Then realized it's good for my soul not to know.

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

ARTHUR MILLER.




Funny that the very evening after I read this, I met a Moroccan man and we stood and talked under an astounding sky (menacing clouds with ragged edges backed by a saffron and magenta sunset) and I pointedly didn't ask him what he did. He volunteered this information after awhile, and then laughed and said that it reminded him of being in Morocoo or Europe not being asked upfront what he does and where.

Unwritten novels.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

REBECCA WEST.

What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential.

Our Economy of Kindness from Mother Jones.

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don't happen, the forests that aren't leveled, the species that don't go extinct, the discriminations that don't occur?

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty. The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it's done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible. Years ago, when my friends started having babies I finally began to grasp just what kind of labor goes into sustaining one baby from birth just to toddlerhood.

happy fourth!

We watched the fireworks from a tiny park situated at the end of Few Street. At first, we had the park to ourselves. Then an Indian family arrived, all carrying ears of sweet corn, and that was all very well. And THEN 20 drunks arrived and started shooting off fireworks of their own, and when a neighbor complained, shouted, "AMERICANS DON'T APOLOGIZE!"



Watching the fireworks from across the lake reminded me irresistibly of that one scene in The Little Mermaid...

I cannot imagine how.

If you want to read a fascinating “conservative” case for legalizing gay marriage, read last week’s Newsweek. The conservative lawyer in question argues that banning same-sex marriage represents a gross governmental interference in private lives of citizens and a breach of personal freedom—a compelling argument from a different angle than the stance I automatically assume on why we should embrace gay marriage ASAP (namely—barring loving homosexual couples from marriage is just cruel).

Here's a sample of the article's contents:

“When we refuse to accord this status to gays and lesbians, we discourage them from forming the same relationships we encourage for others. And we are also telling them, those who love them, and society as a whole that their relationships are less worthy, less legitimate, less permanent and less valued. We demean their relationships and we demean them as individuals. I cannot imagine how we benefit as a society by doing so.”

When I was in my early teens, I thought that introducing the term “marriage” into the debate over same-sex rights made those court and ballot box battles messier than they needed to be. The way I saw it then, people got so tetchy over that one word. Couldn’t “civil unions” confer most of the benefits of marriage while skirting the big fight over same-sex marriage? But I know now that I was wrong. A civil union isn’t the same as a marriage. Yes, a civil union extends certain rights and protections, but it withholds the profound and particular respect and recognition that we (at least in theory, if not in practice) attach to marriage in our society.