“
My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.
My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat.
”
”
Terry Pratchett
“
I know you've always dreamed of going to Europe," he says softly. "I want to make your dreams come true, Anastasia."
"You are my dreams come true, Christian."
"Back at you, Mrs. Grey," he whispers.
”
”
E.L. James (Fifty Shades Freed (Fifty Shades, #3))
“
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
”
”
Thomas Wolfe
“
Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.
”
”
Henry Van Dyke
“
Asia is an entertainment, Europe is a dream, America is an imprisonment and Rest is a nightmare.
”
”
Santosh Kalwar
“
the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.
”
”
Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914)
“
[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.
”
”
Roman Payne
“
I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.
”
”
Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance)
“
The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely.
”
”
Norman Davies (Europe: A History)
“
The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas.
”
”
Irving Stone (Lust for Life)
“
Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.
”
”
Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
“
Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport.
”
”
Frances Mayes (A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller)
“
After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes, our impoverished lovemaking. Her soul had remained over there, among the gigantic, poisonous flowers. She missed the mystery of old temples and the ardor of a sky blazing with fever, sensuality and death. The better to relive all these magnificent, raging memories, she became a recluse, spending entire days lying about on tiger skins, playing with those pretty Nepalese knives 'which dissipate one's dreams'.
”
”
Octave Mirbeau
“
It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men... and modern nations, in the consecrations of kings, and in several superstitious chimeras of divine rights in princes and nobles, are nearly unanimous in preserving remnants of it... Is the jealousy of power, and the envy of superiority, so strong in all men, that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience, that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice? — … There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. As Copley painted Chatham, West, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery; as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries composed their verse, and Belknap and Ramzay history; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhouse his planetarium; as Boylston practised inoculation, and Franklin electricity; as Paine exposed the mistakes of Raynal, and Jefferson those of Buffon, so unphilosophically borrowed from the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains those despicable dreams of de Pauw — neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or sub-committees, considered legislation in any other light than ordinary arts and sciences, only as of more importance. Called without expectation, and compelled without previous inclination, though undoubtedly at the best period of time both for England and America, to erect suddenly new systems of laws for their future government, they adopted the method of a wise architect, in erecting a new palace for the residence of his sovereign. They determined to consult Vitruvius, Palladio, and all other writers of reputation in the art; to examine the most celebrated buildings, whether they remain entire or in ruins; compare these with the principles of writers; and enquire how far both the theories and models were founded in nature, or created by fancy: and, when this should be done, as far as their circumstances would allow, to adopt the advantages, and reject the inconveniences, of all. Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.
[Preface to 'A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America', 1787]
”
”
John Adams (A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America)
“
America for Me
'Tis fine to see the Old World and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumblyh castles and the statues and kings
But now I think I've had enough of antiquated things.
So it's home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom, beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.
I like the German fir-woods in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing foutains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her sway!
I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack!
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free--
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.
Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough, beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
”
”
Henry Van Dyke
“
If you have ever been tempted to look up an old girlfriend or boyfriend, you will sympathize with Frederico. If you have doubts about revealing yourself to someone from your past, you’ll understand Emma. Did you ever have the urge to open a bookstore? You’ll love Dreams & Desires, Emma’s bookstore in Milan that specializes in romance.
”
”
Vera Marie Badertscher
“
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream that, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.—But the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
”
”
Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France)
“
You can
die for it -
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.
”
”
Mary Oliver (Dream Work)
“
The United States is baiting China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel. We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all together faster demise for them. We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang. The coming war will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks. This is why the EU is in such a hurry to form a complete superstate because they know what is coming, and to survive, Europe will have to be one whole cohesive state. Their urgency tells me that they know full well that the big showdown is upon us. O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.
”
”
Henry Kissinger
“
Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a Colossus shall we be when the Southern continent comes up to our mark! What a stand will it secure as a ralliance for the reason & freedom of the globe! I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs Adams and yourself are by my side marking the progress and the obliquities of ages and countries.
”
”
Thomas Jefferson (The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail & John Adams)
“
Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.
It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism.
The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered.
”
”
Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa)
“
Guilt was what kept you awake in the middle of the night or, if you managed to sleep, poisoned your dreams. Guilt intruded upon any happy moment, whispering in your ear that you had no right to pleasure. Guilt followed you down streets, interrupting the most mundane moments with remembrances of days and hours when you could have done something to prevent tragedy but chose to do nothing. When you chose to play with your dolls instead. Or stick pins in maps of Europe, following the armies’ progression. Or flirt with a handsome young lieutenant. That was guilt.
”
”
John Boyne (All the Broken Places)
“
That's why I drove there in the middle of February, patches of snow still on the fields. I had the strong feeling that somewhere between Sluejow, Wygwizdow, and Solec time had ground to a halt or simply evaporated or melted like a dream and no longer separated us from our childhood.
”
”
Andrzej Stasiuk (On The Road To Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe)
“
All around us we have the wreckage – metaphorical and real – of all our dreams, our religions, our political ideologies and a thousand other aspirations, all of which in their turn have proved false. And though we have no more illusions or ambitions left, yet we are still here. So what do we do?
”
”
Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
“
How could an American Negro observe the annihilation happening in Europe without identifying it with their own four-century struggle against deprivation, disenfranchisement, slavery, and violence? Executive
”
”
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
“
If the original architects of the 'European dream' were to wake from their slumber, they would no doubt be turning in their graves at the threats to the Union posed by today's unparalleled mass migration and surge in home grown terrorism. Luckily for them, it is the nightmare of Europe's current leaders to ponder the challenges of reinstating national borders, curbing free movement of people, combating extremism, all of which in turn may lead to disintegration of the European Union itself and all that it stands for.
”
”
Alex Morritt (Impromptu Scribe)
“
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
”
”
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
“
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of "the artist" and the all-sufficiency of "art" and "beauty" and "love," back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. In a way, the phrase summed up everything he had ever learned.
”
”
Thomas Wolfe
“
The dreams of communism and socialism were the sincerest attempts of their day to come up with and put into practice a theory of everything. The endless writings and pamphlets and evangelism in every country of Europe were one more attempt to dream a meaningful dream, capable of solving everything and addressing the problems of everyone. It was, as T. S. Eliot memorably described it, an effort at ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.
”
”
Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
“
Thousands of miles lay between me and Europe, mother of all demons. The demons could not reach me here—there were no telegrams, no telephone calls, no letters, no visitors. My liberated psychic forces poured blissfully back to the primeval expanses.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
“
Maybe you had friends, a girlfriend, a favorite takeout place. Maybe you used to sleep in in the morning, or take long weekend trips to travel around Europe and check out... buildings, or something. Maybe you had dreams. Did you go back to retrieve those?
