocentric, and where there was myth but not history, circular rather than linear time, renewal and restoration but not progress, imaginative apperception far more subtle than science, understanding without words or even ideation, sacred rather than material interpretation of things, and an interpenetration into earth and its life-forms that superceded an identification with self or species. (page 368)

1992 Worldwide population is estimated at more than 5.6 billion.

Rainforest area in the Western Hemisphere, originally 3.4 billion acres, is down to 1.6 billion, and going fast, at the rate of 25 million acres a year, or 166 square miles a day; U.S. forestland, orignially more than a billion acres, is down to 500 million commercially designated acres, some 260 million having gone for beef production alone.

Topsoil depletion and runoff in the United States reaches a rate of 80 million feet per day, nearly 30 billion tons a year.

Twenty-five years after the U.S. Endangered Species Act went into effect, listing 500 of the several thousand threatened species in the country, twelve of the protected species have beome extinct and 150 more are losing population at a rate that will lead to extinction within a decade. Two hundred threatened plants native to the United States have become extinct in the last five years. At least 140 major animal and bird species have become extinct since 1492, including four species of whales, seventeen varieties of grizzly bears, seven forms of bats, Eastern and Oregon buffalo, great auks, sea otters, sea minks, Eastern elks, long-eared kit foxes, Newfoundland and Florida wolves, Eastern cougars, Arizona and Eastern wapiti, Badlands bighorn sheep, heath hens, passenger pigeons, Jamaica wood rails, spectacled cormorants, Puerto Rico blue pigeons, Eskimo curlews, Puerto Rican conures, Carolina parakeets, Antigua and Guadeloupe burrowing owls, Guadeloupe red-shafted flickers, ivory billed wood-peckers, Berwicks wrens, Tecopa pupfish, harelip suckers, longjaw ciscos, and blue pike.

Santayana, G.

Men are habitually insensible to beauty. Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition. It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours. An aesthetic glow may pervade experience, but that circumstance is seldom remarked; it figures only as an influence working subterraneously on thoughts and judgements which in ourselves take a cognitive or practical direction. Only when the aesthetic ingredient becomes predominant do we exclaim, How beautiful! Ordinarily the pleasures which formal perception gives remain an undistinguished part of our comfort or curiosity.

Taste is formed in those moments when aesthetic emotion is massive and distinct; preferences then grow conscious, judgements then put into words will reverberate through clamer hours; they will constitute prejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other beauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent may amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth in these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early impressions more systematically and find confirmations of them in various quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use new categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves. Never being so deeply stirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we then discovered can have a true sublimity....Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations, expecially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them authoritative over our subsequent judgements. On those warm moments hang all our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days and shape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive.

Schiele, Egon

from Die Aktiond,

]an article printed in Berlin in 1914, and reprinted in FMR, September 1984

There is no such thing as modern art. Art is one, eternal. Art is always the same: art and nothing else. New and modern artists do, however, exist. Even a sketch scratched out by one of them is, in any case, a work of art, because it is part of him, because it is alive.... The absolute duty of a new artist is to be himself, to be a creator, to possess inside himself a terrain on which to build, without referring to the past or tradition.

Schoenberg, Arnold

From Problems in Teaching Art:

"The genius "acquires even the things he was not born with."

From Harmonielehre

The evolution of polyphony can be envisioned as follows: The first push may have been given by someone’s urge to participate in singing songs that were ordinarily sung by a single performer. Two or more sang the same melody. Were precisely the same type of voices to sing together, for example, just low male voices, then it is fairly obvious that only unison singing could be considered pure, that is, singing identical tones, the most perfect consonance. If women’s voices were added and the melody lay neither very high nor very low, then the second possibility was manifest: singing in the second most perfect consonance, in octaves. But if the melody lay in such a range that it went too low for the high male and female voices or too high for the low voices, then there was the need to find something else for these voices. As long as actually polyphony had not been invented. . ., nothing was left but to sing the same melody beginning on some other consonant tone. Since the unison and the octave had already been used, the ear had necessarily to choose the next most perfect consonance, the fifth. Thus began organum at the fifth, or what is here the same thing, organum at the fourth. That the third was not employed for the same purpose until much later, that indeed the third had not yet won recognition as a consonance at a yet much later time, is evidence in support of the hypothesis repeatedly mentioned in this book: namely, that the distinction between dissonances and consonances is only gradual, one of degree; that dissonances are nothing else but more remote consonances whose analysis gives the ear more trouble on account of their remoteness; but once analysis has made them more accessible, they will have the chance of becoming consonances just like the closer overtones. . .

The subsequent evolution I envisage as follows: It was presumably soon after the third was recognized as a consonance that the possibility of contrary and oblique motion was discovered. In addition to parallel unisons, octaves, and fifths, there arose the possibility of parallel thirds and probably soon thereafter, as I have said, the possibility also of contrary and oblique motion, hence, an immense enrichment of means. Now it seems to me the following train of thought, only too firmly rooted in man’s nature, gives psychological explanation of the question [of forbidding fifths]:

Singing in octaves and fifths no doubt satisfied in a thoroughly natural way the taste of the time; it was in accord with the nature of sound and with the nature of man, thus it was beautiful. Nevertheless, the possibility of adding thirds to the octaves and fifths and of using contrary and oblique motion very likely produced a heady enthusiasm that came to hold everything of an earlier time to be bad, although it was merely outmoded; such enthusiasm we can indeed observe in every great advance – not only in art. [The enthusiast] so completely forgets to be grateful for the preparatory work done by the predecessors that he hates that work and does not stop to think that the present advance would be impossible without it. Yes, even if that work was full of errors. And the contempt for what is outmoded is just as great as it is unjustified. Whoever keeps a correct sense of proportion will say: I personally would not like to do what is outmoded because I know the advantages of what is new, and because it would be untimely. One should be untimely only in runnng on ahead of the times, but not in limping along behind. I think that such observations concerning the human nature of the artist are just as important for judging the evolution of art as is physics. One must reflect that art has set its course not only by the nature of tones but by the nature of man as well, that it is a compromise between these two factors, attempts at mutual accommodation. And since the tone, the inanimate material, does no accommodating, it is up to us. (68)

A true artistÆs inborn emotional and intellectual gifts have, by self-cultivation and culture, become a faultlessly functioning apparatus that does not need the spur of conscious thought; he is as much at home in the world of the intellect as in the world of emotions, and it is this that distinguishes the true artist from the others. It is fair to say of such a man that everything is granted him as a pure matter of feeling. The world of feelings is quite inseparable from the world of the intellect; the two are always felt as one and the same. So one may take it that the intellectual is just as much a criterion as the emotional, and that if a work has any measurable intellectual qualities (if one finds in it lofty qualities of intellect) one may reckon also to find in it emotional things that are equally worth-while. And vice versa-where there is dearth, it is just as much a dearth of true and worthwhile feelings as of true intellect. For there is but one source! (254)

Schumann, Robert

from The Critical Composer,

edited by Irving Kolodin

[on Beethoven's A-major Symphony] ...I must laugh when I think of the dry old registrar, who discovered in this a battle of the giants, with a very effective annihilation of them all in the last movement, while he slyly passed over the allegretto, because it did not fall in with his fancy; and I must laugh at those who eternally preach about the innocence and absolute beauty of music; to be sure, art has no business to imitate the unlucky octaves and fifths of life - it should rather conceal them; yet in some consecrated arias (of Marchner's, for example) I often find beauty without truth, and in Beethoven (thoush seldom) sometimes truth without beauty. But I shiver to the finger-tips when I hear some people declaring that Beethoven gave himself up, while writing his symphonies, to the greatest sentiments - lofty thoughts of God, immortality and the course of the spheres; the genial man certainly pointed to heaven with his flowery crown, but his roots spread broadly over his beloved earth. (p. 63)

Seldes, George

from Witness to a Century

Suddenly we who were near the first of the five doors of the huge hall noticed a little man arguing with the armed soldier standing there. Each of the five soldiers had been chosen because he was illiterate, each had been given a large piece of cardboard on which were pasted five or six cards, each a different color, one for delegates, one for journalists, one for Comintern members, and so on, and no person without a card matching one of the five could enter.

The little man - he was probably the classic Napoleonic five-foot -five - finally was permitted to enter. I was immediately impressed by his consideration for the speaker, because as he passed by our press table he walked on tiptoes so as not to make a noise. Suddenly he was recognized, and there was an uproar.

Lenin, however, insisted that Zinoviev conclude his gigh-pitched oration, and then he spoke. First in Russian, and then in German (which I understood), and perhaps again in French. But he spoke briefly in each language, with humor, and his eyes twinkled and he smiled, all of which was strange and unusual in Soviet Russia.

...Another story Lenin told - which again illustrates my belief that Lenin was the only dictator, past or present, who had a sense of humor - concerns the time he lived in exile in London. In Marxist circles, of course. Frequently working men's delegations who had chosen arbitration rather than going on strike would come to him asking that he represent them.

"One one occasion," said Lenin, "the delegates themselves could not agree on terms. They argued. Several of them shouted. They made a mess of things.

"I said, `Go home, come to an agreement on terms, come here again tomorrow, and tell me in a few words.'

"The delegation returned the next day. The spokesman said: `All we want is world revolution, and better toilets.'"

Shakertown

The Shakertown Pledge

Recognizing that the earth and the fullness thereof is a gift from our gracious God, and that we are called to cherish, nurture and provide loving stewardship; recognizing that life itself is a gift and a call to responsibility, joy and celebration...

I make the following declarations: I declare myself to be a world citizen. I commit myself to lead an ecologically sound life. I commit myself to a life of creative simplicity and to share my personal wealth with the world's poor. I commit myself to join with others in reshaping institutions in order to bring about a more just global society in which each person has full access to the needed resources for physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth. I commit myself to occupational accountability and in so doing I will seek to avoid the creation of products which cause harm to others. I affirm the gift of my body and commit myself to its proper nourishment and physical well-being. I commit myself to examine countinually my relations with others and to attempt to relate honestly, morally, and lovingly to those around me. I commit myself to personal renewal through prayer, meditation and study. I commit myself to reponsible participation in a community of faith.

Siegal, Bernie, M.D.

from Peace, Love and Healing,

...What is important is creating a society in which self-love and love of others are present. Recently I read an article by Ushanda io Elima about the Efe Pygmies, who live that way. According to Jean-Pierre Hallet, who grew up among the Efes and administers The Pygmy Fund...,which is dedicated to their physical and cultural survival, they are very expressive of their feeling for each other.

There is a great deal of touching and affection among all the Pygmies. Babies and small children are held and carried. Older children and adults often touch one another. They frequently hold hands or sit with an arm around a friend or place their head in another's lap. Anyone feeling the need for reassurance may touch someone briefly or go for a hug. There is also a great deal of cuddling.

The result of this upbringing is a society in which "Pygmies concentrate their attention on the betterment of their personal relations, which are based on trust." There is no crime, no infidelity, no stigma against sexuality, and great respect not only for each other, expecially the elders among them, but for the forest in which they dwell. If we would love one generation of the world's children as the Pygmies love theirs, the planet would change, and our problems disappear. (page 178)

Sinclair, Upton

On PBS radio, I heard a talk by Upton Sinclair delivered during the sixties in Los Angeles. He sounded very old and rambled quite a bit. He had been asked to talk about the Epic Campaign for governor of California during the thirties, but meandered around the subject. He talked about the man after whom Wilshire boulevard was named. Apparently, he'd been a socialist, and had published a paper which was the first place where Upton had seen the word "socialist" as a young man.

Sinclair was a poor boy in New York. He traveled every summer to Baltimore to live with a relative who was wealthy. Thus, he was forever pondering the question of the coextence of rich and poor.

He told some good stories about the Epic campaign and about his trips to Washington on its behalf. He was returning to California just before the Governor's election when he realized that he was afraid to be Governor. He felt he didn't "know enough", and especially didn't know the right people, by which he did not mean the people who were attenders at socialist meetings. He meant business people. As a jounalist, he didn't even know General Otis who was the publisher of the Times. His only connection to that paper was through another journalist friend who had told him that it had been so long since he'd written something that he believed in, he wouldn't know what it felt like.

Later, Sinclair learned that a man with a loaded gun had secreted himself in the hall at which he was scheduled to give his acceptance speech if elected. He did not win the election. Instead, he was giving a talk in Los Angeles during the sixties "watching history being made."

He reminded the audience once more about the question having to do with the rich and the poor. He said that if everybody would go away asking that question, "it will be good for you, and good for the country, and good for the world."

May 2, 1989

Singer, Daniel

Article

from The Nation (June 18, 1988) in an article by Daniel Singer on the success of the neofascist, Le Pen, in Marseilles and the rest of France:

What Marseilles does reveal is how the National Front has grown, and the timing of its growth. The economic crisis and a good number of immigrants were not sufficient on their own. The left had first to get into office - on the one hand to madden the right, and then, on the other, having failed to meet its promises, to diappoint its own supporters. It was in 1983-84, with those two preconditions fulfilled, that the National Front took off. Then, in the past two years, the respectable right had to get back into office and confirm its own inability to cope, giving a new boost to the Front.

...

But serious trouble does not begin when the men with jackboots or with cloven hoofs opt for fascism. It begins when the tinker and tailor, your neighbor and your cousin, are driven sufficiently mad by circumstances to vote for an admirer of Pinochet, a preacher of apartheid, a man for whom the gas chambers are a mere "detail." As I looked down from the steps of the station, on departing this outwardly still-warm and attractive town, I could not help feeling that moral pollution is not so easily perceived. All the more reason to probe below the surface, to sound the alarm and, above all, to seek a cure - unless we want to wake up one day, too late, in a fully contaminated city or country.

Smith, Adam

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

Stael,Madame de

Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.

Stavrianos, L.S.

from Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History:

If the cooperative, communal features of Paleolithic society contributed fundamentally to the early human struggle for survival against environmental dangers, then this has possible implications for the current struggle of the species for survival in the man-made environment that has to a large extent replaced the natural. Relevant in this connection is the experience of the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who lived with the Eskimos of Coronation Gulf in Canada's Northwest Territories between 1906 and 1918. He noted that all Eskimos had access to community supplies of food, clothing, and other necessities, and that it was not necessary to accumulate for old age because "the community will support you gladly when your are too old to work." Stefansson also observed that status depended upon "your judgment, your ability, and your character, but notably upon your unselfishness and kindness." Significantly, Stefansson concluded from his long involvement with the Eskimos "that the chief factor in their happiness was that they were living according to the Golden Rule. Man is more fundamentally a cooperative animal than a competitive animal. His survival as a species has been through mutual aid rather than through rugged individualism." (page 23)

Since human behavior, unlike bones, does not become fossilized, anthropologists must rely mainly on contemporary food gatherers when they seek to determine the nature of Paleolithic society. But can we assume that our Paleolithic ancestors had the same social organization as today's food gatherers, simply because they, too, lived off the bounty nature rather than producing their own food. Anthropologists believe the assumption can be made because of the basic similarity of all food-gathering societies today, regardless of whether they are located in the Arctic or the Amazon, the deserts of Australia or souther Africa.

...Probably the principal difference between Paleolithic food gatherers and those of today is that the latter have been driven into undesirable peripheral regions - deserts and jungles, for example - where they are subsisting under the most difficult of conditions. Their Paleolithic ancestors, by constrast, had access to the entire globe, including the fertile regions with hospitable climates that are now polulated by more numerous and more powerful agricultural and industrial peoples....

Given these dismal circumstances, it is all the more significant that anthropologists in recent years have found it necessary to abandon the traditional Hobbesian view of food-gathering lifeas "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Today each one of these adjectives has been replaced by its exact opposite. Food-gathering society is now viewed as "the original affluent society," whose members work "bankers' hours" and enjoy healthy diets, economic security, and a warm social life. This reappraisal is based on studies of surviving bands on all continents, the most detailed being those of the Kung group of the Bushment living in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa....

One surprising revelation to emerge from studies of the Kung is how abundant and reliable are their food supplies, despite an unfavorable environment. This is due to their extraordinary knowledge of their home territory and all its plant and animal life. Although these nomads cannot read or write, they can learn and remember - so much so that it is estimated that their fund of information, transmitted orally from generation to generation, would fill thousands of volumes.

The Kung use no less than five hundred species of plants and animals as food, or for medical, cosmetic, toxic, and other purposes....These diversity of these food sources ensures a year-round reliable supply of food even under the most adverse climatic conditions, in contrast to agriculturists, who must depend on the few crops they grow, and therefore are vulnerable to droughts, frosts, floods, and pests. In fact anthropologists noted that during a serious drought in the summer of 1964, the Kung food supply remained as plentiful as usual, while the neighboring Banty farmers starved....

Not only abundant and dependable, the Kung food supply also constitutes an exceptionally healthy diet. It is low in salt, saturated fats, and carbohydrates, high in polyunsaturated oils, roughage, vitamins and minerals. This diet, together with the Kung's physically active and relatively tension-free life-style, helps explain their low incidence of high blood pressure, hypertensive heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity, varicose veings, and stress-related diseases such as ulcers and colitis. The life expectancy of Kung adults is greater than that in many industrialized countries. On the other hand, the Kung are more vulnerable to infant mortality, malaria, and respiratory infections, as well as to a high death rate from accidents due to the absence of doctors and hospitals. Western scientists who observed Kung communities found that about one-tenth of the total population was over sixty years old, or roughly the same percentage as in those agricultural and industrialized societies with customary medical-care systems.

It is equally significant that the Kung are able to carry on their hunting and gathering with much less labor than is exacted today from workers in agricultural and industrial societies. The forty-hour week, which was won only after long and bitter struggle, would be considered inhuman by the Kung of both sexes. They devote fifteen to twenty hours a week to gathering and hunting, leaving the rest of the week free for resting, playing games, chatting, sharing the pipe, grooming each other, and visiting friends at nearby camps. Since the necessary food supplies can be obtained with a relatively small labor investment, young people are not required to work. Not until their mid-teens do girls join their mothers foraging, and boys their fathers hunting. At the campsite, work is shared along traditional gender lines, women being responsible for child care, cooking the vegetables and small game, serving the food, washing utensils, and cleaning the fireplaces, while men collect firewood, butcher the game, cook the meat, and make the tools.

The underlying communalism of Kung kinship society is evident in the sharing of property. Each Kung band collectively "owns" about twenty-five square miles of surrounding land, this being the maximum that is logistically manageable. If any band experiences a temporary food shortage, it is expected to ask permission to gather food in a neighboring tract. Permission usually is given, with the understanding that the favor will be reciprocated if the occasion arises. Perishable foods, whether meat or plants, are shared by all band members, but tools and clothes are the private property of the owner.

