The Search

     This enthusiasm of the Mexican is quite easy for me to understand. Even today, I would go half-way round the world to find a book if I thought it essential to my needs, and I have a feeling of absolute veneration for those few authors who have given me something special. For this reason I can never understand the tepid youth of today who wait for books to given to them and who neither search nor admire. I would go without eating in order to get a book, and I have never liked borrowing books, because I have always wanted them to be absolutely mine so that I could live with them for hours on end.
     As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.
— Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung & Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, pp. 3-4.

     It would be rash to expect television to reform. On the contrary, no one should take seriously any news organization that, after announcing the news of even the gravest import, shifts to a commercial featuring talking dogs. Neil Postman says: "I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville."
— James B. Sibbison, "Assisting the Decline of Literacy: Electronic Kudzu," in Chrysalis, Volume VII, Issue 2, "The Future of Human Nature," p. 97.

"It must take courage to
bear a child these days."

Courage? To receive new life and bring it forth
Into a world long barren from refusing what is new?

Courage? To assist in love's creation
For a world gone mad with hate's destroying?

Rather say it would take courage to live on
Poor for the want of new hopes and aspirations,
Blind in the blaze of new light,
In guilty shame for lack of innocence
To lead the way out of old mistakes.

New worlds do not come
From niggardly measuring of acceptance,
Nor from timid shunning of the unknown,
But from the beginnings
Set formless in the void of secret deeps,
Their substance seen, yet being imperfect,
Only by the One who willed it so.
— Carolyn Blackmer, in Ibid., p. 103.