Poverty and Light

1. In "Sight into Insight," an essay first published in Harper's and then collected in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes:

But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

And:

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go.

2. In "Economy," the first chapter of Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes:

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven

3. In "Pride Has Turned Us into Liars," Ryan Alexander sings:

And what we have traded here for concrete and steeples
Are warm blooded people, the orphaned and the widowed

And:

And what we have traded here for suburbs and comfort
Are poor single mothers,
We're turning children into soldiers

4. In "A Jealous Father," I write:

Is this the cost of knowledge? Or a way of explaining to ourselves the
sweating and earning and growing and eating and sometimes starving
that fills our days and nights—burning candles at both ends, as they say,
tilling the earth, as they say, and finding that there is never quite enough to go around.

5. In "Economy," Henry also writes:

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.

6. In The Republic, Socrates says:

. . . the guardians were not to have houses or lands or any other property; their pay was to be their food, which they were to receive from the other citizens, and they were to have no private expenses; for we intended them to preserve their true character of guardians.

7. In "Ain't No Reason," Brett Dennen sings:

People walk around pushing back their debts,
Wearing paychecks like necklaces and bracelets,
Talking about nothing, not thinking about death

8. And in his essay "My Wood," E. M. Forster writes:

The Gospels all through couple stoutness and slowness. They point out what is perfectly obvious, yet seldom realized: that if you have a lot of things you cannot move about a lot, that furniture requires dusting, dusters require servants, servants require insurance stamps, and the whole tangle of them makes you think twice before you accept an invitation to dinner or go for a bathe in the Jordan. Sometimes the Gospels proceed further and say with Tolstoy that property is sinful; they approach the difficult ground of asceticism here, where I cannot follow them. But as to the immediate effects of property on people, they just show straightforward logic. It produces men of weight. Men of weight cannot, by definition, move like the lightning from the East unto the West, and the ascent of a fourteen-stone bishop into a pulpit is thus the exact antithesis of the coming of the Son of Man.