The World Is a Narrow Bridge

by Aaron Thier

As if Boston drivers were not savages, with murder in their hearts and flecks of blood on their glasses.

:)

It’s the old story: You wait for the big moment, and what you get is a gradual transition.

The United States is an Enlightenment nation founded on the idea that problems have solutions. A ridiculous conceit.

Somehow the money is more incredible to him than the apparition of God and his angels.

They visit the Grand Canyon, where they reflect that the most remarkable feature of this geological formation is that it’s not disappointing.

Life is what it is, and either you accept it or you don’t. Either you let the current sweep you out to sea or you swim against the current as it sweeps you out to sea.

We are born into a landscape of metaphor, and we must learn to read it correctly or we’ll die or go mad. For any creature that contends with an avatar like Yahweh, literary acumen is an evolutionary adaptation.

It’s good to have a friend like Satan.

“The world’s a big bell,” says Brette, “and you’re just an ear.”

Dear Child, Murphy writes, Do we wish we’d gotten a better god than Yahweh? Of course we do. It’s just one of life’s many disappointments.

Remember that capitalist markets are human inventions. There’s nothing natural about them. They need to be strictly regulated or they just reinforce existing problems and inequalities.

“You are entitled to an opinion as long as that opinion is informed by a responsible consideration of the available data. We seem to have forgotten this in America today. If your opinion is a matter of prejudice or it derives from poor information, it is not an opinion and you are not entitled to it.”

“In the United States,” he wrote, “the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.” And elsewhere: “I know of no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.” And still elsewhere: “I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”

Tocqueville

“Jefferson thought each generation should write its own constitution,” he says. “Flag waving leads to murder. Rooting for the home team is un-American and it breeds fascism.”