Quote of the Day (8/31/10) (Mind Week)

The sundering we sense, between nature and culture, lies not like a canyon outside us but splits our being at its most intimate depths the way mind breaks off from body. It is still another version of that bitter bifurcation long ago decreed: our expulsion from Eden. It differs from the apparently similar Cartesian crease across things in the fact that the two halves of us once were one; that we did not always stand askance like molasses and madness logically at odds but grew apart over the years like those husbands and wives who draw themselves into different corners of contemplation.
--William Gass, "The Polemical Philosopher"