“In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers.” – Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“You can make it all right if you will only be satisfied to remain small,’ I told myself. I had to keep saying it over and over to myself. ‘Be little. Don’t try to be big. Work under the guns. Be a little worm in the fair apple of life.’ – Sherwood Anderson

“A man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.” – Abraham Lincoln

“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.” – Hokusai (1760-1849)

 

As the electronic media world celebrates what it believes to be a new honest wholesale democratization of society, with a look-the-other-way attitude towards negativity and intellectual decay, it should be obvious how and why we have returned to a new dark age. We’ve given up on the observations of nature, terrible and sublime. We feel no need to tell the stories of nature’s etching needle or an old horse’s end. Lost and vanishing are the inherited narratives which grounded societies within societies. Narratives wrapped in ritual. – LRM