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Category: James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler

American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They’re over-scaled.

Future, American, Energy

James Howard Kunstler

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.

Day, Moving, People

James Howard Kunstler

I think that Obama’s failure to reestablish the rule of law in money matters is the most damaging thing that he’s done – and perhaps the most damaging thing that has happened in American politics in my lifetime. Because once the rule of law is absent in money matters, then anything really goes in politics.

Money, Politics, Law

James Howard Kunstler

Everything we do these days – our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism – all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.

Technology, Growth, Reality

James Howard Kunstler

The three of us ate a fine supper of grilled trout with sorrel cream sauce, and red potatoes out of Britney’s old garden behind the ruins of the Watling place, and watercress sautéed in butter for hardly a moment with a dash of vinegar, and cream custard with wild blackberries for dessert.

James Howard Kunstler

New York City is finished,” he said. “They can’t keep order there, and you can’t have business without order. It’ll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again.” “What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. “We don’t have electricity an hour a month anymore and there’s nothing on the air but the preachers anyway.” “Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn’t met since twelve twenty-one.” Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. “We’re still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?” “We believe in the future, sir. Only it’s not like the world we’ve left behind,” Joseph said. “How’s that?” “We’re building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it’s a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . .

dystopia, post-apocalyptic, science-fiction, title-drop

James Howard Kunstler

If it happens that the human race doesn’t make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.

apocalypse, history, spirituality