The Present Can Try To Bury The

In Moments Of Despair, We Look On Ourselves Lead-enly As Objects; We See Ourselves, Our Lives, As Someone Else Might See Them And May Even Be Driven To Kill Ourselves If The Separation, The "knowledge," Seems Sufficiently Final.

It Has To Be Acknowledged That In Capitalist Society, With Its Herds Of Hippies, Originality Has Become A Sort Of Fringe Benefit, A Mere Convention, Accepted Obsolescence, The Beatnik Model Being Turned In For The Hippie Model, As Though Strangely Obedient To Capitalist Laws Of Marketing.

The Fact Is That Gardening, More Than Most Of Our Other Activities Except Sometimes Love-making, Confronts Us With The Inexplicable.

Europeans Used To Say Americans Were Puritanical. Then They Discovered That We Were Not Puritans. So Now They Say That We Are Obsessed With Sex.

The Strongest Argument For The Un-materialistic Character Of American Life Is The Fact That We Tolerate Conditions That Are, From A Materialistic Point Of View, Intolerable. ... No Nation With Any Sense Of Material Well-being Would Endure The Food We Eat, The Cramped Apartments We Live In, The Noise, The Traffic, The Crowded Subways And Buses. American Life, In Large Cities, At Any Rate, Is A Perpetual Assault On The Senses And The Nerves.