What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hung...er is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the o...bject of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The ...season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning "When" are much more numerous than those beginning "Where" of "If." As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Antifashion, a recurrent theme in the history of dress, was probably first taken up as a sign of status by the nobility, perhaps o...riginally out of necessity. Impoverished, threadbare noblemen could take pride in their lack of style while middle-class upstarts were deeply considering the cut of their coats. This strain in aristocratic style persists. The essential presumptuousness of fashion--its constant pushiness, its middle-class mobility--is one of the things that make people hate and fear it, especially very radical and conservative people. The constant dress-reform movements of the nineteenth century in England and America were attempts, in different modes, to resist and even to abolish fashion.... If elaborate fashion was the outward sign of bourgeois prosperity, antifashion had to be invented as a necessary means of indicating objections to existing social, economic, and sexual standards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You cannot go ten yards, on any thoroughfare, without being passed by some Rotarian of Literature, hurrying to attend a luncheon, ...banquet, tea, or get-together, where he may rush about from buddy to buddy, slapping shoulders, crying nicknames, and swapping gossip of the writing game. I believed for as long as possible that they were on for their annual convention, and I thought they must run their little span and disappear, like automobile shows, six-day bicycle races, ice on the pavements, and such recurrent impedimenta of metropolitan life. But it appears that they are to go on and on. Their fraternal activities are their livings--more, their existences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Americanistic pitch, of course, was old hat on the Bible circuit, as were subterranean virility fears common, the latter alway...s animating the former in the extra-defensive and recurrent dream of the evangelist in which he sees himself, in full color and cinemascope, a lantern-jawed begrenaded U.S. Marine leaping out of a trench to beat the living shit out of the Devil who, widespread was the assumption, wore perfume, spoke Russian, and carried a purse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, withou...t spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »