The Tiger
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between July 24 - August 23, 2020
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Tigers are similar to drugs in that they are sold by the gram and the kilo, and their value increases according to the refinement of both product and seller.
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For many of the valley’s jobless inhabitants, the laws imposed by the river and the forest are more relevant than those of the local government.
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As he runs through the motions of an immobilizing hold, or lines up an imaginary strike, one has the sense that his body hungers for opportunities to do these things in earnest.
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They are so overwhelmed by the wreckage before them that it is hard to distinguish imminent danger from the present horror.
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Since well before the Kung’s engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not in a language like Russian or Chinese, but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men—some more fluently than others. That single blast of breath contained a message lethal in its eloquence. But what does one do with such information so far from one’s home ground? Gitta tightens the psychic leash connecting her to her master. Markov’s friends, already ...more
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His faith rested with his squad mates because he had put himself in an extremely vulnerable position: even though he was leading the way, he did so at an electronic remove—in this drama but not of it, exploring this dreadful surreality through the camera’s narrow, cyclopean lens.
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If there be a time when life is not worth living, I should say it was summer in the forests of Manchuria.
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Because so much of life here is governed by a kind of whimsical rigidity—a combination of leftover Soviet bureaucracy and free market chaos—even simple interactions with officialdom can leave you feeling as if you have wandered into an insane asylum.
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could be argued that this region is not a region at all but a crossroads: many of the aboriginal technologies that are now considered quintessentially North American—tipis, totem poles, bows and arrows, birch bark canoes, dog sleds, and kayak-style paddles—all passed through here first.
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It sounds like an oxymoron, but it acknowledges the blended nature of this remote and slender threshold realm in which creatures of the subarctic have been overlapping with those of the subtropics since before the last Ice Age. There is strong evidence suggesting that this region was a refugium, one of several areas around the Pacific Rim that remained ice-free during the last glaciation, and this may help explain the presence of an ecosystem that exists nowhere else. Here, timber wolves and reindeer share terrain with spoonbills and poisonous snakes, and twenty-five-pound Eurasian vultures ...more
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Primorye’s bizarre assemblage of flora and fauna leaves one with the impression that Noah’s ark had only recently made landfall, and that, rather than dispersing to their proper places around the globe, many of its passengers had simply decided to stay, including some we never knew existed.
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The tiger has been a fellow traveler on our evolutionary journey and, in this sense, it is our peer. In Asia, there is no recess of human memory in which there has not—somewhere—lurked a tiger. As a result, this animal looms over the collective imagination of native and newcomer alike.
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This is both wonderful and frightening to consider: that, in the absence of something so small and so humble, an entire ecosystem—from tigers to mice—could collapse.
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There is a deep irony in Trush’s work, and it lies in the fact that he lives in Russia, a country where many people will tell you that it’s impossible to live without breaking the law. In the taiga, the combination of poverty, unemployment, and highly dangerous people and animals exacerbates a situation that is, at best, untenable. Trush represents a lonely act of faith in a largely faithless system.
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‘First, there was the word and then a deed.’ It is always better to warn a person first; if he does not understand that warning, take action. That’s the principle that I follow. Not for everyone, though.”
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“The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once.”
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There is a costly wisdom in this, the stoic execution of deeds that must be done. It is a survival skill that is closely linked to Fate, and Fate has always been a potent force in Russia, where, for generations, citizens have had little control over their own destinies. Fate can be a bitch, but, as Zaitsev, Dvornik, and Onofrecuk had discovered, it can also be a tiger.
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Lenin may have envisioned it, but Stalin mastered it: the ability to disorient and disconnect individuals and large populations, not just from their physical surroundings and core communities but, ultimately, from themselves.
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The wounds Mao sought to reopen had been inflicted during the nineteenth century when the future superpowers were grinding against each other like so many tectonic plates. The world as we know it was forming then, along fault lines of race, culture, and geography.
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When one considers that this was the seventh time in a century such a revision had been made, it is easy to understand why so many Russians seem cynical and world-weary, and why they place so much faith in the potato crop.
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Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it.
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This notion of self-enhancement by consumption cut both ways, however, and it was believed that a tiger could also make itself stronger by devouring both body and soul of a human being. Once consumed, the victim’s soul would become a kind of captive guide, aiding the tiger in its search for more human victims. As fanciful as such reasoning may sound, there is no question that the strength and knowledge gained from eating humans will inform and influence a man-eater’s subsequent behavior. —— Relatively speaking, the tigers’ appetite for us pales before our appetite for them. Humans
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But infinity is a man-made construct that has no relevance in the natural world.
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Under Stalin, science was a prisoner, too—bound and gagged by a particularly rigid brand of Marxist ideology, which declared, in short, that in order for Mankind to realize His destiny as a superhuman, super-rational master of all, Mother Nature must be forced to bow and, in the process, be radically transformed.
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Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzles of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railroads. Let the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled.… Only in cement and iron can the fraternal union of all peoples, the iron brotherhood of all mankind, be forged.‡
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In the face of such hostile dogma, the tiger didn’t stand a chance.
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Early humans, pre-fire, may well have been Paleolithic Wizards of Oz—masters of illusion and psyops who eventually, amazingly, willed their “impersonations” of superiority into fact. If only during daylight hours.