Hermit hoar, in solemn cell,
Wearing out life’s evening gray;
Smite thy bosom, sage, and tell,
Where is bliss, and which the way?
Thus I spake; and speaking sigh’d;
Scarce repress’d the starting tear;—
When the smiling sage reply’d—
Come, my lad, and drink some beer.
“What needs to be returned to is what I call the ‘social imagination,’ which is the idea that human beings have the right to be the authors of their own worlds rather than being simply an expression of the world that they happen to have been born into. They always have the right, and indeed the obligation, to be makers of their own world, which capitalism, of course, doesn’t allow.”
Curtis White