May 27, 2002
this time from Lewis Lapham (now editor of Harpers) in 1979:
I left California because I didn't have the moral fortitude to contend with the polymorphousness of the place. It was too easy to lose myself behind a mask, and I had the feeling that I was wandering in a void, feeding on hallucinatory blooms of the lotus flower. The emptiness frightened me, and so did the absence of culture, of politics in the conventional sense, of art and conversation, of the social contrivances that make it possible to talk to other people about something else besides the degree of their God-consciousness, of all the makeshift laws and patched-together institutions with which men rescue themselves from their loneliness, their megalomania, and the seductions of self-annihilation... I woke up every morning thinking that I had to invent the wheel and discover the uses of fire. I needed the company of other men who had roused themselves from sleep and set forth on the adventure of civilization."
File under: Books
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