a small paper for a small planet
If we are to truly measure morality, then we need to look at what we prize as a society. How do we spend our free time? What is our treasure? What motivates us? What do we value the most?
The answer isn’t very far away–it’s in our driveways, in the corners of our living rooms, in our hands, our ears and our pockets. It is money and everything money can buy. [Read More]
Some of my conservative friends that I’ve talked to recently think that America in particular and the world in general is in a moral decline. It is common for them to compare America with ancient Rome. “We’re heading the same way as Constantine,” a Republican colleague said to me a few weeks ago.
“Our little house is a wonderful, quiet place to work. Also a very good house for dreams, many people who’ve slept there have told me that. Dreams and the kind of writing I do have some connection. One morning when I was waking up in our Cannon Beach bedroom, the whole idea of one of the “Earthsea” books came to me as the light grew. When I got up, it was daylight and I had a novel to write.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
[Read More]
Closer and closer his little spaceship came
To the event horizon of the black hole.
This was his great adventure.
What he had studied all his life
Might today be proven true or false.
Or perhaps not proven at all.
How can human beings, with our arrogance so many orders of magnitude greater than our understanding or our reverence, hope to recreate the intricacies of these familial relations between different types of trees, plants, fungi, and fauna?
When I was a child, two sounds soothed me to sleep each night: the washing machine in the basement and the bell buoy in the bay. The liquid repetitiveness of the washing machine churning laundry in its gullet contrasted with the intermittent knelling of the bell as it warned ships away from the shoreline.
Looking through a dormant coin collection I discovered a surprise. While I very seldom add to the collection or for that matter even look at it, it is decidedly pre-decimilazation British monarchs. Imagine my excitement when I discovered a Wellington half penny. What caught my eye was the date — 1816.
As a final patriotic attempt by my dad to make the Germans run screaming from all remaining thoughts of invading Britain -or even seeking asylum there- and Scotland in particular, he had the RAF drop my first baby photos over anything that was left standing in Berlin and Dresden Germany.
I wonder how often the “generals” of forest-product corporations visit the clearcuts and view the devastation for themselves. And if they do, do they perceive their surroundings as the wreckage of an ecosystem or as a lawn that has been mowed, as easily regrown as grass?
The era of the brilliant Nabokovs is over. Dmitri died 22 February 2012. He was my age, born in Berlin in 1934 half a year before me. One day when I asked his father about his taste in music, he said he had none; all the musical talents went to his son, Dmitri. The father was very proud of his son and justifiably so.
