Forest Dark

by Nicole Krauss

Since Descartes, knowledge has been empowered to a nearly unimaginable degree. But in the end it didn’t lead to the mastery and possession of nature he imagined, only to the illusion of its mastery and possession. In the end, we have made ourselves ill with knowledge. I frankly hate Descartes, and have never understood why his axiom should be trusted as an unshakable foundation for anything. The more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest,

First mention of forest

We bind and are bound because the binding binds us to those who were bound before us, and those bound before them, and those before them, in a chain of ropes and knots that goes back three thousand years, which is how long we’ve been

That the reason we continue to live on this contested scrap of land today is because of the story we began to write about ourselves in this place nearly three millennia ago. In the ninth century BC, Israel was nothing—a backwater nation, compared to the neighboring empires of Egypt or Mesopotamia. And that’s what we would have remained, forgotten with the

Philistines and the Sea Peoples, except that we began to write. The earliest Hebrew writing we’ve found dates to the tenth century BC, the time of King David.

But we didn’t invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so

we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.”

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.