”
”
Ali Hazelwood (Bride (Bride, #1))
“
So I dream nightly of an embarcation,
captains, captains,
iron passageways, cabin lights,
Brooklyn across the waters,
the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,
the blurred vast sea--
one trip a lifetime's loss or gain :
as Europe is my own imagination
--many shall see her,
many shall not--
though it's only the old familiar world
and not some abstract mystical dream.
And in a moment of previsioning sleep
I see that continent in rain,
black streets, old night, a
fading monument . . .
And a long journey unaccomplished
yet, on antique seas
rolling in gray barren dunes under
the world’s waste of light
toward ports of childish geography
the rusty ship will
harbor in . . .
”
”
Allen Ginsberg
“
In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate. That is true of feudal societies like medieval Europe, India before independence, and much of modern South America, where inherited status determines position. It is equally true of centrally planned societies, like Russia or China or India since independence, where access to government determines position. It is true even where central planning was introduced, as in all three of these countries, in the name of equality.
”
”
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
“
In 2012, China announced its plan to produce 1,000 GWs of wind power by 2050. That would be approximately equal to replacing the entire existing US electric infrastructure with wind turbines. Are the United States and Europe still able to dream so big? It appears not. In many countries, the State is asked to take a back seat and simply ‘subsidize’ or incentivize investments for the private sector. We thus fail to build visions for the future similar to those that two decades ago resulted in the mass diffusion of the Internet.
”
”
Mariana Mazzucato (The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths)
“
23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.
”
”
William T. Vollmann (Europe Central)
“
It is such a privilege to learn from children as they discover new worlds of possibility and give themselves full over to their dreams, inspiring a few adults along the way.
”
”
Colleen Mariotti (Livology: A Global Guide to a Deliberate Life)
“
Europe was lost, but there were other scions:
The dream bequeathed a grand inheritance
To people of the Orient's arid lands
And those who share the sultry night with lions.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges (Selected Poems)
“
the only prospect which is really desirable or delightful, is that from the window of the breakfast-room [...] where we meet the first light of the dewy day, the first breath of the morning air, the first glance of gentle eyes; to which we descend in the very spring and elasticity of mental renovation and bodily energy, in the gathering up of our spirit for the new day, in the flush of our awakening from the darkness and the mystery of faint and inactive dreaming, in the resurrection from our daily grave, in the first tremulous sensation of the beauty of our being, in the most glorious perception of the lightning of our life; there, indeed, our expatiation of spirit, when it meets the pulse of outward sound and joy, the voice of bird and breeze and billow, does demand some power of liberty, some space for its going forth into the morning, some freedom of intercourse with the lovely and limitless energy of creature and creation.
”
”
John Ruskin (The poetry of architecture: Or, The architecture of the nations of Europe considered in its association with natural scenery and national character)
“
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other.
In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own.
I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel.
Is there a tunnel?" he said.
”
”
Don DeLillo
“
nearly dropped my glass. “What are you talking about?” I waved at myself. “This dress is Rodarte. Look at this hair, these nails. I’ve been in Page Six. I’ve been to Europe, like, eight times. I’m totally different now.
”
”
Ashley Winstead (In My Dreams I Hold a Knife)
“
The glories of central planning were meanwhile conveyed through books such as Six Year Old Bronek and the Six Year Plan.10 The evils of capitalism were transmitted though tales like the story of Mister Twister, an American who visits Leningrad and is shocked to find a black man staying in his hotel – or through poems about American plans for war: In crazy America They dream of war And the front lines are painted On maps with human blood11
”
”
Anne Applebaum (Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956)
“
I wanted to forget him, and yet it seemed I thought of him always. It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I'd envision his face -- not as it had been the last night in the fire, but on the other nights, that last evening he spent with us at home, his hand playing idly with the keys of the spinet, his head tilted to one side. A sickness rose in me more wretched than anguish when I saw what my dreams were doing. I wanted him alive! In the dark nights of eastern Europe, Lestat was the only vampire I'd found.
”
”
Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1))
“
It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.
”
”
Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance)
“
He was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)
“
Friendship between tow persons, or two nations, is an unbreakable bond, a tie which cannot be cut. An honourable heart does not cast aside a friend because he is in trouble, nor even if he changes his nature and becomes a criminal. Between two nations friendship must also be eternal, else the friend is false and being false in one event was always false. And what was our crime against the Americans? The Great Change? But is it a crime to change a government? By whose law can it be called a crime? It is of no more importance, between friends, than for one to change his garment! For this lack of reason our love for Americans is changed to hate. I fear for the future! A generation is growing up here in our country which has never seen an American face or heard an American voice. What do they know of Americans except to hate them as they are taught to do? There is no hate so dangerous as that which once was love.
....
- To the Americans, Communism is a crime. They will have none of it.
- But why, when it is ours, not theirs?
....
- I suppose this American concern with a form of government springs from their own history. Their ancestors fled from Europe to escape tyranny from their ancient rulers. Freedom was their dream. To them, therefore, tyranny is endemic in Communism. They will have none of it. It is not we who are Chinese whom they hate. It is the tyranny they imagine.
”
”
Pearl S. Buck (Three Daughters of Madame Liang)
“
The Self is one, the same in every creature. This is not some peculiar tenet of the Hindu scriptures; it is the testimony of everyone who has undergone these experiments in the depths of consciousness and followed them through to the end. Here is Ruysbroeck, a great mystic of medieval Europe; every word is most carefully chosen: The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life. Maya In the unitive experience, every trace of separateness disappears; life is a seamless whole. But the body cannot remain in this state for long. After a while, awareness of mind and body returns, and then the conventional world of multiplicity rushes in again with such vigor and vividness that the memory of unity, though stamped with reality, seems as distant as a dream. The unitive state has to be entered over and over until a person is established in it. But once established, even in the midst of ordinary life, one sees the One underlying the many, the Eternal beneath the ephemeral.
”
”
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
“
But out under the Moon, Chestnut Ridge and Cheat behind them, and Monongahela to cross, into an Overture of meadow to the Horizon, low-lands become to them a dream whilst under a Spell, the way it gives back the Light, the way it withholds its Shadows,— who might not come to believe in an Eternal West? In a Momentum that bears all away? “Men are remov’d by it, and women, from where they were,— as if surrender’d to a great current of Westering. You will hear of gold cities, marble cities, men that fly, women that fight, fantastickal creatures never dream’d in Europe,— something always to take and draw you that way,
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon)
“
I spoke at a few big political events and traveled with activists and comrades, happy to contribute to the dream of Europe and countries around the world existing beyond capitalism. Our message warned that the poor should not be paying for climate change, yet it is the poor who are, once again, paying the highest price.
