Desert Notebooks Quotes

“We have no choice but to scramble to retrace our steps and to try, in a hurry now, to imagine things differently: other worlds, other ways of thinking, living, seeing. Other ways of writing, and of reading.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Not all messages reach their intended audience. Sometimes the messenger is killed, sometimes the audience.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Seen without the gilded lies that comprise what we call “civilization,” history is an assemblage of massacres, mass enslavements, conflagrations, a growing accretion of ruins. Time had to be “blasted out” and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it us.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“all narratives are lies, paths clumsily hacked through the knotted snarl of truth.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“(Benjamin again: “Gambling converts time into a narcotic.”)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own
labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Already on that highway Las Vegas felt like a dream, fleeing from my memory, growing fuzzier and more unreal with every passing mile of creosote basin rimmed by jagged hills. Will what we call civilization go like that too, a brutal, gleaming, plasticized absurdity that we will recall less with nostalgia than with befuddlement and wonder that a whole species could consent to live that way? There are other ways. It's not too late to find them. One way or another, we will have to.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Thompson was, by all accounts, a confident man, and not one to be inconvenienced by ignorance if it happened”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“I read today’s news last month but this time it’s worse.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“There is no document of civilization,” he wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Yesterday’s panicked fears are today’s sober expectations.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Hundreds of millions of years ago, our distant cousins—various phytoplankton and zooplankton, cycads and ferns—lived lives as full of passion and drama as any, and then went ahead and died. Buried in mud or water and deprived of oxygen, they were compressed over the centuries by layer after layer of sediment and stone. Slowly, pressure and heat transformed them into a black and viscous goo, into gas that stinks of flatulence, and into strange, hard, oily lumps. Cut to the early nineteenth century, when British industrialists found a use for these otherwise unpleasant substances, the transformed bodies of the earth’s”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Which is to say, the same things that will likely do us in: the greed and blindness of the few, the hungers of the many, a fatal inattention to the fragile web of life on which our existence here depends.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“That apocalypse is always with us: all the joy that I take from this land has been contingent on the destruction of someone else’s world.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Decades of scrupulous and unrelenting pragmatism carried us here. The minimum necessary for survival now counts as madness. The courses of action still deemed practical will usher us straight down the path that leads to our own deaths.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“A single message, no matter how apparently unambiguous, can mean more than one thing. I’m counting on it.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Human history was for him a rational process, and also a divine one. Subjected to the vigilance of philosophy, the logic propelling it would reveal itself, but only after the fact. History was the very thought of God as it developed over time. It formed a single epic narrative, the story of the growing self-consciousness of Spirit, of God coming to know himself, through us, in time. The trajectory was clear: from slavery to freedom. (Not incidentally, this could also be expressed geographically: “World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.”)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“In this world, that’s how it ended. For Blanqui, at least. Theoretical physicists have since envisaged the cosmos in terms not so different from his, as a patchwork multiverse containing all possible worlds infinitely repeated. If they’re right, and if Blanqui was right, then among all those worlds surely there is one—there must be—in which humans have, at the brink of the abyss, stepped back and learned to live inside of time, and to hold each other there. To hold tight to everything outside of us, and everything within, to everything above and below. Perhaps it’s not this world. But perhaps it is.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Time collapses here. It can have no linear reach. Everything that might ever happen has already happened, and will again, forever. What is left to fear? The concept of progress becomes a very silly joke. Any possible advancement is “locked up on each earth and disappears with it.” Instead, “always and everywhere, on the terrestrial camp, the same drama, the same set, on the same narrow stage, a noisy humanity, infatuated by its own greatness, thinking itself to be the universe and inhabiting its prison like an immensity, only to drown soon along with the globe.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Walter Benjamin’s conviction that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption, that what he called the “time of now” is “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” (Kenneth Rexroth used the same word: “scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.”) If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“(Smohalla, a Wanapum prophet from the Pacific Northwest, exhorted his followers to abandon all the ways of the white man and not to plough or harvest or work in any way, “because men who work cannot dream.”)”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin mentions that when workers in Paris rose up against the monarchy of Charles X in July 1830, they “simultaneously and independently” began shooting at public clocks around the city.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Samuel Pierpont Langley, chief astronomer of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Observatory, who innovated the sale of time”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Mythical time was then replaced by messianic time, which was necessarily linear: it led somewhere. The regeneration of the cosmos no longer recurred in cycles according to a sacred calendar, but was deferred into the future. It would come when God willed it. Time had a beginning and an end, and through them, a meaning. By the twentieth century, deprived of God and the possibility of future redemption but stuck nonetheless on this now single-tracked time, humanity faced a new challenge: how to “tolerate” history, as Eliade”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“Eliade argued that until the arrival of the Hebrew prophets, time was universally understood as cyclical, and was bound through ritual to the sacred. Regularly recurring religious ceremonies enacted, and reenacted, the creation of the cosmos, allowing their participants to play a direct role in the “regeneration of the world,” “projecting” themselves into “mythical time.” Only after the prophets, for Eliade, did history enter the picture.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“This is perhaps a more useful way to think about the shape of time—not as a line or an arrow or a circle or a spiral, but something living, a circle that expands out of sight, invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off. “The world is always new,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, “however old its roots.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“In the end, Harrington documented more than 130 languages, including Chemehuevi, Mohave, Serrano, Paiute, even K’iche’. Many of them are no longer spoken anywhere on this planet. They are preserved only in Harrington’s careful records and perhaps in the fading childhood memories of the descendants of their last surviving speakers.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“But no escape is possible. Capital shrinks space, compresses time.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time