Communalism extends from property sharing to the Kung's carefully regulated social behavior. If a hunter, for instance, is exceptionally successful and returns repeatedly with much game, measures are taken to dampen any tendency toward conceit or any desire to lord it over others. "We refuse one who boasts," explains a band member, "for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless...`you mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here to make us cart home your pile of bones.'...In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle."...

Finally, Kung social life is exceptionally rich and satisfying. Huts are so small that they serve only for sleeping. Fires burn in front of each hut door, and all doors face toward a large communal space. The emphasis then is entirely on the band's common social life. Individuals seek not privacy but companionship. Two-thirds of their waking hours are spent visiting or being visited by friends and relatives from other bands. An anthropologist observer notes that the Kung "must be among the most talkative people in the world." The talk is about the day's experiences hunting and gathering, about food distribution, gift giving, and much-savored gossip and scandal. Music and dancing are also important band activities, as are initation rites accompanied by myths and legends passed down through the generations. This interweaving of art, religion, entertainmnet, and education constitutes the basis for band tradition and cultural continuity. "their life is rich in human warmth and aesthetic experience," concludes an observer, "and offers an enviable balance of work and love, ritual and play."

The Kung way of life is not only "enviable," but also inherently stable, or at least it was so until recent times. It is a society in equilibrium - an equilibrium that prevails not only between individuals, but also between those individuals and their environment. Basic needs are satisfied in a nonexploitative fashion. Personal conflicts of course abound, but not institutional ones. In fact, as anthropologist Stanley Diamond concludes about food-gathering societies in general, "revolutionary activity is, insofar as I am aware, unknown. It is probably safe to say that there has never been a revolution in primitive society."

Not only the concept of revolution but that of reform, too, is alien to such society, and naturally so, since prehistoric peoples assumed that after the creation of themselves, their culture, and their habitat, equilibrium simply continued and was destined to continue. What need was there to cirticize their culture or to try to change it? Parents trained their children to do what they themselves did. Education was a mechanism for preserving, not for altering their world. (page 28)

...Anthropologists agree that Paleolithic food gatherers had a limited impact on their environment but disagree as to why this was so. Some maintain that it was neither the social organization nor the communal attitudes of kinship societies, but their lack of destructive technology that determined their minimal impact on their surroundings. Other anthropologists, more impressed by what they consider to be the food gatherers' reverential attitudes toward their world, attribute that lack of impact to the nondestructive nature of kinship societies themselves.

...

Behind this possibly insoluble debate between anthropologists over the ways kinship societies related to their oikos lies a larger debate over human nature itself: are we "by nature" a rapacious, destructive species held back only by the limits of our technology, or have our "natures" for most of human history been relatively attuned to nature itself? What conclusions we draw about our possibilities in the present moment depend to a great extent on the position we consider most historically valid in this debate. (page 31)

The relationship between the sexes in food-gathering communities is of particular significance for us. Studies of some ninety food-gathering bands indicate that the status of women has been more equitable in kinship societies than in agricultural villages. The basic reason for this appears to lie in the fact that women contribute to the bands' food supplies at least as much as, and usually more than, male hunters do. Unlike village women, who are often confined to domestic quarters, food-gathering women are active band members, ranging far and wide in their foraging. Significantly enough, the degree of gender equality decreases in such bands in proportion to the importance of meat in the band's diet, large game meat invariably being the food provided by men. So sex equality is pronounced among Tanzania's Hadza, who consume little meat, while among the Eskimos, who eat only meat, women are treated largely as sex objects and have little control over their own fates.

The Eskimos, however, are the exception among food=gathering peoples.... (page 33)

Going beyond gender relations to overall band organization, we find that all surviving kinship bands have in common the distinctive characteristic of cooperation and communal sharing. This is due partly to nomadism, which makes individual accumulation of material possessions an encumbrance rather than an asset, partly to the fact that communal sharing gives a band a better chance for survival than competitive relationships do. and partly to the years in which an extended "family" can provide economic security to individual members who become incapacitated.

Yet whatever equality of wealth existed and exists in such bands, there is no such equality in prestige. Individual status varies substantially according to various criteria. Honor and respect cusomarily are accorded to those advanced in years, as well as those considered to possess supernatural powers. Similar high status is bestowed on individuals with outstanding personal qualities, such as skill in hunting or oratory, or exceptional generosity with material possessions or personal services. While a combination of such desirable traits may advance some individual to the rank of headman of the band, his authority is likely to remain minimal. It rests only on his personal qualities, not on any strict obligation to follow a leader or some decreed punishment for failure to do so. The headman is expected to continue making his own tools and to share in all work and communal obligations. He retains his position only so long as there is general satisfaction which his performance. Consequently, it is impossible for any individual to institutionalize his prestige or perpetuate his authority....(page 35)

Although the sharing behavior in kinship societies was the accepted human norm for millenia, it is important to note that it was not a mode of conduct that came either automatically or effortlessly. It was instead the end result of careful socialization during childhood. Anthropologists observing this socialization process in the Kung conclude that their infants, like all infants, are born with the capacity to be selfish as well as to share. Contradictory impulses are, however, channeled into socially acceptable forms that require more sharing and less personal accumulation than is customary in Wester communities.... (page 37)

Food-gathering communities were unique not only for their relatively egalitarian social relationships, but also for their integration of work into daily life. Work was not a necessary evil, tolerated merely for the sake of sustaining life. Digging for roots, setting a trap, or chipping a stone tool were as much a part of daily routine as eating or telling stories or visiting a neighboring band. Work was not a means to an end, but rather both means and end. Modern workers hold jobs in order to earn money for subsistence and for the recreation necessary to "recharge the batteries," a phrase especially revealing in its implication of the enervating effect of daily work. The dichotomy between working and living that we take for granted would have been incomprehensible to Paleolithic band members.

Another unique feature of prehistoric work was its brevity. Studies of food-gathering bands on all continents reveal a common pattern of twelve to twenty hours of work per week. This was noted by the Jesuit Father Baird, who in 1616 expressed his astonishment at the ease with which the Micmac Indians of New Brunswick, Canada, obtained all the food they needed: "Never had Solomon his mansion better regulated and provided with food....their days are all nothing but pastime. They are never in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry." Likewise today, Kung males are not expected to work before they marry and assume family obligations. Hence, the spectacle of able-bodied adolescents visiting neighboring camps or amusing themselves on their own. Their active hunting years are relatively brief since most retire in their fifties. In other words, at any one time, about 40 percent of the Kung population contributes nothing to the common larder.

The ease and leisure of food-gathering societies when set against the toil and pressure of succeeding agricultural and industrial societies explains Marshall Sahlins's thought-provoking conclusion that "the amount of work per capita increases in proportion to technological advance, and the amount of leisure decreases."

Because in the Paleolithic period communal kinship society met certain crucial human needs, it persisted throughout the millennia. From this no one should assume either the absence of aggressive behavior or of conflicts in past or of conflicts in past or present-day food-gathering bands. Those who have studied the Kung, for instance, describe innumerable small clashes, often over women or simply because too many Kung had gathered in one area during the visiting season. But these clashes do not resenmble anything that might be recognized as war. Instead, they usually involve a ceremonial display of histility resulting in minimal damage or injury....

...

Such evidence leads psychologist Albert Bandura to conclude that "from the social learning perspective, human nature is characterized as a vast potentiality that can be fashioned by social influeces into a variety of forms....Agression is not an inevitable or unchangeable aspect of man but a product of aggression-promoting conditions within a society." This conclusion, supported by the evidence our own prehistory offers us, is basically encouraging. "Human nature" is neither pacific nor violent, neither cooperative nor predatory. It is rather, largely determined by "society" or "culture." But society and culture are made by humans and can be changed by humans. It follows that future societies and future humans will be determined not by preprogrammed genes for traits like acquisitiveness or aggression - as our recent historical experience sometimes appears to suggest - but by people who have the potential to be actors rather than pawns on the chessboard of history. (page 41)

"Food gatherers were conscripts to civilization, not volunteers." -anthropologist Stanley Diamond (page 43)

...The English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in 1620 that three inventions - "printing, gunpowder and the magnet...changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world." All three were Chinese in origin, and all three were borrowed by the Europeans and used as basic instruments to power their own explosive chapter in global expansion. By contrast, all three, along with iron and the wheel, remained unknown to the isolated Amerindians until the appearance of Columbus. (page 58.)

How much the status of women deteriorated with the transition from kinship to tributary society is reflected in the following conversation a Jesuit missionary reported having with a Naskapi Indian of Labrador in the seventeenth century. The Jesuit scolded the Naskapi for not acting as "the master," informing him that "in France women do not rule their husbands." The Jesuit related in his report the following exchange with the Naskapi: "I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love anyone except her husband, and that this evil being among them [women's sexual freedom] he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present was his son." The Naskapi replied: "Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe." (page 71)

Studies of tributary societies, whether ancient, classical, or medieval, indicate that ruling elites made up only 1 to 2 percent of their total populations but appropriated not less than half of the total income. The agrarian and urban underclasses were often left with little more than what was necessary to ensure the biological reproduction of the labor force needed to support the state. Everywhere the privileged few lived in provocative luxury that contrasted sharply with the poverty and misery of the working many. (page 72)

It is no exaggeration to conclude that the new way of thinking embodied in the Scientific Revolution, which began in the sixteenth century and persists to the present, altered fundamentally the intellectual balance between the West and the rest of the world. In the past, Westerners had been dismissed by the Chinese as "long-nosed barbarians," and by the Muslims as ignorant infidels. Following the Scientific Revolution, beseiged and beleaguered ruling elites all over the world began to search for the "secret" of Western technological superiority as they tried to cope with Western economic and military aggression backed by unheard-of machines of all sorts. (page 99)

This unique synchronization of historical forces explains why the median multinational corporation today is a global enterprise producing twenty-two products or partial products in eleven different countries. During the quarter-century post-World War II boon, American multinationals alone grew at an average rate of 10 percent a year. By 1980 between one-quarter and one-third of the world's total industrial output was produced by multinationals, and about half of all world trade consisted of transactions among multinationals. (page 137)

Mexico is typical of this process. Large-scale farmers there are increasingly using their fields to grow winter fruits and vegetables for the North American market, while the country is forced to import corn and beans from the United States as staples to feed its people. The number of landless Mexican peasants has risen from 1.5 million in 1950 to 5 million in 1980, many of them crossing the border illegally into the United States in search of work, or internally emigrating to Mexico City, whose population balloned to an almost unmanageable 14 million by 1980 (with an additional 14 million expected by the year 2000).

The tragedy of this runaway urbanization, under way on all continents, is that few Third World countries have an urban industrial base capable of absorbing and utilizing even a fraction of these peasants. Newcomers to the cities are condemned to waste their lives trying to subsist on such work as street vending, shining shoes, running errands, pushing carts, or pedaling rickshaws.

High-Tech Capitalism, by so fully controlling the global production and marketing process, has placed each individual Third World nation producing foodstuffs and raw materials at a distinct and increasingly severe disadvantage. It has done this and devastated Third World economies to a large extent by forcing to historically rock-bottom levels the prices of their agricultural and raw-material exports in relation to the prices of the manufactured goods and the luxury goods they import from the First World. Despite the fact that famine and malnourishment stalk significant portions of the Third World, the global output of foodstuffs since World War II has actually been substantially greater than the increase in global population, which in the world markets has depressed crop prices. In other words, even when Third World countries "succeeded" by First World standards - by applying green revolution advances to crop technology to produce more food - the result at a global level is simply a drop in prices and further impoverishment. The prices of raw materials like Chile's copper, Kenya's coffee, and Bangladesh's jute have slumped sharply, too, because thanks to technological advances, the amounts of such raw materials needed per unit of industrial production are now only 40 percent of what they were in 1900.

...economist Peter F. Drucker has concluded that "foodstuffs and raw materials are in permanent oversupply" and "it is quite unlikely that [their] prices will ever rise substantially as compared to the prices of manufactured goods...except in the event of major prolonged war....The raw material economy has thus come uncoupled from the industrial economy. This is a major structural change in the world economy." It is a change that raises basic questions about whether Third World countries will ever be able to repay their astronomical First World debts. How will such countries ever find the surplus necessary to feed and clothe their own populations while fulfilling any "modernizing" dreams, if they cannot raise investment capital by selling what goods they produce? Is it possible even to conceive of global peace and economic stability as long as the majority of the human race eremains mired in such hopeless - and increasing - pauperization and consequent turmoil? (page 141)

The gap in average per capita income between what we now call the First and Third Worlds was roughly 3 to 1 in 1500. Since then it has widened exponentiallly: 6 to 1 by 1900; 14 to 1 by 1970; and an estimated 30 to 1 by 2000. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein concludes that the great majority of the human race at the base of the global economic pyramid is worse off today than in precapitalist times:

Without any attempt to romanticize the nature of a peasant's life in the Middle AGes, either in Europe or anywhere else in the world, let me offer this brief analysis. If you compare similar strata of the population of the world-economy as a whole, with 70-80% at the bottom, this "bottom" appears worse off today than they were 500-600 years ago, and the top 20% is unevenly spaced geographically throughout the world, and live primarily in such countries as the United States, France, Britain, Germany and Japan. Those who make up the top 20% of the world population may comprise up to 50-70% of the population of those industrial countries. Consequently if someone from one of those countries asks, "Are we better off than our ancestors were 500 years ago?" their answer is not only "yes," but obviously "yes." But that is because those countries have a high percentage of the world's upper strata. (page 144)

A study of eighteen hundred primary schoolchildren in Mexico City revealed the extent of television's imprint on young minds: 96 percent recognized TV cartoon characters, only 19 percent the last Aztec emperors; 96 percent identified a local TV character, but only 74 percent could name the then President Lopez Portillo; and more children knew the times of television programs than the dates of religious festivals, including Christmas. (page 145)

Such First World unemployment has also increased because of High-Tech Capitalism itself. Its unceasing technological advances have proved, in toto, not merely labor-saving but labor-replacing. Between 1973 and 1985, industrial output in the United States increased almost 40 percent, but the number of blue-collar workers decreased by 5 million. Similarly, in Japan planners anticipate a doubling of industrial production in the next fifteen to twenty years, but a simultaneous 25 to 40 percent cut in blue-collar employment.

The combination of labor-replacing technology at home and inadequate purchasing power abroad is considered responsible for a jump in western Europe's unemployed from an average of 3.4 percent in 1970 to 11 percent in January 1988. In that month, Spain's unemployment rate was 20 percent, Ireland's 19 percent, and Italy's over 14 percent. These statistics lead Peter Drucker to the conclusion that the uncoupling of the raw-material economy from the industrial one is being paralleled by "the uncoupling of manufacturing production from manufacturing employment." The first uncoupling is devastating the underdeveloped countries, the second unsettling the developed ones.

...

While factory jobs are decreasing, service jobs like those of bank tellers, fast-food workers, hotel workers, and recreation and health attendants are on the increase. But wages in these service jobs as well as in the high-tech sector of the economy are substantially lower than in the manufacturing one. Whereas American workers in the 1950s and 1960s could look forward to earning one-third more than their fathers, in the 1980s they can expect to earn 15 percent less. Between 1972 and 1987, the average real hourly wages of American workers dropped 10 percent. This amounts for many to the loss of "middle-class" rewards such as home ownership and a college education for one's children. (page 148)

From the seventeenth century on, Europe led the way in population growth as its increasingly productive agriculture and industry provided the means to sustain a rising birth rate. Later, advances in medical science and the adoption of numerous public health measures reduced death rates as well. Consequently, Europe's population soared from 100 million in 1650 to 463 million in 1914. Since Europeans at the same time were also colonizing overseas territories, the percentage of people of European origin rose from less than one-fifth to about one-third of the total world population in less than three centuries.

In recent decades, this particular global demographic trend has reversed itself. Birth rates in the developed regions have plummeted so that they match the low death rates, and a virtual population equilibrium now prevails in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Japan. In the underdeveloped Third World, by contrast, recently increased food production and improved health technology have sharply lowered death rates while birth rates soar. Third World population growth is presently twice that of the developed world - 2.2 percent as against 1.1 percent - a demographic pattern likely to persist regardless of current population-control campaigns because Third World populations are predominantly young. The prospects are a 50 percent increase in world population between 1980 and 2000, and over a 100 percent increase by 2025.

POPULATION PROJECTIONS: 1950-2100

(Population in Millions)

Underdeveloped Developed Total

Countries Countries World

1950 1,670 834 2.054
1980 3.284 1.140 4.424
2000 4.922 1,284 6,206
2025 7,061 1,393 8,454
2050 8,548 1,425 9,973

2100 9,741 1,454 11,195

Source: U.N. and World Bank estimates and projections.

(page 154)

These statistics are unprecedented in their magnitude. The human race reached its first billion in 1 million years, its second billion in 120 years, its third billion in 32 years, its fourth in 15 years, and its fifth in 10 years. These statistics also represent an unprecedented situation because the ecological setting for such democgraphic growth has changed radically. In the past, relatively slow population increases were always at least partially accommodated by the availability of "empty" lands. In ancient times, the Indians migrated southeast into the Ganges valley, and the Chinese south into the Yangtze valley and beyond. Western Europeans of medieval times migrated eastward in large numbers into th underpopulated lands of central and eastern Europe. More spectacular yet was the tidal wave of Europeans who flooded into the "empty" lands of the Americas and Oceania. Today, however, when world population increase far outstrips any in the past, no more "empty" territories remain. The result can only mean rising social tensions, with the number of landless rural housefolds in India alone increasing from 15 million in 1961 to an estimated 44 million by the year 2000.

World population increase engenders a corresponding environmental stress that is compounded by the unprecedented disruptiveness of modern technology. Even in the United States, which is relatively underpopulated and richly endowed, evidence of such environmental stress is everywhere - in the polluted, water-scarce sprawl of cities like Los Angeles and Phoeniz; in the depletion of the great Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies irrigation water to the Great Plains from Nebraska to the Texas Panhandle; in the conversion of California's orchards and Long Island's potato fields into housing developments; in the clear-cutting of remnant primeval forests in the Northwest; in the regions where half of all Americans live where air pollution exceeds health standards; and in the 99 percent of known toxic dumps that have not been cleaned up and that are contaminating water supplies throughout the country.

