Or even better, entering, as Martin Buber might have written, into a relationship with something or someone. Or better, actually experiencing something (or someone). Laing, “Few books today are forgivable.” He wrote this, I believe, because we have become so very alienated from our own experience, from who we are, and this alienation is so destructive to others and to ourselves that if a book does not take this alienation as its starting point and work toward rectifying it, we’d all be better off looking at blank pieces of paper. I think often of a line by the psychiatrist R. Given that fact, you’d think most people would be doing everything they can to protect life on this planet - the only life, to our knowledge, in the universe. We can quibble all we want - and quibble too many do - about whether it is killing the planet or merely causing one of the six or seven greatest mass extinctions in the past several billion years, but no reasonable person can argue that industrial civilization is not grievously injuring life on Earth. The fundamental truth of our time is that this culture is killing the planet. But rather because of how that quote has been too often misused by people who put too much emphasis on the half-hearted, and not nearly enough emphasis on the fanatic. And not even because of the quote itself. Not so much because of the racism and misogyny that characterized some of his work. a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic”). I’VE ALWAYS kind of hated that quote by Edward Abbey about being a half-hearted fanatic (“Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast.
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