Agalia Tan

Poet, philosopher, and Nobel Prize winner Paul Valéry encourages us not to imitate the acts of great people, but to carry their spirit forward:

"All great undertakings do not consist of doing again what others have done before, but in recapturing the spirit that went into what they did—and would have done differently in a different age."

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that the best things in life will also humble us:

"This is how we grow: by being defeated by greater and greater things."

Source: The Book of Images (1902)

every single one requires unlearning first. earnestness becomes possible when you stop performing certainty. learning in public stops being cringe when not-knowing stops being failure. the permission you never knew you needed was always there — you just learned, very thoroughly, to stop looking for it.

unlearning is the root system underneath... See more

the thread running through all of it: collective amnesia.

capitalism didn’t just push these things aside. it made us forget they were ever structural. joy held communities together. rest held creativity and judgment. non-rational knowing held meaning. enoughness held relationships to land and to each other. these didn’t disappear because they... See more

institutions — held shared context, conferred legitimacy.

gatekeepers — decided what was credible, what mattered.

shared context — the stuff everyone just knew.

social contracts — unspoken agreements about how we operate.

mainstream media — told the shared story.

third places — hosted community without anyone organizing it.

you didn’t have to think... See more

host.

we got into the etymology — hostis , the latin root. originally meant “stranger.” the word that split into both “guest” and “enemy.” hospitality and hostility sharing an ancestor. the threshold always having been charged.

and then the word just kept opening up. host as verb — to gather, to receive, to hold space. host as biology — the organism... See more

" Language is never neutral. It reveals and conceals, restructures, rewilds, enchants, and shapeshifts."

I’ve ended up buying just two items from Facebook Marketplace: a marble coffee table and a plush recliner. But purchasing items there is almost beside the point. It turns out that I don’t really want to buy a cheeseburger-shaped lamp. I do, however, want to know about the life of the person who, at one point, couldn’t live without that lamp.