- p23 To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.
- p23 The platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead, they reward shooting and oversimple reaction: of having a "take" after having read a single headline.
- p24 I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other - that wasn't the point - but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person's position.
- p25 Their presence is a reminder that the Rose Garden is beautiful in part because it is cared for, that effort must be put in, whether that's saving it from becoming condos or just making sure the roses come back next year.
- p54 And the word hang in the exhibition's title, Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk, translates variously to "addiction," "penchant," or even "down-ward slope," implying an innate tendency in humans to imagine ever-new, electrified visions of perfection.
- p57 "I am not physically tired, just filled with a deep, vague, undefined sense of spiritual distress as if I had a deep wound running inside me and it had to stanched.
- p57 "It fills me with awe and desire," Merton wrote in a letter. "I return to the idea again and again: 'Give up everything, give up everything!"
- p58 I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
- p59 To choose the world is...an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present.
- p59 Here's what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to forment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently.
- p59 Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of "arms race" of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think.
- p60 It's not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger.
- p60 In other people's reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it's yourself you're thinking about or anything else."
- p64 "The potential of nothing is everything."
- p72 If we believe that everything were merely a product of fate or disposition, Cicero reasons, no one would be accountable for anything and therefore there could be no justice. In today's terms, we'd all just be algorithms. Furthermore, we'd have no reason to try to make ourselves better or different from our natural inclinations.
- p74 Hsieh, who was preoccupied with time and survival, described the process by which people fill up their time in an attempt to fill their lives with meaning. He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out?
- p93 What is needed then, is not a "once and for all" type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.
- p94 In doing so, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.
- p98 From that first day, I was exhilarated...I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world... There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful.
- p104 Even morbid curiosity assumes there is something you haven't seen that you'd like to see, creating a kind of pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner. Although it's never seemed like a choice to me, I live for this feeling. Curiosity is what gets me involved in something that I forget myself.
- p112 But the success of the intervention largely rests on the individual. "To [break a habit], Devine said, you have to be aware of it, motivated to change, and have a strategy for replacing it.
- p112 Defining attention as the ability to hold something before the mind. James observes that the inclination of attention is toward fleetingness. He quotes the physicist and the physician Hermann von Helmholtz, who had experimented o himself with various distractions: " The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things: and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away."
- p113 Maybe this is the beginning of how my own prejudice ends. Watching for it. Catching it and holding it up to the light. Releasing it. Watching for it again.
- p113 We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like "annoying" or "distracting". But this is a grave misreading of their nature. IN the short term, distance can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to "want what we want to want." Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.
- p121 Only those items which I notice shape my mind -- without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
- p123 And it follows that this place can no longer be any place.
- p128 All I could see was that all of us here were alive, and that was a miracle.
- p137 My dad, a musician for much of his life, says that this is actually the definition of good music: music that "sneaks up on you" and changes you.
- p138 Thinking about what it would mean to submit to such a process, becoming. a more and more reified version of "myself", I'm reminded of the way Thoreau described unthinking people in "Civil Disobedience": as basically dead before their time. If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I'll find it - imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self - I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living.
- p140 The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not. Any loss of control is always scary, but to me, giving up on the idea of a false boundary makes sense not only conceptually but phenomenologically. That's not to say there's no such thing as a self, only that it's hard to say where it begins and ends when you think about it for even a few moments.
- p141 I think there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion.
- p143 It was no stretch of the imagination, nor even of science, to think that we were related. We were both from the same place (Earth), made of the same stuff. And most important, we were both alive.
- p145 Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship.
- p145 Nanabozho gives Linnaeus a song so he can see their spirits. And neither of them are lonely.
- p146 Reading this, I began to see that my reaction to the San Jacinto Mountains was something that Western culture and language gae me no way to conceptualize. It was a deep and hopeful suspicion that these forms were something more than rock, that they embodied something, that someone was there.
- p147 This privileging, she writes, "comes out of the assumption that human beings are paradigmatic ethical objects, and that other life-forms are valuable only in so far as they are seen as similar to humans.
- p151 When we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a "cloud".
- p152 I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. [Audre Lorde].
- p159 Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.
- p183 It's a bit like falling in love - that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else's, that you are no longer your own. But isn't that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these "strangers", not just now, but for life. It's scary but I wouldn't have it any other way.
- p187 I have chosen to illustrate this map not as a horrific depiction of the catastrophes that define our common history, but as a reflection of the resilience and magic I see in the city around me. It is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, they are always changing.
- p194 Fukuoka sums up the epiphany as the ultimate expression of humility, echoing Zhaung Zhou when he writes: "Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.""
jul 27 2020 ∞
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