“It is said that at some points of this dismal river, crocodiles are so abundant as to add the terror of their attacks to the other sufferings of a dwelling there. We were told a story of a squatter, who having ‘located’ himself close to the river’s edge, proceeded to build his cabin. This operation is soon performed, for social feeling and the love of whiskey bring all the scanty neighbourhood round a new comer, to aid him in cutting down trees, and in rolling up the logs, till the mansion is complete. This was done; the wife and five young children were put in possession of their new home, and slept soundly after a long march. Towards day-break the husband and father was awakened by a faint cry, and looking up, beheld relics of three of his children scattered over the floor, and an enormous crocodile, with several young ones around her, occupied in devouring the remnants of their horrid meal. He looked round for a weapon, but finding none, and aware that unarmed he could do nothing, he raised himself gently on his bed, and contrived to crawl from thence through a window, hoping that his wife, whom he left sleeping, might with the remaining children rest undiscovered till his return. He flew to his nearest neighbour and besought his aid; in less than half an hour two men returned with him, all three well armed; but alas! they were too late! the wife and her two babes lay mangled on their bloody bed. The gorged reptiles fell an easy prey to their assailants, who upon examining the place, found the hut had been constructed close to the mouth of a large hole, almost a cavern, where the monster had hatched her hateful brood.”

(Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, pp. 22–23.)

“The very march of the alphabet aided the Encyclopedia‘s belief in the ethical equivalence of manual work to supposedly higher pursuits. In French roi (king) lies near rôtisseur (a roaster of meats or fowl), just as in English ‘knit’ follows upon ‘king.’ As the historian Robert Darnton observes, the Encyclopedia seized on such couplings as more than happy accidents; these take the authority of a monarch down a peg by making it prosaic.”

(Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 92.)

“Troubles with materiality have a long pedigree in architecture. Few large-scale building projects before the industrial era had detailed working drawings of the precise sort CAD can produce today; Pope Sixtus V remade the Piazza del Popolo in Rome at the end of the sixteenth century by describing in conversation the buildings and public space he envisioned, a verbal instruction that left much room for the mason, glazier, and engineer to work freely and adaptively on the ground. Blueprints – inked designs in which erasure is possible but messy – acquired legal force by the late nineteenth century, making these images on paper equivalent to a lawyer’s contrat. The blueprint signaled, moreover, one decisive disconnection between head and hand in design: the idea of a thing made complete in conception before it is constructed.”

(Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, pp. 41–42.)

“But the course of this century has revealed a strange equation: state power goodwill = state power. The reason is simple: at the level of the state the ties of affection through which the will becomes good can no longer be felt. We touched on this when speaking of gifts as anarchist property. There are definite limits to the size of the feeling community. Gift exchange, as an economy of feeling life, is also the economy of the small group. When the commonwealth is too large to be based on emotional ties, the gift feeling must be abandoned as a structuring element. For gift-feeling is not impartial. It will always seek to suppress its opposite. Small groups can absorb such antagonism because they can also support affection, but the antagonism of large groups is organized and cold. All commonwealths are way of the stranger, but the huge ones – especially when threatened – put him to death.”

(Lewis Hyde, The Gift, pp. 349–350.)

“The mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction – black ‘soul,’ gypsy duende, the noble savage, the simple farmer, the virile game keeper – obscures the harshness of modern capitalist poverty, but it does have a basis, for people who live in voluntary poverty or who are not capital-intensive do have more ready access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty.”

(Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, p. 29.)