We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of auth… - Susan Sontag

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else).

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.