The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

Philip Roth called history “the relentless unforeseen.” He said that history is where “everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” In the faces of these young farmers, we glimpse how profoundly unexpected the coming horror was. And that reminds us there is also a horizon we cannot see past.

freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five hundredths of a second of that person’s lifetime. That’s a very meager or small extract from a life.” Still,

Sometimes, he will tell me that caring for others is the meaning of life. Other times, he’ll say that we are here to bear witness, to pay attention.

“you’re just a hunk of Earth trying to sustain a departure from chemical equilibrium.”

In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery writes: The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts, Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

how to open the room of attention that contains the soul.

feel like I am a human being planting carrot seeds into Earth, but really, as my brother would tell me, I am Earth planting Earth into Earth.

I live in a wounded world, and I know I am the wound:

Sarah Manguso’s astonishing and wrenching book The Two Kinds of Decay was first published in 2008. (I also love love love Manguso’s book Ongoingness. In fact, I need to make a note to ask Sarah to read

Strawberry Hill has a rich, vibrant strawberry flavor with just a hint of hill.”