Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they’d grown up.

She leaned on the door frame feeling physical loss as her assumptions fell through the floor. He’d done everything by the book. They all had. Willa and Iano had raised two children, the successful one and the complicated one. That was their story, for as long as she could remember. For how many years had it been untrue?

His defeats were so rare she could just about count them, or at least the ones she knew about. He took them hard, for lack of practice. Zeke was very good at everything except disappointment.

Sometimes doing everything right gets you a big fucking nothing! Did that ever occur to you?”

She was still reeling from that brief romance with delusion.

And yet. How were they not just a normal family?

her nascent feminist consciousness had required Willa to scorn the domestic arts. But that equation had flipped in a generation: modern girls reared by working moms were all over Etsy and Pinterest now, clanning together in knitting groups named like revolutionary brigades.

A mother can be only as happy as her unhappiest child. Willa believed in the power of worry to keep another human from flying out of orbit.

But tell me, are you happy?

half a century of the blockade has made Cubans the smartest recyclers in the world. It’s not just cars. Agriculture, manufacturing, name it.”

“Holding and synthesizing information in your brain creates your personality. You’re surrendering your personality to an electronic device in your pocket.”

“As in the fastest-growing sector of personal finance management. Microloans, fossil fuel–free bundles. Socially responsible investments.” “Keep telling yourself that. Helping rich people get richer is socially responsible.” “Look, money’s an engine and it’s out there running day and night, whether you like it or not. For bad or for good. The global move to divest from South Africa is what finally brought down the apartheid regime. You can’t dispute that.”

“Humans have outgrown the carrying capacity of the planet. The responsible thing would be to shrink our bottom line.” “Hey, gee, we tried that! For five centuries before the Industrial Revolution. It was called the Dark Ages.”

Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects.

“We perceive infinite nature as a fascination, not a threat to our sovereignty. But if that sense of unity in all life is not already lodged in a person’s psyche, I’m not certain it can ever be taught.”

The old mythologies are a comfort to many.”

No creature is easily coerced to live without its shelter.” “Without shelter, we stand in daylight.” “Without shelter, we feel ourselves likely to die.”

If trained to nature from an early age, could a mind be freed from its vendetta against the world’s creatures?

Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man’s confidence in his own wisdom.

“I understand your misery. No one could mistake those cries for anything but despair.” Thatcher gazed at the Judas tree and his own loss welled up unexpectedly: a child so briefly in his future, so permanently now in his past.

“How are your pupils, Mr. Greenwood? Can you yet see a light within them?” Thatcher was unexpectedly moved by the question. No one else had asked.

Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study the known world in order to recognize the remarkable.”

“The happy Victorian dream. Unlimited growth that never gets out of bounds or turns ugly.”

“A common mistake in thinking about the past is to assume people were more childlike than we are now.”

stripped Willa of the useful illusion that everything would be fine. It amazed her now to watch people walking through life with their ludicrous trust.