서울에서 책읽기 4: "BAE 03"에서

이번에도, "The Best American Essays 2003" (시리즈 에디터 Robert Atwan,

에디터 Anne Fadiman) 에 실린 여러 에세이에서 각각 한두 구절 인용하는 대신

두 편의  에세이에서만 좀 많이씩 인용히기로 한다.

Joseph Epstein, In a Snob-Free Zone 에서:

By the late 1960s, the old Wasp social ascendancy in American life, after showing many cracks, was beginning to break up in earnest.

His work gives him pleasure and no cause to believe his days misspent.

My cousin Sherwin's way into the snob-free zone was simple enough: care only about one's work, judgfe people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one's work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more or less amusing carnival at which one happens to have earned -- through, of course, one's work -- a good seat. judge all things by their intrinsic quality, and consider status a waste of time. one of the reasons I liked him so much is that he brought all this off without any contortion of his essentially kind character.

Listening to the great Chicago Symphony play the movie and television music of Henry mancini felt to me like getting into a Rolls-Royce to drive around the block to take out the garbage.

Why cannot I, even so late in the day, grow into one of those admirable fellows -- reasonable, tolerant, generous-spirited, honorable -- that Jefferson called "natural aristocrats" and that a liberal arts education is supposed to form but almost never does?

Michael Pollan, An Animal's Place 에서:

The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rrare.

Earlier this year, Germany became the first nation to grant animals a constitutional right: the words "and animals" were added to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of human beings.... The Swiss are amending their laws to change the status of animals from "things" to "beings."

One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, toolmaking, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exlusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit pf Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling.

[J. M. Coetzee] answered .... If animal rightists are right, "a crime of stupefying proportions" (in Coetzze's words) is going on all around us everyday just beneath our notice.

The advantage of being a "reasonable creature," [Ben] Franklin remarks, is that  you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.

The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command.

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. In these places life itself is redefined -- as protein production -- with it suffering.

[Jeremy] Bentham defended eating animals on the grounds that "we are the better for it , and they are never the worse ... The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and , by that means, a less painful one than which would await them in the inevitable course of nature."