The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost site of that. I don’t live inside buildings because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in a real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have stepped outside the natural circle of life.
Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in a box of their bedrooms because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into another box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken into little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to the house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box.
Break out of the box! This not the way humanity lived for thousands of years. ~Eustace Conway from the book The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert
*Image Credits (all artwork used with permission through CC license)
“Tijuana Suburbs” by Nathan Gibbs
“Chicago suburbs from the air” by Scorpions and Centaurs
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Reblogged this on EXPLORINGtheLATERAL and commented:
Awesome quotes 🙂
I watched a few episodes of “Weeds” a few years ago which had an opening song with images that described exactly the theme and image of your blog post. People love their boxes, everything is neat and tidy… and deadening.
When the bee scouts head off looking for a new home for their swarm they prefer circular spaces, though they will adapt to what is at hand. I have this vision that if I build a group of homes for people to live in they will be circular, perhaps like those Hobbit houses, set in woodland.
Precisely: deadening, stagnant, unchanging and comfortable to the point of complaceny. In this kind of environment, not even boredom lifts the deadness.
What is wonderful is that architecture has finally let go of its 90 degree angles and started to incorporate the circles of nature into actual living spaces. The colors of the surroundings of the home are brought inside, seamlessly knitting together shelter and “shelter”. This seems a much more sensible way of living, rather than divorcing one’s self from one’s environment, should not a human (an animal of the earth) seek to harmonize within one’s living environment?
I have seen those hobbit houses and I have dreams of building and living in one of those some day. 🙂
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