Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

“William of Occam was a man of God, a Franciscan friar in the fourteenth century. He argued that a complex explanation, when it does not hold water, will always grow more complex as it attempts to patch its own holes. The less adorned explanation is the one more directly tested, and more plainly proven. And in science, proof is all.”

Tig gently took the scrap of paper from Willa and read aloud. “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein; The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by James Gustave Speth; and The Book That Changed America, by Randall Fuller.