Right now on Amazon these three titles pretty much sum up the major political predilections of America. I’m reading Number 2 and I could have written number 3. As for Number 1, I’m hoping to meet Michael Wolff so I can turn him into compost.
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Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Gerard Van der Leun
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#2 Jordan Peterson is a giant plus to the human race. It is difficult for me to fathom that he is a Canadian.
#3 I have not read the book but will do so. The title is a description of what I am.
I just got Peterson’s book as a Valentine’s Day gift – and anybody our age who’s been through “feminism,” multiple divorces, the loss of children, breakdowns and The Age of Obama learned about not giving a fuck loooong ago.
Still here.
#1, Utter delusion, the national pastime.
#2, Traditional reason, the national squandering.
#3, Apathy, the national undercurrent.
#4 is probably an advisory on not playing in freeways in order to remain living.
Give a nation everything and then watch it throw it all away.
I now have Jordan Peterson’s book; I’ve only just begun it, but it’s already blowing my mind. Powerful, well-written, and to the point.
The first book I don’t need to buy, it’s been read almost cover to cover, on-air, by CNN & MSNBC, where it has replaced the Bible. The third book I’ve already pretty well mastered.
Highly recommended: this conversation between Peterson and Camille Paglia. It made me feel like I’ve sipped through a very small straw at a Niagra of knowledge, and is far too short. If anyone could forbid Paglia from saying the word “okay,” though- she would be unable to speak! See if I’m wrong:
https://youtu.be/v-hIVnmUdXM
An admirable ambition, he would make good compost.