Saturday, January 07, 2006

Alice Walker:From the Ending of The Way Forward is With A Broken Heart

"And Yet, Stranger who perhaps I am never to know, the past doesn't exist. It cannot be sanctuary. Skin color has always been a tricky solace, more so now that the ozone has changed. After Nature is destroyed, money will remain inedible. We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and percieve our collective poverty. We see that everything is truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. our memories of better ways. our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. That healing begins where the wound was made.

Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginning to remake the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like.

I send you my sorrow. And my art.

In the sure knowledge that our people, the American race, lovers who falter and sometimes fail, are good."

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