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Old Master

Book Review

What most impresses me about the work of V.S. Pritchett is its stunning variety. I am faced with the question that often arises in confronting a substantial artist: how can he know all that he does? Each story is unique in its characters, techniques, its tone: each creates its own small peculiar world. “Blind Love,” the title story of an earlier volume, and the third story in this one, deserves special mention.

The Whole Earth Jamboree

Don’t tap your foot. Listen to the words. If I was to be marooned on a South Sea Island with a half dozen metaphors, that would be one. It’s as elastic as a new pair of underwear, and snugly fits the times. Marooned last month in California, at the Whole Earth Jamboree, I listened. In California, the beat is compelling. It’s a state, and a state of mind, where everything seems possible, where the dreams of an age sink down roots, and grow, as dramatically as Findhorn’s 40-pound cabbages, yet may die before their seeds are carried “in from the coast.” Reflecting the best and worst in ourselves, it’s still the frontier, ever receding; the deeper we go into ourselves, the more there is to discover.

Making Predictions

Astrology, particularly predictive astrology, can be an awesomely powerful tool. Through it, consciousness is extended beyond its natural limits. Rather than seeing life from ground level as a series of confrontations with specific, seemingly unrelated situations, the awareness rises temporarily into the stratosphere.

All That Glitters

Book Review

American Gold is a book full of poetry, a book of history, the story of a place as it changes through fifty-eight years, the history of the shaping of a sensibility. It is not quite a novel. But it is a book worth having.

Winning In America

A JAKE scream is the best. It can probably out/decibel a primal scream any day of the week, and has the added advantage of surprise attack, giving it increased sincerity. You don’t know you’re going somewhere special to scream. It is convenient, occurring in the ordinary workings of daily life.

Journal Writing

Where It Can Go From Where It Is

The blood pumps hard and I see that I am really writing, not playing at writing. I use whatever gifts I have. I give respect to the words as I lift and shake and kiss them. I admit that what is secret and hidden is the best advice for the next generation.

Food First — Beyond The Myth Of Scarcity

Book Excerpt

The world’s hungry people are being thrown into ever more direct competition with the well-fed and the over-fed. The fact that something is grown near your home in abundance, or that your country’s natural and financial resources were consumed in producing it, or even that you yourself toiled to grow it will no longer mean that you will be likely to eat it.

Notes On The Lecture On Findhorn

There was no despair in these people. There was none of the grasping idealism about them which has characterized other groups pointing to change in our culture. There was only peace and a simple acceptance of the rightness of each moment spent in attunement with God.

Growing People — The Findhorn Experience

Follow that intuition, that still small voice, that flash, that prompting. Don’t listen to that lower mind, that will give you all the reasons why you shouldn’t follow it there. So, it’s immediate action. Try it out. At first there are two voices — a higher voice and a lower voice. Keep on until there’s only one voice.

That Little Guy In The Corner Needs A Drink

Book Review

His novels are often wildly funny, with a kind of humor that is even more striking on a second reading, once it has had time to sink in. He is not the life of the party, but the enormously funny little man off in the corner whom only a few people know about.