The most mortal of sins, said Immanuel Kant, is to consider another man as an instrument or a means and not as an end in himself. Yet our whole society strives, inhumanly and insensibly, to make instruments of us all, one to the other. We are all corrupted by a world in which everything and everyone is a means to something else. I resist it always, but it creeps over me like an infection, the virus that turns each other man, himself an “I” like myself, into a thing in my eyes — and so secretly turns me slowly to a thing likewise.

Palo Alto is not Padua, but it has its towers; Sunnyvale is not Venice, but there’s the dome of the old dirigible hangar, all shimmering in the midsummer haze.

San Francisco is considered the place where the revival of oral poetry, now immensely popular all over the world, first began. Poetry readings draw enormous audiences — if the poets have something to say those audiences wish to hear. Dylan, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg are runners up on the Beatles, and I don’t do so bad myself.