I was trying to find the human side of history, and humans were often my best source. When I thought about Sacajawea in the Rockies, trying to keep her infant son alive, I thought about my own kids at that age—about my wife breastfeeding them, both parties always hungry, always thirsty.
1w ago
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Every man is wise when attacked by a disease from which he is never likely to suffer.
2w ago
The mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
During the pandemic, Australia was closed to the world, international and domestic borders closed for nearly two years. WITI gave me the opportunity to time travel all over the globe.
Why all the threadbare drama, the stale catastrophism of calling it broken? It still beats, doesn't it, still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was only dislocated, lost its locus for a while, popped out of the socket of good sense.
Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be.
How are things different now from the way they were in the golden age? The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine.
1mo ago
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
1mo ago
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. The fact that some of us look at the stars does not make us better than those who do not.
1mo ago
The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.