Perspectives on Ideas. April 29, 2007

Drugs and Alcohol
Drugs and alcohol 229 Conrad Aiken: This [hashish and peyote], as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook

Dueling
Dueling 296 ...although we do not now quarrel according to the modes and figures of Caranza or Vincent Saviola, no one knew better than Fergus that there must be some decent pretext for a mortal duel...you may challenge a man for treading on your corn in a crowd or for pushing you up to the wall, or for taking your seat in the theater; but the modern code of honor will not permit you to found a quarrel upon your right of compelling a man to continue addresses to a female relative, which the fair lady has already refused. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.

Duels 138 A story arose and lived on that when first, as the challenged party, he had his choice of weapons, he [Lincoln] said, “How about cow dung at five paces?” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years

Dullness
Dullness 280 Johnson: “Why, Sir, … is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Earth
Earth 29 …the earth, far from being at rest is whirling through space in a giddy and highly complicated fashion…its daily rotation about its axis at the rate of 1000 miles an hour, and its annual revolution about the sun at the rate of 20 miles a second…. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein

Earth 87 ...the radius of the universe is 35 billion light years or 210,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 miles. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein

Ecology
Ecology 234 Thoreau, as is evidenced by his final journals, had labored to lay the foundations of a then unnamed science—ecology. Eiseley, The Star Thrower

Ecology xii [Ted Browning suggested]: Instead of first identifying the best areas for development, we can identify areas that are most important for conservation of natural processes, those of special and innate landscape character, and those suitable for modification to parks, playgrounds, green space, and so forth. H. Wm. Sellers, Director, Brandywine Conservancy. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 11 Somebody once said that developers often name their developments after what has been destroyed by the development...Deerfield; Quail Hill, Darlington Woods. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 26 ...a beauty that results when living organisms evolve into near-perfect harmony with the soil, the rocks, the water, the other creatures that make their world--with their environment. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 68 All things are connected--one of ecology’s bedrock concepts. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 70 Chief Stealth: Man did not weave the web of life/ He is merely one strand in it,/ Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 94 Chief Stealth: "If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit." Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 129 …the environmental breakdown is a crisis of spirit, dealing with the fundamental spiritual question: what should be the relationship of humans to earth…. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 129 The native Americans perceived of the great spirit as a kind of cosmic connective tissue stretching through all creation, binding all parts into a fabric of spiritual harmony. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 130 Chief Stealth, a native American philosopher of the Duwamish Tribe in Washington State said this: …every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every…humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people." Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 135 Wendell Berry: We go to the wilderness to be restored…the survival of wilderness--of places that we do not change--is necessary…wildernesses are places where nature is given a free hand and where people go only as guests…function as sacred groves, places we respect and leave alone. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Ecology 138 For the sun is part of us as we are part of it: the heat that makes our normal temperature 98.6 is solar heat, transformed and made available to us by green plants. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.