”
”
Pamela Anderson (Love, Pamela: A Memoir)
“
Imagine for a moment that I live
right here, was born here, that my parents always
have had a shop here, and on Boulevard
du Temple there’s a bistro with a nice
young waitress—I’ll be there. Imagine that
there’s no such thing as Eastern Europe, no
cellars for hiding neighbors, no transports,
no round-ups, never any dreams of going
from house to house—for a moment suppose
it looks like this: a cat stretches its neck
in sunlight on a porch, a secret game
of chess unfolds between the waitress and
that guy. He tracks her moves, she brings him coffee,
as if by chance her hip jostles the board.
T. Różycki, Colonies
translated by Mira Rosenthal
”
”
Tomasz Różycki (Kolonie)
“
Some subjects are timeless, and I would say that food is one of them. Yet only by comparing notes this way can We of the World Who Have Known Real Hunger actually get together and form our own sort of imaginary club. Our members today would be from everywhere, from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, everywhere. But regardless of our assorted languages, regardless of our assorted politics, the members would have something far more in common than the members of most clubs do. Would would at least know that the universal implement we all have, the stomach, usually behaves the same way under duress and causes us all to have much the same kinds of dreams.
”
”
Gregory Boyington (Baa Baa Black Sheep)
“
I had a few glasses of wine at lunch. just the little bottle Sutter Home 4-pack from the party store. Kept it light. It's European, helps you relax, and lets you digest your food properly. Plus. I paired it with a new Artisan Bread sandwich from Quiznos. It's inspired by Europe. So good. Ate it in my car. Europeans love to dine outside.
”
”
Karl Welzein (Power Moves: Livin' the American Dream, USA Style)
“
Most destructive of all to black self-esteem has been the ideology of branqueamento or whitening. This theory was dreamed up in the 1920s to stop Brazil becoming a predominantly black country. White immigration from Europe was encouraged to stem the black tide. The black in Brazil will disappear within 70 years, said one congressman in 1923.
”
”
Kevin Jackson (Capoeira Africana)
“
Perhaps I should go back a few years earlier. My parents, who travelled from Odessa, the Russian city on the Black Sea, shortly before the 1914 war, were part of a vast migration of Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression to the dream of America that obsessed poor men all over Europe. The tailors thought of it as a place where people had, maybe, three, four different suits to wear. Glaziers grew dizzy with excitement reckoning up the number of windows in even one little skyscraper. Cobblers counted twelve million feet, a shoe on each. There was gold in the streets for all trades; a meat dinner every single day. And Freedom. That was not something to be sneezed at, either.
But my parents never got to America.
”
”
Emanuel Litvinoff (Journey through a Small Planet)
“
The waves of refugees who washed into London, escaping from Hitler, and then from Stalin, were bone-poor, often threadbare, and lived as they could on a translation here, a book review, language lessons. They worked as hospital porters, on building sites, did housework. There were a few cafés and restaurants as poor as they were, catering for their nostalgic need to sit and drink coffee and talk politics and literature. They were from universities all over Europe, and were intellectuals, a word guaranteed to incite waves of suspicion in the breasts of the xenophobic philistine British, who did not necessarily think it a commendation when they admitted that these newcomers were so much better educated than they were.
”
”
Doris Lessing (The Sweetest Dream: A Novel)
“
Have you told Mom about the porno yet?” Colby asks. “No, and it’s not a porno, guys. The way it’s shot, it feels artistic. Like a cool sex dream, you know?” “Oh, well, we stand corrected,” Ryan says dryly. “Mom will totally get the distinction between a porno and a cool, artistic sex dream.” “Filmed in Europe,” Keane adds. “Maybe she won’t see the porno,” I say.
”
”
Lauren Rowe (Rockstar (Morgan Brothers, #5))
“
A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
”
”
Maya Angelou (A Brave and Startling Truth)
“
Russians live in a country that has borders with Europe at one end of their map and with Mongolia, China, Japan, and America at the other. Travel to the Inuit community living on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and you can see Russia’s Great Diomede Island just two and a half miles away. Russians still dream of an undersea rail tunnel linking the two continents.
”
”
Alun Anderson (After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic)
“
With its wide, tree-lined boulevards and rich architectural heritage dating back over a thousand years, Paris had long been considered a jewel amongst Europe’s capital cities; a place that had inspired the dreams of romantics, artists and connoisseurs of every kind, from every country.
But for Drake, crouched in the shadows of a dimly lit stairwell that smelled of stale urine and damp, it was an entirely different prospect. The rundown residential apartment block in which he found himself was, in contrast to the ornate architecture the city was known for, a product of cheap 1940s utilitarianism. Stark, bleak and inhabited by people who clearly wished they were living somewhere else, it certainly wasn’t the kind of place he’d visit by choice
”
”
Will Jordan (Deception Game (Ryan Drake #5))
“
The word archive Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek work “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories,
I'm a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding whats worth recording of a child’s early life or---like Europe and its Stolpersteines, its “stumbling blocks’"---a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when
we took her to her death.
”
”
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
“
Dispersal was a conscious strategy of the plunderers. Only by destroying these collections could they build up new ones. Many of these libraries were the results of decades, sometimes centuries, of careful collecting. There had been generations of learned collectors and readers. The books also said something about the people who owned and treasured them: what they read and what they thought and what they dreamed. Sometimes they left traces in the form of underlined passages, notations, notes in the margins, or short comments. The beautiful and personally designed ex librises that many readers had made for their books demonstrate the care and pride they took in their libraries. Each collection in its own right took form in a unique culture, a depiction of its creator's world, which was lost when the library was broken up. The books are fragments of a library, of a world that once existed.
”
”
Anders Rydell (The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance)
“
A major defining factor was my wanting him to be part of the DC Universe. Because if someone as powerful as the Sandman was running all the dreams in the world, a natural question would be “Why haven’t we heard about him by now?”
The answer I came up with was “He’s been locked away.” And that solution formed an image in my head of a naked man in a glass cell.
My next question was “How long had he been trapped there?” The movie Awakenings hadn’t been made yet, but I’d read Oliver Sacks’s book a few months earlier, so I knew about the encephalitis lethargica, or “sleepy sickness,” that had swept Europe in 1916. Scientists to this day don’t understand what caused it, and I loved the idea of blaming it on the Sandman’s imprisonment, so I determined the length of his stay to be seventy-two years—ending in late 1988, when the series debuted.