The global capitalist economy has left an even deeper impring of environmental stress on planet Earth, one of whose early manifestations was the cutting down of New World forests to make way for sugar, cotton, rice, and banana plantations. Even today Haiti and northeastern Brazil are the most deforested and the poorest regions in the Western hemisphere, a linkage that is less than conincidental. Such a pattern was repeated centuries later in West AFrica for the sake of cotton and peanuts, and in Southeast Asia for rice, tea, coffe, and pineapples.

Precisely the same imperative is still operative today, and with the same consequences. In the early 1970s, when world demand for wheat was high and the supply low, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz exhorted American farmers to plant their land "from fence row to fence row" to maximize production. The farmers responded enthusiastically, tearing out rows of trees that had been planted as windbreaks after the 1930s Dust Bowl. As a result, American farmers once more are seeing their topsoil being blown away by the wind.

Similarly, the First World demand for tropical hardwood furniture and wall paneling has tempted cash-poor governments in Africa and Southeast Asia to allow their forests to be overexploited. According to U.N. estimates, Africa has lost 23 percent of its forests since 1950, and the Himalayan watershed 40 percent - a depletion that is largely responsible for the devastating floods that have in recent years ravaged Nepal adn Bangladesh. One key cause for the spped-up in global deforestation is cattle ranching in tropical forests, primarily to produce beef for American fast-food outlets. Once the trees are cleared away and the relatively nutrient-poor tropical soils planted with grass, the consequences are devastating. Erosion and leaching by driving rains, and oxidation and decomposition by the sun's heat, quickly lead to massive soil degradation. Pasture grasses are displaced by weeds, many of which are toxic to cattle. about 15 percent of cattle in the Amazon die each year from eating poisonous weeds. after five to seven years, the productivity of these new grazing lands usually falls dramatically and the ranchers move on to clear new rain-forestlands. In that short time, however, damage has been inflicted on the earth's tropical forests that is much more difficult to reverse than it would be in temperate zones. Since 1960, it is estimated that three-fourths of all Central American forests have been destroyed for the sake of lowering the price of hamburgers in the United States by a nickel. In addition to these external commmercial pressures, deforestation all over the globe continues because of the desperate efforts by landless peasants to carve family plots out of forestland for their subsistence agriculture.

The ecological repercussions of the accelerating pace of technological development world wide are symbolized by a succession of catastrophes that remain fresh in collective memory. Some have been dramatic and attention-grabbing, as the names Hiroshima, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Prince William sound indicate. Others, while less obvious, have perhaps been even more fundamental, reflecting as they do the possible crossing of certain key thresholds of danger in the balance of planetary ecosystems. Such "crossings" may include the recently discovered "hole' in the earth's shield of ozone, which has protected earthly life from the sun's ultraviolet light. Not until the ozone layer formed, 500 million years ago, could early life forms creep out onto the land. Until then, they had to seek shelter in the sea - an indication of the magnitude of the possible repercussions if the depletion of the ozone layer continues unchecked.

Another impending "crossing" now goes by the name "greenhouse effect." This effect, scientists speculate, could be produced by certain waste gases that let in sunlight but trap heat that otherwise would escape into space. One of these, carbon dioxide, has been steadily building up in our atmosphere through the burning of coal and oil, and becuase forests that once absorbed excess carbon dioxide are rapidly being destroyed. Although scientists disagree as to the validity of the "greenhouse" theory, it has been noted that five of the last nine years - 1980, 1981, 1983, and 1988 - have been the warmest since measurements of global surface temperatures began a century ago. It is also acknowledged that even a slight warming of global temperatures could trigger drastic climatic changes. The Gulf Stream might shift course and fail to warm Europe, which would thereafter experience the frigid Arctic temperatures of Labrador, which is in the same latitude. Ocean levels might also rise twenty feet if the ARctic andAntarctic ice caps melted, flooding entire countries such as Holland and Bangladesh, as well as coastal cities from New York to New Orleans.

As already discussed, another "crossing" - an actuality rather than a hovering peril - lies in the proliferation of deforestation worldwide. Since the dawn of agriculture some ten thousand years ago, the earth's forests have shrunk from 6.2 billion to 4.2 billion hectares - a loss of one-third. For centuries the clearing of forests was welcomed as the preerequisite to raising food production and general economic and social development. Today, with forested areas drastically reduced and the world's population even more drastically increased, the continuing deforestation is responsible for seious ecological damage, including erosion, desertification, flooding, and reduced land productivity, as well as fuel loss for the hundreds of millions of Third World peoples who gather wood to cook their meals and heat their homes. Rain forests are also the source of countless thousands of useful plants, animals and insects, many of which have not yet been discovered, much less investigated in terms of their value to humanity. In this light it is worth noting that one-quarter of all prescription drugs in the United States are derived from rain-forest plants. A serious side effect of deforestation then may be the shrinkage of gene pools available to scientists and farmers. finally, forests play such a crucial role in the global cycling of carbon dioxide that tropical forests, expecially those of the Amazon valley, have been characterized as the earth's "lungs." Continued decimation of those forests appears to be building up to a condition of global emphysema.

Summarizing the overall significance of these ecological trends, the Worldwatch Institute warns: "The threats that emerge as we cross natural thresholds are no longer hypothetical....No generation has ever faced such a complex set of issues requiring immediate attention. Preceding generations have always been concerned about the future, but we are the first to be faced with decisions that will determine whether the earth our children inherit will be inhabitable." (page 158)

...Our Paleolithic ancestors (as well as today's Bushmen and aborigines) spent an average of only fifteen to twenty hours per week collecting food; at the other extreme, with the first Industrial Revolution, factory workers labored ten to sixteen hours a day, six days a week. The work-day was then gradually reduced until in the United States in 1935 it was finally made forty hours a week by law. Many dreamed of further cuts to a thirty-five-hour or even a thirty-hour week with a concomitant increase in leisure activity and creativity. Instead, despite all the technological advances in recent decades, the work week in the United States has increased from an average of 40.6 hours in 1973 to 48.8 hours in 1985, and leisure time during this period has dropped from 26.2 to 17.7 hours per week. (page 172)

Mass-merchandising techniques did succeed in creating a mass market. Customers were persuaded to regard what had once been almost unimaginable "luxuries" as "decencies," and later as "necessities." The process accelerated when the second Industrial Revolution generated floods of new commodities that had to be marketed in one way or another. Between January and April 1987, to take an almost random example, no less than 3,152 new food, household, or beauty items made their debut on the shelves of American supermarkets - one product every forty-one minutes. To house this flood of new items, American supermarkets are becoming more super each year. (page 193)

...The 1989 annual report on federal assistance programs by the House Ways and Means Committee revealed that the average family income of the poorest one-fifth of the U.S. population dropped from $5,439 in 1979 to $5,107 in 1987. In that same period, the average family income of the top fifth increased from $61,917 to $68,775 (all in constant 1987 dollars). (page 201)

Symptoms of Third World conditions within the United States have become commonplace in newspaper reports and on television screens: 20 million Americans who are chronically hungry; 13.5 percent of the population reported by the Census Bureau as living in poverty in 1987; hospitals throughout the country closing down their emergency centers because too many patients lack medical insurance or other means of paying; and the incidence of homelessness reaching epidemic proportions. (page 203)

With the end of the war, both political and business leaders were apprehensive about returning to the freewheeling economic style of prewar capitalism. An alternative was offered by the novel theories of John Maynard Keynes. Whereas Karl Marx had been the theorist of class conflict between capitalists and proletarians, Keynes was the theorist of class compormise. His diagnosis and his prescription were appealingly simple and persuasive. If workers cannot affort to purchase with their wages what they produce in the factories, the inescapable end result is a ruinous cycle of inadequate purchasing power, business slowdown, wage cuts, layoffs, closed factories, and growing unemployment until finally a new and less favorable equilibrium is reached. Keynes's remedy was for the government to intervene with various measures designed to increase mass purchasing power and block or reverse any downward cycle. The singular appeal of this prescription was that it seemed to suit the interests of both workers and their employers.

During the prosperous post-World War II years, Western governments painlessly implemented Keynes's basic strategy of "priming the pump" and creating "effective demand" with such measures as progressive taxation, trade-union recognition, and social legistlation of all sorts. Keynes's historic class compromise contributed decisively to decades of unprecedented economic growth and social development. Those were the halcyon decades of the welfare state - limited though it was - which was the institutional instrument for implementing the combination of measures comprising the Keynesian kit.

The Keynesian comproise can work only within the parameter of national boundaries. These boundaries have in recent years become increasingly porous because of acvances in communications, transportation, and management, which allow corporate entities of almost unimaginable size to locate and relocate their operations freely throughout the world. Individual corporations have reaped immediate profits from this new international balance, but while doing so they have engendered serious long-term problems for global capitalism. When an auto company closes its Detroit plant and opens a new one in Mexico where it pays its workers two dollars an hour as against twenty dollars at home, the result is a sharp drop in auto sales in both countries. Neither the unemployed Detroit workers nor the underpaid Mexican workers can afford to buy new cars. The outcome is an economic downward spiral which may one day precipitate a new Great Depression. Worldwide lack of purchasing power generates pressure to lower wages in First World countries and to keep them low in the Third World. This threatens to resurrect the dilemma of overproduction (or underconsumption due to weak purchasing power) that was the hallmark of the Depression years half a century ago. Symptomatic of this ominous trend is the shrinking of world trade growth from average annual rates of 8 percent in the 1950s and 1960s to less than 3 percent in the 1980s.

Some economists argue that one way out is to restore the Keynesian historic compromise, which, given today's integrated global economy, must take place on a worldwide scale to be effective. Either Third World wage scales must be raised, or First World wage scales will be forced down. Various proposals have been made for reducing the current gap between the two, such as making Third World access to First World markets contingent upon meeting international standards regarding wage levels, working conditions, and social benefits. More specifically, it has been proposed that imports from cheap-labor countries be subjected to a "worker exploitation tax" equal to the difference in wages paid to American and foreign workers. The revenues produced by this tax would then be transferred to the workers in the particular Third World country in question in order to raise its prevailing general wage level. The difficulty in reaching such a global arrangement and actually carrying it out can be imagined by recalling how bitterly congressional and business interests opposed proposals to raise the American minimum hourly wage above $3.35.

The strategy of global Keynesianism has been directly challenged by conservative economists who maintain that the current difficulties of capitalist countries such as the United States stem from excessive rather than insufficient purchasing power. The excess, they believe, results in a growing demand for imports and a skyrocketing trade deficit. Their remedy is to reduce consumer demand by decreasing government-spending in entitlement programs, and to increase business profits by reducing wages, speeding up the pace of work, and encouraging technological innovation. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who has enthusiastically implemented these policies, has proclaimed that they are in accord with the Sermon on the Mount. In May 1988 before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, she also invoked St. Paul - "If a man will not work, he shall not eat" - to argue that the rich were blessed while the poor were not. "Indeed, abundance rather than poverty has a legitimacy which derives from the very nature of Creation." (page 206)

...In fact, a revealing parallel may be drawn between the New Deal of the 1930s and the perestroika of the 1980s. Both programs were designed in response to a traumatic crisis _ Hoover's Great Depression in the United States, and Brezhnev's great stagnation in the Soviet Union. Both programs were headed by leaders who came not from below but from above - from the national elite. Both Roosevelt and Gorbachev were interested not in a revolution that would overturn their social systems, but in reform substantial enough to rejuvenate and preserve those systems. (page 211)

...According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, between 1982 and 1987 the Third World as a whole received development assistance, export credits, bank loans, and private investments totaling $552 billion. During the same period, Third World nations paid out $839 billion in interest and amortization on their debts. Thus, the poorest nations on earth provided the most affluent ones with a net gain of $287 billion in a mere six years - a sum apporximately equal to four Marshall Plans. Even after paying out this amount, the poor nations were one-third deeper in debt in 1987 than they had been in 1982. Inevitably, such hemorrhaging affects local living standards. Between 1980 and 1987, Latin America's per capita income dropped 30 percent and in sub-Saharan Africa the decline has been even greater. (page 221)

...An estimated 15 to 20 million people die each year in the Third World from starvation or malnutrition-related diseases. This is the equivalent of a Hiroshima every two days. The ultimate irony is that the global imbalance resulting in a net outflow of capital and even of foodstuffs from the poverty-stricken South to the affluent North hurts the North as well as the South. Because debtor countries cannot both service their debts and pay for imports, U.S. exports to Latin America and Africa dropped from $52 billion in 1981 to $40 billion in 1987. Every billion dollars in lost exports equa, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is no time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions intended, like the avowed commercials, to keep docile huddled masses, keep avid for products addled consumers. I seldom watch television. But when I do set out to twirl the dial, it is usually on Sunday, when our corporate rulers address us from their cathode pulpit. Seedy Washington journalists, sharp-eyed governmelicated Paleolithic type of existence is destined to remain romantic escapism. Rather, our task is to evolve societal forms capable of turning our technology into uses beneficial to the majority of humans, and in a fashion that will nurture rather than devastate the planet we live on. (page 234)

...Current difficulties in the socialist world have elicited dismay, derision, or impatience. Such reactions reflect an ignorance of comparable birth pangs and growing pains accompanying the historical evolution of capitalism. When that new social system finally took root in England about half a millennium ago, it did so only after centuries of false starts in northern Italy and in the Low Countries. From its birthplace, capitalism spread to the Continent and to the New World, where it assumed distinct regional forms, a trend that continues today as it proliferates throughout the globe.

A comparable slowness and unpredictability have marked the evolution of socialism, whose birth as a system, not a theory, can only be traced back to 1917. (page 239)

The historical record not only discourages hopes for quick fixes but also indicates that what we should expect most confidently is the unexpected. Virtually none of the decisive events of recent decades were anticipated,...If we recognize and accept the reality of the unpredictability of future events, then no longer can the lives and liberties of ordinary people be sacrificed in pursuit of certain ends that very likely will prove unattainable.

Instead, todays' dogmatists might reflect on Oliver Cromwell's message to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on August 3, 1650: "My brethren, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." Much more so than in Cromwell's time, it behooves us today to think of the possibility of being mistaken - to guard against any dogma or set of beliefs that we have ensconced above reappraisal. In a world changing infinitely more rapidly than Cromwell's, dogma must give way to working hypotheses constantly reevaluated against unfolding events.

If we must brace ouselves to expect the unexpected, then without in any way being predictive we should take account of an embryonic trend that has at least the possibility of transforming our future in fresh and possibly unimaginable ways - the global participatory impulse....

This participatory impulse is not unique to our age. It is discernible throughout history, or at least since the appearance of the state, with its bifurcation of popoulations into rulers and ruled. Since that bifurcation, the most influential society of each historical period has been the one that reduced the gap between top and bottom - the one that pioneered in raising the level of mass participation. Such quantum jumps constituted the modernity of those pioneering societies, providing them with a qualitatively superior social cohesion and dynamism that enabled them to prevail over all other contemporary societies and to stamp their imprint on their times. (page241)

Stevens, Wallace

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Stravinsky

To listen is an effort; to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Shunryu Suzuki

From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

According to Christianity, every existence in nature is something which was created for or given to us by God. That is the perfect idea of giving. But if you think that God created man, and that you are somehow separate from God, you are liable to think you have the ability to create something separate, something not given by HimFor instance, we create airplanes and highways. And when we repeat, "I create, I create, I create," soon we forget who is actually the "I" which creates the various things; we soon forget about God. This is the danger of human culture. Actually, to create with the "big I" is to give; we cannot create and own what we create for ourselves since everything was created by God. This point should not be forgotten. But because we do forget who is doing the creating and the reason for the creation, we become attached to the material or exchange value. This has no value in comparison to the absolute value of something as God’s creation. . .

There are perhaps three kinds of creation. The first is to be aware of ourselves after we finish zazen. When we sit we are nothing, we do not even realize what we are; we just sit. But when we stand up, we are there! That is the first step in creation. When you are there, everything else is there; everything is created all at once. When we emerge from nothing, when everything emerges from nothing, we see it all as a fresh new creation. This is non-attachment. The second kind of creation is when you act, or produce or prepare something like food or tea. The third kind is to create something within yourself, such as education, or culture, or art, or some system for our society. So there are three kinds of creation. But if you forget the first, the most important one, the other two will be like children who have lost their parents; their creation will mean nothing.

Usually everyone forgets about zazen.Everyone forgets about God. They work very hard at the second and third kinds of creation, but God does not help the activity. How is it possible for Him to help when He does not realize who He is? That is why we have so many problems in this world. When we forget the fundamental source of our creating, we are like children who do not know what to do when they lose their parents.(67)

Subcomandante Marcos

from The Nation, March 28, 1994

from a public letter by Subcomandante Marcos, "the mestizo E.Z.L.N. spokesman whose witty, eloquent letters have transfixed Mexico and made him a national hero."

Why do we have to be pardoned? What are we going to be pardoned for? Of not dying of hunger? Of not being silent in our misery? Of not humbly accepting our historic role of being the despised and the outcast? . . . Of having carried guns into battle, rather than bows and arrows? Of being Mexicans? Of being primarily indigenous peoples? Of having called on the people of Mexico to struggle, in all possible ways, for that which belongs to them? Of having fought for liberty, democracy and justice? Of not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? Of not giving up? Of not selling out? Of not betraying ourselves?

Who Must Ask for Pardon and Who can Grant It?

Those who for years and years have satiated themselves at full tables, while death sat beside us so regularly that we finally stopped being afraid of it?

Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, those who dies "natural" deaths from "natural" causes like measles, whooping cough, breakbone fever, cholera, typhoid, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria, and other lovely gastrointestinal and lung diseases? Our dead, the majority dead, the democratically dead, dying from sorrow because nobody did anythin, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, without anyone even counting them, without anyone saying "ENOUGH ALREADY," which would at least have given some meaning to their deaths, a meaning that no one ever sought for them, the forever dead, who are now dying again, but this time in order to live?

Tchaikovsky, Peter

from Tchaikovsky's diary, 1886,

excerpted in The Critical Composer, edited by Irving Kolodin

To begin with Beethoven, whom I praise unconditionally, and to whom I bend as to a god. But what is Beethoven to me? I bow down before the grandeur of some of his creations, but I do not love Beethoven. My relationship to him reminds me of that which I felt in my childhood to the God Jehovah. I feel for him - for my sentiments are still unchanged - great veneration, but also fear. He has created the heaven and the earth, and although I fall down before him, I do not love him. Christ, on the contrary, calls forth exclusively the feeling of love. He is God, but also Man. He has suffered like ourselves. We pity Him and love in Him the ideal side of man's nature. If Beethoven holds an analogous place in my heart to the God Jehovah, I love Mozart as the musical Christ. I do not think this comparison is blasphemous. Mozart was as pure as an angel, and his music is full of divine beauty.

