The Last One

by Will Dean

To librarians. I’ve visited libraries my whole life. To escape, to warm up, to learn. Librarians are the protectors of those spaces. They help us find what we are looking for, even when we’re not even sure what that is.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. —MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN

Stepping aboard a ship is an act of faith. You place your life in the hands of the captain and crew. You decide, actively or passively, to offer up your autonomy, and oftentimes that decision is not easily reversed.

Where there are gaps in our knowledge, we fill them with best-guess theories and philosophies of convenience.”

lean into the experience and let it happen. To stay loose and relaxed is to survive. That way you don’t crack and make a dangerous mistake.”

No way a dog lover would leave their precious pet here all alone.”

He’s at the age where he’s worked through most of his neuroses, given up on vanity projects, survived his midlife crisis, sold the sports car.

The thing that made me fall in love with him, in addition to his face and his intellect and his humor, is how he makes me feel safe.

Take away basic comforts and authority figures and it’s not long before people reveal their true personalities.

Looking up at these stars, we are experiencing the purest form of time travel. We’re standing here together looking back through millennia and we are experiencing ancient light.”

If you like someone, you have to get on with it and give it a chance. That’s what I think, anyway.”

When you’ve experienced someone you trust rifling through your possessions, taking what belongs to you, violating your private space, lying to your face, you find it difficult to trust anyone ever again.

“Humans can survive three weeks with no food, three days with no water, three hours with no shelter if it’s cold, three minutes with no hope.”

We need privacy in order to thrive and feel secure. We require the concept of contractual consent in order to trust others. They’re bedrocks of modern society.

I need to protect this tradition for myself, keep a place and time to be selfish and deal with black thoughts,

Sharing food is an age-old gesture of goodwill. Breaking bread together.

The only private spaces we have are inside our own minds. The thoughts we conceal from one another. From ourselves.

It’s odd how quickly this kind of petty lawlessness becomes the norm.

You’re strong, until you’re not.

It means the powerful remain powerful by way of distraction and cheap satisfaction of the most base and immediate needs of the masses. No need for meaning or civic involvement.

The powerful stay powerful and the others stay—well, the others.”

You might think you are a sophisticated, twenty-first-century human, but when your body is depleted of the nutrition it needs, with no prospect of a meal, you lose that sophistication so fast it takes your breath away.

“Sometimes a fracture doesn’t heal the same way it was before,”

Wine is fine but liquor is quicker,

Poverty is only understood properly by those who have lived it.

You think you’ll never be stuck in a situation like this. Until you are.

I guess when you finally meet the person you can imagine growing old with, you’ll do anything not to ruin it.

Before you lose someone, you cannot predict the shape or depth of the hole their absence will leave in your life.

“Sometimes life happens whether you’re ready for it or you’re not.”

Secrets eat away at you over time. Shame eats away, I know it does.”

Kant said something about how moral autonomy is the capacity to give yourself moral law, rather than obeying the rules of others. Personal autonomy is the capacity to decide things for yourself and pursue a course of action regardless of moral factors.

She cared so much it was counterproductive. She eventually learned ways to maintain perspective. She told me how she worked out that if she takes breaks, and sometimes gives herself permission to fail, she performs far better.

Each minute feels more like an hour. The miles-deep ocean and the sparkling cosmos. Me trapped somewhere in between.

Why haven’t I watched more sunrises in my life? Why did I not prioritize this miracle?