An Interview With William Irwin Thompson

My feeling is that we’re headed into a discontinuous transition. But anybody living inside one has to try to work for a continuous transition. You go ahead, knowing better, even though the enormous probability is that it will be highly catastrophic.

The End Of The Modern World?

Looking Over The Edge Of History With William Irwin Thompson

A new world order is going to require a new way of thinking. Just as our American revolution was preceded by a philosophical revolution, and the heritage of the Enlightenment, in the same way you can look out in the world now, you begin to see the ideological origins of the new world order revolution. We’re still in the stage where it’s for the most part myth, art, religion and philosophy, and we haven’t yet moved into the stage of politics, economics, organization, implementation. Everything, it’s been said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

New York, New York

Almost everywhere we go, the people, the food, the architecture are a wild conglomeration of every European city I have been in. The past is eye to eye with the future here, and the now is a powerful wealth of positive and negative potential.

Chapel Hill

An Elegy For Jesse Stroud

There is no precipitating event for this elegy. No anniversary. No birthday. No cause whatever, other than personal need. Jesse Stroud lived, struggled, and died. I do not purposefully vilify nor vindicate. Neither do I celebrate. Certainly not regret.

Doing What I Do

Nursing — My Wounds And Theirs

I started out to help but I’ve hurt. I wanted to defend, but I became a judge. I was to be warm and generous but I grew cold. In doing for others I forgot myself. I’m supposed to be feminine and defer but I’m a male and chafe.

Being Creative

To be creative means becoming more familiar with being a little lost. If we are always full of what we want to do, there is no room for the new.

There Is No Time

There is no time. Every moment is now; every moment is every moment that ever existed and ever will exist. But because this particular form in which we find ourselves at present can only ride one impulse at once, it seems to us that indeed time is a ball-bearing rolling down a tube past 1960, then 1970. Jump off an impulse; call the jump death. Land upon another; call the landing rebirth.