Heretic's Heart: A Journey through Spirit and Revolution

Heretic's Heart: A Journey through Spirit and Revolution

Margot Adler

Language: English

Pages: 206

ISBN: B010MZED0A

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Publish Year note: First published in 1997
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Starting in 1964, writes Margot Adler in this dazzling memoir, "I found myself mysteriously at the center of extraordinary events." Now a correspondent for National Public Radio, Adler was a young woman determined to be taken seriously and to be an agent of change--on her own terms, free from dogma and authoritarian constraints. From campus activism at the University of California at Berkeley to civil rights work in Mississippi, from antiwar protests to observing the socialist revolution in Cuba, she found those chances in the 1960s. Heretic's Heart illuminates the events, ideas, passions, and ecstatic commitments of the decade like no other memoir.

At the book's center is the powerful--and unique--correspondence between Adler, then an antiwar activist at Berkeley, and a young American soldier fighting in Vietnam. The correspondence begins when Adler reads a letter the infantryman has written to a Berkeley newspaper. "I've heard rumors that there are people back in the world who don't believe this war should be. I'm not positive of this though, 'cause it seems to me that if enough of them told the right people in the right way, then something might be done about it. . . . You see, while you're discussing it amongst each other, being beat, getting in bed with dark-haired artists . . . some people here are dying for lighting a cigarette at night."

Heretic's Heart also explores Adler's attempt to come to terms with her singular legacy as the only grandchild of Alfred Adler, collaborator of Freud and founder of Individual Psychology, and as the daughter of a forceful beauty who bequeaths her spunk and adventurousness to her daughter, but whose overpowering personality forces Adler to strike out on her own. Adler's memoir marks an initiatory journey from spirit through politics and revolution back to spirit again.

Revealing, funny, joyful, and often wise, Heretic's Heart will restore the spirit of the 1960s: the passion, the confusion, the sense of social transformation and limitless possibility, and the ecstatic feeling that the world is on the cusp of change.

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And just like the Enterprise, its mission is to explore new worlds. And in sadder, more reflective moments, I think that despite the moon landing and the hopes it raised, this is the closest I will get to the other planets in my lifetime. The early hours of the morning, when most people are asleep and few are listening, and those that are awake may still be half in dream and reverie, allow conversations that would never even begin later in the day. During these hours people are willing to reveal.

Be alive.” An Alien in America CHAPTER 2 ON A SHELF in my bookcase stands an album of 78-rpm records that my father, Kurt, brought back from East Germany in 1951. Most are scratched or cracked, occasionally even a chunk of a record is missing. Their labels bear the names of some of Bach’s most famous motets and cantatas. But the labels are fake. And the records contain intellectual contraband—communist songs by Hans Eisler and Bertolt Brecht, some quite beautiful—camouflaged so that no.

Involved—the Berkeley police, and the Oakland police. The Berkeley police were quite civil, even kind at times, and, as policemen go, understanding. The Oakland cops were brutal. They ran up and grabbed Jack Weinberg who was speaking over a microphone and dragged him down the stairs. For each arrest, an officer came up, asked us to leave, gave us a number, photographed us and asked if we would walk. We went limp and they (the Berkeley police) dragged us rather nicely to the elevator. The boys got.

Not be needed.” This lesson in noninterference was difficult to obey, like the prime directive in Star Trek, and we didn’t always follow it precisely. We heard lectures on Mississippi’s political history and the history of voting rights. We spent hours lobbying for civil rights legislation; at one point, I and another volunteer found ourselves inside Gerald Ford’s congressional office in the Capitol, speaking to his legislative assistant. She was clearly uninterested in our civil rights agenda.

Yourself poetically, I meant it. And just imagine what finding a poet and wonderful person in the US army did to my world view!!! So there was some change and conflict, and a broadening of outlook, and now the war is much more real and I guess I’ve got a better, more human outlook and attitude. But I still haven’t changed a lot of my basic political views. I’ve got to place them both side by side until they harmonize. One thing you may find hard to comprehend is why people do things like giving.

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