I've just sneezed on this screen, so I hope you don't catch anything. A debilitating cold has left me only half-functioning. Despite that, you'll all be pleased to know that my daughter and I managed to sort out her room. The horror!
However the next chapter is only half finished and I am now going to bed to feel sorry for myself. I will try to finish the rest of it very soon. While researching for some of the content I ran across a fascinating American philosopher called Edward Abbey who died in the 1980s. He was kind of a modern day Henry Thoreau I suppose, and there were some great quotes I found of his. The best I'm saving for the chapter, so you'll have to be patient. But this is one I like a lot too:
"Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top."
Isn't that great?
Hi James,
ReplyDeleteI hope you are well again.
How did you run into Edward Abbey? I own two or three of his books and went to look for them in the depths of the book shelf.
Besides beeing a philospher and author he has been an eco-activist and a rather radical one, I think.
And funny as well. In "The Monkey Wrench Gang" he describes that his heroes measured highway distances in sixpacks of beer, e.g. "Tucson to Flagstaff, three six-packs". And a few pages later throwing the empty beer cans out of the car window.
Apparently Edward Abbey thought that ecological destruction ist not a question of personal well-behaviour.
Lotte
I think he would probably have been quite an uncomfortable person to know, but the things I've read about him were interesting. If he were alive now, though, I wonder if he would have joined forces with the "all-Government-is-evil" American view and would have been all in favour of making sure everybody had access to automatic weapons of mass destruction? Quite probably.
ReplyDeleteI think it's very difficult for us in Europe to really understand the isolationist back-to-the-backwoods streak in US culture. I recently read a great article by a writer Jon Ronson in a book called 'Them - adventures with extremists' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them:_Adventures_with_Extremists)and found myself starting to feel that what seems like us to be paranoia is maybe not as bonkers as it seems.
I still can't see the necessity for having anti tank weapons in my cellar though.