“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, October 25, 2015

Humans Are Not Nihilistic Princes of Darkness

“By coming to terms with an increasing range of objects, human beings do not become nihilistic princes of darkness, but actually the most sincere creatures the earth has ever seen.”

That has got to be one of my favorite lines of Graham's.

And look: a human tunes to his beloved parrots. Very much so.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Th other side of that threepence might be a reductive "We are all ecofascists to other species so enjoy the party". I struggle with this even as I consider Graham's deeper meaning and abandoning a ring fence view of the natural.