Sublime

His speeches were very simple. He made no campaign promises; a reporter was to write that Coke Stevenson never once in his entire career promised the people of Texas anything except to act as his conscience dictated. He had made a record in Austin, he said. The record was one of economy in government, of prudence and frugality, of spending the peop

We made many a “bran new” theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear-headedness which philosophy requires.

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

I asked him what was on his bookshelf. J. I. Rodale. Sir Albert Howard. Aldo Leopold. Wes Jackson. Wendell Berry. Louis Bromfield. The classic texts of organic agriculture and American agrarianism.

Comprenant ce qui se passait sous Staline, George Orwell s’en fit largement l’écho. En 1945, malgré une résistance acharnée contre la sortie du livre, il publia La Ferme des animaux, une fable faisant la satire de l’Union soviétique.

For Henry David Thoreau, the sentence was the harvest gleaned in a writer’s brain. ‘The fruit a thinker bears is sentences,’ he wrote

“Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa.”