While speaking of Beethoven I touch on Mozart. To my mind, Mozart is the culminating point of all beauty in the sphere of music. He alone can make me weep and tremble with delight at the consciousness of the approach of that which we call the ideal. Beethoven makes me tremble too, but rather from a sense of fear and yearning anguish. I do not understand how to anlyze music, and cannot go into detail.... Still I must mention two facts. I love Beethoven's middle period, and sometimes his first; but I really hate his last, especially the lastest quartets. They have only brilliancy, nothing more. The rest is chaos, over which floats, veiled in mist, the spirit of this musical Jehovah.

I love everything in Mozart, for we love everything in the man to whom we are truly devoted. Above all, Don Juan, for through that work I have learnt to know what music is. Till then (my seventeenth year) I knew nothing except the enjoyable semi-music of the Italians. Although I love everythin in Mozart, I will not assert that every one of his works, even the most insignificant, should be considered a masterpiece. I know quite well that no single example of his Sonatas ia a great creation, and yet I like each one, because it is his, because he has breathed into it his sacred breath.

As to the forerunner of both these artists, I like to play Bach, because it is interesting to play a good fugue; but I do not regard him, in common with many others, as a great genius. Handel is only fourth-rate, he is not even interesting. I sympathize with Gluck in spite of his poor creative gift. I also like some things of Haydn. These four great masters have been surpassed by Mozart. They are rays which are extinguished by Mozart's sun. (p. 85)

Tolstoy, Leo

from Resurrection:

What surprised him most was that she showed no sign of shame, except of being a convict - she was ashamed of that but not of being a prostitute. On the contrary, she seemed rather pleased, almost proud of it. And yet, how could it be otherwise? Nobody can wholeheartedly do anything unless he believes that his activity is important and good. Therefore, whatever a man's position may be, he is bound to take that view of human life in general that will make his own activity seem important and good. People usually imagine that a thief, a murderer, a spy, a prositiute, knowing their occupation to be evil, must be ashamed of it. But the very opposite is true. Men who have been placed by fate and their own sins or mistakes in a certain position, however irregular that position may be, adopt a view of life as a whole which makes their position appear to them good and respectable. In order to back up their view of life they instinctively mix only with those who accept their ideas of life and of their place in it. This surprises us when it is a case of thieves bragging of their skill, prostitutes flaunting their depravity or murderers boasting of their cruelty. But it surprises us only because their numbers are limited and - this is the point - we live in a different atmosphere. But can we not observe the same phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e. of robbery; when commanders of armies pride themselves on their victories, i.e. on murder; and when those in high places vaunt their power - their brute force? We do not see that their ideas of life and of good and evil are corrupt and inspired by a necessity to justify their position, only because the circle of people with such corrupt ideas is a larger one and we belong to it ourselves. (page 201)

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way - said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apatheitic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man tht he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers: the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man. In some people the volte-face is particularly abrupt. (page 252)

And he ran over in his mind the people he knew who were suffering from the activity of the various institutions for the re-establishment of justice, the support of religion and the education of the masses - the peasant woman punished for selling vodka without a licence, the young fellow for stealing, the tramp for vagrancy, the incendiary for arson, the banker for misappropriation of funds and that unfortunate Lydia Shustova, simply because they might have got some information out of her that they wanted, and the sectarians for violating Orthodoxy, and Gourkevich for desiring a constitution - and he saw with remarkable clarity that all these people had been arrested, locked up or exiled, not in the least because they had transgressed against justice or committed lawless acts but merely because they were an obstacle hindering the officials and the rich from enjoying the wealth they were busy amassing from the people.

And the woman who sold vodka without a licence, the thief prowling about the town and Lydia Shustova with her proclamation, and the sectarians upsetting superstititions, and Gourkevich desiring a constitution - were all obstacles to this. It seemed perfectly clear to Nekhlyudov, therefore, that all these officials, beginning with his aunt's husband, the senators and Toporov, down to the petty, neat, orderly gentlemen sitting at desks in the various ministries, were not in the least troubled by the fact that innocent people suffered: their one concern was to get rid of dangerous elements.

Thus the commandment to forgive ten guilty men rather than let one innocent man be condemned was not merely disregarded but, on the contrary, ten who were harmless were punished for the sake of eliminating one dangerous person, just as in cutting a rotten piece out of anything some of the good has to be cut away too.

This explanation of all that took place seemed very simple and clear to Nekhlyudov but its very simplicity and explicitness made him hesitate to accept it. Was it possible that so complicated a phenomenon could have so simple and terrible an explanation. Could it really be that all the talk about justice, goodness, law, religion, God and so on, was nothing but so many words to conceal the grossest self-interest and cruelty? (page 386)

To know that somewhere, far away, one set of people are torturing another set by subjecting them to every kind of humiliation, inhuman degradation and suffering; and for three months to have been a constant eye-witness of that defilement and agony inflicted on one set of people by another - are two very different things. And Nekhlyudov was experiencing this. More than once during the last three months he had asked himself: Am I mad, that I see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I see? Yet the people (and there were so many of them) who did the things that so bewildered and horrified him behaved with such calm assurance - not only that what they were doing was necessary but that it was highly important and valuable work - that it was difficult to believe them all to be mad. Nor could he admit that he was mad himself, for he was conscious of the clearness of his thoughts. Consequently, he found himself in a continual state of perplexity.

What he had seen during the past three months had left him with the impression that from the whole population living in freedom the government in conjunction with the courts picked out the most highly strung, mettlesome and excitable individuals, the most gifted and the strongest - but less crafty and cautious than other people - and these, who were not one whit more guilty or more dangerous to society than those who were left at liberty, were locked up in gaols, halting-stations, hard-labour camps, where they were confined for months and years in utter idleness, material security, and exile from nature, from their families and from useful work. In other words, they were forced outside all the conditions required for a normal and moral human existence. This was the first conclusion that Nekhlyudov drew from his observations.

Secondly, these people were subjected to all sorts of unnecessary degradation in these establishments - chains, shaven heads and infamous prison clothing; that is, they were deprived of the main inducements which encourage weak-people to lead good lives: regard for public opinion, a sense of shame and a consciousness of human dignity.

Thirdly, with their lives in continual danger from the infectious diseases common in places of confinement, from physical eshaustion and from beating (to say nothing of exceptional occurrences such as sunstroke, drowning and fire), these people lived continually in circumstances in which the best and most moral of men are led by the instinct of self-preservation to commit (and to condone in others) the most terribly cruel actions.

Fourthly, these people were forced to assicate with men singularly corrupted by life (and by these very institutions, especially) - with murderers and wrong-doers who acted like leaven in dough on those not yet corrupted by the means employed.

And fifthly and finally, all the people subject to these influences were instilled in the most effective manner possible - namely, by every imaginable form of inhuman treatment practised upon themselves, by means of the suffering inflicted on children, women and old men, by beatings and floggings with rods and whips, by the offering of rewards for bringing a fugitive back, dead or alive, by the separation of husbands from wives and putting them to cohabit with other partners, by shootings and hangings - it was instilled into them in the most effective manner possible that all sorts of violence, cruelty and inhumanity were not only tolerated but even sanctioned by the government when it suited its purpose, and were therefore all the more permissible to those who found themselves under duress, in misery and want.

All these institutions seemed to have been devised for the express purpose of producing a concretion of depravity and vice, such as could not be achieved in any other conditions, with the ultimate idea of disseminating this concretion of depravity and vice among the whole population. `It is just as if the problem had been set: to find the best and surest means of corrupting the greatest number of people,' thought Nekhlyudov, as he tried to penetrate to the heart of what happened in gaols and halting-stations. Every year hundreds and thousands of people were brought to the utmost pitch of depravity and, when completely corrupted, they were set free to spread up and down the country the corruption they had learned in prison.

In the prisons of Tumen, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk, and at the halting-stations on the way, Nekhlyudov saw how successfully the objects society seemed to have set itself were atttained. Simple ordinary men brought up in the tenets of Russian social, Christian, peasant morality abandoned these principles and acquired new prison ideas, founded mainly on the theory that any outrage to or violation of the human personality, any destruction of the same, is permissible if profitable. In the light of what was done to them, people who had been in prison came to see and realize with every fibre of their being that all the moral laws of respect and compassion preached by religious and moral teachers were set aside in real life, and that therefore there was no need for them to adhere to them either. Nekhlyudov noticed evidence of this in all the convicts he knew: in Fedorov, Makar, even in Tarass, who after two months with the convicts had shocked Nekhlyudov by the lack of morality in his arguments. During the journey Nekhlyudov had discovered that tramps who escaped into the marshes would incite comrades to escape with them, and then murder them and eat their flesh. He saw a live man who had been accused of this and had admitted it. And the most appalling thing was that these were not isolated instances but cases that recurred continually.

Only by the special cultivation of vice such as was carried on in these establishments could a Russian be brought to the state of these tramps who (anticipating Nietzsche's doctrine) considered everything permissible and nothing forbidden, and spread this teaching first among the convicts and then among the people in general.

The only explanation of all that was done was that it aimed at the prevention of crime, at inspiring fear, at correcting offenders and at dealing out to them `natural punishement', as the books expressed it. But in reality nothing of the sort was achieved. Crime, instead of being prevented, was extended. Offenders, instead of being frightened, were encouraged, and many of them - the tramps, for example - had gone to gaol of their own accord. Instead of the correction of the vicious, there was a systematic dissemination of all the vices, while the need for punishment, far from being softened by the measures taken by the government, nurtured a spirit of revenge among the masses where it did not exist before.

`Then why do they persist in what they are doing?' Nekhlyudov asked himself, and found no answer.

And what surprised him most was that none of all this had happened accidentally, by mistake, once only, but that it had been going on for centuries, with the single difference that in the old days men had had their nostrils slit and their ears cut off; then a time came when they were branded and fastened to iron rods; and now they were manacled, and transported by steam instead of in carts.

The official argument that the conditions which excited his indignation arose from the imperfection of the arrangements at the places of confinement and deportation, adn could all be improved as soon as prisons were built in accordance with modern methods, did not satisfy Nekhlyudov, because he felt that the things which aroused his indignation were not caused by more or less perfect arrangements at the places of detention. He had read of model prisons with electric beels, where executions were done by electricity as recommended by Tarde, and this perfected system of violence revolted him still more.

What revolted Nekhlyudov most of all was that there were men in the law-courts and in the ministries who received large salaries taken from the people for referring to books written by other officials like themselves, actuated by like motives, fitting to this or that statute actions that infringed the laws which they themselves had framed, and in accordance with these statutes of theirs went on sending people to places where they would never see them again and where those people were completely at the mercy of cruel, hardened inspectors, gaolers and convoy soldiers, and where they perished, body and soul, by the million.

Now that he had a closer acquaintance with prisons and halting-stations, Nekhlyudov saw that all the vices which developed among the convicts - drunkenness, gambling, brutality and all the dreadful crimes committed by the inmates of the prisons, and even cannibalism itself - were neither accidents nor signs of mental or physical degeneration (as certain obtuse scientists have declared, to the satisfaction of the government) but that they were the inevitable result of the incredible delusion that one group of human beings has the right to punish another. Nekhlyudov saw that cannibalism began, not in the Siberian marshes but in ministerial offices and government departments: it only found consummation in the marshes. He saw that his brother-in-law, for instance, and in fact all the lawyers and functionaries from usher to minister were not in the least concerned about justice or the good of the people, about which they talked: all they cared about were the roubles they were paid for doing the things that caused all this degradation and misery. That was quite evident.

`Can it be, then, that all this simply springs from a misunderstanding? I wonder, could anything be done to secure their salaries to all these bureaucrats, even to pay them a premium, to leave off doing all that they are doing now?' thought Nekhlyudov. And with these thoughts in his head, after the cocks had crowed for the second time he fell into a sound sleep, in spite of the fleas that spurted around him like water from a fountain every time he stirred.

(page 529)

And it happened to Nekhlyudov as it often happens to people living a spiritual life. The thought that at first had appeared so strange, so paradoxical, laughable even, ever more frequently finding confirmation in life, suddenly appeared to him as the simplest, incontrovertible truth. Thus he realized quite clearly that the only sure means of salvation from the terrible wrongs which mankind endures is for every man to acknowledge himself a sinner before God and therefore unfitted either to punish or reform others. It now became clear to him that all the dreadful evil of which he had been a witness in gaols and halting-places, and the calm self-assurance of those who committed it, resulted from the attempt by men to perform the impossible: being evil themselves they presumed to correct evil. Vicous men undertook to reform other vicious men and thought they could do it by mechanical means. But the only thing that came of it all was that needy and covetous men, having made a profession of so-caloed punishment and correction, themselves became utterly corrupt, and continually corrupted their victims. Now he knew the cause of all the horrors he had seen, and what ought to be done to put an end to them. The answer he had been unable to find was the same that Christ gave to Peter: to forgive everyone always, forgive an endless number of times, because there was no man living who was guiltless and therefore able to punish or reform.

`But surely it cannot be so simple?' Nekhlyudov said to himself, and yet he saw beyond any doubt that, strange as it had seemed to him at first, used as he was to the opposite, it was certainly not only a theoretical but also the most practical solution of the problem. The age-old question of what to do with wrong-doers - surely not let them go unpunished? - no longer perplexed him. The argument might have some meaning if it had ever been shown that punishment diminised crime or improved the criminal; but when exactly the contrary has been proved - when it has become an established fact that it is not within the power of one set of men to correct others - then the only sensible thing to do is to abandon methods which are not only useless but harmful, immoral and cruel. `For many centuries criminals have been executed. Well, and are they extinct? Not at all. Far from being extinct, their numbers have been greatly increased by the addtion of those criminals who have been demoralized by punishment and those other criminals - the judges, prosecutors, magistrates and gaolers - who judge and punish men.' Now Nekhlyudov understood that society and order generally speaking existed, not thanks to those legalized criminals who judge and punish other men, but because in spite of their depraving influence people still pity and love one another. (page 564)

May 24, 1988

Trotsky, Leon

from The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany:

First of all, the matter concerns the Soviet bureaucracy. In the writings of the Stalinist theoreticians this social stratum does not exist at all. We are only told of "Leninism," of disembodied leadership, of the ideological tradition, of the spirit of Bolshevism, of the imponderable "general line"; but we never hear a word about the functionary, breathing and living, in flesh and bone, who manipulates thegeneral line like a fireman his hose. In the meantime this same functionary bears the least resemblance to an incorporeal spirit. He eats and guzzles and procreates and grows himself a respectable potbelly. He lays down the law with a sonsorous voice, hand picks from below people faithful to him, remains faithful to his superiors, prohibits others from criticizing himself, and sees in all this the gist of the general line. Of such functionaries there are a few million. A few million! Their number is greater than the number of industrial workers in the period of the October Revolution. The majority of these funcionaries never participated in the class struggle, which is bound up with sacrifices, self-denials, and dangers. These people in their overwhelming mass began their political lives already in the category of a ruling layer. They are backed by the state power. It assures them their livelihood and raises them considerably above the surrounding masses. They know nothing of the dangers of unemployment, if they are gifted with the capacity to stand at attention. The grossest errors are forgiven them so long as they are ready to fulfill the role of the sacrificial scapegoat at the required moment, and thus remove the responsibility from the shoulders of their nearest superiors. Well, then, has this ruling stratum of many millions any social weight and political influence in the life of a country? Yes or no?

We are not anarchists. We understand that the necessity of a workers' government and theriefore the historical inevitability of a bureaucracy during a transitional period. But we likewise undestand the dangers that are inherent in this fact, particularly for a backward and an isolated country. The idealization of Soviet bureaucracy is the most shameful mistake that can be made by a Marxist. Lenin strove with all his might to raise the party as a self-acting vanguard of the workingclass above the governmental apparatus in order to control, check, direct, and purge it, placing the historical intersts of theproletariat - international, not only national - above the interests of the ruling bureaucracy. As the first condition of the party control over the government Lenin prescribed control by the party masses over the pary apparatus. Read over attentively his articles, speeches, and letters during the Soviet period, particularly for the last two years of his life - and you will remark with what alarm his mind turned time and again to this burning question. (page 212)

Left Bourgeois ideologists dream of a planned capitalist economy. But capitalism has had time to demonstrate that in the line of plans it is capable only of draining the productive forces for the sake of war. (page 246)

Socialism can be realized only on the basis of the highest achievements of contemporary technology and on the basis of the international division of labor. The Socialist construction of the USSR is not a self-sufficient national process, but an integeral part of the international revolution.

The conquest of power by the German and European proletariat is a task infinitely more real and immediate than the building of a closed and self-sufficient society within the boundaries of the USSR. (page 255)

To be sure, I do not want to say that the workers' state will tolerate even for a day the regime of "(bourgeois) freedom of the press," that is, the state of affairs in which only those who control the printing plants, the paper companies,the bookstores, and so on, that is, the capitalists, can publish papers and books. Bourgeois "freedom of the press" signifies a monopoly for finance capital to impose capitalist prejudices upon the people by means of hundreds and thousands of papers charged with disseminating the virus of lies in the most perfect technical form. Proletarian freedom of the press will mean the nationalization of the printing plants, the paper companies, and the bookstores in the interest of the workers. We do not separate the soul from the body. Freedom of the press without linotypes, without printing presses, and without paper is a miserable fiction. In the proletarian state the technical meansof printing will be put at the disposal of groups of citizens in accordance with their real numerical importance. How is this to be done? The Social Democracy will obtain printing facilities corresponding to the number of its supporters. I do not think that at that time this number will be very high: otherwise the very regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat would be impossible. Nevertheless, let us leave it to the future to settle this question. But the principle itself, of distributing the technical means of printing, not according to the thinkness of the checkbook, but according to the number of supporters of a given program, of a given current, of a given school, is, I hope, the most honest, the most democratic, the most authentically proletarian principle. Isn't that so?

"Maybe."

Then shall we shake hands on it?

"I'd like to think it over a bit."

I ask for nothing else, my dear friend: the aim of all my reflections is to have you meditate once more upon all the great problems of proletarian policy. (page 368)

The imperialist epoch, in Europe at least, has been one of sharp turns, in which politics has acquired an extremely mobile character. At each turn the stakes have been not some partial reform or other, but the fate of the regime. The exceptional role of the revolutionary party and of its leadership is based on this fact. If, in the good old days when the Social Democracy grew regularly and uninterruptedly, like the capitalism which nourished it, the leadership of Bebel ressembled a general staff tranquilly elaborating plans for a war in the indefinite future (a war that perhaps might not come after all), under present conditions the Central Committee of a revolutionary party resembles the field headquarters of an army in action. Thestrategy of the study has been replaced by the strategy of thebattlefield.

