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Ethics
On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. . . . I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was.
December 1983Sunbeams
November 1982Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It’s just the universe breathing.
Teaching, And The Mood Of Relativity
Many years ago when I first taught college English, I made a discovery in the first or second week of teaching, namely, that the main obstacle to instruction, to one’s ability to teach someone something they don’t already know, is the mood and spirit of relativity.
June 1982Sunbeams
January 1981We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.
Sunbeams
June 1980To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread over the whole of eternity. There are no surprises and no unknowns.
Man, Videtan Flora, And The Berendora Of Equatorial Videt
“Dangling in his face was a single stem of the graceful foliage of the Eighteenth Species. He saw then that he could not hold back, and yet must risk doing terrible damage to the crowning floral creation of the Universe. He crept forward in an agony of joy and terror.”
February 1979Sunbeams
March 1978The political campaign won’t tire me, for I have an advantage. I can be myself.
March 1978
An American Dream
Nothing shocks us anymore. The line between social truth and social fiction has been erased (from the Warren Commission to Watergate we have been asked to disbelieve our eyes and ears) and we are in the curious no-man’s-land of the artist, the madman and the saint. There is no consensus reality; there never was.
March 1978Crime Pays — A True Adventure
When I unlock and open the door to my apartment, I see a man standing there, with his back to me. He hasn’t seen or heard me, and continues about his business of piling up my little TV, radio, stereo. I softly — very softly — close the door, tiptoe down the stairs, and call the 911 police emergency number.
February 1978
