It turns out that a Nobel is also followed by other recognitions, and perhaps the most unexpected of these is that the Japan Karate Association in Tokyo has now made me an honorary 7th-degree black belt, something that, given my athletic abilities, is even more unimaginable than being an Economic Sciences Laureate.
Other
I’m addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things – being able to buy a book on the internet that you can’t find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.
Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other.
I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, ‘people’ in the sense of larger numbers of people. It’s as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can’t.
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.
Weapons of mass destruction violate more than individual lives – they cross international borders and jeopardize all people. They also drain resources that could be used instead for medicines, schools and other life-saving supplies. We must come together with even greater determination to prevent a WMD nightmare.
I can still remember the feel in my hand of that most wonderful American coin ever minted, a nickel with a buffalo on one side and the head of an Indian on the other. That nickel was a daily proof of our country’s past. Bring it back!
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning – in other words, of absurdity – the more energetically meaning is sought.
You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it’s moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks’ efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.