And so on; each plot point just seemed to naturally lead to the next one.
”
”
Hy Bender (The Sandman Companion)
“
Hyacinth let her voice grow even louder. “Mama is amazing and the best cook and baker and her food is delicious! And Papa is the best papa in the world! And you are mean and you make us all feel bad about ourselves and you never have anything good to say about anyone. And you won’t go to Mama’s bakery, and I think it’s because you’re afraid to see that Mama is following her dream. And Oliver is great at basketball and he’s smart too, and Isa is the best violin player and is one day going to be the most famous violinist and tour all over Europe, and Jessie will study important science things and help the world be a better place, and I don’t know what Laney is going to do but she’s going to be amazing at whatever she does because she is the nicest person to ever live and gets along with everyone. So stop making us feel bad about ourselves and if you don’t have something nice to say, then don’t say anything at all!
”
”
Karina Yan Glaser (The Vanderbeekers Make A Wish (The Vanderbeekers, #5))
“
I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think. I look at the women in the streets of Saigon, and up-country. Some of them are very beautiful, very white, they take enormous care of their beauty here, especially up-country. They don’t do anything, just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six-months’ leaves every three years, when at last they’ll be able to talk about what it’s like here, this peculiar colonial existence, the marvellous domestic service provided by the houseboys, the vegetation, the dances, the white villas, big enough to get lost in, occupied by officials in distant outposts. They wait, these women. They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves. In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added together one by one like time, like the long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut. Ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves.
”
”
Marguerite Duras (The Lover)
“
The end of the world is seen, as Tennyson puts it, as the “far-off event” that allows Man to realize his true self, as pure Spirit, disencumbered of all fleshly and earthly ties. These ideas may appear deranged, but they continue to constitute a vital substrate of contemporary imaginaries. Signs of this substrate are everywhere around us: in the evangelical Christian idea of the “Rapture”; in the apocalyptic visions of ecofascists; in the dreams of those who yearn for a world “cleansed” of humanity; and in the fantasies of the billionaires who, having grown tired of this surly Earth and its sullen inhabitants, aspire to create a tamer version of it by terraforming some other planet.20 Their dream may be wrapped in futuristic cladding, but it is in fact nothing but an atavistic yearning to put in motion once again the processes of terraforming by which settler-colonials turned large parts of the Earth into “neo-Europes.
”
”
Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis)
“
As with the first Nightmare, we shot a couple of interesting scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut, most notably one featuring a female Freddy. One of the kids in the hospital has a Freddy dream in which he’s being seduced by a sexy nurse. The nightmare evolves into a kinky S&M fantasy, but becomes less M and more S when the ropes that bind the kid to the bed become Freddy tongues, and the nurse’s face morphs into Freddy’s, but her topless torso, which features a pair of perfect Playboy breasts, remains smooth and inviting… that is, for a moment. All of a sudden, the veins in her areolas come to life and turn into Freddy-like burn scars and snake up her cleavage, past her neck, and onto her face. (I’m pretty sure Kevin enjoyed the four hours it took to apply makeup to those tits.) This troubling, erotic transformation didn’t make the final cut for some reason. Occasionally I find myself signing bootleg stills from the missing sequence. Especially in Europe. Ooh la la!
”
”
Robert Englund (Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams)
“
Weather patterns in the Pacific were not human-driven, but the futures market in Chicago was. The world had shifted so rapidly from subsistence agriculture to a market economy that price fluctuations sent ripples throughout the system, destabilizing entire regions. Traders could now set off starvation halfway across the world with the touch of a telegraph key, sucking up grain supplies in India or the Dakotas and sending them to Europe, where prices were high. It was the dawn of “price famines.”174
”
”
Caroline Fraser (Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder)
“
But why should 1299 CE be considered the founding date of the empire? – there were no famous battles, no declarations of independence or storming of a bastille. The simplest explanations are often the most convincing: that year corresponds to the years 699–700 in the Islamic calendar. By rare mathematical coincidence, the centuries turned at the same time in both the Christian and Islamic calendars. What more auspicious year to mark the founding of an empire that spanned Europe and the Middle East?
”
”
Caroline Finkel (Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire)
“
America had been built with trains. That was a long time ago. The steam train was a relic. Passenger light rail was the future. Or at least it should have been. Every year, fewer and fewer people were on board with the dream. High-speed trains worked in Europe and Japan, but America was a different beast. Without government funding, passenger trains were money-losers. What Americans didn’t realize was that without government funding, so were highways and any other form of transportation, public or private.
”
”
Andrew Shaffer (Hope Never Dies (Obama Biden Mysteries, #1))
“
The healer's job has always been to release something not understood,to remove obstructions (demons, germs, despair) between the sick pa-tient and the force of life driving obscurely toward wholeness. Themeans may be direct—the psychic methods mentioned above—or indi-rect: Herbs can be used to stimulate recovery; this tradition extendsfrom prehistoric wisewomen through the Greek herbal of Dioscoridesand those of Renaissance Europe, to the prevailing drug therapies of thepresent. Fasting, controlled nutrition, and regulation of living habits toavoid stress can be used to coax the latent healing force from the sick body; we can trace this approach back from today's naturopaths to Galenand Hippocrates. Attendants at the healing temples of ancient Greeceand Egypt worked to foster a dream in the patient that would eitherstart the curative process in sleep or tell what must be done on awaken-ing. This method has gone out of style, but it must have worked fairlywell, for the temples were filled with plaques inscribed by grateful pa-trons who'd recovered.
”
”
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
“
Question No. 6 Briefly outline the historical development of castles in western Europe. What, if anything, do they have to do with cannoli? By the way, is “cannoli” singular or plural? Are the vanilla kind better than the chocolate? Question No. 7 Tell why you like reading stories about dragons and castles and fairies and that sort of thing. Have you ever read, say, A la recherché du temps perdu by Marcel Proust? Compare and contrast this book with any genre fantasy novel and explain why a writer would spend 30 pages describing how he rolls over in bed (no kidding). Why do the French think so highly of Jerry Lewis?
”
”
John DeChancie (Castle Dreams (Castle Perilous, #6))
“
. . . in Ukraine, the Association Agreement was more than just a few hundred pieces of paper slowly making their way through the inscrutable EU bureaucracy. Alina Frolova, a public relations professional who joined the group of Ukrainians Kuleba rallied in his pro-Ukraine public relations campaign, tells me it was the first step on a pathway to Europe and a dream for which many Ukrainians were willing to risk their lives. The cold practicality with which Ukrainians are willing to endanger themselves in the face of a threat to their budding democracy is still something that shocks me, even after having lived and worked there.
