quotes

Socially distanced

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But when she at last put on gray shawl over the gray dress and went out into the street, Sophie did not feel excited. She felt overwhelmed. There were too many people rushing past, laughing and shouting, far too much noise and jostling. Sophie felt as if the past months of sitting and sewing had turned her into an old woman or a semi-invalid. She gathered her shawl around her and crept along close to the houses, trying to avoid being trodden on by people’s best shoes or being jabbed by elbows in trailing silk sleeves.

#Me, at Costco yesterday morning.

(From Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones)

Extinction

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Humility in born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage in a world beyond ourselves.

—Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land

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I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing—not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer the get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it not but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? […] I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn’t love or understand hawks as much as I do if I’d only ever seen them on screens. I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. […] She can resist the meaning humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all.

— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

Like a familiar and beloved poem

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In those moments, it seems as if it could be possible to comprehend the entire United States, to know it—this beautiful, fragile land—like one knows a familiar and beloved poem; that if one just kept on the road, kept going down new highways, it would be possible not only to express in words but to actually experience, to apprehend in scope, as perhaps a single blood cell does the whole body, this country I love so much.

— Ken Burns, Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip

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“All through life there are much-loved places that we leave behind, sometimes because we choose to and sometimes because we must. Rooms in which we have fallen in love, the distant silhouette of a town where we felt at home, beloved views–all of this falls behind us as we walk forward, for life is full of change.”

Jane Urquhart, A Number of Things (2016)