“True courage is to insist on seeing when all around you is darkness.”
An opportune passage to follow the (rather depressing) sentiment of the previous one.
How do you go on? How do you keep at it when life keeps on throwing your powerlessness in your face?
A book I’ve really admired recently is Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller. This is a hard book to describe. It has elements of biography, autobiography, history of science, science, memoir, journalism … and doesn’t sit comfortably within any one category. The best way I’ve found to tell people about the book is to say that it is an attempt to answer the questions in the previous paragraph.
Another book that, to me, tries to answer the same questions is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Miller, Laozi, Marcus Aurelius, Dillard – all were trying to find the answer to how to go on when death looms around every corner, when heaven and earth aren’t benevolent, when powerlessness is the essence of the human condition. The answers they give are similar in some ways, different in others. But I admire their courage in trying to answer the question at all, in trying to *see*.
May you also find your own answers. I want to see with you.
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