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The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity.
“For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That’s pretty much all the info u need.”
my small life runs into the large forces of the Anthropocene.
At the end of his life, the great picture book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said on the NPR show Fresh Air, “I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.” He said, “I’m finding out as I’m aging that I’m in love with the world.”
For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I
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unity in sorrow and unity in triumph:
We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we choose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.
The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, and then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead, let’s imagine Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1, and today being December 31 at 11:59 PM. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about
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History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.
“We have invented nothing.”
yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.
Everything ends, or at least everything humans have thus far observed ends.
home is “not a place, but a moment.”
“Our presidency is no longer just an idea. It is an idea with a proud history.” And I would argue it is an idea with a proud history. But it is also an idea with many other histories—a shameful history, an oppressive history, and a violent history, among others.
To me, one of the mysteries of life is why life wants to be.
that would be sad, but it isn’t. It only makes me grateful. Toni Morrison once wrote, “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
It’s hard to trust the world like that, to show it your belly.
It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us.
You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.
I am thoughtful—full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless—acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine.
ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.
For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.
‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”
you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved.
“If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory.”
We live in hope—that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.
But to me the real fairness is when everyone has a shot to win,
“We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”
“The pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”
Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself,
English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.”
beatific
We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go.
What you’re looking at matters, but not as much as how you’re looking or who you’re looking with.
“You were a presence full of light upon this Earth / And I am a witness to your life and to its worth. “ That’s a calling to me—to present more light, and to better witness the light in others.
I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn’t matter,
I saw art as a story of individual geniuses.
Art is also picking a light blue for your layer of the world’s largest ball of paint, knowing that it will soon be painted over, and painting anyway.
depressive blizzards
I must choose to believe, to care, to hold dear.
“History is merely a list of surprises,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
there is no holding history fast. It is always receding and dissolving, not just into the unknowable past but also into the unfixable future.
We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary.
What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.
