Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

He did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways. Instead he seemed to believe, as she did, though they never could have discussed it, that everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question.

Yet here she sat, detached, as if this gigantic miserable husband were not her fault. Just being the fools we are right now, she thought: a condition that inevitably changed, often for the worse. In one transcendent moment buoyed by about two ounces of Riesling she saw the pointlessness of clinging to that life raft, that hooray-we-are-saved conviction of having already come through the stupid parts, to arrive at the current enlightenment. The hard part is letting go, she could see that. There is no life raft; you’re just freaking swimming all the time.

climate-change denial functioned like folk art for some people, he said, a way of defining survival in their own terms. But it’s not indigenous, Juliet argued. It’s like a cargo cult. Introduced from the outside, corporate motives via conservative media. But now it’s become fully identified with the icons of local culture, so it’s no longer up for discussion.

A perfect female is the lady that can go out and start a new colony by herself.”

Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, she thought, words from the book of Job, made for a world unraveling into fire and flood.