Circle vs. Square.

This is an excerpt from the book, The Last American Man, by one of my favorite authors Elizabeth Gilbert.  A brief background of the plot: Eustace Conway is a man who ditched the comforts of suburbia to escape to the mountains where he lived alone in a teepee.  At this point in the book, he is giving a speech to a class of students about how the changes brought on by society, technology, etc., have changed the world around us, and not in a positive way.

"I live," Eustace said, "in nature, where everything is connected, circular.  The seasons are circular.  The planet is circular, and so is its passage around the sun.  The course of water over the earth is circular, coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again.  I live in a circular teepee and I built a fire in a circle, and when my loved ones visit me, we sit in a circle and talk.  The life cycle of plants and animals are circular.  I live outside where I can see this.  The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight 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 the real world, but its modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they've stepped outside the natural circle of life."

"Do people live in circles today?  No.  They live in boxes.  They wake up every morning in the box of their bedroom 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 a box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken up into lots of 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 their 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! Does that sound like anybody you know?"


Think about it.