Dylan Mazur

“In a liquid modern life, there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up… must be tied loosely so that they can be untied… when circumstances change." Zygmunt Bauman”
― Sam Atkinson, The Sociology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

“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

“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

“But the man dreaming greatly and pressed by sordid necessity, he is the man who must confront the absolute contradiction. He is the man who cannot pour his artist-soul into his work and exchange that work for bread and meat. The world is strangely and coldly averse to his exchanging the joy of his heart for the solace of his stomach. And to him is it given to discover that what the world prizes most it demands least, and that what it clamors the loudest after it does not prize at all.”
― Jack London, Complete Works of Jack London