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“Aw, it’s just the instant stuff. One day there better be proper coffee again. I hope right now, just as I’m keeping this diner and this little town running, there’s someone in Ecuador or Ethiopia still running their family’s coffee plantation. That’s what it takes. People sticking around, doing the work.” “I suppose that’s how communities form in the wake of disasters. They find the purity of a role and choose to fill it. A life of simplicity and purpose, uncomplicated by…” “By all the bullshit of the old world.”
“You really are carefree.” “Not always, and sometimes it takes reminding myself. But the world goes to hell in high heels, you start to re-evaluate things. You start to think, I got this moment right here. I don’t have yesterday, and no promise of tomorrow. I have this moment stuck between all the other moments, so I might as well live here instead of in a day that’s gone, or a day that might never come.”
She seemed to think about that. “I did. You’re right. I don’t know that I meant to do it at first but…Tell you what it is. The old world nonsense obscured something important: At heart, what we give to the world is our service, and what we give to ourselves is our purpose. For most people, especially back then in the old bullshit, all they did was give service. They worked and worked and worked, but for what? For scraps. For nothing. For a forgotten life and an oh-well death. Unless you had privilege, then what you had was purpose, but didn’t do the work. But now, all that’s been stripped away
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He’d so long been worried about what his role was—CDC, Shepherd, mayor—he had forgotten the purpose of the work. To save who he loved and what he helped build. Like Dot, in a way.
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The mind saw patterns, even when patterns were not there to see. Apophenia. Benji remembered an optical illusion created by Ryota Kanai, a neuroscientist, a white grid on a black background. At the center, the grid was whole and mathematically perfect. But toward the edges, the grid began to break down, literally separating into janky plus-signs instead of a complete grid. Thing was, if you stared at the center of this perfect grid long enough, the broken edges began to heal. Or, so it appeared. Because the mind did its very best to continue a pattern even when the pattern was incorrect, to
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He shrugged. “My dear, nothing matters. Literally nothing. It’s all just salt and stardust. The meaning that life has is only the meaning we are fit to give it.” He held her close. “So, let’s give it a little meaning, and solve this riddle. Sometimes doing the thing is about doing the thing and not about the result of having done the thing. It’s the journey, not the destination, blah-blah-fuckity-blah.”
She offered a small smile. “I do that sometimes. Anytime anything reminds me of Arav. Grief is like a cut in a strange place. You never know when you’re going to bump into it, make it hurt again.”
We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone. —Patti Smith, Just Kids
