To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
Strong I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived.
It was as if I had worked for years on the wrong side of a tapestry, learning accurately all its lines and figures, yet always missing its color and sheen.
They say the Pharaohs built the pyramids Do you think one Pharaoh dropped one bead of sweat? We built the pyramids for the Pharaohs and we're building for them yet.
One's first responsible job is the great revealer - far more than school.
We humans are herd animals of the monkey tribe, not natural individuals as lions are. Our individuality is partial and restless; the stream of consciousness that we call 'I' is made of shifting elements that flow from our group and back to our group again. Always we seek to be ourselves and the herd together, not One against the herd.
Thus I came to condemn capitalism, not through any oppression endured by me personally, but through that very deification of efficiency which capitalism had taught me, for its own purposes.
From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.
You got the impression that each and every little individual was feeling pretty important doing the pretty important job of building up a State . The atmosphere reminded me of a word it was ’democracy.’
A certain number of Americans are already in Peking and most of us here feel that it would be very useful for the United States and especially for the Left-wing progressive movement in the United States if groups of students such as you mention could make a tour of China.
Having no diplomatic representation in Washington, China has no sources which allow her to check the character of applicants and therefore makes the practice of refusing everybody from the United States.
In point of fact all Americans are automatically turned down by China these days because of the escalation of Johnson's war in Vietnam, which several times has intruded into China.
What the Spanish War began the World War accomplished: America became the world's banker and ceased to be the world's pioneer!
So far we have not convinced the Chinese authorities. My own brother was refused a visa on what was probably my last chance of seeing him when he was going around the world on a tour. Scott Nearing was similarly refused.
