Dylan Mazur

“Hasheesh is indeed an accursed drug, and the soul at last pays a most bitter price for all its ecstasies; moreover, the use of it is not the proper means of gaining any insight, yet who shall say that at that season of exaltation I did not know things as they are more truly than ever in the ordinary state? Let us not assert that the half-careless and uninterested way in which we generally look on nature is the normal mode of the soul's power of vision. There is a fathomless meaning, an intensity of delight in all our surroundings, which our eyes must be unsealed to see. In the jubilance of hasheesh, we have only arrived by an improper pathway at the secret of that infinity of beauty which shall be beheld in heaven and earth when the veil of the corporeal drops off, and we know as we are known.”
― Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater

“Men and women face choices and constraints that differ significantly from those faced by their counterparts in previous eras because of the contradiction between the demands of relationships of any kind (family, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood) and the demands of the workplace for mobile, flexible employees. These choices and constraints are responsible for pulling families apart. Rather than being shaped by the rules, traditions, and rituals of previous eras, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that contemporary family units are experiencing a shift from a “community of need,” where ties and obligations bound us in our intimate lives, to “elective affinities” that are based on choice and personal inclination. In spite of these difficult changes, the lure of the romantic narrative remains strong. In an uncertain society, “stripped of its traditions and scarred by all kinds of risk,” as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim put it, love “will become more important than ever and equally impossible.”
― Sam Atkinson, The Sociology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

“Self-identity has become problematic for the individual in ways that are historically unprecedented, and the consequence is a cycle of endless self-questioning and introspection that serves only to confound the individual even more. Ultimately, the result is that our experience of ourselves and everyday life is increasingly played out against a backdrop of ongoing anxiety, restlessness, and unease about who we are, our place in the world, and the rapidity of the changes taking place around us.”
― Sam Atkinson, The Sociology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

“In a good library how swiftly time melts away! Not merely in the sense of its rapid passage through our absorption in other interests, but as an element in any consideration, it becomes entirely neglected. In practical business the present is our only actuality; the past has been cast down like a ladder whose rounds have helped us up to a height whence we never again expect to descend. Among books, all temporal successions are obliterated; Plato and Coleridge walk arm-in-arm; genial Chaucer and loving Elia shake hands; with them, with all, we stand enraptured upon the same plane of time, in one age, the ceaseless age of the communion of souls. Well did Ileinsius say, as he locked himself into the library of Leyden, Nunc sum in gremio sceculorum! —"Now I am in the lap of eternity!”
― Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater