Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life of Raymond Mungo by Raymond Mungo.

3/5 rating. 181 pages.

Book #19 of 2022. Read April 3, 2022.

This was an eclectic book to say the least. It’s mostly string-of-consciousness writing about a year in Vermont and traveling and some other random things.

Raymond was a hippie to the extreme, except even fed up with the hippie movement because of its ineffectiveness. While the book as a whole was just so-so, there were some incredible quotes:

• “Yet this canoe trip had to be made because there was adventure out there.”
• “Remember these are my friends because they are pillars of virtue to me; because I enjoy their company and hope to learn from them and emulate their ways; because I could not leap joyfully to the side of someone I considered my equal, or less, but only those from whom I can draw new life and inspiration.”
• “Well the fact is any excuse for giving yourself a fresh start on life is good enough, whether it be New Year’s or spring, your birthday or deathday, it hardly matters; what’s important is to preserve the right (for it’s yours) to call the past over & irrelevant to the present and future.”
• “It’s not easy, dear one, to love this modern anachronistic Life, but it’s great and grave and vibrant, miraculous and holy, serene and ecstatic, lovely and loving in a full, rich, finely textured way with details and quality and character.”

Quotes:

“But I woke up in the spring of 1968 and said, ‘This is not what I had in mind,’ because the movement had become my enemy; the movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, the seed of a heartless bureaucracy, a minority Party vying for power rather than peace.”

“We hoped only to paddle silently through the world, searching for traces of what has been lost.”

“The old Victory Garden thing may be in for a revival, friends, but I suspect it will reach only a marginal part of the population, the others will be too busy at the shop or office, dump DDT or other chemical killers on their crop, or be afraid to eat an ear of corn that’s white, a tomato with a hole in it, a carrot with dirt on it.”

“Increasingly, every body is my potential friend, and I am striving to find the best in each. The bad or weak or petty things are not so important; we all know about such universal human problems, and we are all given over in some degree or other to the devil. But it is the high, honest, and lyric strains in us which are unique and infinitely heartening to every mother’s son (are there too many?) crawling with us across the planet.”

“Many of us make no money at all, others do but it is something less than incidental to our lives, which are really about a million forces having nothing to do with career, profession, or money; we fish, farm, draw, paint, write, love, drive about in cars, cook, bake, give birth, redecorate, build, destroy, you name it; and reserve the right to stop whatever we’re doing and do something else, just for the hell of it.”

“We canceled the papers. At first it was hard, our last link with bad news, now how could we know where misery has last stuck? But then it got easier, and finally blissful, we still know of war & famine & plague, we’re learning why these things are so, and why they will not, in the future be. But we don’t need that tidy and O-so-efficient daily compendium (gathered for somebody’s profit and everyone’s bummer) of all the worst tidbits of suffering in the last 24 hours.”

“Feel: the wind under the sun across the shady pine grove. Hear: bubbling rushing water behind the wall of trees. Smell: the needles making mulch and all agreen aliving. Fear: not.”

“Slow down, perhaps stop working: you’ll find the time for everything you really want to do.”

“Hang on, dear friend. The greatest show on earth goes on.”

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