I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't beli...
Uncle Albert: Speaking of weather, the other day when it was so cold, a friend of mine went to buy some long underwear. The shopkeeper said to him, "How long do you want it?" And my friend said, "Well, from about September to March."
Hilario: The feeling I felt in my chest this morning, when I saw Calvera run away from us, that's a feeling worth dying for. Have you ever felt something like that? Vin: Not for a long, long time. I envy you.
I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it...
Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in ...
I know it's financially lucrative to go out on my own, but I don't like it. It's really hard work, just the performance aspect. I like people who look like they've been together for too long and sound like they've been together too long. I like rock ...
Few men realize how much of their lives are lived in pursuit of the values our culture has traditionally associated with masculinity. These values – a primary focus on work, logical thinking and always being in emotional control – have many benef...
All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the stud...
Today, despite different backgrounds, those of us who are willing to respect the traditions and history of this country can join together under one national banner as Australians. This is the kind of unity that the conservative will embrace, not the ...
We were born to be friends. We both knew it. The Australian Aborigines have the traditional belief that a complete human being comprises two parts that are split before birth, that we spend our lives seeking the other part to make ourselves whole aga...
The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on "respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to m...
A lot of churches and church people give God a bad name. There's a scripture in the Bible that says the traditions of men make the word of God of none effect. That's so true. All our religious rituals dilute the reality of who God is and make a lot o...
There are many different ways of approaching parenting as there are cultures. However, in non-industrialized cultures, the similarities are also striking. Extended nursing, co-sleeping, carrying the baby in close physical contact, responding promptly...
A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that ...
I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences and at the same time emphasizing the similarities ...
The greater puzzle of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honor through our work includes the profound legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions, the innate integrity of human communities where people seek to live in social ...
Like most people, my views about ghosts and haunted places were traditional while growing up. I believed ghosts were human spirits. Not that I talked to many people about the subject or my experiences. I assumed people would think I was weird.
I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction. Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wi...
Clearly, when western cultures absorbed Christianity, they got an all-inclusive package: ancient Hebrew rituals and myths steeped in lost purpose, scantily recorded and broadly misinterpreted teachings of Jesus, revisions and distortions by Paul, twi...
Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or ...
If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is...