”
”
Nina Jankowicz (How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict)
“
I sometimes made huge mistakes. But what actually is a mistake in politics? And when I look back, I have only one sentiment: an enormous regret. Regret that we did not succeed, that we were not able to create this European world which would be the master of the universe for all time, which made the white race the first race, with the great mastery of the spirit.
And when we see what there is on the other side, what 30 years of the others’ victory has given, this anarchy in the world, this rout of the white world, this desertion throughout the universe; when we see in our own countries the decay of morals, the fall of the fatherland, the fall of the family, the fall of social order; when we see this appetite for material goods which has replaced the great flame of the ideal which animated us, well then, truly, between the two we chose the right side. The small, miserable Europe of today, of this impoverished Common Market, cannot give happiness to men. Consumer society poisons humanity rather than elevating it.
So, for our part, we dreamed of something great, and we have only one desire, that this spirit be reborn. And with all my might, up to the last moment of my existence, I will fight for this. So that what was our struggle and our martyrdom, will one day be the resurrection.
”
”
Leon Degrelle
“
He was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few man could be saved in the whole world.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)
“
Compared to the despotic societies that were the norm in Europe and Asia, Haudenosaunee was a libertarian dream. In the same sense, it was also a feminist dream: the Five Nations were largely governed internally by the female clan heads, and the Great Law explicitly ordered council members to heed “the warnings of your women relatives.” Failure to do so would lead to their removal. The equality granted to women was not the kind envisioned by contemporary Western feminists—men and women were not treated as equivalent. Rather, the sexes were assigned to two separate social domains, neither subordinate to the other. No woman could be a war chief; no man could lead a clan.
”
”
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
“
The European dream was dead, he thought, the Europe of grand ideals was buried in the ashes of apathy. There was no brotherhood of nations, only the squalid struggle of the political and financial masters to line their own pockets, while the masses were brainwashed into a zombie-like existence under the false flag of liberty. All its values were secular and materialistic—with propagandistic jargon employed to nullify citizens from detecting the corrosion of their souls. Once Europe had professed itself to be the embodiment of a spiritual ideal. But, like a fossil, all that remained of it now was its hollow shell, the insides having rotted away during the passage of centuries.
”
”
Mark Samuels (Written In Darkness)
“
So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages and recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its postnational unity, and adored its manners, clothes, and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and who had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved...
”
”
Amos Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness)
“
In Europe my family left their toes, but to Ellis Island they brought a dream. The old American dream. Work hard, save your money, be decent, and success you're bound to have. A business of your own. A house. Nice food on the table, carpets, curtains. Maybe two weeks in December in Miami Beach. Only if you're my family you swim with your slippers on. Okay. I grew up with that dream. But these artists you're describing, the self-promoting crybabies what are intentionally being scholckmeisters and gonifs, they dream the new American dream. And the new one is to achieve wealth and recognition without having the burden of intelligence, talent, sacrifice, or the human values what are universal.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Skinny Legs and All)
“
That is a traveler’s delusion. The writing I do on trains never turns into much. Maybe Jack Kerouac sniffing Benzedrine could do first and final drafts at one crack, but I can’t. In the last book Italo Calvino wrote, he meditates on Hermes and Mercury, Europe’s old quick-witted gods… and Calvino confesses that he always looked to their speed with jealous longing of a more methodical craftsman. “I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.” Saturn is the slow worker… Saturn can finish a four-hundred-page book. But he tends to get depressed if that is all he does; he needs regular Mercurial insight to give him something delicious to work on.
”
”
Lewis Hyde (Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art)
“
I asked her to tell me what the best moment of her life had been
Did she?
Yes, she told me about a trip the two of you had taken to Europe together right after you graduated from high school.
Pascal in Paris, it had been a dream of hers to visit Pascal’s grave. On that trip she finally did. I’d never seen her so excited.
That wasn’t it.
It wasn’t?
No, it was in a hostel in Venice. The two of you had been travelling for a couple of weeks and all of your clothes were filthy. You didn’t mind the dirty clothes very much. Lila said you were able to roll with the punches and for you, everything about the trip, even the dirty laundry, was a great adventure. But Lila liked things a certain way, and she hated being dirty. That day she had gone off in search of a laundry mat but hadn’t been able to find one. You were sleeping in a room with a dozen bunks, women and men together. In the middle of the night Lila woke up and realized you weren’t in your bed. She thought you must have gone to the bathroom, but after a couple minutes when you hadn’t returned she became worried. She climbed down from her bunk and went to the bathroom to find you, you weren’t there. She wondered up and down the hallway softly calling your name. A few of the rooms were private and had the doors closed. As she became increasingly worried she began putting her ear to those doors listening for you. Then she heard banging down below. Alarmed she went down the dark stairwell to the basement. She saw you before you saw her. You were working in the dim light of a single blub standing over an old hand operated washing machine. She asked what you were doing, what does it look like you said smiling. What Lila remembered from that night was that you actually looked happy to be standing there in the cold basement in the middle of the night washing clothes by hand. And she knew you wouldn’t have minded wearing dirty clothes for another week or two, you were doing it for her.
She said that.
Yes when I asked her what the best moment of her life had been she had told me that story.
But it was nothing.
To her it was.
”
”
Michelle Richmond (No One You Know)
“
They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. All their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were fulfilled. Where were they? Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each received a charge of lead. Some in the forehead, some in the back of the neck. Only two or three of them were left over, scattered throughout the world, worn out.
”
”
Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon)
“
Meanwhile, there arrived on the scene someone who did understand those masses: Luther. Just as the Germanic hordes of old had descended on the world of classical Rome, so did this “fanatical man of action, backed by the irresistible force of a mass movement,” sally forth “to swamp and destroy” the dream of a united Europe. Zweig called Luther “a swaggering, brimming, almost bursting piece of living matter, the embodiment of the momentum and fierceness of a whole nation assembled in one exuberant personality.” Summoning the world to arms, this “werewolf raging with uncouth and unjustifiable scorn” split Christian Europe in two. Though Erasmus tried with his pen to defend European unity and the “world-citizenship of humanity,” he proved unequal to the task.
