community
You must give something to your fellow man. Even if it’s a little thing, do something for those who have need of a man’s help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.
Schweitzer: A Biography, by George N. Marshall and David Poling (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 299.
It’s good having friends who farm. It’s good to know the names of their cows and the calves that come in the spring. It’s fun to see the new ones when I head up to get eggs from my neighbor. It’s good knowing they would be here in a minute for us anytime day or night, and it’s good knowing they can count on us the same way. We have a 1958 Ford tractor that I love. We have silos and a barn that has been here 100 years. The original house burned down years before we got here. Our house is a little tract house—nothing much at all. But we put on a tin roof and a covered porch and built a masonry bread oven. We have a big garden—man, I’m starting to cry here. It’s not the prettiest farm at all, but it’s the best place I’ve ever lived in my life.
Interview by Amy Kellner, Vice, October 1, 2008.
It was so important to have center places. Now, instead of five hundred artists there are fifty thousand in New York. There is no center. Max’s Kansas City was central to us.
The Paris Review Daily, Taylor Mead’s Lost East Village, by Craig Hubert, June 11, 2012.
Why I miss the trolley cars. Because unlike everything and everybody else in the U.S. they did not swerve from their ancient path. And because as a boy (thousands of years ago) I went to Coney Island in a trolley car, and saw grass growing between the tracks and because it was an open trolley, with the conductor on the side hopping from row to row to collect his fares (his left arm holding the rail as he hopped) and because it seemed to me then (as does not happen now on the bus) that the other passengers were all my family, all Brooklyn. And because as we neared the sea, and could see its blue glare on the surface, everyone (at least in the back row) burst out singing.
May 21, 1984 entry in Alfred Kazin’s Journals, selected and edited by Richard M. Cook (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011), 504.
To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn’t, and it was sometimes a matter of what’s called luck and sometimes a matter of having or not having the gift to endure and the will to.
Tennessee Williams: Memoirs (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975), 3.
In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
The Medium is the Massage (New York: Touchstone, 1967), 24.
It is the duty of society to take care of its individuals, plain and simple. We will never be healthier than our sickest member.
“Another Shoe,” in Half Empty (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 221.
Sharing a beer on the porch is not something a New Orleanian must schedule two weeks in advance.
“Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, How New Orleans Saved Its Soul,” The Washington Post, August 22, 2010.
Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
Timequake (NY: Penguin Book, 1997), 221.