Highlights from all books

Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of nature and of being utterly forbidden, and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

There are times when we must accept small steps forward -- and there are other times when you need to run like a buffalo.

Climate change isn't an 'issue' to add to the list of things to worry about, next to healthcare and taxes. It is a civilizational wakeup call. A powerful message -- spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions -- telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.

Climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.

Democracy constitutes a folk theory -- a set of accessible, appealing ideas assuring people that they live under an ethically defensible form of government that has their interests at heart.

Individuals are prisoners of their own time and place, shaped in concious and unconcious ways by the things they know.

(Walter Lippman) Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a prickled balloon - the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.

Well informed citizens, too, have come in for their share of criticism, since their well organized "ideological" thinking often turns out to be just a rather mechanical reflection of what their favorite group and party leaders have instructed them to think.

Often, their attempts to bolster the tattered theoretical status quo bring them back to Winston Churchill's claim that "democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried from time to time". But that is a distinctly un-idealistic defense of democracy - and no defense at all of the folk theory of democracy.

We survey a substantial body of scholarly work demonstrating that most democratic citizens are uninterested in politics, poorly informed, and unwilling or unable to convey coherent policy preferences through "issue voting". How, then, are elections supposed to ensure ideological responsiveness to the popular will? In our view, they do not. The populist ideal of electoral democracy, for all its elegance and attractiveness, is largely irrelevant in practice, leaving elected officials mostly free to pursue their own notions of the public good or to respond to party and interest group pressures.

The adoption of initiative and referendum processes in many states has mostly empowered millionaires and interest groups that use their wealth to achieve their own policy goals.

We find that voters punish incumbent politicians for changes in their welfare that are clearly acts of god or nature. That suggests that their ability (or their inclination) to make sensible judgements regarding credit and blame is highly circumscribed. In that case, retrospection will be blind, and political accountability will be greatly attenuated.

We conclude that group and partisan loyalties, not policy preferences or ideologies, are fundamental in democratic politics. Thus, a realistic theory of democracy must be built, not on the French enlightenment, on British liberalism, or on American Progressivism, with their devotion to human rationality and monadic individualism, but instead on the insights of the critics of these traditions, who recognized that human life is group life.

A 1975 study on "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission concluded that the media have become a "notable new source of national power," one aspect of an "excess of democracy" that contributes to "the reduction of governmental authority" at home and a consequent "decline in the influence of democracy abroad." Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

The perception is that democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the "special interests", a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic minorities, and so on -- in short, the general population. In the US presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the democrats were accused of being the instrument of these special interests and thus undermining "the national interest", tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notibly ommited from hte list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and other business elites.

Polls show that almost half the population believe that the US constitution -- a sacred document -- is the source of Marx's phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", so obviously right does the sentiment seem.

Given a choice between the Reaganite program of damn-the-consequences Keynesian growth accompanied by jingoistic flag waving on the one hand, and the Democratic alternative of fiscal conservatism "we approve of your goals but fear that the costs will be too high" on the other, those who took the trouble to vote preferred the former -- not surprisingly.

The process of barring public interference with important matters takes a step forward when elections do not even enable the public to select among programs that originate elsewhere, but become merely a procedure for selecting a symbolic figure.

Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you've read, in the films you've seen, in the stories you've been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disasterous ends.

The word adult implies that all the people who've attained legal majority makeup a coherent category, but we are all travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go. The road is tattered and elastic. Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather, there is none for the many transitions.

Youth is a high risk business.

Cults: as a seemingly radical way to return to the conservatism of blind obedience and harsh heirarchy, there was a crevasse between two modes of being into which many people fell.

The neighborhood was alive in a way that made the suburban places I'd grown up in seem dead and bereft, those subdivisions that were by design and ethos about withdrawal from public space and human contact, where the adults drove and people kept to themselves, and the fences between houses were taller than our heads.

The newcomers lived in the space their money secured, not the space that belonged to everyone, and a vitality faded away as the neighborhood became less a neighborhood.

We were not the intended audience for such art, including the stuff lauded as masterpieces and upheld as canonical. Sometimes the male protagonists protected women, particularly beautiful women, from other men, and protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face, and either one put your fate in their hands.

