Creatures who will one day vanish from the earth in the ultimate subtraction of sensuality that we call death, we spend our lives courting death, fomenting wars, watching sickening horror movies in which maniacs slash and torture their victims, hurrying our own deaths in fast cars, cigarette smoking, suicide. Death obsesses us, as well it might, but our response to it is so strange. Faced with tornadoes chewing up homes, with dust storms ruining crops, floods and earthquakes swallowing up whole cities, with ghostly diseases that gnaw at one’s bone marrow, cripple, or craze—rampant miseries that need no special bidding, but come freely, giving their horror like alms—you’d think human beings would hold out against the forces of Nature, combine their efforts and become allies, not create devastation of their own, not add to one another’s miseries. Death does such fine work without us. How strange that people, whole countries sometimes, wish to be its willing accomplices.
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 3 “Taste” (p. 170)
Source: Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom (1994, with Edward Esko), p. 63
[1998, Unweaving the Rainbow, London, Allen Lane, 9780713992144, 18827466M, Preface]
Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
Pilgrim’s Regress 77
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933)
Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (2010), Introduction
Section 8.55 (p. 241)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
106
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
The Captive Mind (1953)
Context: Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic. Such experiences are associated with works of art for only an insignificant number of individuals. The majority find pleasure of an aesthetic nature in the mere fact of their existence within the stream of life. In the cities, the eye meets colorful store displays, the diversity of human types. Looking at passers-by, one can guess from their faces the story of their lives. This movement of the imagination when a man is walking through a crowd has an erotic tinge; his emotions are very close to physiological sensations.
Source: Mazdaznan Dietetics and Cookery Book (1913), p. 199
