Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

“fact-blindness”: the possibility that telling fake stories about nature might blind us to the true ones.

the possibility that feeling too much awe about the nature we’ve invented will make us unable to appreciate the nature in which we live.

Don’t assume the contours of another person’s heart. Don’t assume its desires. Don’t assume that being alone means being lonely.

She had a deep desire to understand her life as something structured by patterns, woven through with signs and signals and voices. She was hungry for a logic that might arrange all the isolated points of her experience into a legible constellation.

But I felt defensive of reincarnation from the start. It wasn’t that I necessarily believed in it. It was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things—people, programs, systems of belief—than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.

There are more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn’t, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life—like everyone else’s—holds more than I could ever possibly see.

Does graciousness mean you want to help—or that you don’t, and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved. It does not require a good night’s sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory.

Genocide tourism turns public history into private commodity. The past is parceled into ticket stubs and photographs, into the souvenir of experience itself, so it can be taken home.

jolie laide: the idea that something is beautiful because of its imperfections, not in spite of them.

It’s a longing not for what you’ve lost but for what you’ve never had.

One definition of living might be the perpetual swapping of story lines. We trade in the scripts we’ve written for ourselves and get our real lives in return.