More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We, our own worst enemy, had set ourselves up like sitting ducks, allowing weapons capable of killing us all many times over not only to be created but also to land in the hands of egomaniacs, nihilists, men without empathy, without conscience. Between our failure to control the spread of WMDs and our failure to keep from power those for whom their use was not only thinkable but perhaps even an irresistible temptation, apocalyptic war was becoming increasingly likely. . . .
It beggared belief that we, a free people, citizens of a democracy, had failed to stop them, had failed to stand up to these men and their political enablers working so assiduously at climate change denial. And to think that these same people had already reaped profits of billions, making them some of the richest people ever to have lived.
To think that the masses of refugees fleeing shortages of food and clean water caused by global ecological disaster would find compassion anywhere their desperation drove them was absurd, the man said. On the contrary, we would soon see man’s inhumanity to man on a scale like nothing that had ever been seen before.
how had a supposedly freedom-loving people allowed this to happen? Why were people not outraged by the very idea of surveillance capitalism? Scared right out of their wits by Big Tech? An alien one day studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They would rather be slaves.
Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself. The mindfulness rage was just another distraction, he said. Of course we should be stressed, he said. We should be utterly consumed with dread. Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said. It wasn’t individual efforts to achieve inner peace, it wasn’t a compassionate attitude toward others that might have led to timely
...more
He was saying that perhaps it was a mistake to bring human beings into a world that had such a strong possibility of becoming, in their lifetimes, a bleak and terrifying if not wholly unlivable place. He was asking whether to go ahead blindly and behave as if there was little or no such possibility might not be selfish, and perhaps even immoral, and cruel.
Weren’t there millions upon millions of people suffering from various humanitarian crises that millions upon millions of other people simply chose to forget? Why could we not turn our attention to the teeming sufferers already in our midst?
The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To love and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.
Was it really possible that Americans would elect to the highest office in the land, to the most powerful position on earth, a person so manifestly unfit, so brazenly immoral and corrupt, a person who lied with every breath and was a complete incompetent to boot? Never had my neighbor’s faith in humanity been so shaken.
What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?
Never return to a place where you were really happy, and in fact that’s a mistake I’ve already made once in my life, and then all my beautiful memories of the first time were tainted. I could have told her that I’ve made that mistake too. More than once.
This is how we’ve been taught to see cancer: a fight between patient and disease. Which is to say between good and evil. There’s a right way and a wrong way to act. A strong way and a weak way. The warrior’s way and the quitter’s way. If you survive you’re a hero. If you lose, well, maybe you didn’t fight hard enough.
I quit social media because I had to get away from all the noise. Some of the worst comes from the cancer support community—think of your cancer as a gift, an opportunity for spiritual growth, for developing resources you never knew you had, think of cancer as a step in the journey to becoming your best self. I mean, seriously. Who wants to die listening to that crap.
Cancer can’t get me if I get me first. And what’s the sense in waiting, she says, when I’m ready to go. What I need now is someone who understands all this and who’ll promise to stand by me and not go and do something idiotic like flush the pills down the toilet while I’m asleep.
Sanctity of life versus quality of life. We worked on it together over a couple of pitchers of beer. Remember? You argued that a person had a right to take their own life under any circumstances, not just in terminal cases. It was the individual’s business and nobody else’s, least of all the state’s.
When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.
should make a list, I thought. I’d made a lot of lists since all this began, endless to-do lists—as Scott Fitzgerald once pointed out people are wont to do when they’re on the verge of a crack-up.
And lately a lot of classical music also seemed to depress her, she said. It was too much. Too serious, too moving. Too, too unbearably sad, she said. I was startled to hear this. Recently, classical music had begun unsettling me in much the same way. Music I once loved and considered a blessing and a balm I could no longer listen to, a change I didn’t at all understand but that I found heartbreaking.
Make Way for Tomorrow, a film neither of us had seen before. I was eager to see it when I remembered that it had been an inspiration for Ozu’s great film Tokyo Story.
no matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up.
she said, she herself had never witnessed any spiritual growth, any improvement in the moral character of any person she’d known who did yoga—and the number of people she’d known who did yoga was vast—she had never seen anyone who could be said to have become a better person by doing yoga, she said, unless being a better person meant feeling better about yourself; if anything, she said, she had seen people become increasingly self-centered, something she’d seen also in some people who were in psychotherapy.
I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.
“Read the science and see what the world is doing about it. Could it be any simpler? Keep releasing carbon into the air and sooner or later—and more and more it’s looking like sooner—we’re fucked. And make no mistake, if there is in fact even a sliver of hope it depends on the survival of liberal democracy. Nothing is going to hasten the end of a livable planet faster than the rise of the far right. And behold, here they are, the two specters marching side by side.”
All other issues aside, who could ever forgive those Americans—and I’m talking about all the privileged, well-educated ones—who elected a climate change denialist to the world’s most powerful office, or the oil CEOs who covered up their own research about the connection between fossil fuels and global warming way back when something might have been done about it. The enormity of that surpasses all the world’s episodes of genocide, in my view. I don’t know about you, but I’ve completely lost faith in people to do the right thing.”
