Jamaica Kincaid has encapsulated one of the many reasons I have a hard time finding a way of earning my keep that doesn't drive me mad and/or to despair: "I cannot imagine having an occupation that does not go along with #reading..."
Hope, hopefulness, that's the realm of the survivors. It;s not to late for y'all. Grief shows us what we love, what we most want to protect. It swallows everything extraneous. And so much of what you love is still here. And tomorrow is another miraculous opportunity to change, to protect it.
adrienne maree brown- "A Multi-Year Conversation with the Dinosaur at Chicago O'hare Airport and Other Fossil-Beings" included in Fables and Spells
Just finished Kris Manjapra’s “Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation”
Fascinating and heartbreaking analysis of how #emancipation has always been a means of continuing slavery while pretending to eliminate it (via “indenture periods” and reparations to slavers for “property lost”) and how to move past this #history for a more #humane world
“Certainly, the focus on the long trajectory of slavery in the American South is a convenient narrative, allowing mainstream publics to disavow the active forms of enslavement, and the widespread social and political complicity, of Northern society. For contemporary Northerners, to forget about the North's involvement is also to shirk any need to take responsibility.”
“So, the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.” A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers
"On the whole, any painter who really knows his craft recognizes that he is moving in the wrong direction right from the initial sketch." -- from José Saramago's 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', trans. Giovanni Pontiero
I am still a little different from other people.
I speak and act a little differently.
So I tried very, very hard to eliminate the differences, but I couldn't do it.
The more I tried, the more it hurt.
So I thought I'd always be different until the day I die.
But many nice people filled in the gap for me.
And that is how I am standing before you today.
Thank you for filling in the gap.
Thank you for not avoiding me.
And thank you very, very much for your love.
"There was an entire commune of voices living inside the optician. They were the worst lodgers imaginable. They were always too loud, especially after ten o’clock in the evening. They trashed the optician’s interior. They were many of them, they never paid their rent, and they couldn’t be evicted." -- from
Mariana Leky's What You Can See From Here, translated by Tess Lewis
"People have been living on earth for thousands of years, and yet they’ve still not learned to be good. How strange." - from The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith
"I like books that make you discover other books—a virtuous cycle that should never be broken." - from 'Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop' by Alba Donati (tr. Elena Pala)
"The classroom is a microcosm of the world, it is the chance we have to produce whatever ideals we cherish, The kind of classroom situations one creates is the acid test of what it is one really stands for." (Tompkins)