The struggle against a centralized enemy demands centralization. Trained in a spirit of strict discipline, theGerman workers assimilated this idea with renewed vigor during the war and the political convulsions which followed it. The workers are not blind to the defects of their leadership, but none of them as an individual is able to shake off the grip of the organization. The workers as a whole consider it better to have a strong leadership, even if a faulty one, than to pull in different directions or to resort to "freelance" activities. Never before in the history of humanity has a political staff played so important a role or borne such responsibility as in the present epoch.

The unparalleled defeat of the German proletariat is themost important event since the conquest of power by the Russian proletariat. (page 391)

As one of the main causes for the victory of fascism,the luckless leaders refer - in secret, to be sure - to the "genius" of Hitler, who foresaw everything and neglected nothing. It would be fruitless now to submit the fascist policy to a retrospective criticism. One need only remember that Hitler,during the summer of last year, allowed the high peak of the fascist tide to escape him. But even the gross loss of rhythm -a colossal mistake - did not have fatal results. The burning of the Reichstag by Goering, even if this act of provocation was crudely executed, did, however, yield the necessary result. Thesame must be said of the fascist policy as a whole, for it led to victory. One cannot, unfortunately, deny the superiority of the fascist over the proletarian leadership. But it is only out of an unbecoming modesty that the beaten chiefs keep silent about their own part in the victory of Hitler. There is the game of checkers and there is also the game of losers-win. The game that was played in Germany has this singular feature, that Hitler played checkers and his opponents played to lose. As for political genius, Hitler has no need for it. The strategy of his enemy compensated largely for anything his own strategy lacked. (page 398)

Marxism itself is the fruit of union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. (page 403)

A revolutionary tendency cannot score stormy victories at a time when the proletariat as a whole is suffering the greatest defeats. But this is no justification for letting one's hands hang. Precisely in the periods of revolutionary ebbtide are cadres formed and tempered which will later be called upon to lead the masses in the new assault. (page 421)

All history shows that it is impossible to keep the proletariat enchained with the aid merely of the police apparatus. (page 443)

from Lenin:

Lenin raised the question of the Constituent Assembly a few days, or even a few hours, after the insurrection.

"It has to be adjourned," he declared, "and the elections have to be postponed. We must widen the electoral laws so that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote. We must have time to revise the lists of candidates. Even our own lists are not worth much: They contain a large number of men from theintelligentsia, whose names appear almost accidentally. What we need are workers and peasants. The Kornilovists, the Cadets, should be outlawed."

Some protested: "It is awkward to postpone now. People will see in this an attempt to liquidate the Assembly, especially as we ourselves have accused the Provisional Governament oftampering with it."

"Nonsense!" objected Lenin. "Deeds are important, not words. In relation to the Provisional Government the Constituent Assembly represented, or might have represented, progress; in relation to the regime of the Soviets, and with the existing electoral lists, it will inevitably mean retrogression. Why is it inconvenient to postpone it? Will it be convenient if the Constituent Assembly turns out to be composed of a Cadet-Menshevik-Social Revolutionary alliance?"

...Lenin stood alone. He kept on shaking his head, dissatisfied, and went on repeating, "You are wrong; it's clearly a mistake which can prove very costly. let us hope that the revolution will not have to pay for it with its life..."

Yet when the decision not to postpone the elections was taken, Lenin devoted all his attention to organizational matters connected with the preliminaries to the Assembly...

...Lenin undertook to deal with the problem of the Assembly there and then.

"The mistake is obvious," he argued. "We have gained power and at the same time we have put ourselves into a position in which we are compelled to use military means in order to win it anew."

He was preparing the action against the Assembly extremely carefully, giving a great deal of thought to every detail and subjecting Uritsky, who, to his distress, had been appointed the Commissar for the Constituent Assembly, to intense interrogation. Among other measures, he also demanded that one of the Latvian regiments, consisting almost entirely of workers, be posted to Petrograd.

"If it comes to anything, the muzhik may falter," he said, "and here we need proletarian determination."

The Boshevik delegates to the Constituent Assembly, who began arriving from all corners of Russia, were, under Lenin's pressure and Sverdlov's directions, assigned to various factories, workshops ,and military centers. They constituted an important element in the organization of the "supplementary revolution" of January 5. The Social Revolutionary deputies considered it incompatible with the high calling of a representative of the nation to take part in any struggle. " Thepeople have elected us - let the people defend us." In truth, these provincial petit bourgeois_just did not know what to do with themselves, and the majority were simply frightened. But they prepared thoroughly for the whole ceremonial of the first session; they brought candles with them just in case the Bolsheviks cut off the electricity supply, and a large reserve of sandwiches just in case the Bolsheviks deprived them of food. That was how democracy marched into battle against dictatorship - fully armed with candles and sandwiches. The people, however, did not even give a thought to defending those who considered themselves the nation's representatives, but were,in fact, only faint shadows of an outworn period of the revolution. (page 110)

During the liquidation of the Constituent Assembly I was in Brest Litovsk. When, soon afterward, I returned to Petrograd for some consultation, Lenin commented, "Of course, we took great risks in not adjourning the convocation of the Assembly; of couse, we acted very, very imprudently. But in the end it turned out to be all to the good. By dispersing the Constituent Assembly, the Soviet regime, in the name of proletarian dictatorship, openly and finally put an end to formal democracy. This lesson will not be forgotten." That was how theoretical generalization went hand in hand with the practical use of Latvian infantry regiments. It must have been at that time that Lenin was definitely reaching the conclusions which later, during the First Congress of the Comintern, he so brilliantly formulated in his theses on democracy.

The critique of formal democracy has, as we know, its own long history, The 1848 revolution and its transitory character was seen by us and by our predecessors as the crumbling of political democracy which was to be followed by "social" democracy. But bourgeois society knew how to make "social" democracy take the place which democracy pure and simple could no longer maintain. There was a long period in political history when "social" democracy, nourished by the critique of pure democracy, in fact differed little from the latter; it took over all the latter's talks and became permeated with all its vices. Not once has it happened in the past that the opposition was called upon to solve, by conservative means, those problems which the compromised regime of yesterday was unable to solve. From a transitory stage, which was to serve only as a preparatory period for proletarian dictatorship, democracy became the highest criterion, the supreme tribunal, the sacred temple, in essence the acme of hypocrisy, of bourgeois society. This was what happened in Russia. Having received a mortal blow in October, the bourgeoisie still tried in January to reincarnate itself in the phantom like, holy, Constituent Assembly. The victorious developments of the proletarian revolution which followed the open, frank, and brutal dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, gave formal democracy the coup de grace_from which it was never to recover. This was why Lenin was right when he remarked, "In the end it turned out to the good!" (page 184)

All this brings to my mind a worker by the name of Vorontsov, who just after October was detailed to guard Lenin's person and to help him. As we were preparing to evacuate Petrograd, Vorontsov said to me gravely, "If it so happens that they take Petrograd, they_might find quite a lot that's useful...We should put dynamite under the whole city and blow it all up."

"Wouldn't you regret the loss of Petrograd, Comrade Vorontsov?" I asked, admiring his boldness.

"What is there to be regretted? When we are back, we shall build something much better."

I have not invented that brief dialogue, nor have I stylized it. Such as it was, it remained engraved on my memory. That was the correct attitude toward culture. No lamentation and no wails of woe. Culture is the product of human hands. True culture lies not in the decorated pots of history, but in the good organization of the labor of human hands and minds. If on the way to achieve such an organization there are obstacles, they have to be swept aside. And if, in the process, we are forced to destroy some values of the past, then let us destroy them, but without sentimental tears. We shall return to build anew and to build incomparably better. That was how Lenin, and with him millions of men and women, felt and thought. This was right andjust. From this revolutionaries of all countries can learn a great deal.

Tutu, Archbishop Desmond

"When the missionaries came to our neck of the woods, we had the land and they had the Bible. They said, `Let us pray,' and we foolishly closed our eyes. And when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land." -Los Angeles, May 14, 1990

Twain, Mark

from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak?...A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Varese, Edgard

from "The Electronic Medium",

a lecture given at Yale University in 1967, and reprinted in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. by Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs:

First of all, I should like you to consider what I believe is the best definition of music, because it is all-inclusive: "the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound," as proposed by Hoine Wronsky. If you think about it you will realize that, unlike most dictionary definitions, which make use of such subjective terms as beauty, feeling, etc., it covers all music, Eastern or Western, past or present, including the music of our new electronic medium. Although this new music is being gradually accepted, there are still people who, while admitting that it is "interesting", say: "but is it music?" It is a question I am only too familiar with. Until quite recently I used to hear it so often in regard to my own works that, as far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music "orgained soulnd" and myself, not a musician, but "a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities." Indeed, to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise. But after all, what is music but organized noises? A a composer, like all artists, is an orgaizer of disparate elements. Subjectively, noise is any sound one doesn't like. (page 207)

Vidal, Gore

Cue the Green God, Ted

from The Nation, August 7/14, 1989: "

David Hume's celebrated 1758 Of the First Principles of Government has never been more to the point than now:

Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity--much less dissent. Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is no time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions intended, like the avowed commercials, to keep docile huddled masses, keep avid for products addled consumers.

I seldom watch television. But when I do set out to twirl the dial, it is usually on Sunday, when our corporate rulers address us from their cathode pulpit. Seedy Washington journalists, sharp-eyed government officials who could not dispose of a brand-new car in Spokane, think-tank employees, etiolated from too long residence 'neath flat rocks, and always, always, Henry Kissinger, whose destruction of so many Asians and their once-charming real estate won him a prize for peace from the ironists of outer Europe. The level of the chat on those programs is about as low as it is possible to get without actually serving the viewers gin. The opinion expressed ranges from conservative to reactionary to joyous neofascist. There is even, in William Saffire, an uncloseted anti-Gentile.

....

Currently, the principal dispenser of the national religion is Ted Koppel, a very smooth bishop indeed. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting--noble, doomed enterprise--had a study made of just who appeared as Koppel's guests during a forty-month period from 1985-1988. White male establishment types predominated. Henry Kissinger (Koppel's guru and a longtime cardinal in the national security state's curia) and Alexander Haig (by his own admission, in one of many moments of confusion at the White House, "a vicar") each appeared fourteen times, the maximum for any guest. Yet the cardinal's views on almost any subject are already known to anyone who might be interested in looking at Nightline, while Haig's opinions have never interested anybody in the course of a long busy career climbing ladders so that he could be close to those with power in order--to be close to them. The next two champ guests, weighing in at twelve appearances each, were the mendacious Elliot Abrams (Koppel assumes that although Abrams will lie to Congress, he won't lie to Koppel) and Jerry Falwell, a certified voice of God whose dolorous appearance suggests a deep, almost personal grief that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution are not yet repealed. Most of the other guests are hired guns for the national security state.

The Koppel explanation for this bizarre repertory company is that, well, they are the folks who are running the country and so that's why they're on. Well, yes, Ted, that is why they're on, but there are other more interesting and more learned--even disinterested--voiced in the land and, in theory, they should be heard, too. But theory is not practice in bravery's home....

from Monotheism and its Discontents

The Nation, July 13, 1992

The word "radical" derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized by our masters, and no one in politics dares even to use the word favorably, much less track any problem to its root. But then a ruling class that was able to demonize the word "liberal" in the past ten years is a master at controlling - indeed stifling - any criticism of itself. "Liberal" comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

Meanwhile, the word "isolationist" has been revived to describe those who would like to put an end to the national security state that replaced our Republic a half-century ago while extending the American military empire far beyond our capacity to pay for it....

...

Now to the root of the matter. The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three antihuman religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal - God is the omnipotent father - hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not just for one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

The founders of the United States were not enthusiasts of the sky-god. Many, like Jefferson, rejected him altogether and placed man at the center of the world. The young Lincoln wrote a pamphlet against Christianity, which friends persuaded him to burn. Needless to say, word got around about both Jefferson and Lincoln and each had to cover his tracks. Jefferson said that he was a deist, which could mean anything or nothing, while Lincoln, hand on heart and tongue in cheek, said he could not support for office anyone sho "scoffed" at religion.

...

We are now, slowly, becoming alarmed at the state of the planet. For a century, we have been breeding like a virus under optimum conditions, and now the virus has begun to attack its host, the earth. The lower atmosphere is filled with dust, we have just been told from our satellites in space. Climate changes; earth and water are poisoned. Sensible people grow alarmed, but sky-godders are serene, even smug. The planet is just a staging area for heaven. Why bother to clean it up? Unfortunately for everyone, George Bush's only hope of winning in the coming election is to appeal to the superstitious. So at Rio he refused to commit our government to the great cleanup, partly because it would affect the incomes of the 100 corporate men and women who pay for him but largely because of the sky-god, who told his slaves to "be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion... over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Well, we did just like you told us, massa. We've used everything up. We're ready for heaven now. Or maybe Mars will do.

Ordinarily, as a descendant of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which shaped our Republic, I would say live and let live and I would try not to "scoff" - to use Lincoln's verb - at the monotheists. But I am not allowed to ignore them. They won't let me. They are too busy. They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private citizens. We are forbidden abortion here, gambling there, same-sex almost everywhere, drugs, alcohol in a dry county. Our prisons are the most terrible and the most crowded in the First World. Our death row executions are a source of deep disgust in civilized countries, where more and mroe we are regarded as a primitive, uneducated and dangerous people. Although we are not allowed, under law, to kill ourselves or to take drugs that the good folk think might be bad for us, we are allowed to buy a handgun and shoot as many people as we can get away with.

Of course, as poor Arthur (There Is This Pendulum) Schlesinger Jr. would say, these things come in cycles. Every twenty years liberal gives way to conservative, and back again. But I suggest that what is wrong now is not cyclic but systemic. And our system, like any system, is obeying the second law of thermodynamics. Everything is running down; and we are well advanced along the yellow brick road to entropy. I don't think much of anything can be done to halt this progress under our present political-economic system. We lost poor Arthur's pendulum in 1950 when our original Constitution was secretly replaced with the apparatus of the national security state, which still wastes most of our tax money on war or war-related matters. Hence deteriorating schools, and so on.

Another of our agreed-upon fantasies is that we do not have a class system in the United States. The Few who control the Many through Opinion have simply made themselves invisible. They have convinced us that we are a classless society in which anyone can make it. Ninety percent of the stories in the pop press are about winners of lotteries or poor boys and girls who, despite adenoidal complaints, become overnight millionaire singers. So there is still hope, the press tells the folks, for the 99 percent who will never achieve wealth no matter how hard they work. We are also warned at birth that it is not polite to hurt people's feelings by criticizing their religion, even if that religion may be damaging everyone through the infiltration of our common laws.

...

Although we may not discuss race other than to say that Jesus wants each and every one of us for a sunbeam, history is nothing mroe than the bloody record of the migration of tribes. When the white race broke out of Europe 500 years ago, it did many astounding things all over the globe. Inspired by a raging sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their conquests were in order to bring the One God to everyone, particularly those with older and subtler religions. Now the tribes are on the move again. Professor Pendulum is having a nervous breakdown because so many different tribes are now being drawn to this sweet land of liberty and, thus far, there is no indication that any of the new arrivals intends ever to read The Age of Jackson. I think the taking in of everyone can probably be overdone. There may not be enough jobs for very many more immigrants, though what prosperity we have ever enjoyed in the past was usually based on slave or near-slave labor.

...

To revert to the unmentionable, religion. It should be noted that religion seemed to be losing its hold in the United States in the second quarter of this century. From the Scopes trial in '25 to the repeal of Prohibition in '33, the sky-godders were confined pretty much to the backwoods. Then television was invented and the electronic pulpit was soon occupied by a horde of Elmer Gantrys, who took advantage of the tax exemption for religion. Thus, out of greed, a religious revival has been set in motion and the results are predictably poisonous to the body politic.

It is usual, on the rare occasions when essential problems are addressed, to exhort everyone to be kinder, gentler. To bring us together, O Lord, in our common humanity. Well we have heard these exhortations for a couple of hundred years and we are further apart than ever. So instead of coming together in order that the many might be one, I say let us separate so that each will know where he stands. From the one, many, and each of us free of the sky-god as secular lawgiver. I preach, to put it bluntly, confrontation.

...The party of man would like to re-establish a representative government firmly based upon the Bill of Rights. The party of God will have none of this. It wants to establish, through legal prohibitions and enforced taboos, a sky-god totalitarian state. The United States ultimately as prison, with mandatory blood, urine and lie-detector tests and with the sky-godders as the cops, answerable only to God, who may have just sent us his Only Son, H. Ross Perot, as warden....

Villalobos, Joaquin

from L.A.Weekly, April 1-7,1988

An interview with the 36-year-old top commander of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla organization:

(Marc Cooper) As Marxists you propose a socialist El Salvador. Should the U.S. be able to live with that?

(Villalobos) Our choice of model doesn't come from a geopolitical perspective, because we do not mean to align ourselves with either superpower bloc. We don't want to base anyone's missiles in our country. We don't want to participate in an arms race. What we do want is an economic model that can help our people and even improve economic relations with the U.S. Now, does our model imply radical social changes? Yes, it does. Are socialist elements part of this model? Most certainly. But they have to be. The U.S. must understand that we cannot copy its model. You developed a capitalist society by exploiting Latin America, but we have no one to exploit! Where are we going to get our slaves? Whose gold and silver mines are we going to sack? We only have out own sweat and labor to build our country. We only ask to be allowed to do so in peace.

May 23, 1988

Von Karajan, Herbert

from Conversations with Von Karajan

by Richard Osborne

...When Giulini asked a world-famous mezzo-soprano in La Scala, Milan, in the 1950s to note the dots after the crotchets, she said, "I don't read music: do you want it longer or shorter." (page 45)

RO: And Italian opera? I imagine that in Austria, as in England at the time, it was rather frowned upon by so-called serious musicians?

HvK: When Toscanini brought Lucia di Lammermoor to Vienna with the La Scala Company, it was a revelation. I realized then that no music is vulgar unless the performance makes it so. (page 68)

HvK: ...in the language of Buddhism you do not speak about `How I impel this thing' but how it releases itself. I have often referred to my own fear when I was first required to make a horse jump a fence. I was told: `Set the right angle and then leave it, do not disturb it.'

RO: And setting the right angle comes in rehearsal?

