These stories are placid homilies of consumer-spiritual stasis
[...] To abridge thinking in the name of the emergencies that today are permanent reduces it to slogans, perpetual cheerleading or nay-saying. The notion that liberals cannot criticize liberalism or leftists cannot criticize leftism partakes of a bankrupt tradition. My object in any event is not to…
the choice is not between a virulent racism and an anodyne diversity; and even if it were, criticism of the latter should not cease
Continuous assault on the individual, which begins in childhood, leads not to volubility, but the reverse
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did a fair amount of traveling, criticized it as a “fool’s paradise.” “I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe” for art or study, he wrote. But he wondered if travel led to individual growth. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea,…
