I bought this book from the library because they decided to 'trash' its existance on their shelves because it was 'out of date' I guess? So for $0.25 I bought it. Its been sitting in a bind somewhere in the annals of my dad's house. After wrestling with this other book that is all of 227 pages and going back an forth with it while cooking or sun-bathing (you wait till I write my commentary on that one. lmao. Its not what I read, it was what was between the lines. Let me tell you--DEEP between the lines.) Also this could be a strange way of not forming an attachment. Not that I don't try to experience joy of my own doing but I also don't want to believe in 'the yellow brick road' either. The only people rolling down that delusional cloud bank is a naive girl wearing sparkly red shoes, a coward, a heartless tea kettle and an idiot made of straw. I don't plan on applying for any of those jobs no time soon.
So here is some pieces to it I thought sounded pretty spot on.
"I am entirely willing to grant that anything is possible, but to me the statistics seem against it. And to the second reminder concerning the control we exert over our environment, I must reply, "You are thinking of environment in terms of physical arrangements. You are thinking of drainage ditches and antibiotics and slum clearance and hybrid corn. You are forgetting something---that the most important element in the human environment is man himself. And so long as we live in a time when a few human beings, by pressing an arrangement of buttons, can in a few hours so alter our physical environment as to make life all but insupportable on this planet, then I am unimpressed by the argument that we have gained control of any part of it." (Ardrey 33)
"I do not believe that we are towns without histories, ships without compasses, moments without memories. We carry in that region known as the unconscious certain patterns inherited from ancient days. They are patterns of survival value, or we should not be here. And they are legacy of all that life which has come before us, assuring us that we are not alone.
I believe, furthermore, that what we call the age of anxiety is in truth a transitional time, an uncertain moment in the adolescence of a species, when the superstitions and imagery identifications of childhood are no longer enough but the larger comprehensions of maturity are yet unavailable. In such an awkward emotional age we lose faith in fathers, divine or domestic, and yearn for more suitable stars to steer by. We lose confidence. We feel ourselves children of inconspicuous circumstance, dry leaves tumbling before unimportant winds, victims of worlds of our making, will-less trespassers on dubious pastures. Yet self-knowledge cannot be denied. Maturity must come." (Ardrey 37)
"There will be terror of a sort in losing, once and for all, this comfortable, pupa-like, three-dimensional chamber of human uniqueness, the only world we have ever known. And there will be hazard, most particular hazard, in the chance that we may discover ourselves the pale prisoners of a determinate past, whereas before we were at worst the nervous victims of an indeterminate future. But it is a chance I believe worth taking: in part, because I have reason to suspect that this will not be biology's answer; in part because I believe that the winning of self-knowledge is worth every risk; and in part, because I have no choice, for truth is peering in my window and I cannot ask him to go away." (Ardrey 38)
Don't you just love those prophetic doom soothesayers?
Written by: W Harley Bloodworth
~Courtesy of the AOFH~
Sources Cited:
Ardrey, Robert. The Territorial Imperative: : A Personal Inquiry Into the Animals Origins of Property and Nations. New York, NY:Dell Publishing, 1st edition April 1, 1971. pp. 33-38. Print.
