The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?

When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.

Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi.

Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be.

The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.

We must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life.

I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose.