The metal thing holding the leaves of my mind together

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character…they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our [...]

That’s how we thought once, those of us who had been born in the twentieth century. We looked to stories and parables, to plays, films, and poems as a mirror-universe in which we might better see ourselves. Literature, in all its expanding forms, was the very heart of our culture, where we might share disappointments [...]

Between the invention of nuclear weapons and the turn of the twenty-first century the U.S. spent over five trillion dollars building and maintaining its nuclear arsenal–about one-tenth of the country’s total spending since 1940. In America, annual spending on past and present military activities exceeds spending in all other categories of human need; approximately eighty [...]

Reason, like bombs, can be deployed from far away. Closer up there is nothing but feeling. –Lydia Millet, 2005