Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Rebecca SolnitTo lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjaminโs terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
Rebecca SolnitTo hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Rebecca SolnitPlaces matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
Rebecca SolnitIf gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
Rebecca SolnitGlobally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.
Rebecca Solnit