'As immigrant artists for whom so much has been sacrificed, so many dreams have been deferred, we already doubt so much. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who might have had a mother and father killed, either by a government or nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do.'
                                       ―Edwidge Danticat 

‘I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.’
                          —Norman Mailer

The reason I obsess over the New York Public Library's paltry hours, like late morning starts, slim evening hours, and no Sunday hours, is that it shows a lack of determination on everyone's part. Something's not being done to get the library's hours up to where they should be. Even if money's the reason. And, of course, that will be the reason given. Same thing about kids and reading in the city's schools. Something's not being done.
 

'This is the world as it is. This is where you start.' 
― Saul D. Alinsky

It was raining a little outside my window early this morning like the phone showed it would be. But I went downtown with my sign anyway because maybe it would stop even though the phone had blue rain coming out of little clouds all morning. There was an older Asian woman selling umbrellas out of a cart just outside where I came up from the subway. She can't speak English, but her grandchild may go to Penn or Dartmouth. I wasn't outside for five minutes, I hadn't even taken my sign out of the big plastic bag, when I gave in and headed back downstairs to the subway and home. The Asian woman held an umbrella over her head as she stood next to her cart.
 

I was gone almost two weeks.  Wyoming to see my daughter and three granddaughters. Then the death of a friend in Cleveland and there for the funeral. I was back on Chambers Street with the sign this morning. You wonder as you stand there why society doesn't do everything it can for kids. Everything at whatever expense. We say that kids are the future and all that. Then there shouldn't be a need for charter schools. We don't do everything. We don't go to the mat for kids.

from Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth:



'We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man’s idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewilderingly diversified and constantly changing society. Committed we are to maintaining its creative momentum.'