“Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” …William Faulkner, in his 1956 Paris Review interview.
So have we? Reached that point? School shootings, separating immigrant kids from their parents, starvation? The highest infant mortality rate of any of the 27 wealthiest countries? #17 in education? Is our culture desperate?
“Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. …William Faulkner, in his 1956 Paris Review interview.