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Brushstrokes in Time

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Sylvia Vetta

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“Then he asked my age, and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before our births, for instance, and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananment Square student demonstration.”

ChineseGenerationChinese AmericanTiananmen Square
Book:Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
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“When it became clear that Xi Jinping was placing his bet on fortifying the status quo, another Party aristocrat, Hu Dehua, the sixty-three-year-old son of a previous Party chief, Hu Yaobang, used the protection afforded by his family name and pedigree to openly criticize the president. The real reason the Soviets fell, Hu Dehua argued, was that they couldnt stop themselves from appropriating public property by graft and bribery. The Party, Hu said, was indeed facing a crisis. There are two options: to suppress the opposition or to reach reconciliation with the people, he said. It had faced this choice once before, in 1989; and in an astonishing acknowledgment of the bloodshed at Tiananmen, he asked, What does this mean: man enough? Is driving battle tanks against your own people man enough?”

ChinaTiananmen SquareXijinping
Author:Evan Osnos
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“Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father. It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.”

SurvivalManipulationAbuse SurvivorsAbusive RelationshipsSurvival Mechanism
Book:The Obelisk Gate
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“Let the general characters of our coachmen, carmen, postillions, etc., be considered; men who have not had the advantage of a good education, and who are mostly chosen as possessing good and healthy constitutions; little acquainted with painful sensations, and much less disposed to experience any for the sufferings of their cattle; let us reflect on the natural desire of most men for domineering over others. Let it be remembered that these men, from their want of power and their inability of exercising any tyranny over their fellow-creatures, give unrestrained scope to their barbarity on their cattle, which it seems they justly indeed consider as their slaves, and whom, from ignorance and love of cruelty, they press to such a degree, as to render them incapable of yielding the profit which a milder treatment would ensure. And it is to these men, then, that these creatures, seemingly possessed of feelings very similar to our own, are completely given up during their whole lives of above twenty years, when the very idea of our being at the mercy of the former for an instant would be dreaded.”

EthicsHorsesUnhealthy CopingHorses And Humans
Book:Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes
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“You know whats the worst thing in the damn world? It’s the alarm clock on a Monday morning. You go out and see the world, and you feel blood pumping in your veins. You feel like a human being. Then you come back. To the traffic. To the boss who hates his wife. To the rent. You trade the sunsets for a paycheck. You trade your life for a little bit of comfort. It’s not a life. It’s a waiting room for death. And the worst part is, now that you’ve seen the exit... staying feels like suicide.”

Shadow WorkThe New SincerityModern TragedyVisceral RealityThe Morning AfterUnauthorized HeartbreakEmotional SurvivalHeartbreak HangoverLiving GriefThe Waking Death
Book:Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”
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