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Ethics
Sunbeams
March 1996The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.
Feast And Famine
This girl is old enough to understand that she is dying. But she is not old enough to matter. This girl is probably already dead. A newspaper photograph of famine is like the light of stars extinguished many years ago.
March 1996Sunbeams
August 1995Every morning the New York Times is out on the front step, and I wake up and get my tea and decide whether to meditate first or read the New York Times first. If the New York Times is first, by the time I’m to page four, I am already engaged in the pain and the suffering, the greed and the fear. If I meditate first and come into a kind of spacious awareness, I have a perspective that gives me some leverage so that I don’t just keep drowning in it. It doesn’t mean nonaction; it means that the action comes from a quieter space inside.
Sunbeams
June 1995This republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.
Sunbeams
January 1995I did not go to the Maggid of Mezeritch to learn Torah from him, but to watch him tie his boot laces.
Sunbeams
September 1993Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
Our Rag-Bone Hearts
Richard was introduced to mental institutions when insulin and shock treatments were in their experimental heyday. Inappropriate and excessive use of these treatments dealt him the blow ensuring that he would never again plead for his home or protest his lot.
September 1993February 1993
For the World
The hurricane knocks down everything in its path. We give it a name.
February 1993To Invent Fire
I am much too concerned with the actual earth and what walks on it to spend my small time here seeking to define such abstractions as capitalism and socialism, and broader still, society and country.
November 1992