”
”
Michael Massing (Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind)
“
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Renaissance continued, and I began to see the full scope of the Second Insight. The power of the church to define reality was diminishing, and Europeans were feeling as though they were awakening to look at life anew. Through the courage of countless individuals, all inspired by their intuitive memories, the scientific method was embraced as a democratic process of exploring and coming to understand the world in which humans found themselves. This method—exploring some aspect of the natural world, drawing conclusions, then offering this view to others—was thought of as the consensus-building process through which we would be able, finally, to understand mankind’s real situation on this planet, including our spiritual nature. But those in the church, entrenched in Fear, sought to squelch this new science. As political forces lined up on both sides, a compromise was reached. Science would be free to explore the outer, material world, but must leave spiritual phenomena to the dictates of the still-influential churchmen. The entire inner world of experience—our higher perceptual states of beauty and love, intuitions, coincidences, interpersonal phenomena, even dreams—all were, at first, off limits to the new science. Despite these restrictions, science began to map out and describe the operation of the physical world, providing information rich in ways to increase trade and utilize natural resources. Human economic security increased, and slowly we began to lose our sense of mystery and our heartfelt questions about the purpose of life. We decided it was purposeful enough just to survive and build a better, more secure world for ourselves and our children. Gradually we entered the consensus trance that denied the reality of death and created the illusion that the world was explained and ordinary and devoid of mystery. In spite of our rhetoric, our once-strong intuition of a spiritual source was being pushed farther into the background. In this growing materialism, God could only be viewed as a distant Deist’s God, a God who merely pushed the universe into being and then stood back to let it run in a mechanical sense, like a predictable machine, with every effect having a cause, and unconnected events happening only at random, by chance alone.
”
”
James Redfield (The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (Celestine Prophecy #2))
“
The inner contradiction between the nation's body politic and conquest as a political device has been obvious since the failure of the Napoleonic dream. It is due to this experience and not to humanitarian considerations that conquest has since been officially condemned and has played a minor role in the adjustment of borderline conflicts. The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered people's national consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
“
Start releasing the American dream. In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook uses parameters like healthcare, options, living space per person and mobility to conclude that we who live middle-class lives in North America or Europe are living a lifestyle that is, materially speaking, "better than 99 percent of all the people who have ever lived in human history." 2
He goes on to show the great paradox of our material wealth. As our lives have grown more comfortable, more affluent and filled with more possessions, "depression in the Western nations has increased ten times."3 Why? Easterbook cites Martin Seligman, past president
of the American Psychological Association, who identifies rampant individualism (viewing everything through the "I," which inevitably leads to loneliness) and runaway consumerism (thinking that owning more will make us happy and then being disappointed when it fails to deliver) .4 Like the rich farmer in Luke's parable, excessive individualism and rampant consumerism distracts us from the care of our souls. We enlarge on the outside and shrivel on the inside, and we find ourselves spiritually bankrupt.
If any characteristic of North American society might disqualify us from effective involvement in mission in our globalized world, it is the relentless pursuit of the so-called American dream. (I think it affects Canadians too.) The belief that each successive generation will do better economically than the preceding one leads to exaggerated expectations of life and feelings of entitlement. If my worldview dictates that a happy and successful life is my right, I will run away from the sacrifices needed to be a genuine participant in the global mission of God.
”
”
Paul Borthwick (Western Christians in Global Mission: What's the Role of the North American Church?)
“
For the past four decades our national spirit and natural joy have ebbed. Our national expectations have diminished. Our hope for the future has waned to such a degree that we risk sneers and snorts of derision when we confess that we are hoping for bright tomorrows.
How have we come so late and lonely to this place? When did we relinquish our desire for a high moral ground to those who clutter our national landscape with vulgar accusations and gross speculations?
Are we not the same people who have fought a war in Europe to eradicate an Aryan threat to murder an entire race? Have we not worked, prayed, planned to create a better world? Are we not the same citizens who struggled, marched, and went to jail to obliterate legalized racism from our country? Didn't we dream of a country where freedom was in the national conscience and dignity was the goal?
We must insist that the men and women who expect to lead us recognize the true desires of those who are being led. We do not choose to be herded into a building burning with hate nor into a system rife with intolerance.
Politicians must set their aims for the high ground and according to our various leanings, Democratic, Republican, Independent, we will follow.
Politicians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone.
If we tolerate vulgarity, our future will sway and fall under a burden of ignorance. It need not be so. We have the brains and the heart to face our futures bravely. Taking responsibility for the time we take up and the space we occupy. To respect our ancestors and out of concern for our descendants, we must show ourselves as courteous and courageous well-meaning Americans.
Now.
”
”
Maya Angelou (Letter to My Daughter)
“
The whitewash of Kingdom of Heaven Kingdom of Heaven is a classic cowboys-and-Indians story in which the Muslims are noble and heroic and the Christians are venal and violent. The script is heavy on modern-day PC clichés and fantasies of Islamic tolerance; brushing aside dhimmi laws and attitudes (of which Ridley Scott has most likely never heard), it invents a peace-and-tolerance group called the “Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians.” But of course, the Christians spoiled everything. A publicist for the film explained, “They were working together. It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar caused friction between them.” Ah yes, those nasty “Christian extremists.” Kingdom of Heaven was made for those who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the wicked white men of America and Europe would be more tolerant. Ridley Scott and his team arranged advance screenings for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, making sure that sensitive Muslim feelings were not hurt. It is a dream movie for the PC establishment in every way except one: It isn’t true. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of A Short History of the Crusades and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all” as it “depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.
”
”
Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades))
“
One might fancy him, passionate with theories of human equality and human rights, discussing, arguing, fighting behind barricades in Paris, flying before the Austrian cavalry in Milan, imprisoned here, exiled from there, hoping on and upborne ever with the word which seemed so magical, the word Liberty; till at last, broken with disease and starvation, old, without means to keep body and soul together but such lessons as he could pick up from poor students, he found himself in that little neat town under the heel of a personal tyranny greater than any in Europe. Perhaps his taciturnity hid a contempt for the human race which had abandoned the great dreams of his youth and now wallowed in sluggish ease; or perhaps these thirty years of revolution had taught him that men are unfit for liberty, and he thought that he had spent his life in the pursuit of that which was not worth the finding. Or maybe he was tired out and waited only with indifference for the release of death.
