Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclo… - Saul Bellow

Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

Instead I often felt unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and sprinting through the star world.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.