Dark Influences From The American Past Congregate Among Us Still. If We Are A Democracy, What Are We To Make Of The Palpable Elements Of Plutocracy, Oligarchy, And Mounting Theocracy That Rule Our State? How Do We Address The Self-inflicted Catastrophes That Devastated Our Natural Environment? So Large Is Our Malaise That No Single Writer Can Encompass It. We Have No Emerson Or Whitman Among Us. An Institutionalized Counterculture Condemns Individuality As Archaic And Depreciates Intellectual Values, Even In The Universities. (the Anatomy Of Influence)
...the Bible Itself Is Less Read Than Preached, Less Interpreted Than Brandished. Increasingly, Pastors May Drape A Limply Bound Book Over The Edges Of The Pulpit As They Depart From It. Members Of The Congregation Carry Bibles To Church Services; The Paster Announces A Long Passage Text For His Sermon And Waits For People To Find It, Then Reads Only The First Verse Of It Before He Takes Off. The Book Has Become A Talisman.
We Possess The Canon Because We Are Mortal And Also Rather Belated. There Is Only So Much Time, And Time Must Have A Stop, While There Is More To Read Than There Ever Was Before. From The Yahwist And Homer To Freud, Kafka, And Beckett Is A Journey Of Nearly Three Millennia. Since That Voyage Goes Past Harbors As Infinite As Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, And Tolstoy, All Of Whom Amply Compensate A Lifetime's Rereadings, We Are In The Pragmatic Dilemma Of Excluding Something Else Each Time We Read Or Reread Extensively.
We Need History, Not To Tell Us What Happened Or To Explain The Past, But To Make The Past Alive So That It Can Explain Us And Make A Future Possible.
It Is, Then, By Those Shadows Of The Hoary Past And Their Fantastic Silhouettes On The External Screen Of Every Religion And Philosophy, That We Can, By Checking Them As We Go Along, And Comparing Them, Trace Out Finally The Body That Produced Them.
If Coming Events Are Said To Cast Their Shadows Before, Past Events Cannot Fall To Leave Their Impress Behind Them.
In The Past A Leader Was A Boss. Today's Leaders Must Be Partners With Their People... They No Longer Can Lead Solely Based On Positional Power.
I See The Past, Present & Future Existing All At Once Before Me.
You Don't Have To Keep Looking At The Future Foreign Policy In Terms, Simply, Of The Past.
