Endgame

One of my favourite authors, Derrick Jensen, has two new books: Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization, and Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance.

Here's an excerpt:

"Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself: It’s hard to love something you’ve never known. It’s hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed."--from Endgame, Volume I

I have read two of his older books, A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. Both are beautiful and tragic, shocking and revealing.

I encourage everyone to visit either his personal website, www.derrickjensen.org, or the endgame website, http://www.endgamethebook.org.

Quote of the day

"Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities." (Benjamin Franklin, from his report to the King of France on Animal Magnetism, 1784)