”
”
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
“
Where Western tales begin by shifting us to another time – ‘Once upon a time’ they say, meaning elsewhen, meaning then rather than now – Russian skazki make an adjustment of place. ‘In a certain land’, they start; or, ‘In the three-times-ninth kingdom …’ Meaning elsewhere, meaning there rather than here. Yet these elsewheres are always recognisable as home. In the distance will always be a woodwalled town where the churches have onion domes. The ruler will always be a Tsar, Ivan or Vladimir. The earth is always black. The sky is always wide. It’s Russia, always Russia, the dear dreadful enormous territory at the edge of Europe which is as large as all Europe put together. And, also, it isn’t. It is story Russia, not real Russia; a place never quite in perfect overlap with the daylight country of the same name. It is as near to it as a wish is to reality, and as far away too. For the tales supplied what the real country lacked, when villagers were telling them, and Afanaseyev was writing them down. Real Russia’s fields grew scraggy crops of buckwheat and rye. Story Russia had magic tablecloths serving feasts without end. Real Russia’s roads were mud and ruts. Story Russia abounded in tools of joyful velocity: flying carpets, genies of the rushing air, horses that scarcely bent the grass they galloped on. Real Russia fixed its people in sluggish social immobility. Story Russia sent its lively boys to seek the Firebird or to woo the Swan Maiden. The stories dreamed away reality’s defects. They made promises good enough to last for one evening of firelight; promises which the teller and the hearers knew could only be delivered in some Russian otherwhere. They could come true only in the version of home where the broke-backed trestle over the stream at the village’s end became ‘a bridge of white hazelwood with oaken planks, spread with purple cloths and nailed with copper nails’. Only in the wish country, the dream country. Only in the twenty-seventh kingdom.
”
”
Francis Spufford (Red Plenty)
“
He generally traveled to Europe four or five times a year. The pharmaceutical empire he ran had research centers in Germany, Switzerland, and France, and huge laboratories and factories in England. It was always interesting coming over here, exchanging ideas with their research teams, and exploring new avenues of marketing, which was his real forte. But this time it was far more than that, far more than just a research trip, or the unveiling of a new product. He was here for the birth of “his baby.” Vicotec. His life’s dream. Vicotec was going to change the lives and the outlook of all people with cancer. It was going to dramatically alter maintenance programs, and the very nature of chemotherapy the world over. It would be Peter’s one major contribution to the human race. For the past four years, other than his family, it was what he had lived for. And undeniably, it was going to make Wilson-Donovan millions. More than that, obviously, their studies had already projected earnings in the first five years to well over a
”
”
Danielle Steel (Five Days in Paris)
“
Oh my God, Rayna…I think something almost happened with Ben and me in Rio.”
“What? Wait, back up. When? You mean, ‘almost happened’ like…what? What exactly almost happened?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It all went really fast. I was feeling all these things, and he was looking at me like…like he was in that picture, and then…”
“Yeah??”
“I saw Sage.”
“Ooooh,” Rayna winced. “What did Ben do?”
“Nothing. I mean, I ran after Sage and…you know everything that happened then. We haven’t even talked about it.” I looked at her plaintively. “What do I do?”
“What do you want to do?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“Well…how do you feel? She asked.
“I don’t know that either. I never even thought about Ben that way except for that split second in Rio, and even then I wasn’t thinking of it seriously. And Sage…with Sage it’s all I think about, but it’s all jumbled up with the most insane things: dreams, and other lives, and other people’s memories, and…I don’t even know what’s real.”
Rayna took it all in.
“I love Ben,” she said. “You know that. I think you guys could be great together. I also believe in soulmates. Not just as romantic flings, like the guys in Europe, but true soulmates, destined to be together forever because they’re perfect for each other. Are you and Sage true soulmates? I don’t know, but I do know you’re cheating yourself if you don’t at least try to find out.”
“How do I find that out, Rayna?”
“I want you to do me a favor. Promise on our friendship.”
“Promise what?”
“Asking first is cheating. Promise on our friendship.”
It was an evil ploy. Rayna knew I wouldn’t say no, and she knew I wouldn’t go back on something if I promised on our friendship. Neither of us ever would-that was a rule we’d established when we were five.
“Okay…I promise on our friendship,” I agreed, rolling my eyes. “What did I just promise to do?”
“For the rest of the evening, don’t think. Just listen to how you feel and go with it, wherever it leads. And whether or not it makes any sense.”
I nodded. “I’ll try.”
“Not good enough. You promised on our friendship.”
I smiled. “I’ll do it.
”
”
Hilary Duff (Elixir (Elixir, #1))
“
We often associate science with the values of secularism and tolerance. If so, early modern Europe is the last place you would have expected a scientific revolution. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you had travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe. If you had then sailed on to contemporary Paris or London, you would have found cities awash with religious extremism, in which only those belonging to the dominant sect could live. In London they killed Catholics, in Paris they killed Protestants, the Jews had long been driven out, and nobody in his right mind would dream of letting any Muslims in. And yet, the Scientific Revolution began in London and Paris rather than in Cairo and Istanbul.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
The sacred site thus created is a space that nurtures the sense of the continuum in which we are immersed. Many indigenous cultures still have this sacred relational sense of the world that is nurtured by ceremonies; and many of a variety of cultures in these times of great change seek such a relational sense – and who may identify as being in “recovery from Western civilization” . I have been engaged for decades now, in re-turning to my indigenous religious heritage of Western Europe, re-creating, and re-inventing a ceremonial practice that celebrates the sacred journey around Sun: it has been an intuitive, organic process synthesizing bits that I have learned from good teachers and scholars, and bits that have just shown up within dreams and imagination, as well as academic research. It has been a shamanic journey: that is, I have relied on my direct lived experience for an understanding of the sacred, as opposed to relying on an external authority, external imposed symbol, story or image. It has not been a pre-scriptive journey: I have scripted it myself, self-scribed it, and in cahoots with the many who participated in the storytelling circles, rituals and classes over decades. The pathway was and is made in the walking. It is part of a new fabric of understanding – created by new texts and contexts, both personal and communal - that have been emerging in recent decades, and continue so, at awesome speed in our times.
”
”
Glenys Livingstone (A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her)
“
that night she dreamed of employing an army of women cleaners who would set forth across the planet on a mission to clean up all the damage done to the environment
they came from all over Africa and from North and South and South America, they came from India and China and all over Asia, they came from Europe and the Middle East, from Oceania, and from the Antarctic, too
she imagined them all descending in their millions on the Niger Delta and driving out the oil companies with their mop and broom handles transformed into spears and poison-tipped swords and machine guns
she imagined them demolishing al the equipment used for oil production, including the flare stacks that rose into the skies to burn the natural gas, her cleaners setting charges underneath each one, detonating from a safe distance and watching them being blown up
she imagined the local people cheering and celebrating with dancing, drumming and roasted fish
she imagined the international media filming it- CNN, BBC, NBC
she imagined the government unable to mobilize the poorly paid local militia because they were terrified by the sheer numbers of her Worldwide Army of Women Cleaners
who could vaporize them with their superhuman powers
afterwards, she imagined legions of singing women sifting the rivers and creeks to remove the thick slicks of grease that had polluted them and digging up the land until they'd removed the toxic sublayers of soil
she imagined the skies opening when the job was fone and the pouring of pure water from the now hygienic clouds for as long as it took for the region to be thoroughly cleansed and replenished
”
”
Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
“
Already, in fact, rebellion, without claiming to solve everything, can at least confront its problems. From
this moment high noon is borne away on the fast-moving stream of history. Around the devouring flames,
shadows writhe in mortal combat for an instant of time and then as suddenly disappear, and the blind,
fingering their eyelids, cry out that this is history. The men of Europe, abandoned to the shadows, have
turned their backs upon the fixed and radiant point of the present. They forget the present for the future,
the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the eternal city,
ordinary justice for an empty promised land. They despair of personal freedom and dream of a strange
freedom of the species; reject solitary death and give the name of immortality to a vast collective agony.
