baldwin-eden

·

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

Thought:

“I don’t know which seems more futile to me right now, writing a novel or writing another book of social criticism. Both of them seem, in the current context, futile. I suppose what I’d most like to do is write for the sake of writing and not even try to publish. But, I’ve been sort of embarrassingly lucky in terms of being paid for my so-called dissent. My punishment, I suppose, is how many student papers I’ve had to grade.”

Curtis White

Christian Molenaar