This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Reductionism (ultimately, the empirical explanability of everything and a cornerstone of science), has uses that are appropriate, and it also can be used inappropriately. It is appropriately used as a way (one way) of understanding what is empirically known or empirically knowable. When it becomes merely an intellectual "position" confronting what is not empirically known or knowable, then it becomes very quickly absurd, and also grossly desensitizing and false.
Competition | Justice | Privilege |
While the government is studying and funding and organizing its ‘Big Thought’, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to ‘Think Little’, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work... A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
Ego | Experience | Mystical | Power | Think |
The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition.
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 |
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.
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer... the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire.
Power |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Few writers have had less journalistic talent than James, and this is his defect, for the supreme masters have one trait in common with the childish scribbling mass, the vulgar curiosity of a police-court reporter.
People |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters; how well, they understood its human position; how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; how, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth, there always must be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood: they never forgot that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel’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 to 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.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Care | Culture | Future | Good | Justice | Need | Plan | Teach | Will | World |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Human nature is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.
Passion |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Snakes and spiders symbolize the underworld Feminine, a symbol of the sensate world and the physical body. They are associated with the mystery of the creation of the world. This is viewed negatively in the West, yet if one has only known the Divine Mother in its beautific state, its caring, nurturing aspect, at some point you are going to have to encounter its wrathful side, that devours, that enmeshes and consumes, and to honor those forces. Every great thing is birthed out of its counterpart. When you are going through a descent mystery, there is a difference between being dragged into it, and consciously going through the descent. When you are going through a descent, you need to remember you have to submit to its forces, not yours, and unless you are willing to submit to it, which means even dismemberment and death in the process, don’t bother.