So much of what makes young women good targets is self doubt and self effacement. I was young and trained not to make a fuss and to let others determine what was acceptable and even to determine what was real.

What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you.

At its best, a conversation is a joy and a collaborative experience, building an idea, an insight, sharing experiences; at its worst it is a battle for territories and most women have experiences of being pushed out one way or another.

Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasing and a silencing to make room for me.

I had since childhood imagined interrogations in which lacking the right answers was punished, interrogations that must have gotten something of their format from quiz shows seen in early childhood as well as the mockery that comes or came with getting something wrong in school or at the dinner table. One of the reasons I squirrelled away information was anxiety about this infernal inquisition and that knowledge could protect you from a punitive, incoherent universe.

Someone I cherished then as a person I could trust and talk to, perhaps because of who he was or because of who I imagined he was, or how I filled up what I didn't know about him with what I needed.

The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern or meaning.

There is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is the capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.

And all the grail seekers and ring bearers and western explorers and chasers and conquerers and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent. And the task of finding ones own way must be immeasurable harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as the savages or the servants or the people who don't matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.

The words are instructions, the book a kit, the full existence of the book something immaterial, internal, an event rather than an object, and then an influence and a memory. Its the reader who brings the book to life.

Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.

To include a performer meant that the grammatical tense of the piece was in the making and the doing, rather than in the past tense of made and done. Later on in other pieces of hers, the performers would be undoing something, unraveling, or erasing, so that the work was being unmade as well as made for the duration of the exhibition.

Before you can make art you have to have a culture in which to make it, a context that gives it meaning, and people from whom to learn and to whom to show your work.

Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together -- or tearing some piece of it apart to find whats hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions - and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. Something you didn't know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try and write it down.

That derangement came up from Arthur Rimbauld a century before and evolved into another fixture of counterculture, the idea that you got to your creative self by getting fucked up, that some genius is lurking behind the inhibitions and you just have to let the genius out to do its thing without plan or discipline or structure.

Burroughs was seen by some of the young people around me as exemplerary of all this, and he had spent a lot of time taking a lot of drugs, buffered by family allowance and an apparently iron constitution. The young man I knew had neither. I remember with affection one evening with him when he was hallucinating and wielding colored markers, trying to draw on paper (and album covers) and scrawling directly on the floor of the apartment. Then its with sadness that I remember him becoming more and more of a meth addict, and then a homeless person walking barefoot in dirty jeans on market street unable to recognize me. He was cared for by a kind older man for a while, and then I heard he jumped off the golden gate bridge, a sweet and talented young soul, dead of many things, including the prevailing mythology.

Though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race.

The common tragedy is to suffer without having appeared.

Its not always possible to say that a given weather event is due to climate change, but that climate change shapes the trends is clear, and the same can be said of discrimination - that this particular event may or may not be due to someones attitudes about people in your category, but the cumulative effect suggested a pattern.

Often what a woman says is weighed for what kind of woman that makes her and whether she's still pleasing to others rather than its factual content.

Though looking amazing is usually thought of as either a mildly despicable self-glorification or a straightforward strategy to sex, it can be a gift to people around you, a sort of public art and a celebration, even a kind of wit and commentary.

The city (San Francisco) was a magnet for people desperate to get away from the wholesome America that wanted to kill them.

An acquaintance told me about going home, long ago, with a college friend whose father was a Wall Street banker. The rest of the family was enjoying dinner in their lavish Upper East Side apartment when the father arrived. Everyone fell silent, and he sat down and roared, apropos of his day at the stock market, "I fucked him up the ass". Winning over his competitor was like having sex with him, and sex is hostile and punitive at one end and humiliating at the other, an interesting thing to proclaim to your wife and children at the dinner table.

Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving not to be a woman.

If humor consists of noting the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they actually are -- then those least invested in things as they are supposed to be, or who are actually adversaries and victims of conventionality, are most inclined and able to celebrate those gaps. The straight man is a figure in humour, the one who doesn't make or get the joke, and straight suggests linear thinking and conventional paths as well as heterosexuality.

