In his face were the sorrow and tenderness of love as he strongly held
his writhing son, looking at the small face that seemed feral in its isolation.
[Andre Dubus, "Witness," The New Yorker, July 21, 1997.]
The most remarkable quality of line is its capacity to suggest mass or solid
form. This is a quality it only acquires in the greatest masters, and is
expressed in various subtle departures from the continuous outline--the line
itself is nervous and sensitive to the edge of things, it is swift and instinctive,
and instead of being continuous, breaks off at just the right points and re-
enters the body of the design to suggest converging planes. [Herbert Read,
The Meaning of Art(Baltimore: Penguin, 1931), p. 39.]
The ice came from the top of a long tongue that spills out at the head of
this fjord, as if it were the bump of a tastebud that had been sliced off, or a
part of speech. Now it has melted and looks floury, like an unnecessary
word that adds confusion to insight. But when I drink it down, its flavor is
bright, almost peppery, bespeaking a clarity of mind I rarely taste but toward
which I aspire. [Gretel Ehrlich, "Cold Comfort: Looking for the Sun in
Greenland's Endless Night," Harper's, March 1997, p. 40.]
There have been countless movies about addiction, of course; I
remember being rather taken with "The Man with the Golden Arm," which
asked us to believe that heroin would be of use to Frank sinatra--the one
man on earth who could always get high, for free, on the sound of his own
voice. Most drug pictures have examined the subject through the eyes and
nerves of the addict; "Trainspotting" goes one better and approaches it from
the point of view of the syringe. We watch the heroin drain away from us,
down the tube and into the neck of the needle; it looks alarmingly impure,
like amud wrestler's bathwater running out of a plughole, and it immediately
confuses the moral issues that surround the film. There's a clever trippiness
to the sequence, and moviegowers will not readily forget an image that
they've never seen before; on the other hand, it will, without really trying,
persuade you never to go near drugs or needles, or for that matter
Edinburgh, ever again. [Anthony Lane, "Smack in the Face"--a review of
Trainspotting. The New Yorker, July 22, 1996,
pp. 78-9.]
Millions of Americans have used a simple but effective method to quit smoking.
One of them was my wife. A couple of them were my closest friends.
Here's how they did it. They said: "I quit."
And they did.
They didn't chew nicotine-laced gum. They didn't put nicotine patches on their arms. They didn't join support groups, go to a clinic, consult a shrink, or undergo hypnosis or acupuncture.
They just decided that putting smoke in their lungs was bad for their health, and they stopped doing it.
Was it easy? No, each experienced some discomfort. But they stopped and haven't had a puff in years.
That's the way the majority of people who successfully quit smoking have done it: cold turkey.
Yes, the various aids -- patches, gum and so on -- might make it
easier. But long before they existed, people actually did it on their own and
still do. [Mike Royko, July 10, 1996.]
Just as ecofeminists have found the central problem to be not the
anthropocentrism of the traditional environmental movement but rather the
androcentrism of patriarchy, so too have composition teachers reached the
same conclusion about writing and literacy. As Elizabeth Flynn states,
"composition studies is rooted in androcentric institutions and originated
from androcentric disciplines" (140). The job of ecofeminists and teachers
of writing and reading seem to be similar, then, when the job is seen as an
identification of and escape from androcentric world views. Both
ecofeminists and literacy professionals would encourage the activist stance
about writing that Hurlbert and Blitz describe: "Writing, itself, is struggle in
and with the social order. It is struggle to be heard, to make people pay
attention, and to discover ways to attend to the domain of the possible.
Teachers of writing must work with students to perceive these possibilities
because these are, perhaps, our only hope for change" (4). [Donald A.
McAndrew, "Ecofeminism and the Teaching of Literacy" College
Composition and Communication 47 (October 1996): 377.]
. . . We meet at a college noted for Knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today; despite the fact that this nation's own scientific manpower is doubling every twelve years at a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole; despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the fifty thousand years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first forty years, except that at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover himself. Then about ten years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his cave to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole fifty-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power....
Last month electric lights and telephone and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breath-taking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old--new ignorance, now problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer, to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space.
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and laudable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprises and overcome with courage.
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not. And it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.
Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it. We mean to lead it, for the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond; and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.
Yet the vows of this nation can only be fulfilled if we in this nation are first, and therefore we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new, terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win-- and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
In the last twenty-four hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to ten thousand automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a forty-eight-story structure, as wide as a city block and as long as two lengths of this field.
Within these last nineteen months at least forty-five satellites have circled the earth. Some forty of them were "made in the United States of America," and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.
The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the forty-yard lines.
Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.
We have bad our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.
To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade we shall make up and move ahead.
The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.
And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this state and this region will share greatly in this growth. What was once the farthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the farthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your city of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next five years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year, to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities, and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this center in this city.
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year's
space budget is three times what it was in January, 1961, and it is greater
than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget
now stands at $5.4 billion . . .