In My Own Way: An Autobiography

A History of Everyday Things in England,

He did more than anyone else to release me from pomposity, from submitting to false modesty, and from knuckling under to the general fear of the colorful and all that it signifies.

As poets value the sounds of words above their meanings, and images above arguments, I am trying to get thinking people to be aware of the actual vibrations of life as they would listen to music.

Several years ago the students of Stanford voted him the best teacher on the faculty, which must have enraged his colleagues because you cannot maintain proper status in an American university without cultivated mediocrity. You must be academically “sound,” which is to be preposterously and phenomenally dull. Once I had a professor who was teaching

Rinzai Roku (a celebrated Zen text of the T’ang dynasty) and the teachings of Bankei, the seventeenth-century Japanese master who, for me, represents Zen at its best.

I am inclined to believe that these schools are justified more by the eccentrics who resist the system than by the conformists who come out as the system intends. It is now becoming obvious that the same

David Hunter, who was introduced to me by Hilde Elsberg, is one of the pioneers in a movement—originating from many different sources—that has come to be known by the awkward name of Sensory Awareness.

The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein (World Pacific). With Jordan Belsen, the filmmaker, he

Jean Varda.