I Write To Discover What

Celebrity-worship And Hero-worship Should Not Be Confused. Yet We Confuse Them Every Day, And By Doing So We Come Dangerously Close To Depriving Ourselves Of All Real Models. We Lose Sight Of The Men And Women Who Do Not Simply Seem Great Because They Are Famous But Are Famous Because They Are Great. We Come Closer And Closer To Degrading All Fame Into Notoriety.

The Most Refined Skills Of Color Printing, The Intricate Techniques Of Wide-angle Photography, Provide Us Pictures Of Trivia Bigger And More Real Than Life. We Forget That We See Trivia And Notice Only That The Reproduction Is So Good. Man Fulfils His Dream And By Photographic Magic Produces A Precise Image Of The Grand Canyon. The Result Is Not That He Adores Nature Or Beauty The More. Instead He Adores His Camera - And Himself.

The Hero Created Himself; The Celebrity Is Created By The Media.

American Civilization, From Its Beginnings, Had Combined A Dogmatic Confidence In The Future With A Naive Puzzlement Over What The Future Might Bring.

Probably No One Of Us Has The True Religion. But All Of Us Together - If We Are Allowed To Be Free - Are Discovering Ways Of Conversing About The Great Mysteries. The Pretense To Know All The Answers To The Deepest Mysteries Is, Of Course, The Grossest Fraud. And Any People Who Declare A Jihad, A Holy War On Unbelievers - Those Who Do Not Share Their Believers' Pretended Omniscience - Are Enemies Of Thinking Men And Woman And Of Civilization. I See Religion As Only A Way Of Asking Unanswerable Questions, Of Sharing The Joy Of A Community Of Quest, And Solacing One Another In Our Ignorance.