In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; ...
Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that ...
Today's Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after midcentury when the communications revolution lead to expectations of instantanaiy are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the thunderclap of cause will be ...
We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.
But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions vo...
She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memories growing dim, the photographs of the battles turn...
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate langua...
It was the best first kiss in the history of first kisses. It was as sweet as sugar. And it was warm, as warm as pie. The whole world opened up and I fell inside. I don't know where I was, but I didn't care. I didn't care because the only person who ...
You will ask me, after this, why, I didn't tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable t...
It took him almost a half hour to write a message of only five lines. It took yet another fifteen minutes to delete whatever might be construed as ambiguity, desperation, or references to a history that he no longer had access to. Finally, he took a ...
No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of ...
I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life ...
Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make l...
Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.
He was enraged and bitter and hoped for a personal meeting with Sarkozy where he would recount to him France's colonial history in Africa and make him see reasons why her policy of assimilation was a voyage to the destruction of Africa, its people, l...
I found a hair in my Campbell’s soup, and I’d love to talk to them about advancement opportunities for bald people. My love is as bald as an eagle, only not symbolic of the largest prison system in history. Freedom Soup sounds like a good name fo...
Last night I snuck an orchestra into the elevator at my apartment. We made elevator music history until Marvin got his oboe caught in the door and Mrs. Hoffstead started singing "Yes We Have No Bananas Today" in the hall so loud the police were calle...
It is a meaningful thing for a scientist of the stature of Ibn Sina, certainly one of the best scientific minds in the whole history of mankind, to often resort to prayer to seek God's help in solving his philosophical and scientific problems. And it...
This history has for so long lived like a spider in my breast. The spider spins and spins, catching memories in its web, threatening to devour every final happiness. With this letter I hope to sweep away the terror and the sadness and to have my hear...
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing int...
Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between N...
