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“What a word that is, en-courage. Though our dreams be tossed and blown, still we sing ourselves and one another into courage.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Years earlier, in a video about world history, I’d speculated about what might happen “if some superbug shows up tomorrow and it travels all these global trade routes.” In 2019, I’d said on a podcast, “We all must prepare ourselves for the global pandemic we all know is coming.” And yet, I did nothing to prepare. The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit.
…
The pleasure of smoking for me wasn’t about a buzz; the pleasure came from the jolt of giving in to an unhealthy physical craving, which over time increased my phical cravings, which in turn increased the pleasure of giving in to them.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Heartbreak is not really so different from falling in love. Both are overwhelming experiences that unmoor me. Both burst with yearning. Both consume the self.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“...facts still don’t slow down conspiracy theories.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Knowing the facts doesn't help me picture the truth.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Cholera continues to spread and kill not because we lack the tools to understand or treat the disease as we did two hundred years ago, but because each day, as a human community, we decide not to prioritize the health of people living in poverty”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Despair isn't very productive. That's the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“There’s a certain way I talk about the things I don’t talk about. Maybe that’s true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don’t ever get directly asked what we can’t bear to answer.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes - often, in fact - you can't make it better. I'm reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: "Don't just do something. Stand there.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“It is easy enough to describe something, or to comprehend something as it is. But what really thrills the human soul is to be in the presence of astonishment. I am thrilled by everything that makes me feel alive within myself. Alive in my smallness, and alive in my fragility, and alive in my wondrousness.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“How can you regain confidence when you know that confidence is just a varnish painted atop human frailty?”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“For humans, there is ultimately no way out of the obligations and limitations of nature. We are nature. And so, like history, the climate is both something that happens to us and something we make.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“For days now, my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought, constantly interrupting with worries. Even my worries get interrupted--by new worries, or facets of old worries I had not adequately considered. My thoughts are a river overflowing its banks, churning and muddy and ceaseless. I wish I wasn't so scared all the time--scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I'm not sure whether it's even possible to talk about the suffering of others without exploiting that suffering.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Hearing about pain that we do not feel takes us to the limits of empathy, the place where it all breaks down. I can only know my pain, and you can only know yours.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“When we tell those stories to people in chronic pain, or those living with incurable illness, we often end up minimizing their experience. We end up expressing our doubt in the face of their certainty, which only compounds the extent to which pain separates the person experiencing it from the wider social order. The challenge and responsibility of per-
sonhood, it seems to me, is to recognize personhood in others-to listen to others' pain and take it seriously, even when you yourself cannot feel it. That capacity for listening, I think, really does separate human life from the quasi-life of an enterovirus.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I miss the luxury of caring about stuff that doesn't matter.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured... When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“What are we to do about the cliched beauty of an ostentatious sunset?”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it...”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“For me, reading and rereading are an everlasting apprenticeship.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn't dead; it's not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I'm not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn't matter, but I do.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don’t. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth’s greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.
It’s easy to forget how wondrous humans are, how strange and lovely. Through photography and art, each of us has seen things we’ll never see—the surface of Mars, the bioluminescent fish of the deep ocean, a seventeenth-century girl with a pearl earring. Through empathy, we’ve felt things we might never have otherwise felt. Through the rich world of imagination, we’ve seen apocalypses large and small.
We’re the only part of the known universe that knows it’s in a universe. We know we are circling a star that will one day engulf us. We’re the only species that knows it has a temporal range.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I am glad to be unalone in cramped circles of restless yearning.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Perhaps all of this is done in the hopes that we won’t notice just how quickly everything is changing”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“When I open that ancient sticker book and scratch yellowing stickers curling at the edges, what I smell most is not a pizza, or chocolate, but my childhood. I give scratch and sniff stickers 3 1/2 stars.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I...took some pride in 'not fulfilling my potential,' in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn't actually have that much potential.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“All of life is dependent upon other life, and the closer we consider what constitutes living, the harder life becomes to define.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Another sign of mortification’s importance: I don’t remember what I ate for dinner last Tuesday, and I regularly forget where I left my phone. But I can recall my every mortification as if it occurred moments ago. I know this because each evening when I finish reading for the night, I’ll turn off my bedside lamp, roll over onto my side, close my eyes, and my brain will say. “Oh, good evening. Should we play the blooper reel?” And I’ll say, “Ah, you know, I’d really rather not,” and my brain will say, “Excellent. Let’s begin in a high school auditorium outside of San Francisco.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Pay attention to what you pay attention to.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“You'll Never Walk Alone' is cheesy but not wrong. The song doesn't claim that the world is just a happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hopes in our hearts. And like Louis in the Carousel, even if you don't really believe in the golden sky or the sweet silver song of the lark when you start singing, you believe it a little more when you finish.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“Bei dieser Passage gibt es nur ein einziges Problem: Es stimmt nicht. »Der Mensch« hat keineswegs den Atem angehalten angesichts dieses Kontinents, denn wenn wir uns »den Menschen« als die gesamte Menschheit vorstellen, dann hat »der Mensch« die Gegend schon gekannt, ja bereits seit Zehntausenden von Jahren bewohnt. Die Verwendung von »der Mensch« verrät uns am Ende viel darüber, wen genau der Erzähler als Person anerkennt und von welchem Standpunkt die Geschichte erzählt wird.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“The weird part is not that I collected scratch and sniff stickers until I was a teenager. The weird part is, I still have that sticker album and the stickers when scratched still erupt with scent.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I know the world will survive us - and in some ways it will be more alive.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I think two of the fundamental facts of being a person are 1. We must go on, and 2. None of us ever walks alone. We may feel alone (in fact, we will feel alone), but even in the crushing grind of isolation, we aren't alone.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“It is May of 2020, and I do not have a brain well suited for this.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“I stop believing in the future. There's a character in Jacqueline Woodson's novel 'If You Come Softly' who says that he looks into the future and sees only 'this big blank space where I should be.' When I think of the future, I start to only see the big blank space, the whyless bright terror. As for the present, it hurts. Everything hurts. The pain ripples beneath my skin, bone-shocking. What's the point of all this pain and yearning? Why?”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
“It seems to me that the bright trouble is the light you see the first time you open your eyes after birth, the light that makes you cry your first tears, the light that is your first fear.”
Source: The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet