This Corman McCarthy quote is good. “The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.”
John Swansburg in Slate: The Self-Made Man: The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth.
George Monbiot in The Guardian: The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us "When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war 'of every man against every man', he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others....The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage."
Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, found through Leslie Jamison's great Harper's essay on Morgellon's disease, The Devil's Bait, collected in The Empathy Exams (which hit me quite hard w/r/t empathizing with people's challenges I didn't understand; it seemed to me before reading it I had to at least assent to the validity of the struggle in order to empathize, which she explores in depth): The Itch
My friend Evan introduced me to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin through a history of ideas class he had put together; his Message to the 21st Century (published in the New York Review of Books) is still very relevant: "If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.
The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.
This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false."
The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.
This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false."
A city planner friend I'm no longer in touch with wrote this on piece on AirBnB for Thought Catalog; masquerading as a list-y comedic piece, it's got this thoughtful passage within: "Airbnb has been branding our neighborhoods for its booking services, offering images, taglines, and ‘community’ feedback on what people have to say about a place. In many cases, either the erasure of culture and history, or the dilution of it as a selling point are big themes for the way neighborhoods are being presented to would-be visitors. It is a rather cotton-candy presentation in that tourist-brochure kind of way, with a thin veneer of seeming a bit more ‘authentic’ by virtue of lacking any major logos from big hotel chains. Other neighborhoods are being branded as ‘gritty’ or on some ‘edge’ or ‘fringe’ as if they represent some unknown outskirts of our city where ~*nobody has been before*~. Sure, tourists want to have an adventure and a new experience, but who gets to decide what is authentic, what is the ‘real’ Bushwick or Hell’s Kitchen, or DUMBO? Who are the people coming up with these concepts? What is the impact of a branded place on our city?" Would that we thought about more decisions affecting our cities this deeply. An Abbreviated Guide To Airbnb’s New York City Listings
Rebecca Solnit for Orion/Longreads: The Art of Arrival "You travel to get away from something, and though people caution that you can’t run away, you can, and sometimes you should. After all, this is a country full of people who were running away—my father’s parents from the pogroms and massacres, my mother’s grandparents from the famines and anti-Catholic laws, rural kids from the brutalities of agriculture and the limits of small towns, city kids from the slums or the harshness, suburban refugees like me escaping anomie and homogeneity....
But there are many kinds of travel, many reasons to move. Sometimes you travel so that the process of becoming that is your inner life has an external correlative in your movement across space. You may not know how to save your soul, but you know how to put one foot in front of another. You may not know the way to stop being so furious you can hardly sleep, but you can buy a road map of the American West. And then you can put the need on like a knapsack and wear it along your journey, wear it out, shed it, find that it belongs to someone you no longer are. This is pilgrimage, which is not as pretty as it sounds. It’s not running away, though: it’s running toward."
But there are many kinds of travel, many reasons to move. Sometimes you travel so that the process of becoming that is your inner life has an external correlative in your movement across space. You may not know how to save your soul, but you know how to put one foot in front of another. You may not know the way to stop being so furious you can hardly sleep, but you can buy a road map of the American West. And then you can put the need on like a knapsack and wear it along your journey, wear it out, shed it, find that it belongs to someone you no longer are. This is pilgrimage, which is not as pretty as it sounds. It’s not running away, though: it’s running toward."
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