This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy. In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed? The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
I’ve come down from the sky like some damned ghost, delayed too long…To the abandoned fields the trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes to them, time goes, the trees stand; the only place they go is where they are. Those wholly patient ones… They do no wrong, and they are beautiful. What more Could we have thought to ask?... I stand and wait for light to open the dark night. I stand and wait for prayer to come and find me here.
Cause | Disease | Individual | Motives | Order | People | Power | Success | Will | World |
Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Ability | Good | Justification | Order | Revelation | Learn | Think |
This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm; time and fevers burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral; but in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie: mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful.
Belief | Deeds | God | Love | Man | Order | People | Prosperity | Sacrifice | Deeds | God | Victim |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is in. In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.
Adolescence | Aesthetic | Authority | Duty | Learning | Little | Looks | Man | Nature | Need | Peace | Pleasure | Reading | Taste | War | Work | Learn |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The other facet that I am particularly interested in at this staging, is the shift from the old priest/priestess model, which is the individual who, for whatever reason, has found the pathway in, and then returns and, essentially, guides a gathering of people and spends the rest of his or her life doing that – where the individuals are not really brought into the ability to guide, they’re really the recipient of a divine image. And that’s essentially what has been played out for thousands of years. I feel what is, transpiring at this point is what this work is all based in. Which is that individuals are being brought into the ability to tap the resource individually and will be endowed, endowed individually so that when we come together it’s no longer the process of the have and have-nots. It now is a gathering of individuals who know how to find the inner center and when they come to join with others, they’re ready to share those resources in…in a wonderful sense of human camaraderie and, and enjoyment of gathering rather than the idea of taking an inspiration from an inspired one. And there is the process of the mystery training, which a lot of this work is, which is preparing you for such a possibility. So although I am using an old model (which is the teaching model) my intent is to bring you to the bridge from which you will self-discover. You will come to a unique experience of the divine mystery. And when we gather, one is awed by the range in which the mystery reveals itself – very creative and very I find…inspiring. And I believe this is the difference between the Piscean Age and the Aquarian Age that we’re embarking on. Ah…wonderful form prior to, which is One serving the Many. In the next phase the Many serve the One. Which is the Many serve the One inside.
Death | Important | Innocence | Love | Need | Order | Sacrifice |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.