Fire and Knowledge

Although every experienced newspaperman and inquirer knows that the most thoughtful and responsive answers to any difficult question come after long pause, and that the longer the pause the more illuminating the thought that follows it, nonetheless the electronic media cannot bear to suffer a pause of more than five seconds; a pause of thirty seconds of dead time on air seems interminable.

–Theodore White, quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 43

A single right book at the right time can change our views dramatically, give a quantum boost to our knowledge, help us construct a whole new outlook on the world and our life.

–Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005), p. 11

If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like [Christianity].

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 236

A previously unpublished letter by Edward Abbey:

Tucson Daily Citizen
20 September 1972

Dear Sir:
The police helicopter is an unnecessary evil. The money being wasted on that infernal and idiotic machine would be sufficient to add another fifteen or twenty men to the force. The helicopter cannot be justified as a crime preventive; noise pollution is a crime and should be recognized as such, and in all the stink and smog and clatter of downtown Tucson, no individual machine is more obnoxious than that helicopter.

Even if the helicopter could glide about quiet as an owl, it remains still objectionable on even more serious grounds: aerial surveillance of a supposedly free citizenry is an affront to us all, and one more significant step toward an authoritarian police state. There are far better ways to prevent crime than by sending Big Brother aloft to keep his beady 450-watt eye on us dues-paying citizens.

I would suggest, for example, that a few good men on bicycles (a la francaise), properly uniformed and equipped, patrolling swiftly and silently through their own neighborhoods, friends not enemies of the people they work among, could do far more to prevent crime than two official Peeping Toms roaring over our rooftops in their fifty-dollar-an-hour plastic bubble.

Let’s think about this, people. You too, City Officials.

Yours sincerely,
Edward Abbey—Tucson

I had never heard of Heifer International before, but the concept is interesting. Instead of merely purchasing supplies for needy people, this organization buys them animals and training so they can make self-sustainable lives for themselves. Economic self-sufficiency is much better than a constant reliance on handouts. Very interesting.

A man should be in the world as though he were not in it, so that it will be no worse because of his life. His obligation may not be to make “a better world,” but the world certainly requires of him that he make it no worse. That, at least, was man’s moral circumstance before he began his ruinous attempt to “improve” the creation; now, perhaps, he is under and obligation to leave it better than he found it, by undoing some of the effects of his meddling and restoring its old initiatives—by making his absence the model of his presence.

–Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House” in The Long-Legged House (1969), pp. 165-166

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

–Henry Thoreau, quoted in The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005) by Steve Leveen, p. 102

The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America, some of its most honest and most necessary and most respectable business.

–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 5