HvK: For good rehearsing you need a mind like a microscope. It is not a personal matter. You are not helping the players, because if you try to do that they will come to rely on you in the actual performance. In rehearsal it is a matter of establishing the correct way to play the notes. But in the performance it is a totally different thing. There is a sense in which the greatest art in conducting is to know when one should not conduct.

RO: In performance you often appear to be in a state of deep meditation.

HvK: Well, I have practised yoga for many years, but then I met a Jesuit priest who had been sent to the Far East by the Catholic Church to experience the Buddhist way and see how it might relate to Catholic worship. He came to two of my concerts and afterwards we had a long talk. He said the traditional exercises I was doing were unimportant in comparison with the meditative disciplines I was experiencing whilst making music.

RO: Ideally, you become one with the piece itself?

HvK: Do you know the story of the buffalo? One day a young man went to the guru to seek his help. The guru sent him into his hut - just a small, leaf-covered hut with a narrow door - to meditate on his parents. The young man came out again. He couldn't concentrate. The guru suggested he meditate on a rose. Again, failure. So the guru asked him: `What is the thing that is dearest to you?' And the young man said it was a buffalo that lived on his farm. `So, go into my hut and meditate on that,' said the guru. After a very long time the young man had not reappeared. Eventually the guru was so worried he called into the hut to see what was happening. The young man said he was fine. `So why do you not come out?' asked the guru. `I have the problem,' the young man replied, `that I cannot manoeuvre my horns through your narrow door.' `Now you have reached the first stage,' said the guru.' It is a nice story! (page 103)

Wagner, Richard

from an essay in tribute to Beethoven

excerpted in The Critical Composer, edited by Irving Kolodin

If we consider the lives of Haydn and Mozart and contrast them, we shall find a transition from Haydn through Mozart to Beethoven with regard to the externals of life. Haydn was and remained a prince's attendant, providing, as a musician, for the entertainment of his master, who was fond of display; temporary interruptions, such as his visits to London, changed but little in the practice of his art, for in London also he remained a musician recommended to and paid by men of rank. Submissive and devout, he retained the peace of a kind-hearted, cheerful disposition to a good old age; the eye only that looks at us from his portrait is filled with gentle melancholy. Mozart's life, on the contrary, was an incessant struggle for an undisturbed and secure existence such as he found it so peculiarly difficult to attain. Caressed when a child by half Europe, the youth found every gratification of his lively desires impeded in a manner akin to positive oppression, and from his entrance into man's estate he sickened miserably towards an early death. He finds musical servitude with a princely master unbearable, he gives concerts and "academies" with an eye to the general public, and his fugitive earnings are sacrificed to the petty enjoyments of life.

If Haydn's Prince continuously demanded new entertainment, Mozart was none the less compelled to provide novelties day by day to attract the public; fugitive conception, and ready execution acquired by immense practice, will, in the main, account for the character of both their works. Haydn wrote his noblest masterpieces in old age, when he enjoyed the comforts of a foreign as well as a home reputation. But Mozart never attained that: his finest works were sketched between the exuberance of the moment and the anxiety of the coming hour. Thus a remunerative attendance on some prince, as a medium for a life more favorable to artistic production, continually hovered before his soul. What his emperor withholds, a king of Prussia offers: Mozart remains "true to his emperor", and perishes in misery.

If Beethoven had made his choice of life after cool deliberation, keeping his two great predecessors in view, he could not have gone surer than he did in fact go under the naive guidance of his natural character. It is astonishing to observe how everything here was decided by the powerful instinct of nature. This instinct speaks plainly in Beethoven's shrinking from a manner of life akin to Haydn's. A glance at young Beethoven was probably sufficient to deter any prince from the whim of making him his Kapellmeister. But the peculiar complexion of his character appears more remarkable in those of its features which preserved him from a fate such as Mozart's.

Like Mozart, placed without means in an utilitarian world, that rewards the Beautiful only inasmuch as it flatters the senses, and wherein the Sublime remains altogether without response, Beethoven could not at first gain the world's suffrage by the Beautiful. A glance at his face and constitution would make it sufficiently clear that beauty and effeminancy were almost synonymous to his mind. The world of phenomena had scanty access to him. His piercing eye, almost uncanny, perceived in the outer world nothing but vexatious disturbances of his inner life, and to ward them off was almost his sole rapport with that world. So the expression of his face became spasmodic: the spasm of defiance holds this nose, this mouth at a tension that can never relax to smiles, but only expand to enormous laughter. it used to be held as a physiological axiom that for high intellectual endowments a large brain should be enclosed in a thin delicate skull, to facilitate an immediate cognition of external things; nevertheless, upon the inspection of his remains some years ago, we saw, in conformity with the entire skeleton, a skull of altogether unusual thickness and firmness. Thus nature guarded a brain of excessive delicacy, so that it might look inwards and carry on in undisturbed repose the world contemplation of a great heart. This supremely robust constitution enclosed and preserved an inner world of such transparent delicacy, that, if left defenceless to the rough handling of the outer world, it would have disolved gently and evaporated, - like Mozart's tender genius of light and love.

Now let any one try to realize how such a being must have regarded the world from within so massive a frame!

Assuredly the inner impulses of that man's Will could never, or but indistinctly, modify the manner in which he apprehended the outer world; they were to violent, and also too gentle, to cling to the phenomena upon which his glace fell only in timorous haste, and finally with the mistrust felt by one constantly dissatisfied. Nothing involved him in that transient delusion which could entice Mozart forth from his inner world to search after external enjoyment. A childish delight in the amusements of a great and gay town could hardly touch Beethoven; the impulses of his Will were too strong to find the slightest satisfaction in such light motley pursuits. If his inclination to solitude was nourished hereby, that inclination coincided with the independence he was destined for. A wonderfully sure instinct guided him in this particular respect and became the mainspring of the manifestations of his character. No cognition of reason could have directed him better than the irresistible bent of his instinct. That which led Spinoza to support himself by polishing lenses, which filled Schopenhauer with that constant anxiety to keep his little inheritance intact and determined his entire outer life, and which indeed accounts for apparently inexplicable traits of his character - i.e., the discernment that the vercacity of all philosophical investigations is seriously endangered when there is any need of earning money by scientific labor - that fostered Beethoven's defiance of the world, his liking for solitude, and the almost coarse predilections shown in his manner of life.

In point of fact Beethoven did support himself by the proceeds of his musical labors. But as nothing tempted him to strive for a pleasant life, there was less need for rapid, superficial work, or for concessions to a taste that could only be gratified by "the pleasing." The more he thus lost connection with the outer world, the clearer was his inward vision. The surer he felt of his inner wealth, the more confidently did he make his demands outwards; and he actually required from his friends and patrons that they should no longer pity him for his works, but so provide for him that he might work for himself regardless of the world. And it actually came to pass, for the first time in the life of a musician, that a few well-disposed men of rank pledged themselves to keep Beethoven independent in the sense desired. Arrived at a similar turning-point in his life, Mozart perished, prematurely exhausted. But the great kindness conferred upon Beethoven, although he did not enjoy it long without interruption or diminution, nevertheless laid the foundation to the peculiar harmony, which was hence-forth apparent in the master's life, no matter how strangely constituted. He felt himself victorious, and knew that he belonged to the world only as a free man. The world had to take him as he was. He treated his aristocratic benefactors despotically, and nothing could be got from him save what he felt disposed to give, and at his own time. (p. 70)

The aesthetic idea of the Sublimeis alone applicable here: for the effect of serenity passes at once far beyond any satisfaction to be derived from mere beauty. The defiance of reason, proud in its powers of cognition, is wrecked upon the charm that subdues our entire nature: cognition flees, confessing its error, and in the immense joy over this confession we exult from the depth of our soul; no matter how seriously the fettered mien of the listener may betray astonishment at the insufficiency of human sight and thought in the presence of this most veritable world. (p. 73)

[Considering the melodic genius of the Choral Symphony.] The identical impulse which led Beethoven's reason to construct the Idea of the Good Man, guided him in the quest of the melody proper to this Good Man. He wihsed to restore to melody that purity which it had lost in the hands of trained musicians. One has but to recall the Italian operatic melody of the last century, to perceive how curiously vapid a tone specter, exclusively devoted to fashion and its ends, that melody was. By it, and through its use, music had become deeply degraded, so that men's eager taste constantly hankered after some new tune, as the tune of yesterday was no longer fit to be heard to-day. Yet, in the main, instrumental music, too, drew its sustenance from that sort of melody; and we have already seen how it was made use of for the ends of a social life, anything rather than noble. (page 79)

Washington, George

Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

West, Mae

from The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West

Hat-check Girl: Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!

Mae West: Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.

West, Nathaniel

from The Day of the Locust

On the corner of La Herta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a highly coloured shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights. Again he was charitable. Both houses were comic, but he didn't laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless. It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh.

Whitehead, Alfred North

From "Science and the Modern World"

The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?

. . .

There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what id does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. It is not wrong, if properly construed. If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. The narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme methodological success. For it directed attention to just those groups of facts which, in the state of knowledge then existing, required investigation.

The success of the scheme has adversely affected the various currents of European thought. The historical revolt was anti-rationalistic, because the rationalism of the scholastics required a sharp correction by contact with brute fact. But the revival of philosophy in the hands of Descartes and his successors was entirely coloured in its development by the acceptance of the scientific cosmology at its face value. The success of their ultimate ideas confirmed scientists in their refusal to modify them as the result of an enquiry into their rationality. Every philosophy was bound in some way or other to swallow them whole. Also the example of science affected other regions of thought. The historical revolt has thus been exaggerated into the exclusion of philosophy from its proper role of harmonising the various abstractions of methodological thought. Thought is abstract; and the intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect. This vice is not wholly corrected by the recurrence to concrete experience . . . Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of nature which has made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper faith. This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation. It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate present experience. There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves must demand that they should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievement: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues."(20)

Wolf, Hugo

from an article

written apropos a performance of Fidelio in 1884), excerpted in The Critical Composer, edited by Irving Kolodin

Two whispering neighbors seated behind me managed, by their inconsiderate behavior, to deprive me of all enjoyment of the overture. "Lackey-souls" is what Kreisler, the conductor, once termed these disturbers of the peace, these creatures who whisper while the music is played, rattle their fans, stare stupidly around them, greet their acquaintances, wave to their friends, slam their seats, snap their opera-glass cases open and shut, keep time to the music with their stamping feet, or drum out the tempo with their fingers, and perform countless other stupidities.) One of these lackey-souls (what a wonderfully fitting phrase) behind me turned to his fellow lackey-soul to pronounce the following memorable words - while the great Leonora Overture was being played: "Just look! The audience is as attentive as if ti were a concert!"

I was overwhelmed by this bit of unblushing naivete. There it was was - at last. The natural and obvious behavior of a civilized audience considered curious and abnormal, even though a Zulu Island native could not be anything but absolutely quiet and attentive once the first notes of the overture filled the hall!

Is it any the less music if it is played in a theater instead of a concert hall? Does the quality of the music depend upon the room in which it is played? What hair-raising nonsense! Do Mozart, Wagner and Gluck cease to be music once they are heard in an opera? Are the great pieces of these masters to be used as mere incidents to the tableaux, for the benefit of those bored, dirty, loose lackey-souls who flitter from box to box, and loge to loge? Truly a dishonorable role for the Muse of our composers - to be riding pack-mules and camels. It is enough to turn a dove into a tiger to see the abandonment of the true, pure and only Muse of our dramatic composers, Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Marschner, and Wagner, to the cold scorn and disdainful stupidity of those who betray their lackey-souls in theaters and concert halls.

What is to be inferred from the above-quoted words of my dear neighbors? That one attends the opera to hear music? Heavens, no - anything but that! Even the best, most sensitive, most thoughtful of these lackey-souls attends the opera only to feed upon the striking scenery, the luscious hips of the ballerina, or the pretty voice of a singer. They have an eye for everything that is insignificant and unimportant. Everything is sympathetically observed but the music. For that they have only a cold and menacing attitude. And these are the best of the lot! Second to them are those theater-goers who attend the opera only to observe Society, fashions, and the latest coiffures, all of which are best visible during the prelude and certain well-lighted scenes. These people maintain a shatter-proof indifference to even the most sensational and colorful events on the stage. Singers are unimportant. For them the chief role in the opera is played by the virtuosos of opera-glass twirling and handling.

But bad as they are, these lackey-souls are not the worst - the ultimate in the whole category of the species is achieved by those who attend the opera for no other reason than to let themselves be seen. They come regularly only after the last notes of the overture fade away, as noisy in their entrance as poorly mannered children, slamming their seats and snapping their inevitable opera-glass cases open with as much noise as possible before beginning to talk. The conversation is usually lively, and beneath the gaiety and laughter a distinct undertone of business is discerned. "It's going up," "it's going down" are as frequently heard and exchanged in their talk as Piano and Forte in the orchestra. Figures are sprayed throughout the words, etc. etc. and if ladies are along family matters, too, are not omitted. The cook has a novel way of preparing roast goose; the children are growing up to be so talented, clever, and promising. Elsie, the little 5 year old, can already play all of Medelssohn's "Songs without Words" by heart! And little Sigismund, or it may be Siegfried, is writing poetry ---.

"Too much," I say, agreeing with Tannhauser, "it's too much." (p. 89)

Wolfe, Bertram

from Three Who Made a Revolution

Each decade, each half-decade, saw a completely new version of that evangel of universal salvation: through science, through the negation of tradition and convention, through literature and criticism, through non resistance to evil, through a return to primitive Christianity, through the village commune, through love of the people and adoption of their way of life, through anarchism, agrarian socialism, Marxism - whatever the gospel of the moment, its disciples were ready to live by it and die for it and remake the world utterly in its image.

It was a fanaticism that served as a surrogate for the older religions. It idealized Russia, the peasant, the proletariat, science, the machine. It made a true gospel of its particular brand of salvation. It possessed singleness, exclusivism, dogma, orthodoxy, heresy, renegation, schism, excommunication, prophets, disciples, vocation, asceticism, sacrifice, the ability to suffer all things for the sake of the faith. Heresy or rival doctrine was worse than ignorance; it was apostasy. To the disciple even of so rational a doctrine as that of Marx, an ipse dixit_was an irrefutable proof. (page 35)

[Quoting from Gorky's Days with Lenin: " One evening Lenin was listening to a sonata by Beethoven...and said: "I know nothing greater than the `Apassionata'...I always think with pride: what marvelous things human beings can do! But I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads ofpeople who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And you mustn't stroke anyone's head - you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them over the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. Hm, hm, our duty is infernally hard..." (page 512)

The weakness of Lenin's work (Empiriocriticism) as Bogdanov hastened to point out, was its authoritarian character.Its proofs are all proofs by authority - the authority of Marx and Engels....

When Lenin has succeeded in confronting some quotation from Bogdanov (or from anyone whom he can, by whatever literary stratagem, link up with Bogdanov) with some quotation from Engels, and has shown some divergence between them, his task is finished. Lenin is not only "authoritarian" himself, but he insists that all his opponents must be authoritarian, too.:

Your clamor against argument from authority - he writes - is only a screen to conceal the fact that you substitute for the socialist authorities -Marx, Engels, Lafargue, Mehring, Kautsky - the bourgeois authorities- Mach, Petzold, Avenarius and the immanentists.

In pursuance of this idea that every man must have his authorities, Lenin matches a maze of quotations from Engels with a counter-maze of quotations from the "other camp," lumping together the most diverse names, on the philosophical theory, as Bogdanov wryly observed, that "who is not with us, is against us." By this device Lenin blames Bogdanov for things he has not said, and even for things he specifically rejects. It is sufficient that Mach has said them and that Bogdanov is a"machist" and therefore "responsible" for all of his "authority's" views. And for all other Machists! And for all the utterances of any who has praised Mach or been praised by him! This "philosophical chain-reaction method," and "quotational shock treatment," as Bogdanov dubbed them, were calculated as much to impress the reader as to overwhelm the opponent. It was the method of all authoritarian organizations. Bogdanov observed shrewdly, to "hold the chief responsible for the activities of his subordinates" and oblige them to "reflect exactly his conceptions." Bogdanov's reply did not do a very ogood job of defending his own philosophical speculations, but he had probed the weakest spot in Lenin's intellectual armor

The most blatant difference between Engels and Lenin is the angry moral tone of Lenin's attacks, the opprobrious moral epithets that pepper his pages. Engels had spoken of three philosophical "camps": materialism, idealism and agnosticism. Insensibly, Lenin converts "camps" into "parties" and proclaims that "philosophy is a partisan__ struggle." Where Engels finds "philosophical agnosticism" to be a shame-faced way of accepting materialism by the back door," Lenin enlarges the "shame" until it becomes a montrous thing, a plot to drag in not materialism but "religion by the back door." Those in the "idealist camp" are at least to be respected as "open agents of reaction and religion," but those in the "agnostic camp" are to be exposed as covert agents, whose agnosticism is "only a despicable cloak of servility to idealism and fideism."

Marx and Engels could be scornful and ironic in theoretical controversy, and devastating and reckless in their private letters to each other. But even in the Anti-Duehring, which so largely served Lenin as source and model, all that Engels aims at is to convict Professor Duehring of inconsistency and "higher nonsense." Nowhere do we find the imputations of evil intention that abound in Lenin's pages, or the passionately held belief that defects in a man's epistemological theories are defects in his character, willful immoralities of the spirit leading to inevitable political sin. ("Genuinely scientific works," Engels had admonished Duehring, "avoid such dogmatic moral expressions as truth and error.")

If Lenin's philosophical targets disavow a view he has imputed to them, it is sinister trickery. If they have modified a view under criticism (his criticism or another's), it is but the better to deceive. If their views seem very close to his, or to his masters' -still worse: they are "surreptitiously and illegally borrowing" from materialism to hide their true intentions and confuse the right-thinking. As a whole, "professors of philosophy are scientific salesmen of theology." Mach and his school are "graduated flunkies of theism." They are all conspirators, plotting against science and the further progress of mankind. "The philosophy of Mach, the scientist, is to science what the kiss of Judas is to Christ." (page 597)

...In 1893 Engels wrote a series in Vorwaerts_called "Can Europe Disarm?" His answer to this question, verging on what Lenin would, in anyone but Marx or Engels, regard as "utopian pacifism," said:

Such changes are possible at this moment. They can be made by the existing governments and in the existing political situation...I limit myself to such proposals as any existing government can accept withou tendangering the security of its country. I am endeavoring to show that, from a purely military viewpoint, there is nothing to prevent the gradual abolition of the regular army; and that, if a regular army is_still maintained, it is maintained not for military but political reasons - in a word, that the army is meant for defense not against a foreign enemy but against a domestic one.

from Introduction to Trotsky's Lenin

Long after Lenin's death, Trotsky was to write concerning Lenin's successor: "Stalin represents a phenomenon utterly exceptional. He is neither a thinker, nor a writer, nor an orator. He took possession of power not with the aid ofpersonal qualities but with the aid of an impersonal machine. And it was not he who created the machine, but the machine that created him."

