Quote of the Day
This is a winner, from the most recent Rolling Stone, which features excerpts from an oral history of Hunter S. Thompson. This by William Kennedy:
bq. I remember talking with [Hunter] about an essay by James Baldwin about the writer's quest for wisdom. Baldwin viewed the generation of American literary giants -- Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Faulkner -- as looking at the world as "a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost." The key phrase for Hunter was Baldwin's view that "innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward that greater innocence called wisdom."
Give all my rending of soul over the loss of novelty and innocence over the past four years, I find great solace in that notion. Bring on the wisdom!
oddly reminiscent of
Fri, 2007-10-26 01:18 — elleyoddly reminiscent of something i heard on a tour of temple square in salt lake city. i was there with a conference of unitarians, and we were all gung ho about going to the temple to demonstrate our tolerance and our belief in learning about other religious traditions, but still waiting to catch them out in obvious intolerance or hypocrisy. so near the end of the tour we were in a building looking at pictures of the inside of the temple (nonmormons not permitted to enter, but looking at pictures: okay!) with our guides, and we saw a picture of a mural showing adam and eve. aha! we said. do you believe in original sin? nono. one of the guides told us that mormons do not believe in original sin, that eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was necessary, that that was when we were truly born. it was a hard birth, as births are hard, but we aren't people without the knowledge of good and evil, and we didn't really live before then.
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