They no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that
it no longer loves life. Its blind men entertain the puerile belief that to love one single day of life amounts
to justifying whole centuries of oppression. That is why they wanted to efface joy from the world and to
postpone it until a much later date. Impatience with limits, the rejection of their double life, despair at
being a man, have finally driven them to inhuman excesses. Denying the real grandeur of life, they have
had to stake all on their own excellence. For want of something better to do, they deified themselves and
their misfortunes began; these gods have had their eyes put out. Kaliayev, and his brothers throughout the
entire world, refuse, on the contrary, to be deified in that they refuse the unlimited power to inflict death.
They choose, and
give us as an example the only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a
man, to refuse to be a god.
”
”
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
“
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Adam Simba
“
Jung’s remarks about how in North Africa he “felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness” may seem politically incorrect from our oversensitive perspective, but they highlight the core insight of the trip. Although Jung knew a great deal about mythology and mythological thinking, his own thinking was decidedly Western and rational—he described himself as a “thorough Westerner”26—and in many ways, Jung was a typical “left-brainer,” with his detestation of “fantasy,” his formality and punctuality, his precision and need to be “scientific.” In his travels in North Africa, and later Taos and Central Africa, Jung was looking for signs of a consciousness not as differentiated from the unconscious matrix—what in the Seven Sermons he called “the Pleroma”—as ours, with its sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious. What Jung found in places such as Tunis, Sousse, Sfax, and the oasis city of Tozeur was a completely different sense of time. Coming from the land of cuckoo clocks and appointment books, this must have been a shock. Jung had entered a “dream of a static, age-old existence,” a kind of perpetual now, a condition associated with the right brain, which lacks a sense of time; there was none of the incessant activity that characterized even a relatively small city like Zürich. Jung enjoyed the contrast, which gave him an opportunity to entertain criticisms of modernity, a practice that would become something of a habit in later years, but he also felt this timelessness was threatened. Thinking of his pocket watch, “the symbol of Europe’s accelerated tempo,” Jung worried that the “god of time” and its demon, progress, would soon “chop into bits and pieces”—hours, minutes, seconds—the “duration” he sensed here and which was the “closest thing to eternity.
”
”
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
“
What was the battle? What were the aims of the romantics? Why was the subject
the focus of such violent interest?
Hugo and his generation were all ‘enfants du siècle’, all, give or take a year or
two, born with the century. Brought up amidst the dramas of Napoleon’s wars,
they had reached manhood to the anticlimax of peace and Bourbon rule. Restless
and dissatisfied, their dreams of military glory frustrated, they had turned them-
selves instead towards the liberation of the arts, their foes no longer the armies of
Europe but the tyrannies of classical tradition.
For thirty years, while the nation’s energies had been absorbed in politics and
war, the arts had virtually stood still in France, frozen, through lack of challenge, in
the classical attitudes of the old régime. The violent emotions and experiences of
the Napoleonic era had done much to render them meaningless. ‘Since the cam-
paign in Russia,’ said a former officer to Stendhal, ‘Iphigénie en Aulide no longer
seems such a good play.’
By the 1820s while the academic establishment, hiding its own sterility behind
the great names of the past, continued to denounce all change, the ice of clas-
sicism was beginning to crack. New influences were crowding in from abroad:
Chateaubriand, the ‘enchanter’, had cast his spell on the rising generation; the po-
etry of Lamartine, Hugo and Vigny heralded the spring. An old society lay in ruins;
the tremendous forces which had overturned it were sweeping at last through the
realms of art and literature, their momentum all the greater for having been so long
delayed.
Nor, despite the seeming stability of the Restoration, had the political impetus
of earlier years been spent. In the aftermath of the Empire exhaustion had brought
a temporary longing for repose. Now, to the excitement of creative ferment was
added a hidden dimension: a growing undercurrent of political dissent, as yet
unexpressed for fear of reprisal. The romantic rebellion, with its claims for freedom
in the arts, cloaked the political revolution once more preparing in the shadows.
”
”
Linda Kelly (The young romantics: Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Vigny, Dumas, Musset, and George Sand and their friendships, feuds, and loves in the French romantic revolution)
“
We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died.
It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while.
The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it.
As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.
Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.
”
”
Arthur Koestler
“
I want to begin my fight for the future of our world with the sharing of a vision. Everyone has, or should have, a vision. This is mine.
It is a simple vision, really. It begins with the creation of a single, sane, planetary civilization. That will have to be very much like a utopia. People will deny the possibility of such a dream. They will say that people have always been at each other's throats, that this is just human nature, the way of the world. That we can never change the world.
But that is just silly. That is like saying that two battling brothers, children, will never grow up to be the best of friends who watch each other’s backs. Once, a long time ago, people lost their sons and daughters to the claws of big cats. In classic times, the Greeks and the Romans saw slavery as evil, but as a necessary evil that could never go away. Only seventy years ago, Germany and France came to death blows in the greatest war in history; now they share a common currency, open borders, and a stake in the future of Europe. The Scandinavians once terrorized the world as marauding Vikings gripping bloody axes and swords, while now their descendents refrain from spanking their children, and big blond–haired men turn their hands to the care of babies.
We all have a sense of what this new civilization must look like: No war. No hunger. No want. No very wealthy using their money to manipulate laws and lawmakers so that they become ever more wealthy while they cast the poor into the gutters like garbage. The wasteland made green again. Oceans once more teeming with life. The human heart finally healed. A new story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and new songs that we sing to our children. The vast resources once mobilized for war and economic supremacy now poured into a true science of survival and technologies of the soul.
I want this to be. But how can it be? How will we get from a world on the brink of destruction to this glorious, golden future?
I do not know. It is not for any one person to know, for to create the earth anew we will need to call upon the collective genius and the good will of the entire human race. We will need all our knowledge of history, anthropology, religion, and science, and much else. We will need a deep, deep sympathy for human nature, in both its terrible and angelic aspects.
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David Zindell (Splendor)