Inevitably, the question arises in our minds: What machine? Who created that machine and put his stamp on it? What was there in the nature of that machine that could create a Stalin, permit him to vault so easily into the driver's seat, and drive the juggernaut over the bodies of all of Lenin's closest associates, over Trotsky himself, over the party, the peasantry, the working men, the managers, the pary ideologists, and the officers in the Russian Army? Neither in the present work nor anywhere in his later writings does Trotsky ask and answer that question.

Yet there was a time, back in the year 1904, when Trotsky rose to the heights of analytical prevision to forewarn Lenin that the machine he was creating would breed personal dictatorship. "The organization of the party," he wrote prophetically, "will take the place of the party itself; the Central Committee will take the place of the organization; and finally the dictator will take the place of the Central Committee." A true and fateful prophecy, for this tendency was indeed inherent in Lenin's machine, with its authoritarianism,its supercentralism, its infallible doctrine requiring a single interpretation and a single infallible interpreter - lest pluralism reappear in the insidious form of multiple and contending interpretations. Such a machine could more readily elevate a machine man to power than it could a "thinker, writer,and orator." The General Secretary could appoint and control the local secretaries and select his supporters as delegates to a congress. Trotsky could only have had a fighting chance had he fought this machine aspect of Leninism, for this was the "impersonal machine" that elevated Stalin to power over the party and country. By accepting this machine that he had once criticized so accurately, Trotsky was choosing to fight Stalin on Stalin's battleground, and was thereby doomed to impotence and defeat. In this regard Stalin was the better Leninist, raising Lenin's machine to new heights and completing the fulfillment of Trotsky's prophetic vision of 1904. Of all of Trotsky's pronouncements there is none more pathetic than his statement ofsurrender to the Stalinist machine that had just rolled over him:

"None of us can be right against the party. In the last instance, the party is always right....One ought not be right against the party." When Trotsky pronounced these words at a party Congress of Stalin-selected delegates, his supporters trembled and the Congress jeered, for the Congress was Stalin's while the one who would henceforth be "always right" and who incarnated in his person the party, was Joseph Stalin."

As Trotsky criticized Lenin in 1904 for his theory of an undemocratic party, so Lenin criticized Trotsky in 1905 for developing a thory of an undemocratic revolution. Trotsky calle dhis theory the doctrine of "permanent revolution." Lenin'scriticism was gentler than was his wont, for he made it at a time when he was being compelled to admiration of Trotsky for his leading role in the Petrograd Soviet and the October General Strike. Moreover, there was an ambiguity in Lenin's own spirit which secretly inclined him to accept Trotsky's thesis.

Lenin always regarded himself as an orthodox Marxist, and orthodox Russian Marxism, particularly as taught by his master Plekhanov, held that Russia was too backward for a socialist revolution, its proletariat too unorganized, too inexperienced, too uncultured, and in numbers only a tiny island in a surrounding peasant sea. What Russia was facing, the Marxists held, was a "bourgeois democratic revolution." The duty of the party of the proletariat was to fight for "bourgeois democracy" and help the bourgeoisie to come to power....in any case the bourgeoisie was supposed to introduce a democratic republic, universal suffrage, freedom to organize, and thus enable the proletariat to mature and prepare its own socialist revolution. Without such democracy, Plekhanov warned, the overthrow of a particular autocrat would be followed by a restoration of autocracy. Even worse, it might perhaps be a restoration of a more autocratic despotism on a pseudo socialist basis. If, as Lenin was to propose in 1907, the revolutionary government should nationalize the land, this would only tighten the bonds that bound the peasantry to the state, and produce a new ruling cast elike the "Inca sons of the sun." With his head Lenin acceptedt his orthodox teaching of his master, but in his heart there was ambivalence, for the idea of helping the bourgeoisie to power and postponing the struggle of his own party for power until he was perhaps long dead, went against his ardent, power-concentrated temperament. Hence he looked long and wistfully at Trotsky's view that the bourgeoisie would be too weak and cowardly in Russia to fight for its own "bourgeois democratic revolution," and too afraid of the concentrated, fighting proletariat to install democratic freedoms. The English revolution of the sixteenth century, Trotsky argued, still had to be fought "in a religious guise." But the French Revolution at the end of the seventeenth century "could dispense with religion." Now it was the twentieth century, and, just as Russia was borrowing the latest technology from abroad, so it could borrow the latest political technology, that of socialist revolution. The proletariat itself would have to take power and, one in power, could "leap over democracy" and at once begin its advance toward socialism. Morevover, its revolutionary example would stir the socialist proletariat of Western Europe to take pwoer, and they would help the Russian workers overcome their backwardness.

Very clever, Lenin thought, and devilishly tempting, yet, rememvbering the pronouncements of Marx and Engels on Russia and Plekhanov's solemn warning, he refused to be tempted. Moreover,he did not yet feel himself so near to power that he could imagine what it would be like to renounce one's own revolution and hand power over to the bourgeoisie, so, much as he felt the attraction of Trotsky's activist thesis, he nevertheless uttered a grave and, as it turned out, a prophetic warning against Trotsky's proposal to "leap over deocracy" and keep the revolution going in permanence until it brought about international and Russian socialism.

"Whoever attempts to achieve socialism," he (Lenin) warned, "by any other route than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at the most absurd and reactionary results, both political and economic." And in 1917, this, too, proved to be a true prophecy. for in that fateful year when he and Trotsky joined forces, they amnestied each other's cardinal errors. Trotsky accepted Lenin's undemocratic machine. Lenin accepted Trotsky's undemocratic revolution with its "leap over democracy." An undemocratic party to make an undemocratic revolution - what are these if not the very foundations of totalitarianism?

Yoors, Jan

from The Gypsies

Upset as I was by my first violent experience with the other side of the law, I had, naively, not given a thought to the cause of Pesha's arrest. I had simply seen a senseless injustice done to the people I loved. It had never dawned on me that they, my friends, really stole chickens. Being their guest, I had never questioned the source of their lavish hospitality. In assuming that their defenselessness alone was what had tempted their tormentors, I had made my renewed allegiance to them uncomplicated and direct. The pitiful discovery of their thieving, by Kore's untroubled admission, showed me the fallacy of this uncritical loyalty and shattered my illusions. I was bitter and amazed. When I asked Kore if anybody in our family "caught" chickens in "this way," he said unhesitatingly that Pulika would not have it because he did not like chicken meat and therefore felt the consequences were not worth it. He added boastfully, "Keja is very good at it, almost as good as Liza le Tshurkinaski."

Putzina explained to me that stealing from the Gaje was not really a misdeed as long as it was limited to the taking of basic necessities, and not in larger quantities than were needed at that moment. It was the intrusion of a sense of greed, in itself, that made stealing wrong, for it made men slaves to unnecessary appetites or to their desire for possessions.

Gleaning a little dry wood for the fire, from the forest, was no misdeed. There was so much of it, and anyway if they did not take, it was left to rot. Putting a few horses to pasture overnight in someone's meadow was not that bad. Grass grew without the owner's active contribution or effort.

Because I was a Gajo the Rom would not allow me under any circumstances to take what was not mine. This too was the law. (page 34)

Pulika's band traveled every day on and on toward boundless, ever-changing horizons. The environment and the circumstances of our vagrant life were never the same two days in succession. The monotony of constant moving contrasted sharply with the total lack of routine and the sort of security we somehow derived from it. I faced each new day with expectation and apprehension, identifying ever more deeply with the Rom. On a few occassions I was distressed when we left a particulary pleasant or convenient camping spot. These regrets were due to the conservative streak of a nature basically more sedentary than that of the Rom. Rupa chided me for this, in her gruff way; she said I would, by losing it, cherish the memory of this place even more, with the tenderness reserved for incompletely satisfied longings. She said in time I too would learn to possess the single passing moment more passionately, more fully, without regrets. She tried to tell me that the Rom lived in a perpetual present: memories, dreams, desires, hungers, the urge toward a tomorrow, all rooted in the present. Without now there was no before, just as there could be no after.

She said that "to the Lowara a candle is not made of wax, but is all flame." In the stories they told, the Rom praised extravagant lavishness and most of them practiced this all consuming generosity, at times to the extreme of outright squandering. In their language thriftiness, or any other word denoting carefulness, was translated as stinginess. They strongly disapproved of saving, with the result that between red-letter days, worthy of legend, there were hollow ones, more frequent than bargained for. (page 35)

For weeks at a time we boys and also the men lived exclusively in the open, unlike the women and the older girls who occasionally retired to privacy of a kind inside one of the wagons. Especially in the beginning of my life with the Gypsies I would suddenly feel an overpowering need for physical shelter, for enclosed space, for actual shade and for privacy in the Western sense, to be able to close a door, yes, even to turn the key and lock the door. With her uncanny sensitiveness and her unobtrusive affection Keja would then intone a monologue seemingly coming from a clear blue sky. Her voice had a honeyed quality, if slightly husky, and she spoke with a hypnotic intensity. She said privacy in the first place was a state of mind; perhaps the clever Gaje erected walls to create secluded privacy. In the walls there were doors and the doors keyholes, the better to pry. To the Rom privacy was first of all a courtesy extended and a restraint from the desire to pry or interfere in other people's lives. However, privacy must not be the result of indifference to others, but rather a mark of respect for them and of real compassion.

Most of the time the Gypsies lived together in fairly restricted quarters. In summer and in fair weather they all slept in the open, but even then their sleeping steads were at the most ten to fifteen feet apart without partitions of any kind between them. Privacy therefore was a concept that worked two ways: not only to avoid prying in the affairs of others, but also to keep from giving offense to others nearby who could not possibly avoid seeing what you were doing. In this same spirit of tactfulness and restraint one did not address another person in the morning before he or she had washed and was prepared for social intercourse. The same delicacy of feeling and extreme sensitiveness existed in relation to the functions of nature; neither were there jokes about the subject. Relating these observations about the Gypsies, I hardly want to imply that they were Victorian in any sense; but the fact that they constantly lived at close quarters with an ever-changing assortment of strangers, even if these were Gypsies too, made it mandatory that certain specific restrictions be observed. I often wondered at their delicacy of feeling and respect for others. These various restrictions, broadly speaking, applied only from puberty onward; by contrast there was more than a certain laxity about the behavior of small children, though little boys certainly had far greater leeway than little girls at any age. In the presence of Gypsy adults, respect and a minimum of decorum were demanded, whereas in the presence and at the expense of the Gaje almost anything was allowed. Not infrequently the Gaje were the horrified targets of exhibitionistic performances by the small children. These games were frankly intended to be insulting, and as such were slyly encouraged by some Gypsy adults. No such untoward familiarity would ever be tolerated by the Gypsies themselves. (page 38)

The Rom talked animatedly through whole nights. They never seemed to be short of subjects of conversation. When certain family groups met, they often celebrated their happy reunion with profuse and joyous drinking, which in turn led to nostalgic songfests. The more important heads of families would then sing wild sad songs to each other in Romani, their eyes closed in deep emotion, while their listeners silently nodded their heads with approval, lost in contemplation.

When I asked Putzina what the Rom were singing about, he would grope for adequate words or he would say, "They sing about us."

Occasionally young girls were asked to dance to "honor" an important guest. Everybody joined in the boisterous singing, clapping their hands, until the pale predawn light scattered them. In the distance the cattle were lowing mournfully. The feather beds were spread out in the open, throughout the camp, around the individual wagons. Before retiring for what was left of the night a group of us would for a last time "go and look at the horses." [This was the euphemism for answering the call of nature.-dr]

Waking up after a night's deep sleep, I stared into the infinite, vacant sky. I could not focus properly and failed for an instant to make the association with height or depth, so that I was overtaken by a violent sensation of vertigo. I grabbed at the weeds growing beside my sleeping place, to hold myself back and avoid dizzily falling into the shimmering blue sky above me. I closed my eyes violently, trying to subdue this flash of senseless obscure agony and quietly absorb the affirmative touch of the earth. Several times, as a child amont the Rom, I had had the overwhelming sensation of awe that comes from exposure to too much sky, and I had wondered about my companions, who felt no need to be protected by enclosing walls, always exposed to voiceless fears and sudden violence. (page 39)

With abrupt suddenness Pulika told me one day we would pass within a few miles of my place of birth, where my parents lived, and the actual place from which I had run away to join the Gypsies months ago. My flight from home had been unpremeditated and unintended. My hiding in Pulika's wagon during the scattering by the police of the various members of the mobile group had been without forethought, and if it had not actually been the cause of my running away, it certainly had made it easier.

Pulika sent me away with a solid hug, saying in a low voice that surely we would meet again after the winter months. He gave me some small change to take the bus. I wanted to protest, to refuse to be sent away so arbitrarily, but I could not; all my pent-up apprehensions of the approaching winter almost made me grateful for so easy a solution, especially because I was so close to home.

I came back to the house of my parents after an absence of nearly six months, which seemed like a lifetime. I arrived there at dinnertime and as usual they had a number of guests, painters and writers. Nothing was said in front of them about my long absence, nor was my disheveled appearance explained. I was sent to bed early. I waited tensely for the scolding and punishment I knew I well deserved. After the guests left, I could no longer bear to wait, and after some understandable hesitation I went to my parents rather than wait for them to come to me. I found them already asleep--or perhaps they were just pretending; I never found out. Even today this subject is for some unknown reason kept in a mythical haze, by all concerned. In the morning, I confronted them with my prolonged absence and emphasized the fact that I had run away with the Gypsies, possibly to make it even more provocative. With rare psychological insight and wisdom they replied that although of course this had caused them sorrow, since they loved me, they nevertheless wanted to respect my personal choice and they trusted me to know my mind even at the age of twelve. I was shocked. It was so entirely unlike my anticipation of the event. My father added he had hoped I would become an artist like himself, but if I preferred to become a full-fledged member of a band of nomads, he wanted the choice to be entirely mine. I kissed my father and my mother and shed tears, long and bravely held back. (page 41)

When the Rom traveled in small units they displayed a greater tolerance toward the Gaje. Occasionally they even sought out such contacts and enjoyed being entertained by the unsuspecting Gaje. Sitting around the blazing campfire, they played a more subtle game of mystification, leaving the Gaje totally unaware of their ridicule, never betraying themselves by so much as an amused smile. Many of the wilder stories about the Gypsies were told in this spirit to unsuspecting Gaje, to be repeated or even published in. . . (something lost here)

. . . to be able to establish a working base so rapidly and easily. They relaxed their initial suspicion. The Rom saying is "Admire him profusely and let him talk long enough and any Gajo will lose himself." Several hours of this persistent treatment left the inquisitive Gaje exhausted but happy--until it occurred to them that they had been prevented from asking any questions themselves. When they returned to follow up the initial contact with the Rom, they found the Gypsies had left.

On the rare occasions when the Rom chose not to avoid an actual dialogue with the Gaje, their answers were almost as inconsistent and bewildering. If one question was asked of twenty different Gypsies, all the answers, as might be expected, were contradictory. If the same question was asked twenty times of the same informant, there was an equally wide diversity of answers. Pointing out to the Gypsies their lack of consistency did not embarrass them in the least. In Romani they said, "Tshatshimo Romano" (The truth is expressed in Romani). It was the Gaje who, by forcing the Rom to speak a foreign language, made the Gypsy lie. The Rom said, "Mashkar le gajende leski shib si le Romeski zor" (Surrounded by the Gaje the Rom's tongue is his only defense). Often they simply pleaded ignorance or, by interrupting him in mid-sentence, refused to allow the Gajo to pursue his line of thought. An old woman might turn on him begging, urgent, demanding; unsettling in the stark, almost brutal simplicity of her approach. His attention might be distracted by a sudden violent quarreling among his listeners, or a young woman might start a provocative flirtation, not easily ignored.

The Rom sometimes resorted to scratching themselves persistently in the presence of unwelcome Gaje. With the strangers' departure all scratching ceased. A number of times I have seen old people, who disapproved of what they felt was the undue interest of outsiders, start coughing violently, driving the Gaje away by the implication of some contagious, dreaded lung ailment. (page 51)

The stealing of chickens was the cardinal sin with which the country population often rightfully reproached the Gypsies. Sometimes the Gypsies were violently denounced as the abductors of Christian children. At the same time the country population and also city dwellers consulted Gypsy women about their most intimate family problems, their fears, failures and secret longings. Fotune-telling was practiced by Gypsy women the world over. A remunerative occupation, it also served as a convenient source of information, a sounding board for the moods of the particular region. Rupa and the girls read palms by the wayside, with quiet conviction, earnestness and an air of mystery. The first time I showed interest in this, Rupa, with a voice that turned hard, gave me to understand, once and for all, that for the Rom this activity carried a double taboo; it was intended for the Gaje, and it was exclusively proacticed by the women, "never the Rom."...

The Gypsy women stopped passersby and, gripping them by the wrist, insisted on reading the Gaje's futures in the lines of their hands. The suddenness and the dark intensity of their approach made it difficult to deny them. Some Gaje were amused, others intrigued, but most were apprehensive and disturbed by this.

I was too young and too full of imagination to be attracted to divination or to be in search of its solace. Daily I saw the women of our group practice it, and because of this I was taken aback by Rupa's angry, emphatic refusal to answer my questions about it. Keja also rebuffed me when I approached her about the subject. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled with just a trace of disdain. Without Rupa's bitterness, however, she told me, "This is not for the Rom. Leave it to the foolish Gaje." Whenever I saw Rupa tell fortunes, she looked so convincing that I thought to myself she might very well have second sight.

