This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.
Conservation | Energy | Policy | Public | Rule | System | Crisis |
Until we end our violence against the earth- a matter ignored by most pacifists, as the issue of military violence is ignored by most conservationists-how can we hope to end our violence against each other? The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be an earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants.
Despair | Enlightenment | Grief | Land | Man | Pride | Sense | Thought | World | Think | Thought |
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Compassion | Enough | Imagination | Kill | Knowledge | People | Power | Old |
We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare — warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
Civilization | Enough | Forgiveness | Good | Imagination | Need | Question | Sympathy | Forgiveness | Think | Understand |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone as it had on the white legs disappearing into the green water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Energy |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The mass and majesty of this world, all that carries weight and always weighs the same lay in the hands of others; they were small and could not hope for help and no help came: what their foes like to do was done, their shame was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride and died as men before their bodies died.
Heart | Imagination | Indignity | Think |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself.
Abstract | Body | Children | Dawn | Day | Fidelity | Hope | Insult | Love | Soul | Thinking | Time | Will | World | Insult |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The surface mind is like a dinghy on a vast sea. Dreams are the dimension for initiation and awakenings. Revelations, healing, or the reflection of a potential healing show up in dreams. One puts oneself into a vulnerable position because one surrenders the surface mind’s preferential viewpoint and goes into letting the dream reveal what its forces might be, and what the intent of the vaster nature is. Denied aspects by the surface psyche are cast into the unconscious where they live their material and influence not only us but others as well, whether we are conscious of it or not. The ego can’t project, it can’t cast out, it is predominantly a witness. What you think are your resources, and who and what you think you are is really a mask, and it precludes your seeing the authentic being. The whole development in the second half of life is to discover the authentic being and to release the defenses, and the masks, and meeting other people’s expectations. We begin to explore the mystery of natural beingness which is a very strange things for human beings – we have to be trained back into it.
Body | Disease | Energy | Experience | Life | Life | Love | Nature |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Illness comes from living too small a process or too large a process.
Art | Awareness | Compensation | Experience | Individual | Present | System | Universe | Will | Wrong | Art | Awareness | Value |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The stately ship is seen no more, the fragile skiff attains the shore; and while the great and wise decay, and all their trophies pass away, some sudden thought, some careless rhyme, still floats above the wrecks of Time.
Age | Belief | Culture | Existence | Faith | Ideas | Imagination | Legends | Life | Life | Light | Little | Poetry | Religion | System | Time |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Faith always presented to the mind the idea of an abnormal intellectual condition, of the subversion or suspension of the critical faculties. It sometimes comprised more than this, but it always included this. It was the opposite of doubt and of the spirit of doubt. What irreverent men called credulity, reverent men called faith; and although one word was more respectful than the other, yet the two words were with most men strictly synonymous.
Age | Character | Contemplation | Imagination | Men | Nature | Suffering | Contemplation | Old |
Green is the night and out of madness woven, the self-same madness of the astronomers and of him that sees, beyond the astronomers, the topaz rabbit and the emerald cat.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The main task of any teacher is to make a subject interesting.
Duty | Energy | Teacher | Understand |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
I enjoyed the mathematics that I had time to learn. If I ever need or want to learn some more, I shall not be afraid to do so.
Crime | Energy | Force | Fulfillment | Good | Important | Individual | Learning | Little | Means | Sense | Society | Will | Wishes | Society |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
Energy then is morally neutral, it is good or bad depending on the direction it takes. Our task is to provide legitimate outlets for it. The provision of such outlets is important in three ways - for society, for the individual and for the learning of subjects. For any society that wishes to remain civilized this is the highest priority; only by providing satisfactory activities for all citizens can delinquency, vandalism, crime and violence become exceptional rather than normal. This is a priority of which our dominant institutions seem totally unaware. For the individual, finding a satisfactory outlet for energy means a sense of fulfillment and escape from frustration. For the learning of subjects it is the driving force without which little will be learned.
Children | Duty | Energy | Enthusiasm | Life | Life | Society | Society | Child |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
It is, indeed, marvelous that science should ever have revived amid the fearful obstacles theologians cast in her way. Together with a system of biblical interpretation so stringent, and at the same time so capricious, that it infallibly came into collision with every discovery that was not in accordance with the unaided judgments of the senses, and therefore with the familiar expressions of the Jewish writers, everything was done to cultivate a habit of thought the direct opposite of the habits of science. The constant exaltation of blind faith, the countless miracles, the childish legends, all produced a condition of besotted ignorance, of groveling and trembling credulity, that can scarcely be paralleled except among the most degraded barbarians. Innovation of every kind was regarded as a crime; superior knowledge excited only terror and suspicion. If it was shown in speculation, it was called heresy. If it was shown in the study of nature, it was called magic. The dignity of the Popedom was unable to save Gerbert from the reputation of a magician, and the magnificent labors of Roger Bacon were repaid by fourteen years of imprisonment, and many others of less severe but unremitting persecution. Added to all this, the overwhelming importance attached to theology diverted to it all those intellects which in another condition of society would have been employed in the investigations of science. When Lord Bacon was drawing his great chart of the field of knowledge, his attention was forcibly drawn to the torpor of the middle ages. That the mind of man should so long have remained tranced and numbed, seemed, at first sight, an objection to his theories, a contradiction to his high estimate of human faculties. But his answer was prompt and decisive. A theological system had lain like an incubus upon Christendom, and to its influence, more than to any other single cause, the universal paralysis is to be ascribed.
Energy | Fanaticism | Influence | Melancholy | Present |