BALANCING PHYSICAL WORK WITH INTELLECTUAL WORK
David Grene:
When I was on either of the two farms, I was incessantly and delightfully busy milking, feeding the animals, learning the ways of grass and grazing.
TAKING NOTE (AS IN NOTE-TAKING) CAN CHANGE ONESELF AND THE WORLD
Mary Cappello:
We come into the world handled, carried, and it is hoped, caressed, passed from hand to hand to hand, and gaze to gaze, a life-giving relay that yields in time a painstaking and laborious self-configuration arrived at via endless forms of representation, all of them historically grounded and political imbued; we learn, if you will, to see, and by extension, to know, think, and feel.
HUMAN FRAGILITY
Lewis Thomas:
This [the universe] is a very big place, and I do not know how it works, nor how I fit in.
EPHEMERALITY
Christopher Woodward:
… when we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. To statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the futility of mortal man’s aspirations.
TRIBAL NATIONALISM
Hannah Arendt:
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by a “world of enemies,” “one against all,” that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others.
WRITING ABSTRACTS THE EMBODIED CONCRETE
Claire Messud:
We were embodied, animals still and always; our words emanated, became separate from us – wasn’t this precisely the magic of writing, to send a construct of words into the world, to share the abstract as if it were, as if it had been made, real, had become a concrete experience, the way a composer and orchestra created music or an architect and builders a tower?