We Know That The Adult In A Certain Sense Has An Attitude Toward Life Exactly Opposite To The Attitude Of Commercials. Commercials Say, 'your Longing For 3.2 Beer Is Very Important. Your Longing For Skin That Doesn't Have Any Wrinkles In It, That's Very, Very, Very Important.' The Adult Says, 'no, I've Got Wrinkles, So What?'
If You Want To Know What It Will Be Like When We Are More Deeply Into The Horizontal, Simply Go To One Of The Indian Casinos. The Native Americans, Who Stand For Vertical Thinking More Than Anyone Else In Our Culture, Have Been Setting Up Totally Flat Casinos For Honkies.
All Of Those On The Left, As I Am, Have Always Vastly Preferred The Democratic Society Over The Hierarchical Society And Still Do, But The Democratic Culture Doesn't Exist Without Highly Informed Citizens Capable Of Thinking Well, And If You Have Schools In Which 40 Percent Of The People Coming Out Of Them Cannot Make Change For A Dollar, You Don't Have A Democracy. You Have A Sibling Society.
I Saw Sophia Loren - The Italian Woman With Those Wonderful Cheekbones - In A Movie The Other Day. She Must Have Had 24 Face-lifts, And She Looks Like An Alien, As If She Weren't From This World At All. Her Italian Wrinkles Would Have Been A Thousand Times More Beautiful.
I Think More And More People Are Recognizing How Much Adults And Elders Are Actually Needed. That's A Gift Of The Sibling Society.
Transcendence Or Detachment, Leaving The Body, Pure Love, Lack Of Jealousy-that's The Vision We Are Given In Our Culture, Generally, When We Think Of The Highest Thing. . . . Another Way To Look At It Is That The Aim Of The Person Is Not To Be Detached, But To Be More Attached-to Be Attached To Working; To Be Attached To Making Chairs Or Something That Helps Everyone; To Be Attached To Beauty; To Be Attached To Music.
I Think That Poetry Is Important When You Are Shipwrecked, When The Ordinary Structures That Hold You Up Are Gone.
Myth And Poetry Represent A Reservoir Of Vertical Thinking, Which We Could Also Call Longing And Gratitude To Ancestors. We Need That Gratitude Desperately.
People In The World Can Never Imagine The Length Of Days To Those In Asylums. They Seemed Never Ending, And We Welcomed Any Event That Might Give Us Something To Think About As Well As Talk Of.
I Shuddered To Think How Completely The Insane Were In The Power Of Their Keepers, And How One Could Weep And Plead For Release, And All Of No Avail, If The Keepers Were So Minded.