A few days later we were driving through a vast sandy plain covered by heather, at the edge of a pine forest....Keja sat on her haunches in Gypsy fashion, rocking her brother Yojo's youngest child and pacifying his persistent cries for his mother by giving him her breast. Her breasts were round and full, but she was still a young unmarried girl and had no milk. Without turning her head she intoned in a soft voice a monologue about fortune-telling, for my attention. It surprised me that she should be sensitive to my concern about this. She talked without reticence. In essence Keja said that the avidity for fortune-telling came from an inability to cope with one's anxieties. Instead of satisfying, it created a self-perpetuating greed for prophecy, akin to compulsive gambling, only more harmful since one lost not money but insight. It blinded one to the causes of one's problems, and this was "madness." It was a vain and self-defeating search for expedient solutions to problems of moral integrity, and was caused by an unwillingness to face life as it was. Most people consulted fortune-tellers primarily to seek the confirmation of their fears, more often than of their hopes. Fear could become father to a wish, for many subconsciously wanted to have happen that which they said they feared most. Keja said that fear impoverished, while the acceptance of sorrow could enrich. The Lowara said, "Without wood the fire would die"...disclaiming guilt. Seen from a practical point of view, the tangible substance of fortune-telling was the ability to listen with endless patience to every human folly. To this they added some vague generalities into which specific and personal meanings could be read. Keja talked for a long time and with great openness.

She told me about a country squire in Serbia, long ago, who imagined that he had a dreaded, incurable disease. He consulted a physician in Sarajevo who reassured him and emphatically denied his fears. The squire rushed to see other physicians, all of whom agreed with the first doctor. He went to Nish and to Belgrade and to Sofia in Bulgaria. In despair, he went to see a soothsayer, who immediately confirmed his fears, proving the medical authorities wrong in the eyes of the squire. After a protracted and costly treatment he managed to save the squire--from an imaginary illness!

There are times in people's lives, Keja conceded, when consulting a palmist might relieve their loneliness, provide a confidant, or allow them to project their anxiety or hostility. It could relieve boredom, add salt and exoticism to life. It might satisfy a passing need for dabbling in the mysterious, with just enough of a suspicion of the satanic. The promise of a hypothetical better tomorrow might, if not taken too seriously, help break the habit of unhappiness and of material misery; otherwise it became a crutch that crippled.

With witchery in their eyes the Gypsy women practiced this art for a modest price. It was rare that they went beyond this and tried to gain a personal and more permanent power over their willing victims. The legend of Gypsy divinatory faculties, like all legends, was simply an exaggeration. It was spread and magnified largely by the half-believers, those who sought sensation and were more vocal than the truly addicted. Coincidence often seemed to substantiate the accuracy of what was in reality daring guesswork, and people remembered only those predictions that came true. They tended to forget the errors....

The Rom certainly gained a degree of self-protection from the Gaje's fear of the Gypsies' curses and spells. In a subtle way it could limit the brutality and the repression inflicted on a minority without adequate defense. The legal status of the Gypsies was at best that of a tolerated minority, at worst that of undesirables to be extradited or eliminated, and at the mercy of all. By fortune-telling they imposed on the credulous a certain fear and respect: a slim defense but better than nothing. (page 57)

At first nobody paid much attention to our new clothes, with the possible exception of a few very young girls, who had not yet reached puberty and perhaps wanted attention. We walked over to Pulika's fire, still tense, to receive a reception out of all proportion to our hopes. Pulika and Tshukurka jumped up; several other visiting Rom followed suit. We suddenly felt shy, our pride unexpectedly deflated. Everybody expressed admiration for our looks, for our choice of color and the quality of the material; they asked us the price we had paid and they praised the elegance and the cut. Slowly, we regained our vanity and pride, insensitive to the undertone of mockery. Pulika stood close to me, admiringly fingering the wide lapel of my new jacket with his right hand, his left hand holding on to Zurka's. In a flash he tore off my lapel and part of Zurka's collar, without apparent reason. It had not been done in anger. I stood thunderstruck. As if far, far away I heard him say, "May your clothes rip and wear out, but may you live on in good health and in fulfillment"...As unexpected as had been their stormy demonstrations of admiration, as suddenly did their mood subside. The men returned to the fireside without any further hooting, taunting or mocking. The incident was never mentioned again, and it might never have happened, except for my torn lapel, which I proudly wore as a badge of my Rom-ness. Needless to say, the lapel was never sewn back on again.

When a Rom acquired a new suit he wore it every day, in all weather, under all circumstances, for work around the horses, for leisure and for the most festive occasions, until it fell to pieces or was replaced by a new one. The old one was passed on or simply thrown away. No Rom in his right mind would have cared to own an additional suit. The Rom had no conception of distinctive wear for special occasions. (page 107)

The kumpania of Pulika, like any other kumpania for that matter, was at best but a loose, temporary association, forever kept fluid, scattering and regrouping as new patterns of interest developed, alliances shifted and old relationships waned. Like the flowing of water, the kumpania adapted itself to all circumstances, without in any way changing its own nature, endlessly remolding itself but forever remaining true to its own essence.

The chief of the kumpania was sometimes referred to as Rom Baro, the "Big Man," or as the Kapo, before World War II and the concentration camps gave this particular title an unwholesome connotation. The position of Kapo carried no material advantage aside from the satisfaction of the extra challenge and the heightened self-confidence derived from responsibility. The Rom proudly said that the measure of a man is only equal to the responsibility he is willing to shoulder. At the same time it was not unusual, when a kumpania crossed a border into a foriegn country, for its members to join forces temporarily with another kumpania, and let the Kapo of the new group assume responsibility for them. The newcomers contributed part of their earning, in fair exchange, to the benefit of the community.

Specific districts, provinces or countries were divided into "hunting territories" or reserved areas "belonging" to a specific kumpania. Whenever another group, or even a single wagon, passed through an area not its own, it was the accepted custom to compensate the present Gypsy "owners." In exchange, they helped the new arrivals in their dealings with the authorities, vouched for them or, if this was mandatory, arranged to post caution or bond, usually in the form of gold pieces. The "native" Gypsies taught the "foreign" ones as much of the language, trades, laws and customs of the country as was essential for them to survive. The Rom were aware that in rendering these services to other Gypsies they were building up good will and that in return they could hope for repayment in days of need. A large part of the system of jurisprudence of the Rom, the Kris (this same term can designate the trial by judges), is concerned with contractual law. There are a number of possible forms of relationships, or alliances, governed by specific and complex legal ties, despite the superficial impression the Gaje have of Romany life as completely free.

The Rom protected their "hunting reserves" against depletion or erosion; they did not exceed the limit of endurance of the local population, and strictly limited their pilfering in proportion to their requirements. They often limited their radius of action and remained "peacefully" within a certain region, at times for periods of many years, even willingly paying a yearly head tax. By agreement, other Rom stayed out of their territory, and in case of infringement the original Gypsies were not always reluctant to appeal to the Gaje authorities, cooperating with them to have the newcomers extradited, thus protecting their fief. With the proper authorization duly obtained from the Rom, however, other parties were helped to cross the territory or would even "sublease" parts of it from them. Many of the older Rom remembered the days they had been the victims of organized manhunts, when they had lived on acorns, hiding in the heart of the forest, and suffered untold atrocities under oppressive governments. They were wise enough to counsel moderation. They were the ones who knew that justice was only what the rulers made it, and they said that the angry and the weak were their own worst enemies. To them, as Pulika often repeated, communism and capitalism alike were merely reflections of the foolish Gaje's fixation of the accumulation of things, which in time enslaved men. But the young men grew foolhardy with extended periods of peace, and danger increased with success.

Each kumpania was autonomous and their interrelations were based only on the awareness of eventual reciprocation. There existed no formal or central superstructure of power. The Rom who fell on hard days through illness, death or accident, or who became impoverished through Gajo harassment, were always welcome to join bands of more or less distant relatives in other lands. They could work off whatever credits were extended to them by a kind of voluntary and limited bondage. This was called montshimo, and during the entire period of servitude their creditor was held responsible for them in every way by the law of the Gypsies.

Not all migrations were prompted by the desire to prospect for future brides for the sons of the group. The Rom migrated for the sake of sheer adventure in search of new territories to exploit, or because the old ones had become "depleted"; or because of local wars, revolutions and persecutions. They fled before outbreaks of epidemics, and they fled the ever-recurring night of the long knives.

The atrocities committed against them lessened in direct ratio to the progress of their westward trek. Cruelty and harassment, instead of being a national policy, became the more or less exceptional behavior of isolated individuals. The main defense of the Rom was their mobility and their feigned poverty, their freedom of movement, their indifference to form or ritual. But above all it was their mobility which spared them. They did not fight back; they simply moved away. In their minds the distinction and the division between the Rom and the Gaje were never forgotten. They did not expect anything from a world which was not theirs, and in logical consequence they never surrendered to the temptation of hope. Nomads, they felt life should always be seen as a horizon: "The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it." The Lowara did not believe in accumulating "things", nor did they see power in possessions. To them the enjoyment of possessions was only in the spending of them. Many years ago I met a Rom of the Tshurara tribe whose name was Pitti la Kaliako. He was dressed in awful rags and had the most dismal of expressions. Everybody referred to him as "the millionaire." At that time I dismissed it as a joke, until Keja explained to me that "he was a millionaire because he spent a million." I forget in what specific currency it was supposed to have been, nor would I vouch for the accuracy of the figure. The point is that he was rich not because he was in possession of a fortune but because he had spent one. (page 124)

...The following morning we left at dawn and traveled out of the district as if fleeing some looming disaster. After a few days the multiple but tiny woulnds were healing well and the stinging sensation left. [Kore and Jan had been shot by an irate farmer while resting in his fields, but Pulika had forestalled Jan's seething desire for a violent revenge.-dr] Kore and I had practically forgotten the incident except in its potential as a dramatized story to be told, but only now did Pulika allude to it in that fashion so typical of him, indirectly but very much to the point. He started his rambling monologue by quoting what he said was an old Lowara saying "not to eat the food as hot as it is while being cooked," and I remember wondering for an instant if he was paraphrasing the French saying, La vengeance est un plat qui se mange a froid. He said I was still "straddling two horsebacks with a single behind," and that I must abandon my attachment to the Gaje, for that was the reason I still resented them and expected good things from them. To the Rom life was an endless flow, like a torrent without form or goal, beyond good or evil, and man's place in it was like a process of self-definition, forbidding the all too human cowardice of weariness and doubt. With a driving urge to seek out what was elemental in life, man was free to react in his own way to its challenges, be what he could make of himself. This was his freedom.

Dusk came early and I thought I read new meaning into it as I watched the fireflies squander their lights.

Occasionally my bitterness would suddently flare up again, and it was from Keja that I learned to bend my head when I was unable otherwise to hide the hatred I could not transpose. (page 159)

One day as we were tending the horses, Pulika asked me abruptly, "Which is greater, the oak or the dandelion?" I was weary of such questions, knowing him well and sensing a trap; I grinned and tried to gain time but he pressed me to answer. The too obvious reply would have been "the oak" because it was bigger and more useful. Instead I slyly replied "the dandelion," realizing that this was bound to be wrong. The correct Romany solution was "whichever one of the two achieves fulfillment." A matured dandelion would be greater than a stunted oak, irrespective of its size or usefulness. The ultimate measure, the fulfillment of one's potentialities, was the valuation: the truthfulness to one's own seed and nature.

Another day Pulika asked me if I knew that all Gypsies, and possibly all humans, had two successive lives. He said that since I had almost become one of theirs it was time for me to be informed about some of the facts of life. His expression was inscrutable. Pulika expanded on the subject and told me that because God was just and loved us He gave us a first chance to live the way we wanted, making all the possible mistakes we cared to make, and afterward the second life was meant to correct and avoid the errors of the first one. It sounded like an improbable, rather wild theory, but then on the other hand it seemed to offer some appealing possibilities; and since Pulika appeared to put a certain emphasis on proposing it, I felt it my definite and pleasant obligation to try to fulfill these conditions of my first life. Pulika pushed back his dark, wide-brimmed hat with his thumb and leaned over toward me. He clearly guessed the thought he had deliberately called up. With a broad grin that turned into a deep belly laugh he added that, unfortunately for me, this happened to be my second life, in which I was supposed to correct the errors I had committed in my first one.

...

Toward nightfall one day, I saw old Bidshika, absorbed in thought, squatting by some pools left by the previous day's rain. With his heavy walking stick, ornamented with inlaid silver bands, he traced a narrow gully from one small pool to the other. When he looked up after a while and saw me stare in amused puzzlement, he simply said, "What divides is evil, and what joins, relates, flows, is good. Life is a flow, a dialogue, and death is an isolation, a dividing, leading to chaos and subsequently to disintegration." Bidshika was as unself-conscious as he said this as if he had remarked that the day had been hot. It was in no way meant to be wise, didactic or superior.

The same afternoon, uncomprehending, I had watched Pulika playing with one of his small grandsons, Palko, the son of our Yojo. Pulika sat half crouching on an upturned bucket by the log fire. Little Palko stood between his knees, leaning with his elbows on Pulika's sturdy thighs. Occasionally the child pulled up his legs and swung nonchalantly or gravely observed his grandfather smoking. Pulika leaned over and loudly whispered in his ear, pointing at Tshaya who crouched nearby cleaning some vegetables. Half reluctantly, the child fairly shouted in baby talk something which to him was a bad or naughty word. Tshaya pretended at first to ignore him but Pulika encouraged the child to persist in teasing her. These words--like kula or pulpa--had no particular meaning except as a symbolic release of pent-up displeasure or of mockery, but when repeatedly directed at one person they were considered to be provocative. Tshaya looked up and threateningly shook her open hand in a chopping motion. Still prodded by Pulika, little Palko repeated his words and Tshaya pretended increasing anger, till she took the trouble to get up and come over to hit the child and the grandfather both. The child turned to Pulika for protection, which he gave with mock exaggeration. The insult was repeated endlessly and as the child displayed less fear, Tshaya gradually became more violent. The boy received more of the mock slaps and thus, in playfulness, lost his fear of them. There were bouts of angry protesting cries as Tshaya hit him harder than expected, but the "lesson" was repeated until the child was able to continue insulting independently of his reasonable fear of immediate consequentces. This entire mock battle was controlled by tacit understanding between the grown-ups and was never allowed to get out of control. The purpose of this game was to teach the child not to do or refrain from doing anything because of fear of physical pain, and to prevent him from developing a cowardly disposition. The only form of discipline the Lowara recognized ultimately was self-discipline based on understanding, or in other words a discipline of responsibility. To the Lowara, fear was the symbolic attribute of Beng, or Evil, because it destroyed man's soul. (page 162)

[After a lengthy sojourn in Paris-dr] I was seized by a sudden sadness. I achingly longed for the restless erratic pace of the Lowara I had become attuned to. I longed for the woods, for nature, for the smells, colors, tastes, sights and sounds that made life lyrically sweet. I longed for the seasonal pattern of growth--yes, I even longed for the earthy peasants I had hitherto scorned: the earthy peasants with their capacities limited to the slow, heavy, archaic tilling of the soil, who lived and slept and bred and died in dark, smelly holes close to their cattle and the earth. I longed for the farmyards with their huge dunghills where geese and piglets played in the dark brown pools that formed around them. Gradually, even though belatedly, I had discovered another side to them too: their patient, tenacious courage, their sense of purpose and duty to the land, their uncomplicated loves and joys, their sorrows, their fears and uncertainties about supernatural life, and their inarticulate emotions. (page 225)

The Rom had no articulate concept of the Hereafter. They were certain there was neither Hell nor Heaven. Life after death went on much as before but on a different plane. They rarely talked about it and failed to grasp the Gaje's curiosity about it since "Everyone will go there and then will know beyond any doubt."

The belief was not uncommon among the Lowara that the dead may return to haunt the world of the living. Evil or sinful people returned in vain search of forgiveness, or those who had died a sudden death, or those who died before their time. The likelihood of a dead one's return was in direct proportion to his inner drive during his lifetime and his relationship to the people he cared about. The Rom yearned for what they called "a great death," for which they could prepare and which they could share with their households, relatives and friends. They feared most that kind of death which came when one was unprepared.

The Mule, the ancestors, the "souls" of the dead of the tribe, did not have eternal life. They somehow weakened with the years until at the death of the last person who had known them the "old souls" conceivably died once more. To questions of what might be beyond this the Rom shrugged their shoulders. Why should anybody seek comfortable illusions in a search for the unfindable? (page 237)

Then Lyuba slowly walked out of the night that surrounded us. Her unanticipated presence among the celebrating Rom brought them out of their rapturous moment of bliss. Unseeing, she walked among them and her ancient lips quivered. She coughed drily a few times. Then suddenly she broke out in a lament for the dead, a mulengi djili. Her voice had a penetrating, unfathomed, metallic quality the like of which I had never heard before and which stirred me in a way I cannot forget. I was too shaken and enraptured by the singing itself and by the total impact of what was happening to remember the precise tenor of her words beyond the general scope of what she said. She sang of experiences shared in common that bound the living and the dead, and how through their lives and past deeds the dead contributed to and inspired the living, how they lived on in the hearts and memories of those present. She humbly begged them, the dead, to give us the strength to live as they had lived and to die as they had died, as generous, true Rom. The old woman stood upright and seemed to be gaining in strength, stature, and presence. Her voice grew more powerful, her eyes filled with pride and authority. I wondered at the strange metamorphosis in the silent, slow-moving old Lyuba with the dark, wrinkled face, and I realized this was as she must have been long ago and as the legends about her portrayed her, when Yojo, Pulika's father, and his brother Duntshi were alive, when Tshompi made and spent fortunes in Spain, Mexico and North Africa, and when the Kalderasha first went to the Americas. She belonged to those legendary days. She talked to the dead and for a while they and their times lived again in the present, as a vision for all of us to see. She sang and talked of them intimately. Some of the events she told about had happened so long ago that only the very old people remembered and wondered about them. Pulika thanked her and gave her a silver beaker of brandy, but she went on singing, more and more inspired. Milosh took her hand and tried to kiss it and soothe her, to distract her and make her end her lament. The Rom were afraid of the aftereffects of the exhaustion and strain she was subjecting herself to. But she sang on. With a sweeping gesture of her long, thin arms she rejected all their devoted attentions, while her voice still grew in volume, drowning out all objections, interference and blessings. Her singing surged, as irresistible and powerful as a spring tide. Long afterward we wondered how such power and inspiration could pour forth from so ancient a woman. She talked to the old ones, the dead, about the present generation; she exhorted and she censured. It was as if she wanted to give herself completely in one lavish and powerful last breath. Eventually she collapsed and fell to the ground, surrounded by all her kinsmen and descendants. The distant look in her large old eyes told that she was no longer with us in heart and mind. For a short period she would remain with us, to quietly depart one day leaving for us her own unmistakable trail and a timeless inspiration for all the trail-blazing still to come. (page 250)

Zaehner, R. C.

from the introduction to "The Bhagavad-Gita"

During the last war we used to see notices everywhere asking if our journey was really necessary. In conscience we had often to admit that it was not.