Rural safety consists of distance from danger, not the barriers against it and the recourse from it that urban structures and systems provide. Access to nature is also contingent on your sense of safety, as people of color know.

The nuclear bombs being exploded there regularly were a brutality against all the living things downwind, reservation dwellers, ranchers, livestock, small town people, and wildlife, in those rehearsels for the end-of-the-world war.

I sometimes thought of this as the Madonna Whore theory of landscape: human contact was imagined as inevitably violating a vulnerable, passive nature that was inevitably degraded by us.

We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizable monsters, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time, trained in what to feel and think and notice, and what not to. The men who wrote those reports seemed like earnest bureaucrats, sometimes sympathetic to the plight of the people or the people they were helping to exterminant, always convinced of their own decency. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.

In many parts of American society, kindness has increasingly become a criterion applied to all forms of interaction, but its absence before was elusive, because its too easy to not notice who and what is not in the room.

Consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.

I'd eventually realize that what I was doing could equally be characterized as stealing away the best excuse for doing nothing: that you have no power and nothing you do matters. It was nurture of people's sense of possibility, and it was dissent from a lot of the most familiar narratives in which despair and cynicism - that weird formula in which overconfidence about outcome undermines ones will to play a role - justify nonparticipation.

Works of art that had an impact in their time sometimes look dated or obvious because what was fresh and even insurrectionary about them has become the ordinary way things are, how we edit films or see history or nature or sexuality, or understand rights and their violations. Thus the vision of one or a few becomes the perspective of many. They have been rendered obselete by their success -- which makes the relevance of even much nineteenth century feminist writing a grim reminder that though we've come far, its not enough.

Change is the measure of time, and these movements were often regarded as having failed to realize short term or specific goals but in the long term they often changed the very premises by which decisions were made and facts were interpreted, and how people imagined themselves, each other, their possibility, their rights, and society. And who decided, who intepreted, what was visible and audible, whose voice and vision mattered.

Efficiency says that grief should follow a road map and things should be gotten over and that there should be that word that applies to wounds and minds both: closure. But time and pain are a more unpredictable business, expanding and contracting, closing, and opening and changing.

Paradise is not a destination to arrive in, but a pole star by which to navigate.

(Kintsugi) is a way to accept that things will never be what they were but they can become something else with a different kind of beauty and value.

(on dignity) I suppose it comes down to not removing ones clothing in public.

In bantering lies the key to human warmth.

His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that in the least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I TRUSTED. I trusted in his lordships wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really -- what dignity is there in that?

Ecology is the study of consequences.

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea.. and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

This man who believes he cannot be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in dribbles every second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he'd rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference how he dies now.

The way to control and direct a mentat, Nefud, is through his information. False information -- false results.

Paul stirred the savage beating of his heart, set his mind as a blank slate upon which the past few moments could write themselves.

These are ashes, these are roots.

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture -- it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

Deep in the human unconcious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step from logic.

The guild navigators, cursed by limited prescience, had made the fatal decision; they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.

There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man healthy planet. You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. It's aim is simple to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life -- all life -- is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available by life BY life in greater and greater richness. As the diversity of life increases. the entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.

Kynes was not a madman totally, just mad enough to be holy.

We shouldn't have tried to create new symbols. We should have realized we weren't supposed to introduce uncertainties into accepted belief, that we weren't supposed to stir up curiosity about god. We are daily confronted by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions to grow more rigid and controlled, now conforming and oppressive. What is this shadow across the highway of divine command? It is a warning that institutions endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa of all attainable knowledge.

Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves 'I am not the kind of man I ought to be'. It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.

When law and religion are one, your selfdom encloses the universe.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until its too late.

You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training education and discipline of the Orthodox community. Because of this pressue, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face the ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the Orthodox ethic.

The universe has a beginning, but no end -- infinity. Stars too, have their own beginnings, but their own power results in their destruction.

Human memories are ambiguous, and as time passes they become more subjective and tend to be compressed into a single narrative.

Regardless of whether the memory is a good or a bad one, it's common to only be able to remember words that left an impression. And that impression will often alter your memories of the surrounding conversation.

No one knows what the future holds. That's why it's potential is infinite.