More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Back then, I thought I was smart, for all the details I caught, but there was so much I never saw.
my boss called it “Shovel Pig,”
I could tell his greatest need, or mine, was to sit alone in a park for an hour and be as silent as a stone.
Some things remain mysterious even if you think about them all the time.
The moment I type their names, they’ll be lost to me, belong to you.
The internet was a colander. You were the water. The metaphor changed by the week. It didn’t always make sense.
Like bears are always injured, exist in that state, I was always injured.
To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less.
had a vision of that last small expedition, the last group, setting out. Maybe it was just a dozen, maybe less. Tried to imagine it as Silvina had. Trying their best to overcome those obstacles. Each one of those individuals on an epic journey. One they never came back from. But: the joy. Even then, there must have been moments of joy and of contentment on the journey. Sanctuaries and times of plenty. It wasn’t just a winnowing. It was a life. I held fast to that. Even if it was selfish, for myself.
All the faces around me felt so gray and featureless. Scentless bodies, rapt, in the falling-apart banquet chairs, lashed together like life rafts, in row after row. How had I become part of this?
“Transpose what is done to an animal onto a human,” Silvina said in the video. “If it is disgusting, wrong, unethical, immoral, then you know what the truth is.”
Weak men know they’re poor in virtue and take their self-knowledge as evidence others will plot against them. So they want to be the only ones who know things.
How it’s calling you now: to transform, to make a decision, to become one thing or the other. Neither will make you happy.
The -ism that will fix this has not been written down because it exists in what remains of the world beyond us and we cannot read that language.
