“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Without consciously seeking them out, in chance meeting by meeting, wild animals have remade my life. They have bestowed upon me better sight, meaning that they have taught me to ‘see’ more acutely and on a wider plane. They have caused me to pay attention to movement, colors, the sky, scat, rubs, trails, behavior. They have broadened and deepened my empathy, made me a believer in a transcendence that has […]
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Perhaps this begins to make sense of the daily horror movie we endure: the Civil War never ended, Lee’s surrender merely a pause while those forces of aristocracy and white supremacy took the time to remake themselves into what we see now: a blatantly racist President of a blatantly white supremacist Party, supported by an array of reactionary corporate interests, appealing to a narrowing base […]
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I can call up their appearances, and for most, their specters, yet after all these years my memories of them are glittering and sharp, as if each in turn bore a reminder of a planetary innocence inconceivable now. Still, they come forth, but fewer than before. I can name them in their numbers and measure how settled I grew in their presence, how tied in to what felt like a […]
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Recently, after marveling at his performance in King Lear , I watched an interview with Anthony Hopkins, 83 now, who said that to keep his wits sharp he memorizes a poem a week, and so with his good advice, I have begun to try to ward off the darkness I fear the most, the loss of mind and memory, and thus also have begun to learn by heart the first of 52, […]
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